My Scarborough
The neighbourhood I grew up in was diverse and full of working-class pride, but all that its critics could see was crime and isolation
I have a piece in this weekend’s The Globe and Mail. It’s a homage to the working-class, immigrant community that raised me. Way out in Scarborough. Where we laughed and lived together, where we grew up together, where so many dreams were born, where our parents and grandparents passed on wisdom, where young people created new ideas and art that would define generations to come.
Excerpt below. Read the full piece, with family photos and classic pictures of Scarborough, on The Globe and Mail’s website. Available in print and online.
BROWN BOY: A MEMOIR coming Tuesday. Subscribe to Notes From The Margins for the latest updates on my book, writings, events, and more.
Omer Aziz is the author of Brown Boy: A Memoir.
I don’t remember the first time I heard slander spoken on Scarborough’s name, but I do remember the last.
It was 2018, and I was at a book event in downtown Toronto. An American journalist and a local moderator had packed the hall at the Reference Library, Torontonians flocking to hear enlightened opinions about the unenlightened U.S. president. At some point, for reasons I don’t recall, Scarborough was mentioned. What I do remember is the laughter: Rippling through the room, as if to say, you know, Scarborough, that place, why mention it here among the civilized? I sat in the back row and did what I’ve always done around polite Canadians – held my tongue.
I was born in Scarborough, grew up in Scarborough, spent the first decade and a half of my life in Scarborough – and then went out into the bigger world, studying in Kingston, Paris, London and New Haven, Conn., before becoming a foreign policy adviser in the federal government and a fellow at Harvard. Yet my heart has never left Scarborough. And as an adult, I came to learn all too well that laughter, that derision, was suggestive of other things as well.
Full piece here.
I’m Omer Aziz, the author of Brown Boy: A Memoir, a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, and Publisher of Notes From The Margins. This publication is fueled by passion and supported by readers! You can share and subscribe below. Thank you for reading.