Street Level

By DALE BASS
When she was just a child, Monia Mazigh wasn’t afraid to express her opinions.
Her father always did — and that wasn’t easy for a public servant in Tunisia, working for a government that has been condemned for a poor human-rights record and intolerance of its citizens who criticize it.
“My father was someone who didn’t accept injustice easily,” she says. “He was not intimidated. And it was not easy to say those things because, in my country where there is one party, a ruling party, people had no choice but to obey.”
That confidence and sense of right and wrong instilled at such a young age helped Mazigh through what she calls “the boom,” when her husband, Maher Arar, was arrested in the United States and sent to his native Syria, where he was held and tortured for more than a year.
“I enjoyed giving my opinion at home and listened to different arguments and all of this was important,” says the woman who now teaches finance at Thompson Rivers University.
“I took this for granted because this is how I was raised — and then boom! I had this big shock. It didn’t happen to me in Tunisia. It happened to me in Canada, where I didn’t expect it. But the good thing is that it happened to me and I was able to speak.”
When Mazigh came to Canada in 1991, she arrived with a bachelor’s degree in commerce and a drive to further her education. Her brother, who, like Mazigh, has a doctorate degree and also teaches — his specialty is mathematics — had already come to the country and sponsored her and her parents.
Mazigh studied for her master’s degree at Montreal’s Ecole des hautes etudes commerciales — she is fluent in French — and then transferred to McGill University to achieve her doctorate and be exposed to the English side of Montreal.
“Going to McGill covered this other part of Montreal that I didn’t know.”
And it was there that she met Arar, who had moved to Canada from Syria in 1988, at the age of 17. He was also studying at McGill, working on his degree in computer engineering.
He also has a master’s degree in telecommunications.
The couple married in 1994, moved to Ottawa, started a family and went about their lives — until 2002, when their nightmare began.
Mazigh says she was never afraid of speaking out for her husband.
“I had lost my life. I didn’t have more to lose.”
The story of her public face is well-known to most Canadians, but it was the mom who had to cope with the private torment of going home every night to two young children, one of whom was old enough to know something was wrong.
Daddy wasn’t home.
Daughter Baraa was almost seven, Mazigh says, “and she knew right away something was wrong. I told her her father had problems. And then, after, when we knew he was in prison, I told her that he was in prison . . .
“ I don’t know if she knew. I remember one time, she asked me, we were watching something and she said, ‘Does this look like a prison?’ So I don’t know if she really realized at that time if she realized what a prison is. Even myself, I didn’t know where he was.”
Mazigh says it was important to not hide the truth from Baraa — son Houd was too young — “because my life was all about that. I would ask her from time to time how she’d feel. Sometimes she’d feel sad and she would tell me that. She would tell me she missed her dad.”
Mazigh wonders how the reality the family has lived with — and will continue to deal with — will affect her daughter.
“I think with time we will know. I would like to have her tell it to me later on. After her father came back, she would sometimes, especially with all the pressure . . . she’d sometimes say, ‘Why can’t we have a normal life?’ I think she has this frustration.”
Mazigh has been hailed as a feminist role model, a moniker she’s not sure she’s comfortable wearing. She says she’s not a feminist “in the traditional meaning,” but is a woman who “cares a lot about other women.
“I sympathize with women’s issues and I try to understand them. My views are probably not the same as women, feminists, who grew up here and have different values.
“But an injustice is an injustice. Sufferance is sufferance.”
Mazigh knows her life will never be the same.
She’s coping with a new job, a new hometown, a husband who is unemployed and dealing with his own demons from his experience. She’s watching her children grow up and worries — as moms do — about what the future will bring them.
She strives, she says, to ensure her children “have the life they need and deserve.
“But I don’t think we have a normal life anymore. Maybe time will tell. I can only hope.”
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© Copyright 2007 Kamloops This Week

Posted by Dale at 11:06 a.m. Comments