DOES REPRESENTATION REALLY MATTER?
I grew up playing with barbie dolls. The tall white dolls with awfully beautiful blonde hair. I wanted to be like them. I yearned for the time when my hair would not only grow but also turn sunflower yellow. To sum it up, I wanted to be like the dolls I played with. T.V was no different. Liza Mcguire was very white, whilst the A.N.T Farm cast wasn’t midnight black. My parents would later Introduce me to the hijab and Its benefits, which heightened my predicament because no one on T.V wore the hijab. The hijab stories being told at the time mostly covered oppressed women in the middle east. The Saudi Driving Ban, The oppressed women of U.A.E these were the issues that I was bombarded with. Nothing positive about a hijabi let alone a black hijabi.
Representation according to the Merriam Webster dictionary, is the description or portrayal of someone or something in a particular way. Its crystal clear that I never had any form of this growing up. But the year is 2020 and times have changed or at least they are. More women are taking up space in the political arena, Saudi Arabia has lifted its ban on driving, Hijabi models are strutting the runway, movies like Blackpanther which are by an all-black cast are being produced and receiving good reviews, films have started incorporating Muslim women with their hijabs on. To some extent, it is truly a great time to be alive. In the different crannies where women, black women, black Muslim women would not have been seen, they are now filling those gaps efficiently.
It's exhilarating to see women who look like me filling up such crannies. It is a subtle yet major feeling to know that you are represented and in a good light. It shows that as an individual be it black, hijabi, Asian, PLWD, you too are seen and appreciated as part of society. Representation gives individuals a sense of belonging, it proves beyond doubt that as much as we hail from diverse parts of the world and, we can all make something of importance out of our humble selves.
Representation is a vicious cycle. We write about what we see and what we experience. When all we study is white and all we see is white, all we create is white. I applaud the great authors and thinkers that have managed to test these boundaries, to push our current media and literature out of balance. They inspire young writers like me to explore the unseen characters, the traditional sidekicks, the never forgotten villains. They also encourage us to find characters in our own identity. We are encouraged to write characters with our strengths and weaknesses and flaws~ Natachi Onwuamaegbuliza