urphotojournalism
Madina Azizi-Personal Project
“When I started elementary school, I was new to Canada then and at the time I thought all people in Canada had blond hair and blue eyes. That’s how I had envisioned everybody. So I attended Thomas Collegiate, which is in the north east side of the city, and there were a lot of Indigenous people there and they all were non-blond and non-blue eyed. So my first instinct was that they are Afghan so I started speaking with them in Farsi because in my mind if they were blond and blue eyed that meant they were Canadian but anyone outside of that characteristic meant that they were from Afghanistan. And of course they were giving me weird looks because they had no idea what I was talking about and little did I know that, in fact, they really did not know what I was saying. I realized that much much later.” Aqila Azizi came from Afghanistan to Canada in 2000. She is an engineer working in the construction field and she calls Canada her new home. Photo by Madina Azizi.
Madina Azizi-Personal Project
“When I started elementary school, I was new to Canada then and at the time I thought all people in Canada had blond hair and blue eyes. That’s how I had envisioned everybody. So I attended Thomas Collegiate, which is in the north east side of the city, and there were a lot of Indigenous people there and they all were non-blond and non-blue eyed. So my first instinct was that they are Afghan so I started speaking with them in Farsi because in my mind if they were blond and blue eyed that meant they were Canadian but anyone outside of that characteristic meant that they were from Afghanistan. And of course they were giving me weird looks because they had no idea what I was talking about and little did I know that, in fact, they really did not know what I was saying. I realized that much much later.” Aqila Azizi came from Afghanistan to Canada in 2000. She is an engineer working in the construction field and she calls Canada her new home. Photo by Madina Azizi.