Muslim-Canadian Women’s Enunciations: Sofia Baig’s Performative Identities

Abstract

In Sofia Baig’s debut album Daughter of Sand (2009) the contested experience of MuslimCanadian women’s identity is explored and complicated through artistic enunciations of spoken word art. Within mainstream and popular culture, the Muslim woman’s body has been a prominent terrain embodying the West’s “Other,” a space upon which many prejudices and preconceptions are mapped out and propagated. This is why, through the homogenizing discourses of mainstream media, Islam, with its various cultural and spiritual aspects, has been increasingly constructed as the violent “Other” and the oppressed Muslim woman as its poster girl. Despite real instances of oppression against Muslim woman which are shaped by various social, political and historical aspects that cannot be simplistically reduced to religious practices, what interests me in this paper is the representations of Muslim women and Muslim-Canadian women artists’ resistance and engagement with the prevailing stereotype of the victimized Muslim woman. What is alarmingly disconcerting about such a victimized image is that it robs these women of their subjectivity, reviving Orientalist discourses of “Othering” which objectified these women as exemplified in past nineteenth century Orientalist discourse and art.