Geraldine Bedell, The Observer
Sunday August 3 2008
Irshad Manji arrived in Canada at the age of four as a refugee from Idi Amin's Uganda. One night, when she was 10, her father chased her through the house with a kitchen knife after she threatened to report him to the police and social services for his violence towards her mother. Hiding on the roof, out of reach, she had an epiphany - or that's how she tells it now: 'I realised I was grateful because there were people I could go to, talk to, whereas if we'd still been in East Africa that may not have been the case. I realised I lived in a society where the story of who we are as a people was not finished, which meant that I, as an individual, mattered. I could be a partial author of this grander story.'
No comments:
Post a Comment