Breaking the Ocean

A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Reconciliation

Annahid Dashtgard

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781487006488
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

In Breaking the Ocean, diversity and inclusion specialist Annahid Dashtgard addresses the long-term impacts of exile, immigration, and racism by offering a vulnerable, deeply personal account of her life and work.

Annahid Dashtgard was born into a supportive mixed-race family in 1970s Iran. Then came the 1979 Revolution, which ushered in a powerful and orthodox religious regime. Her family was forced to flee their homeland, immigrating to a small town in Alberta, Canada. As a young girl, Dashtgard was bullied, shunned, and ostracized both by her peers at school and adults in the community. Home offered little respite, with her parents embroiled in their own struggles, exposing the sharp contrasts between her British mother and Persian father.

Determined to break free from her past, Dashtgard created a new identity for herself as a driven young woman who found strength through political activism, eventually becoming a leader in the anti–corporate globalization movement of the late 1990s. But her unhealed trauma was re-activated following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Suffering burnout, Dashtgard checked out of her life and took the first steps towards personal healing, a journey that continues to this day.

Breaking the Ocean introduces a unique perspective on how racism and systemic discrimination result in emotional scarring and ongoing PTSD. It is a wake-up call to acknowledge our differences, addressing the universal questions of what it means to belong and ultimately what is required to create change in ourselves and in society.

Part II

Rebellion

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

— Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

Six

Losing My Religion

Mr. Pezem, my high school English teacher, told my mother that literature was my strong suit. No surprise. Disappearing into a maze of words was like visiting my internally located second home. Yet when the time came to choose a career path, I was still caught up in trying to please my father, so I followed the one leading farthest away from what I loved: business instead of literature, status over art. I was well aware of the gold-star professions that many immigrant parents pressured their kids into, careers that guaranteed stability and financial success: doctor, lawyer, engineer. Corporate something-or-other seemed like a decent runner-up. My dad’s advice was to make money, then make a difference — a common yet unfortunate fallacy. In the fall of 1991 I travelled from Sherwood Park, Alberta, to Kingston, Ontario. Queen’s University School of Business had a reputation for being one of the hardest-won academic placements in the country. And I had been accepted, so how could I not go?

I tried not to think about the arguments that had played out at home about this decision. My father pushed me to attend; I think he wanted to see his own sacrifices pay off, and to ensure his children earned the kind of status that would protect us from all the indignities he’d had to suffer. My mother was worried about the extra debt brought on by travel and accommodation costs; my dad was still in the throes of starting his business (in its first year he earned less than eight thousand dollars) and money was tight. When they both finally agreed that I should accept, I felt it was because they saw me as my family’s investment in a better future.

The exclusive business faculty at Queen’s was filled with extremely privileged, well-dressed white kids who liked to drink — a lot. During frosh week, I was quickly introduced to the ritualistic drinking games, to the long-standing (mostly) friendly competition with the purple-jacketed engineers, and to the concept of nepotism. More than one wide-eyed blond freshman shared a story that first week about getting in because of parental connections, despite having grades well below the standard.

Until that point in time, my father had been the most dominant influence in my life. But being away from home opened my eyes to the fundamental ways in which I was different from him. Money didn’t motivate me, and studying spreadsheets made me want to pass out with boredom. As the year wore on, I relied more heavily on prayer and Jesus to get through days I had little passion for and a social hierarchy that had once again positioned me at the bottom. That first year at Queen’s unmoored me. I thought it would be liberating to be so far from home, and yet, away from everything familiar, I started spinning out. The paradox of freedom is that it’s experienced in the context of limits. Without a sense of boundaries, I started free-falling.

I lived in residence at Chown Hall, in a coveted single room. Along with most of the other girls in my residence, I’d go to the common room on Thursday nights to watch even richer white kids living their incredibly vacuous lives on Beverly Hills 90210, then all the rage. Sharing my floor were Tracey, a whippet-thin, tall white girl who had spent the previous few years modelling in Japan (what impressed me most was that she was able to resist an unopened Mars bar on her dresser for the entire freshman year! I yearned to be her); Elaine, who struggled with depression, and with whom I’d talk late into the night trying to resolve all her unresolvable issues (pain management outsourced); and Shalini, one of a handful of other non-white girls I remember meeting during my time at Queen’s, though we never once talked about our ethnicity together (shared internalized racism). These women became a kind of disjointed family for me, yet they were not enough to keep me grounded.

---

Frosh week introduced me to the sole friend I made in my faculty, Amanda. She had spiky blond hair, and though she was short she compensated with a bulldog personality. She ate with great gusto and never dissected calorie-counts or dissed her body like most of the other girls. I liked her forthrightness, her get-it-done-at-all-costs attitude. But others didn’t, especially some of the male students.

Halfway through our first year she walked out of her room in a co-ed dorm to find a picture crudely tacked to her door. It was a black-and-white, finely detailed image of a vagina with the word “cunt” scrawled across it. This happened twice more over the next three months, and Amanda became increasingly agitated each time. She decided to take the case to the university harassment committee, on which I was the recently appointed student representative.

Amanda came in to voice her concerns. What I remember most is the power that shrouded those of us in the room, mostly older white men (I was one of the few exceptions). Like a modern-day set of The Crucible, we sat on one side of the table facing Amanda as she struggled to plead her case. And I do mean plead, as her story was met with the predictable dismissal and minimization: “Come on, this is just a bunch of guys having fun”; “You’re taking it too seriously! Have they ever touched you?”; “Did you do anything to provoke it?” This was also the year that Queen’s found itself in the spotlight after signs were seen hanging from male dorm rooms with the counter-phrase “No Means Yes!” to the “No Means No” campaign against sexual assault.

I wish I could say I was an ally to Amanda. The truth is that I was wishy-washy in my support, caught between acting from my intuitive adherence to a feminist philosophy (though I had no framework for it at the time) in order to back my friend and sucking up to those with the power. I didn’t want to tarnish my own image in any way, to invoke the marginalization that I felt at subtle levels pretty much all the time I was there. Uneducated about the dynamics of race, gender, and power, I had no way to put any of what I was experiencing into a broader context. The result was that I let Amanda down. The guys in her dorm got off easily, a mere slap on the wrist. She was angry with me, justifiably, for not arguing her case more strongly. Sadly, I lost her friendship. And the whole incident sent me further into emotional confusion and turmoil.

As the year went on, my bulimia worsened. I started staying up later and later, having an even more difficult time surrendering to slumber, pulling all-nighters for no good reason and then sleeping far into the day. I knew I had to keep up my grades, or in my parents’ eyes the year would have been a failure, the money wasted. I spent a lot of that year locked in one of the residence bathrooms caught in my own cycle of bingeing and purging. As final exams approached, I slipped into an altered state. Very little of what I was eating stayed down. The stress accumulated so that I remained awake three nights in a row studying for a psychology exam. Just a year earlier I had written the International Baccalaureate exams, each four hours long and requiring encyclopaedic knowledge. In comparison, that first-year psych multiple-choice test was the training-wheel version.

And I cheated. Such opportunities were rampant and openly discussed in the ethics-optional School of Business. I had never cheated before, and have never cheated since, and I’m certainly not proud of it. Ironically, getting the answers to a handful of questions was more trouble than it was worth, and I got a worse grade than if I’d just relied on my own knowledge. It was a testament to how panicked I felt, so completely out of my depth. I felt lost in that sea of whiteness and privilege, like flotsam on the ocean, ready to be picked off at any moment.

---

I came back to Alberta for the summer of 1992 following that first year at Queen’s, realizing that, as imperfect as my family was, I missed them. And they needed me. My younger brother and sister were in high school and junior high respectively, and they were struggling in different ways with similar challenges around identity and belonging. My sister had trouble leaving the room after our nightly “Disperse! Disperse now!” ritual. My brother was uncommunicative and surly. The fault lines in my parents’ marriage were also deepening, the family structure slowly falling apart. As the protector, I couldn’t leave again. Living three provinces and a four-hour flight away for another three years meant that I would miss all the important transitions.

I wasn’t thrilled about returning to Alberta — it was better than where I’d been, but that wasn’t saying much. That summer I quickly landed a job at a daycare in Sherwood Park. I enjoyed being with kids — it was a welcome break from academia. Plus, I needed income to pay off some of the debt from my year away.

The daycare operator was a white woman, and she ran a strictly regulated program. About halfway through the summer she called me over. “Did you take some crackers from the cupboard?” she asked. I explained that I had — a couple here and there — because I wasn’t aware that access to the food was restricted. It was clear to me, though, that this wasn’t a conversation, it was an ambush; a tiny composite of flour and water was overriding hours of carefully built relationships with children and other staff.

My mom picked me up from work that day. I explained what had happened, and she downplayed it. She was trying to present the other woman’s perspective, but in that moment what I needed was someone to take my side for once and say that I had not done anything wrong. By the time we got home I was screaming at the top of my lungs, enraged with the daycare boss, another uncaring white woman, and furious at my mother for her inability to see that this was a pattern — that her daughter did not have the luxury of blending in the same way she did, that I had never fit in. Alberta wasn’t home to me; it felt like a holding pen for ongoing betrayal.

I quit my job at the daycare. Leaving was the only way I knew how to cope. I really needed to fight — on my own behalf — but the time for that hadn’t yet arrived.

Towards the end of that summer I arranged a last-minute transfer to the University of Alberta, where I would major in psychology with a minor in English, subjects closer to my heart. I successfully applied for a student loan, which, in combination with a part-time job, meant that I could cover the costs of my own education. Even though it felt somewhat like a step backwards, the transfer to Alberta was also a relief because it meant I would be studying what I wanted without feeling financially and emotionally beholden to my parents. My mother was relieved to have me closer to home; my father was silently supportive. Although neither of them addressed the situation directly, they were aware that I wasn’t thriving at Queen’s and were pleased to have the prodigal daughter return home.

I moved into an apartment near the university with a friend who had been in the IB program with me in high school. I didn’t really want to — it wasn’t an easy friendship — but, as I did in most of my relationships, I deferred to my friend’s wishes. Huan was Filipino, the son of immigrant parents, and he was both academically and artistically gifted. He was ahead of his peers, reading Camille Paglia for fun, buying high-end designer clothes, advising me on all dress- and dating-related matters. “You can’t wear that!” was a common refrain. He was charming, yet extremely controlling. Looking back, it was a friendship bound as much by experiences of exclusion in a white-dominated, small-town context as it was by shared interests.

When I moved in with Huan at age nineteen, about to start my second year of university, I was still a virgin — a fact I attribute to a combination of my Christian beliefs and a childhood hangover of low self-esteem. We had a best friend in common, Phil, who I was secretly in love with. On weekends, Huan, Phil, and I started frequenting Buddy’s, an underground but popular gay club in town. It was a thrilling few months when it felt as if we were collectively pushing a cultural edge. In the early 1990s police raids were still a possibility, threatening the world inside the club, which was dominated by six-foot-something drag queens, buffed and hairless gay men of every background, and costumes that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Bollywood dance number. I was the token “fag hag.” It was a natural role, as I felt a kinship in the scene of cultural outsiders. You’d think the penny might have dropped as to what was going on with Huan and Phil, but this was Alberta in the 1990s, and in many ways I was still a small-town girl.

After a small party one night at our apartment, a male friend told me that he had given Huan a blowjob in his bedroom next door to mine. Huan and Phil both came out to me shortly thereafter, cracking my world wide open. At that time, a few years before the courage of Ellen DeGeneres, coming out was still a revolutionary act — no one else I knew identified as anything other than heterosexual. Their revelation immediately cut a hole in the middle of my Christian safety net. I couldn’t reconcile my belief in an all-loving God with one who would reject some people simply for having a different sexual preference. Caught between the religious security I had clung to since childhood and the bone-deep knowledge of what it felt like to be an outcast, I was in crisis.

Desperate for someone to help me reconcile Huan’s disclo...

Table of contents

• viCopyright
• viiDedication
• ixContents
• xiAuthor’s Note
• xiiiPrologue
• 1Part i
• 98Part II
• 206Part III
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About the Publisher