Can a memoir be a horror story?

This memoir is a psychologically deep dive into the horror of patriarchy. Growing up, Sumaiya Matin heard stories where people are possessed by jinn into mad love. When those possessed are women, however, Matin comes to understand the jinns seduce them into shameful acts that remove them from the world at large. Hearing these stories, Matin evokes a literary device of the Shayṭan Bride, the one who is seduced; she is outside of society’s bounds and free, because her "freedom of movement existed entirely outside the spectrum of their imaginations.”

A child immigrant to Canada, Sumaiya Matin visits Bangladesh at 19. The revelation that she is dating a non-Muslim Desi back in Toronto causes an uncle to take control of her life. She is held hostage and forced into an arranged marriage—almost. At the 11th hour before the wedding, her attempts to contact the High Commission of Canada finally go through and staff arrive: Sumaiya returns to Canada to deal with the aftermath. These basic facts would make for an excellent straight narrative, but this memoir is something much more complex.

The book has a disclaimer: "this is not a rescue story." It is a challenge to Canadian literature to take in more complex narratives of race/feminism/desire/religion. The story is also deeply embedded in the psycho/spiritual aspects of the author’s experience.

For me, this memoir felt deeply resonant, even though I read this book from a different positionality than that of the author. I also grew up in Toronto, in a family embedded in a different ethnic community: Irish/East Coast Catholics. Matin describes being dragged from a middle school dance by her father. This reminded me of when I was dragged by my elbow from the high school dance by my red-faced, screaming father who feared I’d possibly dance with a boy. When I was 18 I was not forced into marriage but I was pressured into a different fate by my father: joining the Canadian Army, where the psychological horror of semi-torture, sleep deprivation, and constant threats of rape caused me to lose contact with reality. Like Matin, I was hallucinating and sleep-walking and questioning who I was on a deep level.

Reading this memoir through my own white gaze, I kept in mind the disclaimer: this is not a rescue story. There is a whole trope of white feminism rescuing Muslim women. Sumaiya writes that for Muslims post 9/11, "the whole of Canada is shaped like a panopticon, with law enforcement and the government at its centre." I was a part of those organizations as a soldier during the time when Canada was in Afghanistan. It was reading across difference and taking seriously writers from the Islamic world that made me question how the patriarchal forces I was caught in could possibly liberate Muslim women. I left the military and slowly made a new life for myself. 

But Matin’s and my experiences were also very different. I lost my Catholic faith, whereas for Matin, "it was then that my faith had deepened the most". 

A lesson from The Shaytan Bride is that white feminism cannot ever rescue Muslim women. This memoir felt so close and at the same time a world away from my life. My response to Matin’s memoir is from the vantage point of my own positionality, and I’m sure I miss many specificities I could never understand, but this is partly why I enjoyed reading and engaging with her work so much. A key takeaway from her book is that, in the end, if we need to be rescued, we have to rescue ourselves–particularly from the horror in our own minds created by the trauma of living so intimately with our own specific patriarchies.

Megan Kinch is a writer and construction electrician from Toronto. She lives in between the spaces of literature/journalism and working manual labour on construction sites. Her work explores these contradictions through memoir, investigative journalism, reporting, usually published in magazines, including This, Briarpatch, West End-Phoenix, Spacing, NOW. You can find her @meganysta on Twitter.