When I was very little, my father would tell me that it was very important that I “come first in class.” I would remember this every morning as I tried my best to hurry around the vast and perfectly square sand field that lay, purpose unknown, by the school. We were none of us allowed to just cross that dusty gold expanse, but had to tramp around its three concrete edges: one right turn and then another before reaching the playground and then the classrooms. And I was small and all the other kids were big and I had not guts or cockiness enough to shoulder my way through those morning crowds. Even if I had, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. I took the bus from our quiet compound and there were kids whose fathers drove them to school.

So every morning I would walk into class and see, disappointed, that someone was already there. At best, I was second, never first.

I was still in grade school when I realised that my father couldn’t care less if I was there to wipe the dust off fresh morning desks and write the date on the blank green chalkboard. I was well into university before I stopped caring what marks the other students were getting and focused, with much better results emotionally and academically, on honing my own skills.

But my father’s second pet-phrase, “have some self-respect,” confounded me well past high school. It was only recently that I finally understood. In high school, when he would make this demand almost daily, I would slit my eyes in sulky and uncomprehending anger. It seemed to me then that this concept of self-respect was too closely tied up with the need to maintain a façade of respectability and I resented this shameless intrusion of an entire neighbourhood of various prying eyes of varying ages into my sundry and pathetic tragicomedies.

I was 15 when it first struck me how much I was like my mother and the thought scared me. But I was only 15 and now, over half a decade later, I am very much aware of myself as a composite of my parents. I can hear lacing my scepticism their cynicism, their cynicism that used to irritate and sicken me so much. So I know that if I have children, that I will turn around and tell them too to behave as though they have some self-respect and they will no doubt also have no idea what I mean, until they’ve embarrassed and demeaned themselves in ways they will try very hard to forget.

I thought of this on Sunday, standing in the airy Lennox Contemporary Gallery, which was hosting “A Light unto Nations,” a photography exhibit showcasing four Muslim and four Jewish photographers. It’s a part of the month-long CONTACT photography festival currently happening in Toronto. This particular exhibit is all about “the theme of tolerance and the consequences of intolerance.”

(Those of you who haven’t yet checked out the exhibit (it runs until May 20) might want to leave this post for later reading.)

Scattered throughout the show were paraphernalia chosen presumably by the organisers: magazines, placards, postcards, plastic flowers. The placards soon drew my attention. There were only two of them. One had a verse from the Quran printed on it reminding Muslims of Islam’s interconnectedness with Christianity and Judaism, the other Abrahamic faiths. The second placard also had this verse, as well as an apology from Salim Mansur, a man I had never before heard of. Leaving aside the strangeness of this need on the part of the organisers to showcase only Islamic scripture in an exhibit meant to draw attention to a region that is home to three different religions, Mansur’s apology made me think again of my father and his insistence on self-respect.
For Mansur had to decided to apologise without my permission on my behalf for things I have absolutely nothing to do with.

What you should know about me, what you hopefully take for granted about me, and what I therefore refuse to prove (it’s that whole innocent until proven guilty frippery) is that I have not killed, do not intend to kill, do not supporting the killing of people. I do not tear down houses, do not intend to tear down houses, do not support the tearing down of houses with people still in them. I do not build walls, do not intend to build walls, do not support the building of walls between people and through families.
These are all things that I do not do, do not intend to do, do not support the doing of.

So what must I apologise for, when others, people I have never met and do not want to meet, do these things? I will, yes, do my part to stop them, but raising my voice in anger at them is not the same as apologising for them. I will do the first, which makes sense and will have results, but I will not do the second, which stems from a terrible lack of self-esteem and responds to a demeaning system that could care less about actual complicity.

That middle-aged white man sitting across from me on the bus, he does not abuse children, does not intend to abuse children, does not support the sexual abuse of children.
But every pedophile I have heard of is a middle-aged white man.
So what does it mean then when he leans over and apologises to the six-year-old boy gazing out the window? What does it mean when he says, unctuously and pompously, that he apologises on behalf of all other middle-aged white men for those few men who resemble him who do things to children that make police officers retire sick and heartbroken?
The thing is, he doesn’t. He doesn’t apologise. It never occurs to him to apologise and it never occurs to that six-year-old’s mother to turn to this man and demand he apologise.

So Mansur, if you are apologising for something you feel you are personally responsible for, then I commend you. I would appreciate it, however, if, the next time you are offered a soap box, you would refrain from involving me in your unburdening of your personal guilt. You do not need to speak for me. No one needs to speak for me. My every word – and there are many of them, you know - is reserved for that purpose, so I really don’t need your assistance.

This is my understanding of one very important aspect of that self-respect that my father ingrained in me: the right to make my own apologies and to make them when and where I feel fit. I will not have someone else’s guilt foisted on me by virtue of their sharing one strand of existence with me.
And yes, my Muslimness is but one strand - it is by no means the only strand and it is not the strand with which I neatly up knot my identity.
Understand: there are no Muslims who speak for me.
There are no Muslims who have the authority to apologise for me.
There is only me.

And if I decide to make an apology and to have it printed and photocopied, framed and hung on gallery walls, rest assured I will not be apologising for anyone but me. I will not speak for the middle-class, for women, for Canadians, for Sri Lankans, for pre-meds, for English students, for immigrants, for young adults. I will not speak for Muslims. I will not speak for any hyphenated combination that you may devise from those few, very few strands. I will not speak for anyone but me.

There were also other things in this exhibit that I found troubling.

For instance, the very first images in the exhibit were arranged in a manner that clearly exacerbated certain stereotypes, to the discredit of the show’s organisers, if not the individual photographers. The gallery itself is arranged into two rooms. You walk into and through the first room, through a slight narrowing and up a few steps to reach the second room. It’s this first room, then, that where first impressions are made and, thus, where placement of the pictures is of paramount importance.
On the left side of this first room were the pictures by Gilad Benari. They were beautiful pictures: two fishermen catching stars in a net; a girl surrounded by clouds; a sleeping baby, a Star of David strung along a (n inexplicably dotted) Muslim rosary. There was also a picture of a young Israeli soldier, a friend of Benari’s, with his head bowed in prayer. Interestingly enough, this particular picture was placed far from the one of a string of bullets, entitled “Combat DNA.”

On the left side of this room were Tamara Abdul Hadi’s picture. All her pictures were about sectarian violence. All her pictures were troubling, but they were, after all, pictures about war. But when considered in direct comparison with Benari’s pictures, as they must have been, given that they placed directly opposite each other, her pictures are rendered even more troubling, but for a different reason.

One of Abdul Hadi’s pictures was of two pre-adolescent boys with wary faces, one wearing a sweater with the words “We sail right into the storm.” A second was a picture of a minaret reflected upside down in a muddy puddle. These were the first two pieces of Abdul Hadi’s that I saw and I thought them well-portrayed and did not begrudge them their edginess. In fact, I didn’t think the upside-down mosque picture very edgy at all, until I saw all the other pictures. And all the other pictures were: dripping, red graffiti praising Imam Hussein; a man with a tattooed face, who claimed loyalty to Muqtada Al-Sadr (a direct translation of his Arabic tattoos was not provided); a shot of the hand of the tattooed hand of a boxer-turned-refugee, a view of a mosque through a metal sheet ridden with bullet holes. And then the collection finished off with a standard rear view of chador-clad women inside an intricately designed mosque.

Each piece on its own I would not have considered very critically. The collection in its entirety I would have read as a comment, and just one comment, on current sectarian violence in the Middle East. What I resented was the placement of Benari’s and Abdul Hadi’s collections opposite each other and the resultant juxtaposition of Israeli peacefulness, with its praying soldiers and decontextualised bullets, against Muslim violence, with its anonymous women and unsmiling children.

Sawsan Yassine’s works hung in the mini-hallway. They struck me as self-portraits, but they might not have been. Two of them were of a woman with a scarf hung loosely and appealingly around her face. One was entitled “Faith,” the other “Orient” and the blurb that accompanied the second did not question the problematic title, but instead contributed to the exotification of the wide, almond eyes and the pouty, lip-glossed lips.

The pictures in the inner room covered a variety of topics, ranging from Aasil Ahmad’s stunning pictures of Hajj (though I had to wonder how he managed to these pictures and whether or not he was on Hajj himself when he took those pictures) to Kitra Cahana’s thoughtful portrayal of the way different religions are practised within Israel (though, for Islam, this amounted to a picture of three girls wearing the hijab and I am not fond of images that collapse Islam and hijab together).

Cahana was the only photographer to present two collections. The second was about the Falash Mura, Ethiopian Jews who have a broken Jewish lineage, some of whom are being allowed to immigrate to Israel. Judaism in Africa is something I’ve been interested in for a while now, so I thought this was an engaging primer. One of the things that stood out at me was the way Cahana referred to them as “Ethiopian Jews” even after their move to Israel. For instance, in the introduction to her collection, she wrote, “nearly one hundred Ethiopians have been placed on an airplane, many for the firs time in their lives and brought to Israel, a country that is already home to nearly 11,000 Ethiopian Jews.” The intersections glimpsed here of nationality, citizenship, class, race, religion, and heritage are fascinating.

Anthony Asael, founder of Art in All of Us, also had some pictures on display. He listed as a matter of pride on his biography that he’d visited over a hundred countries. I’m always somewhat suspicious of people who boast about how many countries they’ve been to, because I don’t think travel and knowledge are immediately associated in any real way, but that’s a post for another day. I had a few minor issues with two of his pictures, beautifully composed though they were. There was one of a happy young girl. The right edge of the photo ran right through the middle of her face, so that only the left half of her face was visible. And the worrying title of this obviously constructed image was “Half a voice, half a chance, half a smile.” Given that African women are too often lumped together into homogenising images of poverty and violence, I couldn’t help but take issue with the way this title drew on popular stereotypes of a dehumanised existence in Africa and then made them seem inherent and self-evident, when in fact it was the photographer and not some vague system of subjugation that cut this girl’s smile in half. Said another way, what I object to is the way the literalness of her self and her smile were co-opted, probably without her permission, into figuratively strengthening an already deeply entrenched stereotype of Africa.

In keeping with his “Millenium Goals” theme, Asael’s pictures all had two-part titles, the first half being the actual title for the image and the second half being a humanitarian goal that Asail would like to see reached. Most of his title pairings made sense. The previous image, for instance, was linked to the need to improve maternal health. The one pairing that stood out at me had to do with the photo of a boy – again, only part of his face was shown – whose face was decorated with traditional tattoos. It was was entitled “Scarification” and subtitled “Millennium Goal: combating HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and other diseases.” I’ve talked before about the images that surround African scarification and I was more than a little disappointed at the condescending presentation of the tradition in his picture.

And finally, it irritates me to no end when people misspell Quran, as in “Learning in a Koranic School.”

I need to make it clear now that it isn’t as thought I hated all the pictures or that I thought the intended aim from of the exhibit misguided. Far from it. I strongly believe that art has an important part to play in bridging knowledge gaps and that the joint efforts of artists who identify from different sides of any given struggle are integral to this sort of political art. And the pictures in this exhibit, whatever my qualms about their subject matter, were all beautifully composed pictures. All of the photographers clearly possess remarkable technical skills.

That said, I was disappointed, not so much with the individual pictures, but with the way they were packaged and presented. I think the show fell short of its purported aim. The political ideologies presented, particularly by the Muslim apologists and some of the artists, were unsatisfying in their lack of nuance and authenticity.

I wish they giving having guided tours again - I missed the ones on Thursday and Sunday. I’d like to hear how the organisers and photographers explain the exhibit. Possibly, they can justify all the things that I’ve pointed out here as inconsistencies and do so to even my satisfaction.

Now. Off to more CONTACT stuff. Who wants to join me?