Like what you see? I asked the short, stocky blonde-haired and green-eyed, decidedly butch gal I'd seen eyeballing me since I walked the Eaton Center that afternoon. Sorry about that ma'am, she said shyly, her butch swagger faltering for a moment. I looked her up and down, taking in the short, spiky blonde hair, the tattoos and the myriad piercings. The gal...
"Babe, I don't care how fabulous Salvador City is, no disrespect to the people of Brazil but I bet none of your malls come close to the Toronto Eaton Center," Shadya said to her girlfriend Selena Texeira as they walked around the world famous mega-mall together. Located in downtown Toronto, Ontario, the Eaton Center dwarfed most malls that Selena had ever se...
"Wahida, tell me please, in your own words, why should I hire you?" said Lucinda Lopes, who emphasizes quite often that her last name ends with an S and not the Z that everyone assumed. The six-foot-tall, curvaceous, bronze-skinned and dark-haired Colombian-Canadian woman looked at the young Somali Muslim woman who sat opposite her, and frowned. This one is...
"Stop talking shit about my religion, you lesbian feminist witch!" Those were the first words my future girlfriend Nabila Yassin ever said to me. Most of you would assume that things wouldn't bode well for us, and this is where you'd be wrong. Absolutely wrong. The most passionate couples out there argue the most, and clashing isn't always a bad thing. It tr...
Hijabi, that's what the world calls women like myself. We who wear the hijab as a sign of feminine piety and chastity in accordance to the rules of Islam. Yet so often, people pay more attention to what's on my head than they do about what's in it. My name is Halima Abdullah, and I'm a young Black woman of Somali descent living in the City of Ottawa, provinc...
The name is Jasmine Taylor, and I'm a young Black woman originally from the City of Boston, Massachusetts. I transferred to Spelman College in the City of Atlanta, Georgia, from Bay State College, a small school located in downtown Boston, and life hasn't been the same since. Even though the Dirty South and its ways get on my nerves as an outspoken young Bla...
"Hello Selena," Jamila Ahmed typed into the messenger box, and the young Somali-American Muslim woman paused, wondering what she should say. It was the middle fo the night and she was stark naked. She'd gotten up to pee, and then, on impulse, went on the computer. This was her first time getting on Facebook in quite some time. It had been months since Jamila...
I don't want to be a lesbian but I might not have a choice. What am I going to do? I feel like I don't know anything anymore. My name is Halima Hussein and I am a young Black woman of Somali descent living in the City of Ottawa, Ontario. If you saw me walking around wearing my long skirt and hijab, with my Koran tucked under my arm, you'd assume I was just a...
"So, your name is Fartuun Asif and you've got a habit of farting at the worst possible times, man, that's absolutely frigging priceless," says my roommate/girlfriend Catherine Malemba, laughing merrily. We were sitting in the living room of our shared apartment in the Glebe area of downtown Ottawa, Ontario. Just two young women smoking shisha, relaxing in fr...
The name is Adara Ibrahim, and I'm a young black woman of Somali descent living in the City of Ottawa, Ontario. I recently graduated from Carleton University with a bachelor's degree in criminal psychology. Presently I work as an addictions counsellor with the Department of Social Services. That's a fifty-eight-thousand-dollar-a-year job by the way. I'm only...