“Pass me the hookah”: an assessment of Toronto’s ‘shisha ban’ as related to Muslim placemaking, forced displacement, and racializing surveillance
By
Mitra Fakhrashrafi
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto
Copyright 2020 “Pass me the hookah”: an assessment of Toronto’s ‘shisha ban’ as related to Muslim placemaking, forced displacement, and racializing surveillance
Mitra Fakhrashrafi Master of Arts Department of Geogrpahy & Planning University of Toronto Copyright 2020
ABSTRACT
Toronto’s ‘shisha ban’ came into effect on April 1st, 2016 and has since forced nearly 70 predominantly Black and brown Muslim migrant-owned businesses to close or restructure their livelihoods. Following the passing of the ban, Ali, the owner of Scarborough-based Habibiz
Shisha Café, spoke to the cultural and religious significance of shisha and asked, “where else is there for us in this city?” (Hassan, 2016). Through semi-structured interviews and an analysis of the legislation enacted, I look to Ali’s question as a starting point to engage in a study of the relatively new bylaw and its impacts on Muslim placemaking in the Greater Toronto Area
(GTA). Through this thesis, I put forward a non-exhaustive archive of Toronto’s shisha culture and look to traditions of Black, Indigenous, and racialized urban placemaking to consider collective futures beyond racializing surveillance and the unbelonging and displacement which often follows.
ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Bé naam-e khoda.
This thesis would not have been possible without the support, kindness, and generosity of many people.
This work began in 2015 following rumors about a city-wide shisha ban. The ensuing passing of the bylaw led to conversations with friends online and in-person about how to protect Toronto’s shisha lounges and the people who frequent them. I am grateful to be in community with people in Toronto who are invested in the futures of Muslim placemaking including the Muslim- identified research participants, without whom this work would not have been possible.
I am appreciative for the opportunity to have undertaken this research with the guidance of my supervisor, Dr. Emily Gilbert, whose endless patience, unwavering support and thoughtful insight kept me motivated towards completing this work. Likewise, Emily’s feedback, edits, and questions pushed me to further think through this study, especially with regard to the possibilities for agency and resistance.
Lastly, I would like to thank my family and chosen family for keeping me grounded and encouraged and focused (and distracted) throughout the otherwise very isolating writing process. Mersi!
iii TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii
LIST OF FIGURES vi
INTRODUCTION 1
Purpose of the study and research questions 1
Significance of the study 1
Summary 4
CHAPTER 1. Theoretical framework and literature review 4
Introduction 4
Placemaking, a ‘sense of place’, and enacting spatial justice 6
Gentrification and forced displacement 12
Racializing surveillance 17
The rise of the shisha lounge: a case study of the Ottoman coffeehouse 20
Literature review summary 29
CHAPTER 2. Methodologies 30
Introduction to research methods 30
Vulnerability and mitigating research risks 31
Data collection 33
Positionality 37
CHAPTER 3. Assessing and analyzing the shisha ban 38
Introduction and terminology 38
A timeline of Toronto’s shisha ban 39
iv Countering the “strict health needs assessment” 51
The financial burden of shisha lounge owners 53
Analyzing the legal challenge 57
Bylaw analysis summary 61
CHAPTER 4. Narrating former shisha lounge patron responses 62
Introducing former shisha lounge patrons 62
BIPOC transformations of the city 67
Affordable places of belonging 69
Citizenship and clashes over space 77
Resisting the white gaze 78
Resisting the auntie gaze 81
No ‘safe’ spaces 84
After the ban 85
“Where now?” 88
CHAPTER 5. Summary and conclusions 93
Study objectives, restated 93
Limitations and recommendations for future research 94
Conclusions 95
BIBLIOGRAPHY 97
v LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 4.1: DoNothingClub ‘Cold Cutz’ digital mix illustrated cover art
Figure 4.2: Hundreds of Muslim community members demonstrate discriminatory bylaw at Toronto City
Figure 4.3: Still from The Feeling of Being Watched (2018)
Figure 4.4: Screenshot from the music video for “Shisha” (2012) by Massari featuring French Montana
Figure 4.5: Jessica Kirk’s playlist listening station and Jean Deaux lyrics as seen at Habibiz (2019) multidisciplinary art exhibit
vi INTRODUCTION
I: Purpose of the study and research questions
This thesis examines Muslim peoples’ fraught, contested and ever-shifting relationships to placemaking in the City of Toronto, as revealed through the government’s ban of hookah waterpipes, or shisha. The ‘shisha ban’ came into effect on April 1st, 2016 and has since forced nearly 70 predominantly Black and brown Muslim migrant-owned businesses to close and/or restructure their livelihoods. Through a series of semi-structured interviews and multidisciplinary artistic interventions, as well as an analysis of the legislation enacted, I illustrate what the City’s banning of shisha lounges means for Muslim peoples’ ‘sense of place’. I first look to traditions of radical placemaking in Toronto and in ‘the West’ more generally to underline the ways that Black, Indigenous, and racialized peoples’ placemaking practices are systematically (albeit differentially) marked by unbelonging, displacement, and racializing surveillance. With a focus on Muslim people navigating the Greater Toronto Area I ask questions such as: What are existing barriers that Muslim people face in creating ‘a sense of place’?; How do shisha lounges serve as important places of communal gathering that oftentimes model alternative ways of sharing and inhabiting space?; What does it mean to further police places predominantly frequented by already hypersurveilled communities?; and How do we collectively imagine futures beyond unbelonging, displacement, and the surveillant mechanisms that seek to maintain white, capitalist, colonial spatial architectures? I explore these questions with the overarching goal of better understanding how the relatively new City of Toronto bylaw prohibiting the smoking of hookah in licensed establishments, aka ‘the shisha ban,’ has impacted Muslim placemaking in the city. An accompanying objective of this work is to narrate Muslim peoples’ experiences with belonging/unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance in shisha lounges and to put forward a non-exhaustive archive of Toronto’s shisha culture.
II: Significance of the Study
Existing literature and organizing related to the targeted surveillance of Muslim people in Toronto and in Canada has predominantly focused on state funded surveillance programs at the airport, at the border, in workplaces, and in places of worship. For example, situated against the
1 structural backdrop of “whiteness as a cultural signifier for innocence in [the] airport and other border spaces”, Melissa Finn, Jenna Hennebry, and Bessma Momani (2018) look to the “immobilization of racialized and securitized” Muslim people through identity scrutiny, ‘risk’ profiling, and biometric assessment to demonstrate how it leads “many Canadian Arab youth to see themselves as second-class citizens” (Finn et al., 2018, 607). This surveillance and the overarching ‘feeling of being watched’ often results in unconscious self-policing by Canadian Arab youth as well as conscious efforts such as the altering of travel plans (Finn et al., 2018, 669). Finn et al. highlight that, through borders, ‘racializing surveillance’ (Browne, 2015) not only manages who is ‘in or out of place’ but also functions as a “social sorting” related to who moves, further demarcating the “parameters” (Finn et al. 2018, 670) of belonging and unbelonging in public spaces. In tracing the barriers that migrants, refugees, and/or many Black, Indigenous, and racialized people face in accessing essential Toronto city services including public spaces like libraries, Jean McDonald (2012) uses “governmentalized internal borders” (p. 129) to stress that borders are more complex than black lines on maps and are not limited to airports. For example, state-funded surveillance programs such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) mandate to increase its presence in mosques and religious associations such as post-secondary campus-based Muslim Students’ Associations (MSAs) from Halifax to Toronto to Alberta have led to what a University of Toronto MSA member described as the invasive feeling of an “additional microscope” (Nasser, 2019). This “additional microscope” highlights the way that, for many young Muslim Canadians already navigating the terrain of gendered and classed racism, surveillant encounters continue to act as everyday borders and barriers. Likewise, recent debates have also addressed federal, provincial, and municipal legislations that police Muslim people’s, and particularly Muslim women’s, encounters in public spaces such as workplaces and beaches (Ali, 2018; Ahmad, 2019). Despite “dominant and liberal discourses that position Canada as a tolerant and multicultural nation” (Ali, 2018), the recent passage of Bill 21 in Quebec further highlights governmentalized internal bordering as teachers and other provincial employees are effectively banned from wearing the hijab and, for this reason, increasingly uprooted across provinces (Ahmad, 2019). Racializing surveillance thus facilitates unbelonging and processes of displacement that extend “well into the everyday geographies of the city” (Fakhrashrafi et al., 2019, 85). These examples signal to the necessity of ‘Muslim placemaking’
2 (Nasser, 2003) through practices that produce alternative relationships to neighborhoods, homes, mosques, and streets.
Importantly, as sites of racializing surveillance that target Muslim people, the border, the airport, the workplace, and the mosque have and continue to be written about and organized against. I study Toronto’s relatively new shisha ban to broaden discussions on everyday encounters with racializing surveillance and to look to policing in Muslim places of recreation. Although not often valued as spaces for Muslim placemaking, I will go on to demonstrate that their historical and present role as such makes the banning of shisha lounges a particularly effective entry point for investigating the reach of racializing surveillance and the unbelonging and forced displacement which often follows. Within this context, the public health inspector that fined at least six people $385 each in Bab El-Hara Café (CBC News, 2017) can be understood as a surveillant force administering a spatial organizing which leaves the youth that frequented the shisha lounge located in the predominantly Black and brown Muslim neighborhood of Heron Gate, Ottawa as problematic figures in need of management and discipline (Ali, 2018; Taylor & Zine, 2014). I look to shisha lounges operated for and by Muslim people living in Toronto to identify the ways that, through Muslim placemaking, Muslim people address and shift these uneven relationships to place. Put differently, in the face of racializing surveillance and other structural determinants that continue to shape life for Muslim people in the city, the shisha lounge acts as a site to negotiate and transform these circumstances.
Similarly, in conversation with second generation Muslim-American women, Mayida Zaal, Tahani Salah, and Michelle Fine (2007) describe the embodied experiences with surveillance that many women face as a “scaffolding of scrutiny” where in which surveillance comes from the “government and also from their community, family, media, and self” (p. 170). Like Finn et al. (2018), who describe the self-policing that Canadian Arab youth take up in the face of the border as a “locale of citizenship depletion” (p. 670), Zaal et al. (2007) demonstrate that “the sensibility that they were being controlled [and] being watched was enough to lead” young Muslim women to believe they were under constant surveillance and, in turn, direct “a scrutinizing lens onto themselves” (p. 170). Zaal et al. thus signal to distinctly gendered experiences with heightened surveillance that Muslim women and trans and non-binary people
3 navigate. To this point, this study centres the experiences of women participants to examine the possibilities of shisha lounges as an urban commons to “share affinities and resources and sustain and expand networks in an effort to thrive in the city” (Hunter et al., 2016, 34) while also highlighting the particular ways that the shisha ban effectively severs Muslim women’s relationships to an important space of belonging in Toronto.
III: Summary
Legislation policing Muslim women’s dress such as Bill 21, the expansion in the definition of what “counts as criminal activity” (Paik, 2017), the “stress of living in a metropolis actively pricing out its [racialized] residents” (Bin Shikhan, 2018), and interpersonal surveillance are some of many structural determinants that continue to shape mobility, access, and life for Muslim people in the ever-gentrifying City of Toronto. Sunjay Mathuria (2018) suggests that Toronto’s suburban strip malls—where most shisha lounges sit, bordering the expensive core—are places that defy “the downtown white gaze” by nurturing “cross-cultural interactions and community building” (Mathuria, 2018). Through a study of the shisha ban and its impacts on Muslim people including shisha lounge owners and patrons, I am invested in contributing to a “multifaceted view of gentrification” (Gordon, 2018, 8) that critiques ‘colour- blind’ city policies which fail to recognize Black, Indigenous, and racialized peoples’ complicated relationships to places of belonging including shisha lounges. The semi-structured interviews and examples that I draw from speak to the possibilities for increased spatial agency of Muslim people in Toronto while pointing to the intimate relationship between Muslim placemaking, racializing surveillance and the unbelonging and forced displacement which often follows.
CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND LITERATURE REVIEW
I: Introduction
The City of Toronto’s ban of hookah waterpipes in licensed establishments (or ‘the shisha ban’) came into effect on April 1st, 2016 and has since forced nearly 70 predominantly
4 Black and Brown Muslim migrant-owned businesses to close and/or restructure their livelihoods (Hassan, 2016). Following the passing of the shisha ban, Ali, the owner of Scarborough-based Habibiz Shisha Café, spoke to the cultural and religious significance of shisha and asked, “where else is there for us in this city?” (Hassan, 2016). In this chapter, I locate shisha lounges as sites of intergenerational gathering, sites of migrant ownership, and sites of radical placemaking for Muslim people living in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). With emphasis on Black, Indigenous, and racialized peoples’ traditions of radical placemaking in public and urban spaces in Canada as well as the United States, I look to the meanings inscribed to physical places such as shisha lounges. I thus offer a literature review on the intimate relationship between placemaking and racializing surveillance, especially as experienced by those subject to “in-between” citizenship (Walcott, 2003, 48), that is, people who might have formal citizenship but are not granted full belonging or rights. I first summarize key terms and explore (1) the power structures that Black, Indigenous, and racialized people (albeit differentially) confront in creating ‘a sense of place’; (2) how placemaking practices are utilized towards increased spatial agency; and (3) what limits and possibilities radical placemaking holds. In doing so, I seek to engage with central themes that the research participants pointed to, particularly as related to the importance of shisha lounges while navigating systemic unbelonging and processes of forced displacement and racializing surveillance in Toronto. I conclude this chapter with a discussion of the placemaking enacted and policing encountered in ‘Ottoman-style coffeehouses’ operated for and by Muslim Anatolian labour migrants on the North-East coast of the United States in the early twentieth century. This case locates contemporary migrant-owned shisha lounges within the broader context of Muslim placemaking practices in modern Islamic history. This literature review is indebted to existing scholarly work, organizing, and artistry that has contextualized and complicated Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and racialized peoples’ relationships to space and place; oftentimes putting forward alternative ways of inhabiting and sharing space (Haritaworn et al, 2018, 13). Importantly, looking to these traditions of ‘radical placemaking’ enables the naming of structures that facilitate the maintenance of white, capitalist, colonial spatial architectures while also looking to placemaking as a performed and enacted process that creatively transforms spatial agency and the functions of citizenship. These diverse and sometimes diverging works significantly defined data collection analysis of the following chapters.
5 II: Placemaking, a sense of place, and radical placemaking possibilities
“There must be two United States”, “Must be two Americas”, or “Must be two Torontos” are catchphrases that have been popularized online by many Black twitter users. For example, in response to a tweet by the American Enterprise Institute which claimed “The birth of the United States was unique because it was founded not on blood or ethnicity, but on ideas” (@AEI, 2017), activist and writer Stephanie Yeboah responded by suggesting “There must be two United States” (@StephanieYeboah, 2019). Yeboah’s response names the way that space is experienced differentially and interrupts whiteness which, in its pervasiveness, seeks to render itself “non-category, normal, natural”, and invisible (Fariaa & Mollett, 2016, 79). Especially in response to how race and class shape experiences to place, the catchphrase has been adopted by twitter users globally. Rinaldo Walcott and Idil Abdillahi (2019) note that in the last decade, Canada, a ‘white-settler society imagined as a liberal, multicultural democracy” (Mahtani, 2014, 20), has been repeatedly rated as one of the top ten western countries in which to reside despite “persistent poverty against Black and Indigenous peoples in Canada” which “tells a different story of the top rating” (Walcott & Abdillahi, 2019, 39). With a primary focus on race, age, income, and gender, a recent United Way report further addresses facets of inequality in the Greater Toronto Area from 1980-2015, showing that Toronto has become the income inequality capital of Canada and noting that “For every dollar a white person in Toronto earns, a racialized person in Toronto earns 52.1 cents” (United Way, 2019, 15). Toronto is thus one of many cities where Black, Indigenous, and racialized residents have taken to saying “Must be two Torontos” online as a means of describing the uneven power structures that shape peoples’ lives. In the coming sections I look to the possibilities for radical placemaking to explore the ways that, in spite of unbelonging, unaffordability, displacement, and surveillance, Black, Indigenous, and racialized people continue to name spatial inequities and create a ‘sense of place’ in the city.
Defining radical placemaking In human geography, architecture, and urban planning, ‘placemaking’ is commonly referred to as a process whereby people transform the places in which they find themselves into places in which they live (Schneekloth & Shibley, 1995), underlining how social and emotional meanings are formed and associated with place (Greenop & Darchen, 2015). Relatedly, Doreen Massey uses a ‘sense of place’ to highlight the power relations embedded in all flows and movements, calling
6 for thinking about places and our relationships to them not so much as bounded areas but rather as “open and porous networks of social relations” (Massey, 1994, 119). Through an indirect conversation with Massey who asks “who is it that is really hankering after a notion of place as settled?” (Massey, 1994, 122), Katherine McKittrick (2011) proposes a ‘Black sense of place’ not as “a steady, focused, and homogenous way of seeing and being in place” (p. 950) but, rather, as a way to reveal what our present knowledge system, inherited from enlightened colonialism and Eurocentric modernity cannot bear. For McKittrick, this means embracing the ways that “Blackness (and therefore the plantation) has produced untidy historically present geographies that are predicated on difficult encounters and our entangled and common histories” (Ibid). Put differently, McKittrick uses a Black sense of place to name “the structural workings of racism [that] kept Black cultures in place and tagged them as ‘placeless’ while also pointing to the way that “these communities innovatively worked within, across, and outside commonsense cartographic and topographical texts” (McKittrick, 2011, 949) to create feelings and places of belonging. In extending McKittrick’s discussion of a ‘Black sense of place’, Marcus Anthony Hunter, Mary Pattillo, Zandria F. Robinson, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2016) use the term “Black placemaking” to both affirm that “existing notions of placemaking are relatively moot on the topic of race and do not explore what particular, concrete… expressions of urban commons might look like”, and to illustrate “the ways that urban Black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance” (p. 32). In drawing from and Hunter et al. and looking to how “otherwise oppressive geographies of a city can provide sites of play, pleasure, celebration, and politics” (Hunter et al., 2016, 34), I use ‘radical placemaking’ to name the ways that Black, Indigenous, and racialized people’s placemaking practices “model different ways of inhabiting and sharing space” (Haritaworn et al., 2018, 13) and, in turn, contest and transform relationships to spatial agency; “the ability to be in, act on or exert control over a desired part of the built-and-natural environment” (Montgomery, 2016, 777). Radical placemaking and increased spatial agency are particularly important as heightened islamophobia (Rana, 2018), augmented immigration enforcement (Walia, 2018), an expansion in the definition of what “counts as criminal activity” (Paik, 2017), surveillance (Browne, 2015), the “stress of living in a metropolis actively pricing out its [racialized] residents” (Bin Shikhan, 2018), and other structural determinants continue to shape mobility, access, and life for Muslim people in Toronto.
7 Of note, drawing from Black geographies to define ‘radical placemaking’ is not an attempt to flatten all non-white peoples’ diverse and diverging experiences with race and space in the Americas. Instead, looking to Black placemaking and ‘a Black sense of place’ is a means of naming the ways that “bondage and displacement, coloniality, dehumanization, and resistance produced within a plantation economy” have been given a geographic future that continues to distinctively “shape Black and non-Black perspectives on place and belonging” (McKittrick, 2011, 949). All readings of spatial agency and placemaking in the Americas are thus strengthened through the recognition of racial entanglement and, more specifically, the plantation in shaping a ‘sense of place’ and ‘placelessness’ within the “historical-present” (Browne, 2015, 8). Notably, in the context of shisha lounge culture in Toronto, Black placemaking is particularly useful framework for discussions of the anti-Blackness which permeates Toronto and is experienced by Black communities including Black Muslim people in the city. Angela Davis writes that radical “simply means grasping things at the root” (Davis, 1990, 14), emphasizing the importance of mapping space in ways that address systemic histories of displacement and erasure (Haritaworn, 2018). Although not without caution, I thus use radical placemaking, racialized placemaking and Muslim placemaking interchangeably throughout the coming chapters to explore how the relatively new City of Toronto bylaw prohibiting the smoking of hookah in licensed establishments has affected Muslim peoples’ experiences with belonging/unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance.
Making communities, making places, and ‘human competence’ Schneekloth and Shibley (2008) insist that placemaking and public space more broadly are not something we have but rather are “something we do” (p. 216). While the public realm has long been cited as “the tissue that binds communities together in the long history of human settlement” (Schneekloth & Shibley, 2008, 215), Susan Silberberg, Katie Lorah, Rebecca Disbrow, and Anna Muessig (2013) suggest that the relationship between public places and the needs and cultures of communities has come to be understood as increasingly fragmented:
Despite this intrinsic link between public places and community, by the end of the 19th century, this link had fractured. The industrial age’s focus on machine efficiency, and the suburbanization of the United States in the 20th century cemented the divorce (Silberberg et al., 2013, 5).
In response to “modernist, technical, rational” frameworks which centre an uncritical acceptance of the “expert” and which foster inaccessible bureaucratic and corporate structures, many
8 architects and urban planners gravitated towards placemaking as a means of both highlighting and strengthening “relationships between people and places, and among people in places” (Schneekloth & Shibley, 2008, 207). Fostering these connections is linked to creating conducive and collaborative environments to “shape our public realm in order to maximize shared value” (Schneekloth & Shibley, 2008, 216). Put differently, “making relationships and communities is the goal” of placemaking in professional contexts and “making places is the vehicle for this practice” (Schneekloth & Shibley, 2008, 207). Joseph Pierce, Deborah Martin, and James Murphy (2011) suggest that a study of the politics enacted through placemaking is key to understanding how communities conceptualize themselves and how this shapes socio-spatial re-ordering of the urban environment such as development or gentrification. While Schneekloth and Shibley (1993; 2008), Silberberg et al. (2013), and Pierce et al. (2011) all engage with placemaking within the context of social movements and more democratic practices of place, Hunter et al. (2016) note that this emphasis on “human competence” (p. 35) is often not a characteristic granted to Black urban residents. Furthermore, Seram Nejad, Ryan Walker, and David Newhouse (2019) emphasize that discussions of how urban ‘places’ in the Americas are created “is inseparable from Indigenous dispossession and marginalization in cities” (Nejad et al., 2019, 2). In affirming that place- creation is inherently a political act and a strategic device in the assertion or resistance of power and domination, Nejad et al. draw from Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) to point to how colonial processes of urban planning and design have re-territorialized urban space in ways that subordinate Indigenous sense of place, superimposing Western epistemologies of placemaking upon it (Nejad et al., 2019). With these understandings in mind, I look to reflections on Black placemaking, Indigenous placemaking, Muslim placemaking, and broader racialized acts of placemaking to centre the importance of spatial justice in radical placemaking practices. These perspectives intersect, overlap, and point to ways that class, gender, sexuality, ability, and other structural determinants continue to shape “practices, performances, and policies” (Browne, 2015, 16).
Black placemaking and enacting spatial justice Using Chicago as a case, Hunter et al. put forth ‘Black placemaking’ as a means of privileging the creative, celebratory, playful, pleasurable, and poetic experiences of being Black and being around other Black people in the city (Hunter et al., 2016). In doing so, the authors
9 demonstrate how Black Chicagoans use “interaction and meaning to transform spaces into places, however ephemeral they may be” with the goal of “adding to a growing literature centering black agency as consequential to city life and urban processes” (Hunter et al, 2016, 35). Hunter et al. are mindful not to ignore assaults on Black placemaking both externally through lethal policing and destructive urban planning or internally through dangers such as homophobia, harassment, and homicide. Instead, they highlight “how Black people make places amidst and in spite of those realities” (Hunter et al., 2016, 32). These shifts and transformations are a part of why, at the American Black Sociologists Annual Meeting, Charlene Carruthers suggests that the act of Black placemaking is “agitational at its core” (Carruthers, 2014). Although Silberberg et al. indirectly suggest that placemaking has the ability to shift marginalized peoples’ relationship to spatial agency because, at its most basic, it is a practice that aims to “improve the quality of public place and the lives of its community in tandem” (Silberberg et al., 2013, 2), Black placemaking also reveals that mainstream placemaking and the urban planning which follows fall short in addressing the ways white supremacy organizes itself across space and time to structure social and institutional relations that privilege whiteness (Browne, 2015) and make “abstract notions of difference material” (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, 48). While David Harvey (2012) suggests that urban commons are made possible through the “daily activities and struggles [wherein which] individuals and social groups create the social world of the city, and thereby create something common as a framework within which all can dwell” (p. 74), Hunter et al. suggest that Harvey and other scholars do not adequately address “the obliteration and attenuation of Black spaces” including through dominant placemaking- centred planning practices (Hunter et al., 2016, 34). While their archival work is ongoing and non-exhaustive, through “Black Placemaking: Celebration, Play, and Poetry”, Hunter et al. use Black placemaking to offer an understanding of a Black urban commons; “a place to share affinities and resources and to sustain and expand networks in an effort to thrive and survive in the city” (Hunter et al., 2016, 36). Hunter et al. discuss urban planning interventions that “call for the displacement or exclusion of Black people (or other stigmatized groups) for the purposes of progress and improvement” and, in doing so, highlight the way that policies often envision poor populations as “severable” (Williams, 1997, 11) and disposable. In using physical and virtual examples of Black placemaking in Chicago, the authors illuminate the way that many Black
10 Chicagoan “men and women, old and young, gay and not gay, poor and not poor, digitally connected and in the ‘real world’” participate in making places that have value to them, “that counter the depictions in the barrage of books and articles about Black subjugation and deviance”, and where Black lives matter (Hunter et al., 2016, 35). Rinaldo Walcott (2003) affirms that settler colonies are characterized by their struggles over race and space, noting that Canada is by no means an exception. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton (1993) contend that racial residential segregation shapes the landscape of urban America and Hunter et al. emphasize that nowhere is this truer than in Chicago. Hunter et al. do not conflate Black diasporic experiences in America as static or singular and rather, use ‘Blackness’ to signal to “particular histories of resistance and domination” that are “never closed and always under contestation” (Walcott, 2003; Browne, 2015). As is the case within and across all communities, there are “schisms and distinctions within Black communities, such as class, gender, ethnicity and, sexuality” (Hunter et al., 2016, 36). In drawing from Patricia Hill Collins (2004), Hunter et al. note that the particular mistreatment that Black lesbians and gays face “both outside of and within the larger Black community create the need for safe and affirming spaces” (Hunter et al, 2016, 36). The definition of placemaking that Hunter et al. offer thus considers intersecting and diverging experiences with race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, social citizenship, and age. In drawing from ethnographic accounts of a Chicago nightclub, Hunter et al. use Black placemaking to highlight the making of an urban commons for Black LGBTQ2S people in Chicago who attend the club’s weekly Friday ‘gay night’ to party, to unwind, and to cope. Reflections about using the club to “make the community you need” and to develop social support networks was very common among interviewees that Hunter et al. spoke with. Through a tribute to the life, pleasure, and kinship developed and nurtured at the nightclub, Hunter et al. demonstrate what Black placemaking can look like in practice: the ability to transform a nightclub into a place inscribed with cultural significance, belonging and the agency of Black people, “often lost in conventional perspectives” (Hunter et al., 2016, 35). The example that Hunter et al. draw from is one of many which goes beyond placemaking projects developed by urban planners or architects and towards a care for the oftentimes deliberate and inadvertent ways that “it is what people do in place, day-to-day, that makes places what they are, and it is the interactions between people as agents in and across different places that constitutes those places” (Raghuram et al., 2008, 8). Hunter et al. also assert that Black placemaking offers a framework
11 to understand this dialectic for “other deeply disadvantaged, stigmatized, and often segregated groups” because all must find meaning and community in hostile spaces (Hunter et al., 2016, 33).
III: Gentrification and forced displacement
While many urban debates on gentrification continue to centre architectural changes and consumer shifts, in conversation with Amani Bin Shikhan (2016), Black Lives Matter organizer Janaya Khan described gentrification in Toronto as first and foremost “the erasure of people”, especially in reference to the “erasure of poor people, of Black people, and of racialized people” from the downtown core and other areas across the city. In a recent and problematic study on gentrification and the way that it impacts “original [longstanding] adult and children low-income residents of gentrifying neighborhoods”, Quentin Brummet and Davin Reed (2019) argue that while “gentrification modestly increases out-migration”, movers are not made observably worse off and that “gentrification thus has the potential to dramatically reshape the geography of opportunity in American cities” (Brummet & Reed, 2019). I draw from Hunter et al.’s (2016) use of Black placemaking and McKittrick’s (2011) use of ‘urbicide’ to briefly analyze Brummet and Reed’s (2019) limiting methods, language, and findings. In doing so, I seek to further illustrate the limits of mainstream planning in enacting spatial justice and to demonstrate why Hunter et al. suggest “marginalized populations cling so fiercely to places that powerful and privileged elites see as degenerate” including, in the Toronto context, shisha lounges (Fullilove, 2004; Hunter et al., 2016, 33). In Chicago, Hunter et al. link the 21st century foreclosure crisis to a long history of housing (and other) injustices that are acutely felt in the city’s Black neighborhoods (Hunter et al., 2016). Hunter et al. note that words such as “smart growth”, “creative destruction” and “pruning” are used by planners while undertaking the rebuilding of new neighborhoods with new people:
Comparing the destruction of houses in Black neighborhoods – and therefore the communities themselves – to the mundane act of ‘pruning a tree’ is to conceive of these as unproductive, diseased, obstructive, and derelict spaces (Hunter et al., 2016, 34).
Hunter et al. demonstrate the lack of regard for Black placemaking and the destruction which often follows as intrinsic to the language of planners. This depoliticized use of language is
12 mirrored in Brummet and Reed’s (2019) work as they use ‘displacement’ interchangeably with ‘out-migration’, suggesting a lack of regard for the distinct relationship “between gentrification and social cleansing [of poor and/or Black residents]” (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, 43). A part of Brummet and Reed’s study includes observing residents’ time in their “original neighborhoods” as compared to their experiences in their new neighborhoods with attention to “each original resident’s income, rent paid or house value, commute distance, and neighborhood poverty rate” (Brummet & Reed, 2019, 2). While mentioning “gentrification could cause unobserved harm to original residents through out-migration”, the model utilized in the study privileged quantitatively identifiable factors such as income but failed to consider the forced loss of ‘a sense of place’ or the affective meaning inscribed to places through processes such as Black placemaking thus failing to fully capture erasure explicitly linked to forced displacement. Brummet and Reed’s use of “unobserved harm” illuminates the way that, when significant cultural artifacts and spaces for and by Black residents are subject to policies or processes that threaten their elimination, these contributions are treated as apparently unknown to city officials and others who speak of ‘remaking’ neighborhoods. Within the context of urban planning, McKittrick (2011) looks to ‘urbicide’ (Berman 1987, 8) to draw attention to the environmental, social, and infrastructural deterioration and geographic surveillance that demarcate many Black geographies and their inhabitants. McKittrick goes on to name this “deliberate denial or killing of the city” as a conceptual tool useful in making sense of “the interlocking and connective tenets of place, poverty, and racial violence in the Americas” (McKitrrick, 2011, 951). Despite the “ignorance, willful blindness, or malign intent that contemplates demolitions” (Hunter et al., 2016, 34), Hunter et al. insist that Black Chicagoans have always turned “segregation into Congregation” (Lipsitz, 2011, 56) and have transformed often violently enforced neighborhood boundaries into a ‘Black Metropolis’, affirming the spatial agency enacted through Black placemaking processes (Hunter et al., 2016).
Rejecting a “geography of nowhere” As is further discussed in the coming chapters, Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities cling to places that are often represented as degenerate; this applies to the relationships that many Torontonians have with the shisha lounges often located in strip malls bordering the ever-gentrifying and wealthy downtown core. In Places in the Making: How placemaking builds places and communities (2013), ‘geography of nowhere’ is used to refer to
13 the American suburban sprawl which, through the industrial age’s focus on machine efficiency, “cemented the divorce between public places and community” (Silberberg, 2013, 5). Silberberg et al. suggest “one strip mall and subdivision looked much like any other and ‘place’ became a generic and valueless term” (Silberberg et al., 2013, 5). While Silberberg et al. (2013) importantly argue that the ongoing process of making a place is as significant as the place itself and that the process should be people-driven to ensure long-lasting benefits for a community, by focusing on James Howard Kunstler’s (1993) “geography of nowhere”, Silberberg et al. fail to imagine Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (QTBIPOC) as “geographic subjects who model different ways of inhabiting and sharing space” in the suburbs (Haritaworn et al., 2018, 13). Although understanding 20th century shifts such as slum clearance projects and increased “top-down shaping of our built environment” is critical to locating present-day placemaking in urban planning as a response to systemic destructions, this history remains partial without accounting for the people who experienced fractured relationships to spaces, including suburbs, that continue to be transformed into places.
Toronto strip malls and suburbs Recent scholarship on Toronto’s ethnic suburbs (Mathuria, 2018; Zhuang & Chen, 2017; Hernandez, 2017) stresses that they are “complex, contradictory, and multi-authored places eminently worthy of continued re-conceptualization” (Mathuria, 2018). Mathuria examines the way that “community life pulsates” and spatial resistance is enacted in the margins of the city:
Geographically distant from gentrifying downtown, strip malls refuse the white gaze. Their purpose intentionally is tied to the communities they serve and while strip malls are clearly visible from arterial roads and occupy space, their function is often known only through community and history. For the outsider, the built form is unapologetically difficult to navigate and signage in multiple scripts and languages speaks directly to its users, not to the outsider (Mathuria, 2018).
While Mathuria notes that many suburbs now have central shopping centres such as malls and big box stores, strip malls continue to act as a “neighborhood-level cornerstone for communities” (Mathuria, 2018) where residents can congregate and small business tenants can find relatively affordable space in the increasingly high rent city (Linovski, 2012; CityNews, 2019). Zhixi Cecilia Zhuang and Amanda Xiaoxuan Chen (2017) take interest in these suburban shopping centres to identify the way that they are a part of ‘retrofitting suburbia’. To avoid gentrification
14 and the displacement which often follows through projects to ‘restore’ neighborhoods, Zhuang and Chen state that “retrofitting suburbia is more than a matter of physical repair” and, rather, that “building a welcoming and inclusive community space is the key to long-term sustainability” (Zhuang and Chen, 2017, 293). Zhuang and Chen (2017) take up the way that, through small businesses, new migrants promote ‘a sense of place’ and directly transform ‘ethnoburbs’ by “providing ethnic-oriented products and services and community spaces for social, cultural and political activities” (p. 277); offering a human-scaled public realm within an otherwise car reliant infrastructure. The Muslim-owned shisha lounges which predominantly sit in strip malls and ‘ethnic business enclaves’ in Toronto from Scarborough to North York to Rexdale are no exception.
The limits of market-driven placemaking There are notable limits to identifying shisha lounges, and, more broadly, ‘ethnoburb’ retailers’ as sites of placemaking, especially because they are privately owned commercial businesses. In Queens, NY, the limits of using a privately owned commercial property for placemaking was made evident when the McDonald’s general manager of the Queens branch called the police on a group of Korean-American seniors who were, according to the general manager, repeatedly loitering by violating the branch’s ‘20-minute dining limit’ (Kimmelman, 2014; Eckenwiler, 2016; Nir & Ham, 2014). Stories from seniors such as Jee Woong Lim, an 81 year old new migrant who had only been in America for two years at the time of the incident, highlight the way that he used the McDonald’s as a place to seek out company, to “gossip, [and to] chat about politics back home and in their adopted land” (Nir & Ham, 2014). The ensuing forced removal by the police signalled a call for a global boycott against McDonald’s for its “stark racism” (Nir & Ham, 2014) and highlights the privileging of business and real estate interests which plays out in ‘public’ privately owned urban spaces. In a Philadelphia Starbucks, the arrests of two Black men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson (who were waiting for a business partner to commence a business meeting when the store manager called the police on them) further illustrates systemic racist encounters between businesses and Black, Indigenous, and racialized people simply existing in privately owned public space (Tornoe, 2018). Alessia Montgomery uses ‘public space' to refer to gathering places (including ‘ethnoburb’ small businesses) that appear to be open to all, “regardless of government or private ownership” (Montgomery, 2016, 777). While Montgomery argues that market-driven
15 placemaking such as privatized parks subordinate the Black urban poor, she proposes a “dialectic” relationship (p. 776) between market-driven placemaking and spatial agency by suggesting that the contradictions of these privatized practices continue to generate opportunities for resistance taken up due to and in spite of anti-poor, anti-Black, and anti-Indigenous planning. In practice, debates about land use spurred by privatized placemaking but which took shape in Detroit as continued colonial land grabs illustrated this dialectic. Many in the Black urban public reshaped the conversation on property rights to call for a consideration of the land belonging to the people who sustain it and “plant gardens on lots that are owned yet untended by the city and real-estate speculators” (Montgomery, 2016, 785). This rethinking is particularly important in highlighting that “clashes between racial capitalism and social movements in public space reappear in the contradictory design of privatization, “which both suppresses and displays cultures of resistance” (Montgomery, 2016, 776). These tensions parallel what Hunter et al. describe as the dialectic between structure and agency, made complicated through a study of Black, Indigenous, and racialized peoples’ already fraught relationships to place. While McDonalds and Starbucks are both transnational corporations and most small businesses do not have ‘20-minute dining limits’, anti-poor, anti-Black and anti-Indigenous laws continue to shape who controls land use, and in extension, how relationships to place are socio-spatially unevenly structured (Montgomery, 2016). There are thus notable limits to naming shisha lounges as sites for radical placemaking which I will further expand on through interviews with former shisha lounge patrons. In short, resistance continues to be enacted, however, I seek to exercise caution in my study of shisha lounges by avoiding the glorification of private-owned and systemically anti-Black, anti-poor, homophobic, transphobic, ableist businesses operating on Indigenous land. Nevertheless, like the strip malls that they are located within, shisha lounges are regarded as “a place of possibility” (Mathuria, 2018). The comments from interviewees who owned or used shisha lounges mirror Mathuria’s and Zhixi and Chen’s studies of suburban strip malls, noting that shisha lounges act as an anchor for community gathering and interactions. Many interviewees also valued shisha lounges as a halal and affordable means of recreation and a place for ‘ethnic retail’ to thrive and be supported by the community which the businesses sought to serve; all of which are important for the Muslim-identified research participants’ varying daily practices navigating the city. It’s from this spatial understanding that I discuss shisha lounges as a part of broader traditions of radical placemaking in Toronto, especially for Muslim people
16 living in the suburbs. Noha Nasser (2003) uses Muslim placemaking to discuss the specific ways that South Asian Muslims in the United Kingdom shift contemporary conditions such as displacement by producing new relations and everyday practices in neighborhoods, homes, mosques, and streets. In doing so, Nasser points to Muslim diasporic agency in redefining relationships to their built environments. By studying shisha lounges as spaces where diasporic Muslim people congregate and share resources, from Anatolian labour migrants’ Ottoman-style coffeehouses in the early 1900s to contemporary shisha lounges for and by Muslim people living in cities like Toronto, I extend the use of Muslim placemaking to identify how shisha lounges are also a space used by Muslim people to address and shift uneven relationships to place. Put differently, in the face of increased surveillance, unaffordability, erasure, and other structural determinants that continue to shape life for Muslim people, the shisha lounge acts as a site to negotiate and transform these circumstances.
IV: Racializing surveillance
My MA thesis research thus looks to identify how the shisha ban reveals the intimate relationship between the radical placemaking practices of Muslim people in Toronto and the policing and surveillance that accompany this placemaking. As previously mentioned, in emphasizing the transformative nature of radical placemaking, I examine the ways that Muslim people in Toronto use shisha lounges to confront and transform uneven socio-spatial relationships in the city. While the central themes I engage with through my fieldwork are unbelonging, unaffordability, displacement, and surveillance, I am indebted to Simone Browne’s (2015) ‘racializing surveillance’ as a theoretical basis used to consider the intersecting and overlapping nature of these experiences; all of which are rooted in spatial structuring that seeks to maintain whiteness. Browne asserts that “surveillance is nothing new to Black folks” and that rather, it is “the fact of anti-Blackness” (Browne, 2015, 10). Browne examines how certain surveillance technologies installed during enslavement such as slave patrols and runaway notices were used to monitor and track Blackness as property thus anticipating the contemporary surveillance of racialized subjects. Through the archive of the transatlantic slave trade and its afterlife, Browne questions how an understanding of “the historical, the present, and the historical present” can shift mainstream discussions of surveillance that suggest surveillance is something inducted by “new technologies such as automated facial recognition or unmanned
17 autonomous vehicles (or drones)” and towards factoring how racism and anti-Blackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances of our present order (Browne, 2015, 8). Browne asserts that surveillance cannot be detached from slavery and, by extension, from racialized capitalism and the maintenance of white settler society. Similarly, in her study of migrants with precarious status in Toronto, Paloma Villegas (2015) describes surveillance practices of the present order as reinforcing the boundaries of citizenship and legal status through both concrete and diffuse practices. She expands on Browne’s discussion of ‘racializing surveillance’ as “reify[ing] boundaries along racial lines, thereby reifying race” in ways where the outcome is “discriminatory and violent” (Browne, 2015, 8), and towards the maintenance of the white settler state. With a focus on Muslims in Britain and ‘the West’, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin (2011) write that the contemporary moment marks “an atmosphere wherein Muslims can at a moment’s notice be erected as objects of supervision and discipline” (Morey & Yaqin, 2011, 5). Nadiya N. Ali (2018) draws from Morey and Yaqin (2011) to extend a discussion related to surveillance and “in-between” citizenship (Walcott, 2003, 43), contending that the Islamophobic conditions which Muslim people in Toronto face must be situated within a layered system of regulative, legislative, and security-centred architectures (Ali, 2018).
Anti-Blackness and Islamophobia In “The (Anti) Black Ass Roots of America’s Islamophobia”, Vanessa Taylor (2017) links these security-centred architectures that shape Muslim peoples’ lives to continued anti- Blackness, indirectly taking up Browne’s call towards “think[ing] creatively about what happens if we centre conditions of Blackness when we theorize surveillance” (Browne, 2015, 33). Taylor speaks back to assumptions that Muslim surveillance in America only began after 9/11 or with the rise of brown migrant presence in the 1980s by asserting that this is an erasure of ongoing attacks against whoever was interpreted as Black and/or Muslim from the time that enslaved Africans were forcibly displaced through the transatlantic slave trade (Taylor, 2017). Browne notes that “the scrutiny of white supremacy comes from all sides” (Browne, 2015, 61) and in the context of anti-Blackness, this includes non-Black (i.e non-Black Middle Eastern or South Asian) Muslim migrant communities manifesting “a model-minority ethos that uses Black Americans as an example of what not to do and who not to affiliate with” (Mire, 2015). Anti- Blackness also takes shape through public projections of Muslims as having “always been
18 racialized as brown”, thus sustaining a false disconnect between Blackness and Islam in America (Taylor, 2017; McCloud, 2012; Khabeer, 2018). Taylor asserts that through this erasure of Black Muslim histories, discourse on Islamophobia and the surveillance which follows is often reduced to individual encounters rather than a continued targeting of Black ‘radical’ Muslims in liberation movements which, through “federally funded surveillance projects”, governments continue to mimic today (Taylor, 2017). For example, despite the entrapment program ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ which targeted Somali-American Muslims and which “echoe[d] the work of COINTELPRO in Black (Muslim) communities” having existed within Barack Obama’s administration, it wasn’t until the election of Donald Trump that a national solidarity movement for non-Muslims to register as Muslim gained momentum (Taylor, 2017). This instance points to the limits and dangers of treating Islamophobia as newly inaugurated and experienced foremost by non-Black Muslims as it detaches Islamophobic surveillance from its anti-Black roots while leaving Black Muslims particularly vulnerable to systemic violence (Khabeer, 2018). An anti-Muslim attack against Kayla Gerber, a non-Muslim Black Canadian woman, aptly points to the interlocking relationship between surveillance, anti-Blackness, and Islamophobia, and citizenship in the Toronto context. In November, 2015, in the week following a series of co-ordinated bombings in Paris perpetrated by Daesh (or the Islamic State), attacks against Torontonian Muslim people increased from online threats to verbal attacks to attempted shoving onto the subway tracks at Sherbourne station to a robbing at a Flemingdon Park neighborhood public school where a Muslim woman was picking up her children (CityNews, 2015). Gerber is a Black Canadian actress who had adjusted her scarf to stay warm when it was mistook for a hijab by a white man who proceeded to physically pin her against a wall and repeatedly yell at her to take off her “fucking hijab” and “get the fuck out of my country” (CityNews, 2015). Browne takes up the deeply spatialized nature of racializing surveillance as a technology of social control where practices, policies, and performances produce norms pertaining to race and, by extension, exercise a power to define what or who is ‘in or out of place’ (Browne, 2015). Halima S. Gothlime expands on this understanding of surveillance in the context of the forces trying to supress and outright ban [Somali women] from public spaces, describing surveillance as “an organism trying to regulate how and where things are placed” (Sharif, 2017). This white settler’s failed attempt at attacking a Muslim woman highlights the way that he characterized himself as enactor of the law in relation to Gerber as an ‘out of place’
19 object to be governed (Hage, 1999). Islamophobia is thus racialized in ways that cannot be detached from anti-Blackness, and notably more broadly, anti-Indigeneity, racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, and other forms of identification which intersect, diverge, and discomfort the imagined white settler nation. In drawing from David Theo Goldberg (2008), Browne exercises caution in discussing ‘racialization’ as racial ordering by way of surveillance that depends on space and time and is subject to change most often in line with upholding the “strategies that first accompanied European colonial expansion and transatlantic slavery” and “that sought to structure social relations and institutions in ways that privilege whiteness” (Browne, 2015, 17). In discussing the US census form as a surveillance technology that renders populations visible and categorizable in “racializing as well as gendered ways”, Browne emphasizes that “The proliferation of racial categories from which to choose, or have one’s answer assigned, was first reserved for the management of Blackness with other groupings later added to reflect changing immigration patterns” (Browne, 2015, 56). It is this rejection of racialization as static that I seek to apply to my reading of shisha lounges as places where Black and non-Black Muslims congregate and experience racialized surveillance not identically but within the overarching goal of maintaining a white geographic imaginary where non-white people exist outside of what is allowably and imaginably Canadian (Walcott, 2003; Fakhrashrafi et al., 2019). I thus draw from Browne’s racializing surveillance to ensure that my use of surveillance is grounded in the anti-Blackness which upholds islamophobia. Because Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, racialized Muslim people exist and identify along varying classed, ableist, and gendered lines and spectrums, I draw from the shifting nature of racializing surveillance to point to the white normativity that surveillance seeks to maintain. This study of radical placemaking thus engages with the alternative ways that Muslim people choose to inhabit and share space in spite and because of the surveillance that differentially shapes our experiences with space and place.
V: The rise of the shisha lounge: a study of the Ottoman coffeehouse
While many Toronto shisha lounges opened in the 1980s, in her short essay on shisha culture, Huda Hassan argues that shisha isn’t new, noting that “Persians [likely] introduced the custom to the Mughal Empire in India in the early 16th century” and, through migrations and violent invasions, it is now considered “a cultural mainstay throughout the Middle East and parts
20 of Africa and Asia” (Hassan, 2016). In the 1600s, despite efforts by monarchs and religious leaders to enact (albeit short-lived) bans or high taxes on tobacco across the Middle East for reasons including tobacco being seen as a vice which promoted laziness, Willem Floor (2002) describes qalyān (waterpipe) as “indispensable to Persian life” (p. 53) across gender and class demarcations by the 1700s and up until the cigarette was popularized in the 1880s. Although the exact history of hookah waterpipes remains debated, Hassan notes that “immigrants from these pockets of the world have spread the tradition in the West”, using décor, music, and ambiance to recreate the feeling of shisha lounges in their home countries (Hassan, 2016). Today London, New York, New Jersey, Paris, Lyon, Budapest, and Toronto are some of many North American and European cities that have distinct shisha cultures born through the “preserving of immigrant traditions” and which “give diaspora communities a sense of home” (Hassan, 2016). The popularization of the shisha lounge as a site of communal recreation can be traced back to the coffeehouse which Frank Ahmed notes acted as a “house of respite” and leisure in towns and villages from Cairo to “Istanbul to Karachi” and notably beyond those points (Ahmed, 1993). While smoking began in royal courts and private homes, increased access to coffee, tea, tobacco, and Venetian glass (for waterpipes) through trade, including trade with the colonizing British East India Company, paved the way for the commercialized coffeehouse (Floor, 2002). The coffeehouse acted as a place for patrons to drink coffee or tea, smoke shisha, read newspapers, exchange ideas, hold political debates, and partake in various entertainments (Akyar, 2012). To locate Toronto’s shisha lounge culture within a broader history of Muslim placemaking, I examine the rise of the Ottoman coffeehouse to identify the way that throughout modern Islamic history, smoking lounges have acted as important places of gathering which predominantly aligned with religious practice while simultaneously transforming peoples’ relationships to place. I follow this non-exhaustive study with a focused interrogation of Ottoman-style coffeehouses that opened at the turn of the 20th century in the United States and which are arguably North America’s first shisha lounges. In doing so, I note the possibilities and constraints (including a coffeehouse ban in Massachusetts) that Muslim labour migrants faced using the coffeehouse as a means of placemaking in the context of racism, surveillance, and worker exploitation. This broad study of the Ottoman-style coffeehouse paves the way for an understanding of Muslim diasporic shisha culture and its transformations across time and space.
21 Marita Ervin’s (2014) study of “Coffee and the Ottoman Social Sphere” describes distinctions between grand coffeehouses located in the wealthiest districts and popular among European travelers against working-class coffeehouses which were architecturally different but featured a similar layout and were equally successful. Selma Özkoçak (2007) further highlights the use of different coffeehouses for “bachelors and poorer inhabitants who lodged in very limited dwellings” and Ottoman elite, all of whom used the places as their primary location for “social, political, and cultural discourses” (Özkoçak, 2007, 965). Both Ervin and Özkoçak resist the glorification of the Ottoman coffeehouse as a space that transcended class while pointing to the way that they continued to act as places to serve coffee, smoke, and “foster a sense of community within the public space” (Ervin, 2014, 12). As I will further illustrate through conversations with former shisha patrons in Toronto, the use of shisha lounges as affordable places of communal gathering is a tradition that continues to be taken up in lounges operated by the Muslim diaspora.
The Ottoman coffeehouse and the mosque Ervin expands on this “sense of community” to note that coffeehouses’ had a “uniquely harmonious relationship with the mosque” as institutions which “stood physically separate from the mosque and yet were ideologically tied to the Islamic tradition”:
The coffeehouse existed alongside the mosque as an independent entity that harnessed a new social function. Selma Ozocak noted a symbiotic relationship where the coffeehouse “functioned as an entertainment place for those who came to the nearby mosque and needed to be occupied before and after prayer times”…Muslim men visited the mosque for prayer up to six times each day, sometimes as little as two hours apart. As opposed to traveling home, they were able to reside in the coffeehouse until the next prayer time. (Ervin, 2014, 25)
Ervin further reveals the distinct relationship between the Ottoman coffeehouse and the mosque by noting that the coffeehouse was assigned to the pious endowment; vakıf. Vakif was a public feature “funded by a Muslim and meant to serve as a testament to their faith” (Ervin, 2014, 25). While usually found in the form of a mosque, a madrasa (Islamic school), or a fountain, the coffeehouse was also considered a vakif in its ability to promote a sense of community, signalling to the centrality of the Ummah (unity among Muslim people from diverse cultural and geographical settings) in forming a Muslim ‘sense of place’.
22 Transforming the public sphere As was true in and beyond the 1600s in the Ottoman empire, the coffeehouse “acted as an alternative place to existing public spaces” (Canaran, 2018, 73). Like Ervin, Deniz Canaran notes that while coffeehouses were opened near the mosque for [men] to gather, socialize, and “spend time for long hours”, in comparison to the mosque, conversations in the coffeehouses “could be about daily life or ordinary topics rather than just religious issues”, “prepar[ing] the ground for political conversations where gossip could be produced, and dissatisfaction was shared” (Canaran, 2018, 47). These spaces thus resisted the governing surveillance and paved the way for criticism of the existing regime in the public sphere:
In times when written communication was not common, coffeehouses were providing a place for social communication. They were place[s] of rumors and complaints about the state and the government was aware of the potential of the coffeehouses. Even, in some periods, these places provided an area for planning of rebellions (Canaran, 2018, 47).
In the 16th century, coffeehouses in the Ottoman empire became “such an essential place” that they were threatened with closure (Canaran, 2018, 47). Canaran reveals that up until the 18th century, the state was afraid of the potential of these places and occasionally prohibited some coffeehouses as a demonstration of power. By the 19th century, the state used more subtle policies to seize the public space, often sending “their agents to coffeehouses and similar public places to be aware of the society” (Canaran, 2018, 49). Intelligence documents gathered in Egypt, particularly as related to mass protests against British colonial rule and the Egyptian Revolution of 1919, further illustrate the presence of spies in coffeehouses. Whether Ottoman, Egyptian or British colonial, “coffeehouses were crawling with spies who wrote about what they heard eavesdropping on people’s conversations” (Posey, 2017). Nevertheless, historians and geographers who study coffeehouses in predominantly Muslim regions have demonstrated the ways that they played an essential role in facilitating a place “to freely gather and exchange ideas” and established “an unprecedented space” for communal interaction and the “the disintegration of social constrictions” (Ervin, 2014, 20). This history of the coffeehouse is thus essential to a reading of the contemporary shisha lounge and by extension, Toronto’s shisha ban and its reverberations on Muslim people’s relationships to both placemaking and surveillance in the city.
23 Shisha culture in the West: Histories of congregating, organizing, and placemaking One of the first recorded histories of shisha culture in North America is documented by historians who tracked Turkish migration to the Northeastern coast of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and up until World War I. Isil Acehan (2019) describes the study of Ottoman coffeehouses which were successfully transplanted to other areas including Peabody, Massachusetts, as a unique opportunity to trace and understand the social and cultural life of new immigrant communities from the Ottoman Empire with particular emphasis on the way that these physical spaces acted as places of leisure, cultural and religious preservation, organizing, and placemaking. The Ottoman-style coffeehouses in the United States mirrored contemporary shisha lounges as places where various Ottoman ethnic groups in the diaspora would come together, play instruments such as oud and violin, play backgammon, smoke shisha, and “recreate a home away from home” (Acehan, 2019). While Acehan (2010) suggests the coffeehouse in the Ottoman empire was a purely entrepreneurial space in contrast to the Ottoman-style coffeehouses in the United States, my interrogation of the Ottoman coffeehouse in the context of the public sphere (Ervin, 2014; Canaran, 2018; Akyar, 2012) highlights the way in which “since the day they opened [in the Ottoman empire] they received many different public practices due to their pluralistic pattern” (Canaran, 2018). I suggest that the coffeehouses opened in North America are an extension of this tradition, reinvented in the context of the communal needs of Anatolian labour migrants.
Anatolian labour migration Acehan (2019) notes that the role of the coffeehouse was reimagined by Turkish migrants in the United States, acting not only as a place for leisure activities but also as a place of cultural preservation, a place of religious preservation, an informal employment agency, a mailing address for workers living precariously in boarding houses, and a place to give and receive news about the homeland. By the 1910s, after the establishment of various Turkish- and Greek-owned coffeehouses along Walnut Street in Peabody, the street came to be known as ‘Ottoman Street.’ While the term Turk was used broadly in America at the time to refer to any ethnic group from the Ottoman Empire including Syrian people, the historical accounts of coffeehouses in Peabody at the turn of the twentieth century primarily reference the experiences of Anatolian Turkish- and Kurdish-speaking Alevi and Sunni Muslim peoples from Harput Province who migrated as farmers and shepherds without previous experience as wage-labourers or urban dwellers
24 (Acehan, 2009). Through informal networks, most Turks found employment in the leather and leather-related industries while others ran their own businesses such as barbershops and coffeehouses. Acehan notes that while existing literature fails to define this era of Ottoman migration as labour migration, it should be understood in the context of labour history. I take up a study of the Ottoman-style coffeehouse in North America and the ensuing ban on Turkish- owned coffeehouses to expand on Acehan’s (2009; 2010) important intervention and trace the way that this uneven labour history is explicitly tied to the surveillance of racialized peoples’ placemaking practices and the “consolidation and circulation of white normativity” (Baldwin et al., 2011, 3) which the labour migrants confronted in the workforce and, more broadly, the public sphere. Tracing this brief history of Turkish labour migration highlights the way that migrant workers used their coffeehouses as a means of transforming the functions of citizenship, asserting a right to a livable life “when no such prior authorization exist[ed], when no clearly enabling convention [was] in place” (Butler, 2004, 224). Frank Ahmed highlights the way that the immigrant worker was “classed according to his national origin, and among the immigrant workers there were several classes” (Ahmed, 1993). As Turkish migrants arrived, they were given the most menial tasks in leather tanneries and often faced much more difficult obstacles in the workplace in contrast to their white American, Canadian, and Western European working-class counterparts. Most Turkish migrants who arrived during this wave did not bring their families and had no intention of staying in America; their only purpose was to “earn and save as much money as possible… and then go back to their old homes” (Salem Evening News, 1912). This reluctance to send for their families “led to further exclusion from the American society who expected the immigrants to shift their attachment from the homeland to the new home” and resulted in public newspapers describing Turkish migrants as “low-class, backward people who were not able to appreciate the American values” (Acehan, 2010, 206). The leather tannery factory owners’ practices reflected broader American attitudes and social mores towards Turkish workers:
They were employed in the tanneries in the toughest jobs, which would not have been carried out by any of the [white] American working class. For that work, they were paid no more than $5 or $6 a week, an amount similar to that which children employed in light jobs received (Acehan, 2009, 37).
25 The Muslim Turk who spoke no English, was of another religion, and, towards the beginning of World War I, came to be associated as an ally of Germany, had to overcome enormous odds before he moved out of the most arduous of work stations (Ahmed, 1993). Likewise, living conditions in low-rent, close-quarter boarding houses and working conditions doing 8-12-hour daily shifts in tanneries with exposure to chemicals and “blood and skin… everywhere” increased the labour migrants’ susceptibility to the contraction of contagious diseases such as tuberculosis (Acehan, 2009, 33). The Turks buried in Cedar Grove Cemetery reflect the “production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Wilson Gilmore, 2007, 244) as the majority of the fifty-one Turks buried in Peabody died from tuberculosis” in 1917 (Acehan, 2019, 34). Acehan examines the emergence of Ottoman-style coffeehouses on “Ottoman Street” as a direct response to the pressures of the industrial conditions that Turkish labourers including many peasants and farmers were facing for the first time. The Ottoman-style coffeehouse (also likely North America’s first shisha lounge) is thus referred to by Acehan as “a safety valve in the adaptation of Turkish immigrants to the industrial system” (Acehan, 2009, 30).
The Ottoman coffeehouse as “a safety valve” Accounts of the Ottoman-style coffeehouses in America emphasize “The importance of kin and friends in providing practical information vital for survival in the new environment” (Acehan, 2009, 19). The coffeehouse was not just a place to visit after long hours of labour but rather a necessary institution in the Turkish migrant’s life which included gaining “first-hand information about the new life that was waiting for the immigrant as well as jobs and housing possibilities” (Acehan, 2019, 19). Acehan notes that the Ottoman-style coffeehouse operated as ethnic clubhouses do and that patrons with precarious housing in boarding houses also used the site as a mailing address. Furthermore, while Ahmed notes that feelings of regret were expressed by Turks at the time for not having opened a mosque in the Peabody area, religious and cultural customs were also preserved at the coffeehouse as patrons gathered there after funerals for a reception honouring the deceased that is traditionally held immediately after burial (Ahmed, 1993). Acehan draws on Ahmed’s vivid depiction of the coffeehouse as a place indispensable to the “transplantation and transnationalization” of Turkish migrants in the United States:
26 In the coffeehouses news from home would be conveyed. Newly arrived immigrants were united with former villagers; this was a clearing house for coveted news from home. How relatively comfortable and fortunate was the immigrant who arrived to find a complete Turkish environment that could include a relative, prepared to offer him a place to live and assurances of some work. I witnessed how these Anatolian Turks took care of each other (Ahmed, 1993, 15).
Despite arguments that were stirred which often related to gambling or politics of the homeland, “the Ottoman immigrants’ transformation in the United States” led to the coffeehouse as a common ground for Ottoman ethnic groups to come together and form a commonality, particular in the face of shared labour disputes (Acehan, 2009). While it wasn’t until World War I and its aftermath that a labour union for Turkish migrants was formed, in part due to war-time labour shortages, Turks in Peabody began to “demand rights and wage increases” by 1913 as they were further “exposed to the host culture and [as] their presence in the industry [became] more secure” (Acehan, 2010, 158). The coffeehouse as a common ground paved the way for increased familiarization with the leather industry, relative increased solidarity among Ottoman ethnic groups, and increased class consciousness. Discussions in the coffeehouse such as formal lectures in Turkish by an Anatolian Greek were transformative in highlighting the state of American labour laws and assisting Turkish-speaking labour migrants in developing “a group consciousness and… demanding higher wages from the factories” (Acehan, 2010, 160). The circulation of the Turkish newspaper, widely available in coffeehouses and founded by two Turks who lived in Peabody, also contributed to changing perceptions of short-term and long-term labour organizing goals. In response to these shifts, Acehan notes that many factory owners “raised their wages considerably for fear of losing such hard working and less demanding beam house workers” (Acehan, 2010, 160). In doing so, the demands made by Turkish labour migrants, many of whom had no intention of becoming American citizens, demonstrate the way that articulations of citizenship extend beyond legal institutions which attempt to govern “who may and may not act as a subject of rights within any given polity” (Isin, 2017, 502). The coffeehouse acted as the physical place that these performances of citizenship were negotiated, practiced, and enacted.
North America’s first shisha ban? While the “conveniences [coffeehouses] conferred to the immigrants” paved the way for notable labour successes including wage increases in tanneries, Turkish-owned coffeehouses
27 became targets of criticism for “breeding evil” beginning in 1913 and escalating “with Turkey’s entry into World War I on the side of Germany [which] embittered anti-Turkish sentiments” (Acehan, 2010; Acehan, 2009). Although the coffeehouse provided “a secure place for the Turkish immigrant in an alien world and fostered his adaptation to a hostile environment”, the use of the coffeehouse as a base for transnational activities as well as remaining open on the Lords Day and allowing for gambling to be carried out on the premises were among factors which led to a rising white American paranoia over the institution which was already exclusively used by Ottoman ethnic groups. Acehan notes that the place where the migrant “had its favourite beverage, spoke its own language freely, told its own jokes over the bar, and enjoyed its own delicacies” was increasingly policed in the context of World War I and “rising nativism and hostility towards immigrant labor” (Acehan, 2009, 42). The fact that proprietors “did not show any effort to attract other nationalities to the coffeehouse” further solidified this paranoia (Acehan, 2010, 197). As Turks were increasingly subject to criticism as “enemy alien workers” who were “not spending money in the United States and instead investing it in their own countries”, the Ottoman coffeehouses came to be associated with “hotbeds of sedition and treason” due to “corruption, crime, worries over assimilation of immigrants, and the moral decay of the youth” (Salem Evening News, 1918). Like many businesses at the time, coffeehouses had been operating as places for patrons to eat, smoke, and drink coffee with and without victualer licenses (licenses to serve food) but as the coffeehouse came to be associated with “lowering the moral standard of the country”, police began closing down all coffeehouses which did not have victualer licenses (Acehan, 2010, 196). Examining the role of the Ottoman-style coffeehouse in the context of Muslim labour migrant placemaking practices demonstrates the way that organizing, politics, and life were enacted in the space; refuting the narrative that Turkish migrants were “helpless peasants” and revealing the considerable accomplishments they made in their respective industry’s labour struggles (Acehan, 2009). Despite collective bargaining and successful striking, the ensuing ban on coffeehouses revealed that these accomplishments did not go beyond short-term economic achievements and that xenophobia, white normativity, and other systemic barriers continued to shape the Muslim labour migrants experience in America. Though some Ottoman-style coffeehouses remained open or gained licenses to re-open, World War I led to the systemic decline of the Turkish population in the United States and, shortly after, the closure of all
28 coffeehouses on “Ottoman Street” in Peabody. Like many labour migrants at the time, a large number of Turks in America had always intended to return to their homeland after earning sufficient funds for themselves and their families to live comfortably. Both the outbreak of anti- Turkish hostility as well as the optimism apparent among the Turkish community in the United States after the establishment of the Turkish Republic were a part of what led non-Armenian1 Ottoman groups to return to Turkey. The closures of the coffeehouses thus went hand in hand with broader political changes globally. Andrew Baldwin, Laura Cameron, and Audrey Kobayashi (2011) argue that “whiteness in all its historical-geographic variability is fundamentally concerned with spatializing racial difference in ways that allow for its spatial practices to pass unquestioned” (Baldwin et al., 2011, 6). Baldwin et al. problematize the unequal capacity of whiteness to naturalize its geography, drawing from Stuart Hall (1980) to address the ways that racisms are historically situated phenomena whose “contours shift and change in response to specific social histories” (Baldwin et al., 2011, 7). When smoking lounges re-emerged in North America as shisha lounges operated by Black and brown Muslim migrants in the 1990s and early 2000s, the way that these places acted as important places of communal gathering, places of cultural preservation, and places of organizing mimicked and followed the tradition of the Ottoman coffeehouse. A study of the Ottoman-style coffeehouse in America and the ban which followed thus connects the policing of the shisha lounge to broader surveillance tactics and the shifting nature of maintaining whiteness across time and space.
VI: Literature review summary
In drawing from scholarly works that take up and complicate relationships to space and place, I have provided a literature review of placemaking and look to the possibilities of radical placemaking as performed, enacted, and capable of creatively transforming spatial agency and the functions of citizenship, particularly for Black, Indigenous, racialized, people navigating unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance. I also look to the ways that dominant placemaking theories and terminologies such as ‘revitalization’ and ‘geography of nowhere’ fail to recognize
1 The founding of Turkey and the making of the “modern Turkish identity” (Yeginsu, 2015) coincided with and cannot be detached from the Armenian genocide which resulted in the estimated targeted murder of 1.5 million Armenian people and the deportations and abuse of countless others, making a return to West Asia unsafe for many Armenian migrants living in America.
29 Black, Indigenous, and racialized peoples’ ‘human competence’ and agency as individuals and communities making spaces of belonging out of suburban strip malls, nightclubs, McDonald’s, and shisha lounges; both in deliberate response to whiteness and/or as an incidental means of preserving cultural traditions. Likewise, in identifying the claims necessary in producing a sense of place, I also lightly touch on placemaking in relation to the erasure and negation of ongoing settler colonialism and continued Indigenous presence on Turtle Island. Lastly, in providing a case study of the first shisha lounges in North America, I document the cultural, religious, and historical significance of shisha, particularly important for the coming chapter as most conversations that took place at the City of Toronto leading up to the passing of the shisha ban relied heavily on rejecting the cultural, religious and historical significance of shisha lounges. Through interviews with Toronto-based public servants, a former shisha lounge owner, and former shisha lounge patrons, I further explore placemaking and the ways in which the newly enacted shisha ban implicates Muslim peoples’ experiences with belonging, unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance in Toronto.
CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGIES
I: Introduction to Research Methods
Through this study, I look to traditions of radical placemaking in Toronto and in ‘the West’ more generally to underline the ways that Black, Indigenous, and racialized peoples’ placemaking practices are systematically (albeit differentially) marked by unbelonging, displacement, and racializing surveillance. With a focus on Muslim people navigating the Greater Toronto Area I ask questions such as: What are existing barriers that Muslim people face in creating ‘a sense of place’?; How do shisha lounges serve as important places of communal gathering that oftentimes model alternative ways of sharing and inhabiting space?; What does it mean to further police places predominantly frequented by already hypersurveilled communities?; and How do we collectively imagine futures beyond unbelonging, displacement, and the surveillant mechanisms that seek to maintain white, capitalist, colonial spatial architectures? I explore these questions with the overarching goal of better understanding how the relatively new City of Toronto bylaw prohibiting the smoking of hookah in licensed establishments, aka ‘the shisha ban,’ has impacted Muslim placemaking in the city. An
30 accompanying objective of this work is to narrate Muslim peoples’ experiences with belonging/unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance in shisha lounges and to put forward a non-exhaustive archive of Toronto’s shisha culture. In this chapter I outline the methodologies used to undertake data collection/analysis and highlight key thinkers who informed my practice. I first underline theoretical works I drew from and point to the ways they shaped and grounded my data analysis. As a study primarily made through semi-structured interviews, I also summarize how I went about deciding who to interview and how I reached out to potential participants. Notably, as a study pertaining to smoking hookah waterpipes in shisha lounges, a practice that has been banned in Toronto since mid-2016, prioritizing the confidentiality and safety of participants was especially important to my fieldwork. Likewise, being in conversation with Muslim people living in Toronto who, from state surveillance to internal bordering to interpersonal policing, are already systemically vulnerable to racializing surveillance (Browne, 2014) and other breaches of consent, looking to Black (hooks, 1992; Sharpe, 2014; Montgomery, 2016) and Indigenous (Luccesi, 2018; Garneau, 2012) archival practices that resist and refuse the white gaze was imperative to maintaining the integrity of this community-shaped research. In an interview, Toronto-based writer and director Amani Bin Shikhan pointed to the use-value of research ethics “for the purpose of production and not for the purpose of care” (Bin Shikhan, 2019). To this point, I explain that a large part of my methodological practice included abstaining from some interviews and withholding some comments made by interviewees, even if the contribution could have further shaped research findings. I interweave this chapter with discussions of reflexivity, positionality, and community organizing that led me to and guided me through this work.
II: Vulnerability and mitigating risks
In recounting her experiences at the opening night of an exhibit by Jean Michel Basquiat, bell hooks (1993) takes on the distance Basquiat consciously produces through his art between himself and “white folks in the established art world” (hooks, 1992, 36). She goes on to describe Basquiat’s painting as a means of challenging those who think that by merely looking, they can ‘see’ (bell hooks, 1992). David Garneau (2012) also takes up this drive to ‘see’, particularly in its academic branch, linking it to the colonial function of making translatable, exploitable and in extension rendering artifacts and histories as potentially extractable resources or commodities
31 (Garneau, 2012, 29). From art to academia, both hooks and Garneau engage with storytelling practices and look to the necessity of resisting and refusing the surveillant white gaze which historically and contemporarily is linked to maintaining “white, capitalist, colonial” structures (Haritaworn et al, 2018, 21). While much of my study involves unearthing narratives that were left out of dominant debates pertaining to Toronto’s shisha ban, I am guided by Black and Indigenous scholars who have taken up the limits and possibilities of writing about people and places that are vulnerable to surveillance and the unbelonging and displacement which often follows. I centre these understandings in data collection and analysis processes and look to alternative ways of archiving relationships to space and place with ‘opacity’ and the “perpetual, active refusal of complete engagement” (Garneau, 2012, 32) in mind.
Writing about people and places In writing about Detroit, Alesia Montgomery notes that before the city became synonymous with the auto industry or was reimagined as a gentrified “eco-capitalist ‘future city’”, what is now its financial core was once the last stop on the Underground Railroad and its code name was Midnight. To this point, Montgomery contends that “It is not always liberating to be brought into the light” (Montgomery, 2016, 796). Relatedly, Christina Sharpe (2014) looks to Frederick Douglass’ (1845) refusal of “pressures by allies and enemies alike to reveal the routes” by which he made his way to “comparative freedom” in Northern states (Sharpe, 2014):
I have never approved of the very public manner in which some of our western friends have conducted what they call the underground railroad, but which I think, by their open declarations, has been made most emphatically the upperground railroad. … I see and feel assured that those open declarations are a positive evil to the slaves remaining, who are seeking to escape. They do nothing towards enlightening the slave, whilst they do much towards enlightening the master (Douglass, 1845, 60).
Like Garneau (2012) and hooks (1995) who, in their respective contexts, look to the dangers of being ‘seen’ by the surveillant white gaze, Sharpe draws from Douglass to name the detrimental impacts of certain underground railroad accounts which increased “watchfulness” and the ability for white enslavers to recapture enslaved Black people. For Sharpe, Douglass’ work paved the way for important interventions on the ethics of writing about already hypersurveilled communities, particularly with regard to how these practices can further subject individuals and communities to harm.
32 For Montgomery, the current “spotlight” on placemaking in Detroit’s downtown seeks to “highlight benevolence to the Black poor” while increasing marketability to white gentrifiers as well as the Black middle class (Montgomery, 2016, 796), pointing to the distinct and dangerous relationship between surveillance and forced displacement. In writing about Toronto, and especially, in writing about small businesses that sit in low-income and/or racialized neighborhoods, I cautiously take up making visible the placemaking practices of Muslim people in the city. Interviewees that I spoke with recounted moments of warmth, belonging, and gathering in Toronto’s shisha lounges and often more broadly, in ‘ethnic enclaves’ such as parts of Scarborough and North York. But with the average rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in Toronto hitting $2,300 per month in mid-2019 (CityNews, 2019), I consider the potential risks of making placemaking practices ‘seen’ within the context of visibility, marketability, and forced displacement that low-income and racialized communities face the brunt of in this rapidly gentrifying city.
III: Data Collection
Maintaining informed, ongoing consent Semi-structured interviews were a useful although, as explored within the context of surveillance, oftentimes limiting means of exploring justifications for the shisha ban and its impacts on Muslim peoples’ placemaking. Because the bylaw has only been in effect since mid- 2016, as of yet no academic primary research has addressed Toronto’s shisha ban policy makers, analysts or other stakeholders. For this reason, from April-June 2019, I undertook semi- structured interviews with 3 public servants, 1 Muslim former shisha lounge owner, 5 Muslim former shisha lounge patrons, and 3 Muslim artists and activists whose work has explored Muslim placemaking in Toronto. All participants were Toronto-based and above the age of 19. To recruit participants I relied on quota sampling, a practice wherein which participants are chosen out of a specific subgroup (i.e Muslim, former shisha lounge owners), and purposive sampling, wherein which the researcher subjectively selects members of the population to participate in a given study (i.e Toronto city councillors). 9 of the interviews were conducted over the phone, 2 were conducted in Toronto-based university campus private meeting/study rooms, and 1 was conducted in a public servant’s office. Each semi-structured interview was about 1 hour long.
33 Before beginning each interview, I read from University of Toronto Research Ethics Board approved informed consent agreements to maintain ongoing consent and to ensure participants were comfortable being recorded. I made clear that declining to participate in any capacity and at any time throughout the interview was permitted and that there would be no consequences for doing so. In reading the informed consent agreement I also outlined the steps I would take to keep their data confidential and affirmed that participants could contact me up to one month after our scheduled meeting in case they wanted to withdraw from the study or retract specific comments made. As I will further outline, maintaining confidentiality was particularly important due to sensitive topics discussed such as feelings of unbelonging and experiences with displacement and surveillance. Confidentiality was also important because of the small sample size of interviewees and so I took up practices such as making all locations discussed unidentifiable. Likewise, making clear that I planned to contact legal counsel and unconditionally resist any foreseen and unforeseen pressures to disclose participants’ confidential data to forces such as the police, even if subpoenaed, was a practice I also outlined before beginning each interview.
Interviews and interviewees Through semi-structured interviews with public servants I sought to explore how the shisha ban came into public debate and highlight what justifications paved the way for its passing. I identified potential participants through online searches of shisha related policy documents and media articles. I prioritized City Councilors, City of Toronto staff, Toronto Public Health staff, and legal experts whose work put them in direct engagement with the shisha ban. I did not set out any requirements or restrictions pertaining religion, race or gender. While I had intended to interview 5 public servants and I utilized purposive sampling to send out over 15 recruitment emails, most requests for interviews were ignored or declined. Notably, 4 of the City Councilors who declined to partake in the study turned down my request on the basis that they didn’t feel they had enough information on the matter despite having voted in favour of the shisha ban at Toronto City Council and having participated in related committee meetings. My reach was also limited because many of the Toronto Public Health staff I had intended to interview required that I complete a separate Toronto Public Health Research Ethics Review that I did not have the capacity to complete given my MA thesis timeline. Despite given restrictions I was able to set up meetings with a health advocate and former Toronto Public Health worker, a
34 legal expert, and a City Councilor. All public servants interviewed were middle aged white men who were well informed about the shisha ban because it pertained to their existing work. While I was initially very interested in interviewing shisha lounge owners as a means of assessing if or how the bylaw impacted their small and mostly Muslim migrant owned businesses, I chose to limit the pool of potential participants to former shisha lounge owners to maintain the safety of current shisha lounge owners who continue to operate businesses despite the City of Toronto bylaw prohibiting hookah smoking in licensed establishments. Put differently, interviewing individuals who currently operate shisha lounges could have affected their safety, the safety of their patrons, and the safety of their businesses/livelihoods, especially if I received pressure to disclose data to police through a subpoena or otherwise. Although, as previously noted, unconditionally resisting any pressures to disclose data by contacting legal counsel was a central part of my research practice, interviewing current shisha lounge owners was not a risk I was willing to take, especially within the context of legal structures that have not and do not serve to protect Muslim people from surveillance, policing, and criminalization. To recruit participants, I relied on quota sampling and circulated public and shareable recruitment posters on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. I also used purposive sampling by directly reaching out to Muslim former shisha lounge owners whose contact information I came across online. While I intended to interview 3 former shisha lounge owners, only 1 of the 12 potential participants that I reached out to replied and expressed interest in participating. To respect the energy and opportunity cost of participating in this community- driven research, I compensated the former shisha lounge owner $20 for her time. Similarly, I interviewed former shisha lounge patrons rather than individuals who have continued to frequent shisha lounges after 2016. Interviewing former shisha lounge patrons was a particularly effective means of highlighting what shisha lounges meant to participants while also tracing the ways that their relationships to places of belonging like shisha lounges shifted with the passing of the shisha ban. Muslim former shisha lounge patrons shared diverse and sometimes diverging experiences of living and navigating these spaces, thus rejecting “flat representations” of ‘Muslimness’ and revealing the “embodied dimensions” (Ali, 2018) of faith and identity oftentimes complicated by race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability. I embraced the contradictory nature of these interviews to consider the non-exhaustive, inconclusive, and ever- shifting nature of archival work. To recruit participants, I relied on quota sampling and circulated
35 public and shareable recruitment posters on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. To respect the energy and opportunity cost of participating in this community- driven research, I compensated the former shisha lounge patrons $20 for their time. Lastly, I interviewed artists and activists whose work implicitly or explicitly takes up Muslim placemaking in Toronto. While I don’t have a section dedicated to the conversations with artists and activists, these interviews were pivotal in guiding me through this work and allowed for me to better understand the ways that belonging and unbelonging in Toronto are negotiated and resisted through organizing, art and creative practice. For example, in conversation with Bin Shikhan, she stressed that “surveillance always bleeds in” and pointed to the ways that, as a writer, she refuses to allow her interviewees to feel uneasiness for the sake of a publication. In practice, this sometimes meant being in dialogue with her interviewees after the interview and before publication. These tactics and Bin Shikhan’s broader call for “an ethics of care” deeply shaped the methodologies of this study. Notably, unlike all other interviews which took up sensitive questions pertaining to Toronto’s shisha ban as related to feelings of unbelonging and processes of displacement and policing, the artist/activist interviews focused solely on Muslim placemaking and how it has shaped their artistry and activism. For this reason and because it’s important to cite the work they do, the interviews with artists and activists such as Bin Shikhan were not anonymized. Artists and activist participants were recruited through purposive sampling and interviewees were compensated $20 for their time.
Media Review and Toronto Staff Reports As previously identified, because reaching out to shisha lounge owners had the potential of outing small business owners who are or have engaged in practices that violate the City of Toronto bylaw and could in extension impact their personal safety, the safety of their patrons, and/or the future of their livelihoods, drawing from existing literature such as local media and City of Toronto staff reports was a particularly effective means of tracing the perspectives of shisha lounge owners who had already spoken publicly on the matter. Likewise, because this research topic is relatively new and little to no academic research specifically takes up concerns of shisha lounge owners and patrons navigating Toronto’s shisha ban, drawing from existing media articles was a useful means of framing this study. For example, Huda Hassan’s (2016) “Banning Shisha in Toronto is About A Lot More Than Health Codes” explored the social
36 implications of the shisha ban, especially pertaining to the experiences of Black Muslim people in Toronto.
Art and cultural productions Lastly, art and other means of subverting the white gaze deeply guided my methodologies. In looking to Afrofuturists and with a focus on Somali artists and writers’ living and working in the US, Najma Sharif notes that “while some people rush to cover their webcams with tape, other can’t escape their more intimate, long-standing relationships with surveillance” (Sharif, 2017). Sharif goes on to say that “Black people have always been ahead of their time, and thus are no strangers to navigating and subverting the kind of mass surveillance used to control parts of the populace” (Sharif, 2017). In considering the workings of ‘racializing surveillance’ (Browne, 2015) and the ways that white supremacy organizes itself across space and time to structure social and institutional relations that privilege whiteness, Simone Browne (2015) engages with art as a means of reckoning with and putting forward alternative ways of living under routinized surveillance. For example, through her research on Indigenous cartographies, Annita Lucchesi identifies the way that Esther G. Belin’s Of Cartography (2017) uses poetry to articulate Indigenous sovereignty and claims for belonging; pointing to the possibilities of archiving while refusing the commodification of placemaking practices. Belin maps her families’ route between the Navajo Nation and Los Angeles, “using place-markers that would be of significance to a Navajo or indigenous driver but may melt into the landscape for anyone who lacks the cultural context to notice or appreciate them” (Lucchesi, 2018, 195). The poems reflect what Garneau (2012) describes as the refusal of “translations or full explanations” (p. 32) and point to the use of art and other cultural productions that map claims for belonging while refusing to be fully ‘seen’. To this point, along with semi-structured interviews, arts-based interventions accompanied my data collection and analysis processes.
IV: Positionality
As a second-generation Muslim Iranian woman living in Toronto, living in ‘Canada’, and living on Indigenous lands, it is through navigating this relational space that I have built understandings of belonging, unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance. My considerations of positionality were particularly influenced by Debbie Gordon’s (2018) MA thesis on
37 gentrification and erasure in Toronto’s Little Jamaica as she lends insight towards how to engage with the entanglement of the experiences of the researcher and research participants within the context of complex socio-political contexts such as forced displacement and architectures that attempt to maintain white imaginaries of the city. Gordon contends that we cannot remove ourselves from our research and points to her own complex relationship to gentrification as something that she cannot work around. I look to privileges I hold as an English speaker, as a non-Black Muslim, as an affiliate of the University of Toronto, and as someone with relative housing stability to consider some of the power relations that shaped my writing and my engagements with interviewees. From frequent closures of migrant-owned businesses such as shisha lounges to public service funding cuts to increased anti-Black and anti-poor transit fare enforcement to normalized threats of bombing Iran, in the face of the ‘disposability’ of the places and people that I love, I also consider the important ways that the Muslim diaspora and communities of colour in Toronto have shaped my relationships to belonging in the city. In rejecting false notions of ‘objective’ research, Gordon notes that “The researcher... is not just an observer; [they] both disturb the research setting and [are] also disturbed by it” (Gordon, 2018, 38). To this point, care for the futures of my loosely defined communities in a since-always racist and increasingly unaffordable city guide my practice and it is from this positionality that I investigate the impacts of Toronto’s shisha ban on Muslim placemaking practices.
CHAPTER 3: ASSESSING AND ANALYZING THE SHISHA BAN
I: Introduction and terminology
Throughout this study, I locate shisha lounges as sites of intergenerational gathering, sites of migrant ownership, and sites of radical placemaking for Muslim people living in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). While there are Muslim-owned shisha lounges in the GTA from Moss Park to Scarborough to East Danforth to North York to Richmond Hill to Rexdale to Mississauga and Brampton and Hamilton, my fieldwork only focuses on businesses located in the City of Toronto (aka ‘Toronto proper’) due to the specificity of the shisha ban legislated by Toronto’s city council. Through interviews conducted with former shisha lounge owners, former shisha lounge patrons, City of Toronto public servants, and artists/activists, I ask what the banning of
38 shisha lounges means for Muslim peoples’ “sense of place” in Toronto. More broadly, the purpose of this study is to create a non-exhaustive archive of shisha lounge culture in Toronto by documenting the role that shisha lounges have played in the lives of Muslim people in the city. I share findings from this fieldwork by tracing a timeline of shifts in legislation related to Toronto shisha lounges and by identifying concerns and controversy related to City Council’s prohibition of shisha in licensed establishments. I pair this data alongside conversations with public servants working in the City of Toronto at the time of the shisha ban and/or who had insight surrounding rationales used to justify the shisha ban. I interweave these findings with perspectives of and interventions from stakeholders who felt left out of this conversation including the voices of a former shisha lounge owner and former shisha lounge patrons. By identifying key concerns and themes identified by research participants such as belonging/unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance, I draw from interviews and data findings to point to the ways that the shisha ban makes visible the intimate relationship between placemaking and racializing surveillance, especially as experienced by Muslim people who are subject to “in-between” (Walcott, 2003, 48) citizenship in Canada. In line with the City of Toronto’s terminology cited in the “Review of Businesses Operating as Vapour Lounges and a Discussion of the Status of Hookah/Shisha” (LS16.2), I use hookah and waterpipes interchangeably to refer to the waterpipes used to facilitate consumption and I use shisha to refer to the tobacco and non-tobacco (herbal) substance being smoked (while differentiating between tobacco and non-tobacco shisha when applicable and/or when feasible). Likewise, “shisha lounges” is used throughout this study interchangeably with “waterpipe establishments” and “shisha bars.” Lastly, the City Council Agenda Item discussing “Hookah (Waterpipes) Use in Licensed Establishments” (HL4.1) and the bylaw “Prohibiting Hookah (Waterpipe) Use in Licensed Establishments” (LS7.2) are referred to as “the shisha ban.”
II: A timeline of Toronto’s ‘shisha ban’
2011: Identifying the gap in municipal licensing and standards In the 2000s shisha lounges in Toronto gained increased visibility through travel directories, restaurant reviews, and print and social media advertisements despite operating before then, albeit more inconspicuously. In November 2011, Toronto City Council adopted a motion (MM14.26) to inquire into the operating of all establishments being licensed as cafés but which
39 marketed themselves as vapour lounges and permitted clientele to use waterpipes, vapourizers, and vapourizing accessories to smoke and inhale substances such as marijuana, tobacco, and herbal mixtures including shisha. Moved by Councillor Mark Grimes, the action item called for a comprehensive review by 2012 to investigate into the legality and impact on individuals and community members of indoor smoking in public lounges and businesses. The motion described the rise of indoor smoking businesses across Toronto, Ontario, and Canada and cited the interest of residents living in the immediate vicinity of these businesses who are concerned with increased “drug trade, prostitution, and other illegal activities” as a part of the urgency for an inquiry into the City of Toronto’s licensing practices (Toronto City Council, 2011). The motion requested that the Licensing and Standards Committee share their findings through a report with comments from the Chief of Police, the Medical Officer of Health, and the Executive Director of Municipal Licensing and Standards. The motion also requested that recommendations for changes include monitoring activities of existing businesses and disallowing further businesses to be licensed to undertake this activity. Prior to this motion, shisha lounges were grouped together with businesses including medical marijuana vapour lounges and all were being licensed without consideration of factors including air quality or minimum age requirement. Typically, these establishments were licensed as either eating establishments such as cafés or retail stores under Chapter 545, Licensing. Given the differences in the nature of these businesses and the varying legal, public health, and safety concerns related to them, on October 11th, 2012, the Executive Director of Municipal Licensing and Standards produced two separate reports for the Licensing and Standards Committee: (1) The Review of Businesses Operating as Vapour Lounges and a Discussion of the Status of Medical Marihuana (LS16.3) and (2) The Review of Businesses Operating as Vapour Lounges and a Discussion of the Status of Hookah/Shisha (LS16.2). I examine the findings of the latter to assess shifts in discussions related to shisha culture in Toronto and the rise of the City of Toronto’s shisha ban.
2012: Undertaking a regulatory regime In 2012, through the Review of Businesses Operating as Vapour Lounges and a Discussion of the Status of Hookah/Shisha (LS16.2), City of Toronto staff recommended that City Council develop a regulatory regime for the Municipal Code, Chapter 545, Licensing, to include a specific article governing shisha lounges. The prospective recommendations were meant to regulate primary health concerns at the establishments such as (1) air quality including
40 second-hand smoke, (2) transmission of communicable disease, and (3) entry of minors. The call for recommendations was also proposed as a means of mitigating broader challenges in policing tobacco control legislation already in effect through the Smoke Free Ontario Act (SFOA). The SFOA replaced the Tobacco Free Ontario Act of 1994 and was described by the Liberal government of the time as the “strictest anti-tobacco legislation in North America” (CBC, 2005). The SFOA prohibited the smoking of tobacco in all workplaces and indoor public spaces in June 2006. Although the SFOA was amended in 2017 to include a ban on the smoking and vaping of tobacco and cannabis in the vicinity of public places including restaurant/bar patios, enclosed workplaces, playgrounds, schools, publicly owned sports areas, and government office buildings, there is an absence of specific reference to smoking non-tobacco shisha in the SFOA. For this reason, in the years following the implementation of the SFOA, many Toronto-based shisha lounges, including the now closed Awtash Lounge on College St., began serving herbal/non- tobacco shisha to ensure they were following the provincial law. Other shisha lounges continued serving tobacco shisha in part because there was no municipal license which specifically addressed shisha lounges and in part, because Tobacco Control Officers had to prove the shisha contained tobacco before laying a charge which was complicated by factors such as discrepancies in products, “wording gaps”, and labels that weren’t in English (Toronto Staff Report, 2012). Nevertheless, Toronto Public Health (which began inspecting shisha lounges in 2010) had laid 81 SFOA charges against 25 establishments by 2012, at times in collaboration with the RCMP, the Ministry of Revenue, Toronto Police Services, and Toronto Municipal Licensing and Standards. The cost of the inter-agency coordination involved in Toronto Public Health inspections was a part of the reasoning behind suggestions for an expansion of Chapter 709 of the Municipal code to include a ban on the smoking of tobacco and non-tobacco shisha in licensed establishments (Toronto Staff Report, 2012). The Review of Businesses Operating as Vapour Lounges and a Discussion of the Status of Hookah/Shisha (LS16.2) dispelled claims that “illegal drug trade, prostitution, and other illegal activities” were excessively taking place at shisha lounges and reflects a shift in the conversation towards the three primary public health concerns identified above. Notably, this 2012 Review was the first report at the City of Toronto to consider an outright prohibition of shisha in the city.
41 Although a ban of both tobacco and non-tobacco shisha was considered in 2012 as a means of “uphold[ing] the spirit and intent of the SFOA” (Stephen, 2019) and deterring indoor smoking, the executive director of Municipal Licensing and Standards at the time used the 2012 Review of Businesses Operating as Vapour Lounges and a Discussion of the Status of Hookah/Shisha to consider the impact of a shisha ban on owners, operators, and neighborhoods. The 2012 Review highlighted that the context within which waterpipe establishments operated was legal as long as they were not serving tobacco which was banned across Ontario. The Review also named the “cultural sensitivities surrounding hookah and the number of businesses [which would be] affected [by a ban]” (Toronto Staff Report, 2012). Given these factors, the Review suggested that the City consider “adopting reasonable measures to address the public health concerns” (Toronto Staff Report, 2012). Suggestions made through the review included calling for (1) a licensing regime that considers regulating indoor air quality through the provision of adequate mechanical ventilation to address air quality, (2) enforcing the cleaning and sanitizing of hookah equipment to reduce the transmission of communicable diseases, and (3) restricting the entry of minors, in other words, to bar youth under the age of 18 from entering shisha lounges. Taking these factors and potentials into consideration, the Review concluded by asserting that “a license, rather than a prohibition or a ban, regulates owners and operators in a reasonable manner, while balancing the community's cultural practices” (Toronto Staff Report, 2012). The steps taken following this report introduced to the Licensing and Standards Committee included conducting public community consultations with stakeholders and taking into consideration “all other necessary internal division inputs” (Toronto Staff Report, 2012). Despite acknowledgments of shisha’s cultural value affirmed by City of Toronto staff, a number of pivotal meetings, reports, and consultations that took place between 2012-2015 culminated in the prohibition of hookah use in licensed establishments and the ensuing closure of approximately 70 mostly Black and Brown migrant owned small businesses. I take up these closures in the context of Muslim peoples’ ‘sense of place’ and explore the rise of the shisha ban to trace the factors considered and neglected which paved the way for legislation that privileged prohibition rather than regulation and education.
2013-2015: Toronto Public Health and Ontario Tobacco Research Unit findings The Staff Report on Hookah (Waterpipe) Use in Licensed Establishments (HL4.1) presented to the Board of Health by the City of Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health reviewed findings from a 2013 air monitoring study conducted by the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit and
42 summarized Ipsos Reid’s consultations commissioned by Toronto Public Health and conducted between October 2014 and January 2015. The stakeholders contacted by Toronto Public Health via Ipsos Reid included: (1) patrons of hookah establishments, (2) hookah establishments and the neighboring businesses that do not permit hookah use, (3) Iranian, Somali, Arab, and Turkish cultural organizations, (4) community health centres and health organizations. I will first summarize the responses from these consultations, the accompanying Ontario Tobacco Research Unit study, and interviews with public servants to further explore the rise and justifications of the shisha ban. Throughout this section and increasingly in the following sections, I will contrast the official report responses with sentiments expressed through my interviews with former shisha lounge owners, former shisha lounge patrons, and organizers/artists who felt left out of this consultation process. Ipsos Reid’s consultations with patrons took up “awareness and perceptions of health risks among persons who visited hookah businesses” (Toronto Staff Report, 2015). Through intercept interviews–the process of gathering strangers’ data on-site by stationing oneself in public and requesting that people walking by participate– Ipsos Reid collected data from 100 patrons from 13 sites across the city. 77% of the participants recruited were men and 54% were under the age of 25. The data collected was primarily demographic and showed that almost half (48%) identified as Middle Eastern. The majority of patrons (65%) described visiting the businesses as a means of socializing with friends. 16% emphasized the importance of being able to socialize with people of “the same cultural background” and a small percentage (4%) of patrons noted that they weren’t smokers but went to the lounges as a means of recreation. As will be further discussed, while the study made public in 2015 states that nearly half (46%) of patrons interviewed would still visit these establishments even if hookah was not served, tracing the closures of shisha lounges since the implementation of shisha ban points to a different reality. In consultations with hookah business owners, Business Improvement Areas (BIAs), and businesses that neighbored hookah lounges, interview objectives included: learning about the attitudes related to hookah use, determining the level of awareness of the health risks associated with hookah use, and identifying the impact of a potential prohibition of hookah establishments. Ipsos Reid’s key findings highlighted mixed views shared in interviews with BIAs and the neighboring businesses that do not offer hookah. While some felt health risks were notable, others did not. Some believed that a prohibition would have no impact however some stated that
43 it could decrease commercial traffic in their neighborhood. The overall consensus was that “hookah use is not a significant issue facing their community [of small businesses]” (Toronto Staff Report, 2015). Although there were 71 hookah businesses operating at the time of the Ipsos Reid study, only 14 shisha lounge owners were successfully reached and recruited. Through one- on-one telephone interviews, these interviewees expressed the importance of their business module as a social and cultural alternative to pubs and bars where patrons could gather without consuming alcohol. Most operators emphasized that tobacco shisha is not healthy but identified the herbal shisha they sold as a healthier option than tobacco or alcohol. The hookah business operators stressed that roughly 70-90% of their business revenue came from hookah use. The Toronto Staff Report noted that almost all interviewees believed that a prohibition of hookah use would result in a closure of their business. Through interviews with cultural organizations, the Ipsos Reid consultations sought to identify how Toronto Public Health could support communities to protect their health while seeking ways to reduce the impact that a restriction or a prohibition of hookah could have on communities as a whole. Four cultural organizations serving Iranian, Somali, Arab, and Turkish communities in the Greater Toronto Area participated in this consultation. The consultations highlighted that there is a growing trend of hookah use among the youth that these cultural organizations work with. Key findings also showed that communities generally considered smoking shisha safer and less addictive than smoking cigarettes, especially in regard to herbal shisha options. The cultural organizations noted that a prohibition would impact the business sector and this this may have an economic impact on the communities they serve. While the cultural organizations did not explicitly reference the social impact of a prohibition, additional views that emerged through consultations pointed to the fact that a substantial portion of households already have a hookah at home and, in the face of a shisha ban, smoking inside homes would become a more popular communal activity. Cultural organizations noted that within the home setting ventilation is poor, disposable mouth pieces are less frequently used, and smoking shisha often happens in the presence of children. The cultural organizations thus proposed that a shisha ban could in fact increase public health threats that the City of Toronto and Toronto Public Health had previously adopted as primary concerns: (1) inadequate mechanical ventilation and overall air quality in shisha lounges, (2) the transmission of communicable diseases due to unclean shisha equipment, and (3) the possibility of minors
44 smoking or being around second-hand smoke. The conversations that came out of these consultations were essential in directing legislative possibilities towards more education rather than more policing. This is especially significant because, as noted by the cultural organizations, a prohibition would not make the act of smoking disappear but, rather, it would make it less possible for it to be regulated by Toronto Public Health. Interviewing these Iranian, Somali, Arab, and Turkish organizations notably demonstrated that at the time of consultations, the cultural significance of shisha lounges was on the radar of Toronto Public Health. The coming decision to ban shisha lounges, however, reflected that this knowledge was not a priority of Toronto Public Health or Toronto City Council. Along with consultations which identified ‘key stakeholders’, the 2015 Toronto Staff Report also summarized the findings of a 2013 air monitoring study conducted in Toronto shisha lounges by the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit and a 2012/2013 Youth Smoking Survey among Canadian students. Through the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit study, researchers concluded that the levels of air nicotine in indoor and outdoor Toronto shisha lounges were exposing staff and patrons to the health risks of tobacco use and second-hand smoke. Researchers also pointed to the smoking of both tobacco and non-tobacco shisha resulting in exposure to “unacceptably high, and in some cases, hazardous levels” of cancer-causing chemicals. In reference to concerns that youth were increasingly using shisha, the Youth Smoking Survey found that 38% of Ontario students and 38% of Canadian students (grade 9-12) believed hookah use to be less harmful than smoking cigarettes. The Toronto Staff Report observed that the social visibility of commercial shisha establishments was leading to the overall acceptability of smoking tobacco and non- tobacco products. In line with data identified through the Ipsos Reid consultations, the Toronto Staff Report thus correspondingly pointed to the growing popularity of shisha among young people and a majority perception that both tobacco and non-tobacco hookah use is less harmful than cigarettes.
2015: Toronto Board of Health deputations Deputations presented to the Toronto Board of Health on June 1st, 2015 and the Licensing and Standards Committee on October 22nd, 2015 also heavily influenced City Council’s decision to ban hookah waterpipes in licensed establishments. At the Toronto Board of Health, a group of individuals, all of whom were involved with or representing tobacco prevention focused non- profit organizations, shared personal anecdotes and expressed their concern about shisha lounges
45 as related to public health. The deputations called for urgent prohibitive action against shisha smoking and reemphasized findings revealed through Ipsos Reid consultations including the growing prevalence of shisha smoking among young people and the misconception about herbal shisha as less harmful than tobacco shisha. While the Ipsos Reid consultations with Iranian, Somali, Arab, and Turkish cultural organizations underlined the health impacts of shisha while also practically acknowledging that, as a cultural practice, a ban would simply increase shisha smoking inside homes and leave regulation further out of Toronto Public Health’s reach, the deputations to the Toronto Board of Health by tobacco prevention advocates focused solely on prohibition and attempted to dispel claims that shisha has religious and cultural significance. On behalf of the Smoking and Health Action Foundation, executive director Lorraine Fry’s deputation drew from the shisha ban in Vancouver and the ensuing legal challenge to argue that “there is no evidence to support the Defendants' claim that their ability to operate their hookah cafes, that permit people to smoke for profit, is a function of their spiritual faith” (Toronto Board of Health Meeting, 2015). Iranian-Canadian shisha lounge owners Abdolabbas Abdiannia and Abdolhamid Mohammadian were the first shisha lounge owners in Canada to file a lawsuit against a municipality on the grounds that, among other things, the shisha ban violated their fundamental freedoms of conscience and religion. Fry drew from comments the Vancouver judge used to reject Abdiannia and Mohammadian’s claims on August 11th, 2014, stating “Hookah smoking is not part of any religious ceremony and does not connect Muslims with the divine” (Toronto Board of Health Meeting, 2015). The erasure of the historical significance of smoking lounges as vakifs, meant to serve as a place of gathering for Muslim people and considered a testament to the faith of those that provided these spaces, reflects Fry’s limited understanding of Islam, employed as a means of speaking over the beliefs of shisha lounge owners and patrons. Likewise, in drawing from the Vancouver judge who argued that the bylaw does not prevent people from smoking shisha in their homes, Fry exposed a limited approach to public health which prioritizes the optics of a prohibition over valuable public health dialogue geared towards educating communities about harmful smoking habits including within individual households. Fry concluded by arguing that “Given the known dangers of smoking and exposure to second-hand smoke (with or without tobacco), arguments in favour of the protection of historical cultural practices… must take a backseat to the more important goal of public health protection” (Toronto Board of Health Meeting, 2015). On June 1st, 2015, following these public
46 deputations, members of the Board of Health voted in favour of passing the recommendation to prohibit waterpipes in licensed establishments along to the Licensing and Standards Committee and City Council. Councillors Joe Mihevc, Sarah Doucette, Jon Burnside, Christian Carmichael, Joe Cressy, and Frances Nunziata were all present for the Board of Health deputations made solely in favour of prohibiting shisha lounges. Notably, these councillors all voted in favour of the shisha ban at city council in November, 2015.
Shisha lounges in the provincial court of British Colombia As the first lawsuit of its kind in Canada, the case between the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver-based shisha lounge owners ruled at the Provincial Court of British Colombia set an important and dangerous precedent for policy makers and elected officials alike. The judge’s assertion that “There is no evidence whatsoever to support [the] implied claim that the Defendants’ ability to operate their hookah cafés permitting people to smoke hookah for profit is a function of their spiritual faith” (Toronto Board of Health Meeting, 2015) was repeatedly referred to in Toronto Public Health staff presentations and public deputations as a means of suggesting a disconnect between shisha lounges and religion. For example, Michael Perley, the director of the Ontario Campaign for Action on Tobacco, drew from this case to call the assertion that shisha is a cultural practice both “specious” and lacking in a foundation of evidence (Toronto Board of Health Meeting, 2015). The statements made in deputations by Fry, Perley, and other tobacco prevention advocates signaled a shift in the way that shisha lounges were discussed, more and more so without consideration for the religious or cultural implications of a shisha ban. Denying the significance of shisha as important to Muslim diasporas implicated the way that opponents of the ban organized; as is evident in tracing the deputations presented by shisha lounge owners at the Licensing and Standards Committee.
2015: Toronto Licensing and Standards Committee deputations In line with popular political organizing tactics, approximately 14 shisha lounge owners mobilized and attended the public Licensing and Standards Committee meeting on October 22nd, 2015 to present deputations and attempt to humanize the policy issue that would deeply impact their lives. While shisha lounge owners touched on the cultural and religious consequences of a ban, the primary focus of deputations was to demonstrate their expected financial burden and to push for shisha specific licensing over an outright prohibition. Ashraf Hasouna, owner of
47 Scarborough-based Alexandria Café, addressed the proposed shisha ban in the context of comparatively lax regulation on alcohol which “causes brain damage and liver damage”, asking “If this [ban] is regarding the health of citizens, why is alcohol allowed?” (Yusuf, 2016). In his deputation, Hasouna noted that Michigan’s Smoke Free Law exempted hookah businesses under the condition they don’t serve food, a means of limiting the amount of time individuals spend in smoking lounges while allowing businesses to remain open (Toronto Licensing and Standards Committee Meeting, 2015). While proponents of the shisha ban referred to the continued economic success of restaurants and bars in Toronto that had previously protested the Smoke Free Ontario Act ban on tobacco smoking, Hasouna suggested this logic was like comparing “apples to oranges” as those restaurants and bars were never in the business of selling cigarettes to patrons. Drawing from the Toronto Public Health Ipsos Reid consultation findings, Hasouna reemphasized that, in contrast, most Toronto shisha lounge owners were making over 75% of their income through shisha sales. While significant points were made with regard to the financial impact of a shisha ban on predominantly Middle Eastern new migrant small business owners and their families and workers, discussions related to how the ban would impact Muslim peoples’ already fraught relationships to belonging, displacement, and surveillance in the city were further underestimated and delegitimized at the Licensing and Standards Committee meeting. In her public deputation, Rubina Kharel, a Nepalese-Canadian women and volunteer with the Canadian Cancer Society, urged members of the Licensing and Standards Committee to ban hookah and stressed that shisha is a “giant loophole” within Ontario’s otherwise strict anti- smoking policy (Toronto Licensing and Standards Committee Meeting, 2015). As the only presenter at the meeting born in a country with a large Muslim population and speaking in favour of shisha’s prohibition, the ensuing question and answer exchange between Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker and Kharel further illustrates the explicit undermining of claims that shisha is connected to cultural practice. Councillor De Baeremaeker asked “So as an individual whose cultural traditions include hookah, you are not offended by us banning hookah smoking?” to which Kharel responded “No, not at all.” Councillor De Baeremaeker went on to say “You don’t think it’s a slight against you personally?” to which Kharel again responded “No, not at all.” Councillor De Baeremaeker’s questions began to sound more like assertions as he proceeded to state, “It’s not a slight against your culture, not against your religion, not against the good
48 Nepalese people that live in this city.” Kharel continued to affirm that she wasn’t offended by the proposed ban. When Councillor De Baeremaeker asked “If you want to show off your culture to your friends or maybe some of my family who are of Irish heritage and Belgium heritage, would you show them Hookah smoking or the great food that you can get at a Nepalese restaurant?”, Kharel exclaimed that she would show them “Food, never hookah smoking” as culture is about living in a “healthy and happy environment!” (Toronto Licensing and Standards Committee Meeting, 2015). Councillor De Baeremaeker ended the exchange with a final question delivered as a statement, saying “So to promote your culture, you’re happy to share with me and all the members in this room your history, your traditions, your food, your love, your good music – hookah doesn’t need to be a part of your culture!” (Toronto Licensing and Standards Committee Meeting, 2015). The paternalistic logics the Councillor relied on mirror what Ghassan Hage refers to as “internal orientalism” or “the way the ‘ethnic other’ is made passive not only by those who want to eradicate it, but also by those who are happy to welcome it under some conditions they feel entitled to [enforce]” (Hage, 1999, 17). In this case, Councillor De Baeremaeker noted the palatable parts of Nepali culture such as food and music, “making a liberal citizen out of a subject who exists in the margins”, and deeming the cultural significance of shisha and those who promote it as “‘problematic’, ‘difficult’ or ‘perplexing’ [to] the hegemonic order” (Ali, 2018; Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2014). Within the context of the multicultural nation, the Councillors emphasis on food and music also point to what Minelle Mahtani (2014, 96) describes as the “apolitical tenets of the diversity discourse” wherein which “diversity is celebrated without recognition of a power politics at play.” Predictably, Councillor De Baeremaeker did not ask any other Muslim self-identified presenters such questions for the remainder of the Licensing and Standards Committee meeting.
Race and erasures: Voting in by-law No. 1331-2015 Within a similar logic, Toronto Public Health staff and tobacco prevention advocates repeatedly used the Toronto Board of Health and the Licensing and Standards Committee public meetings to indicate that shisha “has nothing to do with a cultural practice” and that the claim “should be set aside” (Toronto Licensing and Standards Committee Meeting, 2015). This general disregard for shisha’s cultural and religious significance was particularly harmful because Black
49 and brown Muslim diasporic people in Toronto faced and continue to face the brunt of City Council’s decision. ‘Setting aside’ calls to recognize the cultural and religious significance of Toronto’s shisha lounges paves the way for questions such as: Whose cultural practices are treated as secondary? Whose experiences with displacement and forced closures are normalized? Whose places of communal gathering are subject to surveillance apparatus’ that mark certain practices as illegal? Simone Browne (2015) rejects the use of ‘invisible’ that is commonly used to describe these uneven relationships with place; instead calling for an understanding of experiences that are “unseen or unperceived by many” (Browne, 2015, 9). In doing so, Browne points to the way that unobserved harm manifests in places like Toronto’s City Council, often at the hands of well- intentioned elected officials and staff who likely did not think through the former questions, particularly with regard to how feelings of unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance also effect public health. Similarly, within the context of ‘colorblind’ institutional power, Julie Guthman (2008) stresses that “refusing to see (or refusing to admit) [to] race difference” erases the violence that the social construct of race has wrought in the form of racism and, in the process, “instantiate[s] whiteness” (p. 391):
When particular, seemingly universal ideals do not resonate, it is assumed that those for whom they do not resonate must be educated to these ideals or be forever marked as different (Guthman, 2008, 391).
The ensuing majority vote overwhelmingly in support of the shisha ban following consultations and deputations that largely rejected racial implications of the ban demonstrated that there were perspectives missing at Toronto’s City Hall. The disregard for the cultural impacts of the shisha ban materialized in November 2015 when the bylaw was voted on by Toronto City Council 34-3. Progressive City Councillors who had voted against racist carding practices, had voted towards increasing mental health resources in marginalized communities, and had worked towards increasing access to public space in the city, all voted unanimously in favour of the shisha ban that implicated the livelihoods of hundreds of racialized and mostly new immigrant families and made precarious a community space utilized by thousands of Black and brown Muslim people. By-law No. 1331-2015, prohibiting Hookah Waterpipes in Licensed Establishments, went into effect in June 2016. I reached out to 10 city councillors and former City Councillors to comment on their votes. Although all of the City Councillors and former City Councillors that I reached out to were
50 present for the vote and most had publicly commented on the legislation and/or been involved with the Toronto Board of Health and the Licensing and Standards Committee meetings, all but one declined to meet with me. The City Councillor that I spoke with affirmed that City Councillors primarily voted for shisha prohibition in response to and in support of Toronto Public Health’s recommendations. The rationale for the vote and the limited approach to public health in relation to Muslim peoples’ placemaking practices and experiences with racializing surveillance is explored in the following sections.
III: Countering the “strict population health assessment”
In phone conversation with Stephen (pseudonym), a public health advocate and former Toronto Public Health worker, he cited the culminating Toronto Staff Report on Hookah (Waterpipe) Use in Licensed Establishments (HL4.1), which included Ipsos Reid consultations and the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit study, as what led him to conclude that shisha lounges were a health concern that required prohibitive legislation. As illustrated, key findings throughout the staff report revealed that increased shisha smoking was paired with a lack of educational resources available to young people who were at risk of heart disease, emphysema, lung cancer, throat cancer, gum disease, and osteoporosis and were being exposed to carbon monoxide and toxic metals such as cobalt, chromium, nickel, cadmium, and lead. Likewise, the staff report pointed to an absence of information related to the health impacts of herbal shisha which was falsely perceived as a healthy alternative to tobacco. Stephen suggested there was a gap in policy needed to address living choices and stressed that this gap was particularly concerning because “if you look at patterns of population health and what is responsible for morbidity and disability, heart disease and respiratory disease are diseases of how we live.” Stephen identified “a strict population health needs assessment” as essential for Toronto Public Health when analyzing pressing health issues in the city and producing policy recommendations for Toronto City Council (Stephen, 2019). Within this context, Stephen identified “the health effects for both users and employees of [shisha] establishments” (Stephen, 2019) as the driving force that led to calls for shisha’s prohibition. In line with comments made by tobacco prevention advocates that suggested shisha’s cultural significance be ‘set aside’, Stephen emphasized that “as the organization responsible for the health of the population”, it is Toronto Public Health’s
51 responsibility to prioritize health impacts “even if there are other impacts such as economic issues” (Stephen, 2019). My research does not seek to disregard public health findings related to smoking both tobacco and non-tobacco shisha; especially with regard to heart disease, respiratory disease, second-hand smoke, and cancer-causing chemicals. Rather, I seek to extend public health discussions beyond Toronto Public Health’s limiting “strict population health needs assessments” (Stephen, 2019) and towards socioeconomic determinants of health and the impact of the shisha ban on Muslim peoples’ ‘sense of place’ in the city. As previously illustrated, this is particularly important in the context of continued disregard for Muslim peoples’ placemaking practices in Toronto and the exclusion, displacement, and policing which undergirds this disregard. To broaden this discussion, I first briefly touch on the relationship between drug consumption and racialized capitalism and locate the City’s shisha ban within a longer history of criminalization and the insidious and malleable nature of the law in targeting substance use by people of colour. I then summarize and analyze data I’ve collected as related to the economic as well as social impact of the shisha ban to touch on acts of surveillance, feelings of belonging/unbelonging and processes of forced displacement which the shisha ban intensified. This includes considering some of the reasons that shisha culture has become popular among minoritized young people; a concern that wasn’t addressed beyond ‘peer pressure’ and the social visibility of smoking in the Toronto Staff Report (2015). Lastly, I speak to the importance of artistic interventions and highlight how Muslim people continue to navigate and respond to the shisha ban and broader socio-spatial organizing that seeks to maintain whiteness and exclude, displace, and erase non-white communities’ acts of life in the city.
In conversation with Nathan (pseudonym), a Toronto-based legal expert who traced the unfolding of the bylaw, Nathan proclaimed that while Toronto Public Health advocated for the shisha ban on the basis of health and “protecting people from themselves”, “the obvious argument is that things like alcohol are just as harmful—No, more harmful—But [alcohol is] culturally entrenched!” (Nathan, 2019). Nathan points to a longstanding relationship between race, health, and the law in determining what is culturally entrenched and what is made a drug. To this point, in her investigative study of the opioid crisis in the US, Donna Murch (2019) traces the ways that, historically, “the fundamental division between ‘dope’ and medicine was
52 the race and class of users”; demonstrating how racial capitalism has “steeped our ideas of licit and illicit” substances. Murch names anti-opium ordinances that targeted Chinese labourers in the late nineteenth-century as the first of US domestic drug wars. Notably, Kay Anderson (1987) draws from the Canadian context to trace a parallel history of racial classification from the 1880s to 1920s that, through the characterization of Vancouver’s Chinatown as a place of opium use and unsanitary conditions, conferred Chinese people living in Canada to “outsider status” and affirmed white settler identity, privilege, and institutional power (p. 594). Likewise, Murch stresses that preceding increased immigration rates in the aftermath of the Mexican revolution, cannabis was well known in the US and used in numerous tinctures and medicines. Nonetheless, in targeting the customs and culture of many newly settled Mexican migrants, a racial scare campaign swept the country, warning that marijuana “aroused men of color’s violent lust for white women” and resulting in the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 at Congress (Murch, 2019).
Murch extends this history to the contemporary carceral regime of drug prohibition and policing that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s following the Black Power and Civil Rights movements, identifying the way that War(s) on Drugs became de facto urban policy for impoverished communities of colour in US cities. In drawing from pharmaceutical historian David Herzberg, Murch argues that there is no real difference between prescription medicines and illicit drugs as both possess physical and psychoactive effects (Murch, 2019; Herzberg, 2009). Rather, for both Herzberg and Murch, the social meaning attributed to substances “has more to do with race, class, and, differential application of state power than pharmacology” (Murch, 2019; Herzberg, 2009). In addition, Murch speaks to the way that cultural logics as well as criminal policy have “reinforced and animated the racialized boundary between ‘licit health seekers’ and ‘illicit pleasure seekers’ in the popular imagination” (Murch, 2019). These interventions on health provide a backdrop which, arguably, complicates the City of Toronto’s push for public health and illuminates the deeply racialized nature of substance prohibition. The following section looks to how this prohibition impacts the everyday lives of shisha lounge owners.
IV: The financial burden on shisha lounge owners
53 2326169 Ontario Inc. vs. The City of Toronto From June 2016 to June 2017, six shisha lounge owners based in Wexford Heights in Toronto’s East end took the shisha ban to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice and the Court of Appeal for Ontario to share their grievances and argue that the by-law passed by Toronto City Council was “confiscatory legislation” that would bar them from operating their businesses (2326169 Ontario Inc. vs. The City of Toronto, 2016). In our phone interview, Stephen suggested that “one of the things that made a difference in the way that elected officials thought about [the hookah by-law]” was that leading up to the prohibitive tobacco ban implemented through the Smoke Free Ontario Act, “businesses always said [a tobacco ban] would kill them” but according to Stephen, “there wasn’t much evidence that happened” (Stephen, 2019). While Stephen argued that the “economy goes up and down” and that “we still have a vibrant hotel, restaurant, [and] bar sector without smoking”, the collective action taken up by Toronto shisha lounge owners who operate(d) small businesses outside of the downtown core and whose primary customers are racialized Muslims suggests that the evidence which Stephen referenced did not adequately reflect their experiences. The legal case thus draws attention to the economic impact of the shisha ban. The following section includes excerpts from the legal case as well as interviews with research participants such as a Toronto-based legal expert, a former shisha lounge owner, and a Toronto city councillor. To further illustrate the financial toll and forced closures that shisha lounge owners encountered in the face of the shisha ban, I also draw from media reports on shisha lounges across Canada with a focus on Toronto-based locations. The shisha lounge owners, referred to as “the Applicants” in 2326169 Ontario Inc. vs. The City of Toronto, were represented by lawyer Ryan Zigler. On behalf of the Applicants, Zigler argued that, under the City of Toronto Act, Toronto City Council did not have the authority to pass a by-law that puts an entire industry out of business and has a “confiscatory effect” (2326169 Ontario Inc. vs. The City of Toronto, 2016). Expanding on the limits of a “strict population health needs assessment” (Stephen, 2019), Zigler said that because of the shisha ban’s “narrow scope”, what the City of Toronto really did was pass a bylaw to shut down existing businesses (Adler, 2017). Because the shutting down of businesses would cost workers their jobs, Zigler also argued that the by-law conflicted with the Occupational Health and Safety Act of Ontario which seeks to protect work. With a focus on the detrimental impacts that owners and workers of these small businesses encountered, the overarching claims made by Zigler took up
54 the way that the City of Toronto acted in bad faith in passing this by-law to ban hookah waterpipes in licensed establishments. The shisha lounge owners represented by Zigler were all described as having “immigrated to this country” and having sought to create businesses with “the atmosphere of traditional hookah lounges” (2326169 Ontario Inc. vs. The City of Toronto, 2016). While Zigler noted the significant cultural role that their modest businesses played in their respective communities, the foundation of the case relied on naming the shisha ban as confiscatory by drawing on details related to the impacts on the livelihoods of the applicants and the short window of time that they were granted to restructure their businesses. Karim Rajah Fallah is described as one of many “typical hookah lounge owner[s]” who borrowed $30,000 from friends and family to purchase his business in 2013. After gaining a business license from the City, Fallah began operating Fairouz Sheesha Café on East Danforth as a means of replicating the atmosphere of a Middle Eastern hookah lounge; serving non-alcoholic drinks and a limited amount of food. Fallah described his business as a place where customers came to socialize, read Arabic newspapers, and play boardgames. His main source of income was selling shisha and because he was unable to restructure the business, Fairouz Sheesha Café was listed as ‘permanently closed’ by 2018. Similarly, Sam Maktabi, the operator of Le Beirut Shisha Café, also noted that his main income was derived from providing shisha to his customers. As of 2019, Maktabi’s business on Warden Ave. was also listed as ‘permanently closed’. Magdy Mehany is described as another “typical hookah lounge owner” who immigrated to Canada from Egypt in 1996 and has spent about $100,000 to open and renovate Nile Palace Café on Lawrence Ave. East. At the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Magdy emphasized that, due to the location of his business, he did not believe that converting it into a restaurant is feasible. He also noted that even so, he did not have the $60,000 he believed was required to restructure his business from a shisha lounge to a restaurant. Likewise, Monir Mikhail, the owner of Oum Kulthom on Lawrence Ave. East, also spent over $100,000 to buy and renovate his business. In his affidavit Mikhail said that “Just as most customers would not patronize a pub or bar that no longer sells alcohol, my clients will not patronize a hookah lounge that cannot sell this product” (Ferreira, 2016). Mikhail noted that “the bylaw represents a financial calamity for me” because “At age 56, I do not know how I will be able to earn a living” (Ferreira, 2016). Affidavits by the Applicants stressed the importance of shisha lounges for their community and
55 emphasize the “genuine fear for the financial health and future of their businesses” (2326169 Ontario Inc. vs. The City of Toronto, 2016). While 46% of shisha patrons interviewed in Ipsos Reid-led consultations said they would visit the lounges even if shisha wasn’t served, tracing continued closures of shisha businesses between 2015 to 2019 suggests otherwise. In conversation with Victor Ferreira, shisha lounge owner Younes Regragui underlined that he only served patrons who were 19 years and older at the Desert Rose Restaurant and that he “invested $6000 in a ventilation system” to address the public health risks posed by shisha products (Ferreira, 2015). Before the forced closure of the Desert Rose Restaurant in 2015, Regragui had insisted that regulations would better address the public health concerns without “hurting small business like [him]self” (Ferreira, 2015). Regragui emphasized that he was “against serving hookah to teenagers 200 percent” but that City Council’s decision was “taking away [his] dream” (Ferreira, 2015). Similarly, the sentiments of the shisha lounge owners who filed the lawsuit was that, through the implementation of the shisha ban, “their businesses would have no future” and they would “lose their life savings” (Adler, 2017). In response to the Applicants’ concerns, the judge made clear that although sympathetic to their situation, no court could quash a by-law for unreasonableness and the only basis upon which a by-law may be quashed is for illegality. In short, because the by-law does not expropriate any property, impose extra property or municipal taxes, or prevent the applicants from doing what they are licensed to do (because a hookah license does not exist), the Ontario Superior Court of Justice and the Ontario Court of Appeal found the by-law not to be confiscatory. The judge also noted that, even if it were confiscatory, City Council made a policy decision that hookah smoke is harmful, and the courts do not second-guess such policy decisions. In part because the Provincial Court of British Colombia ruling set a precedent which dismissed claims that shisha is tied to religion (and by extension culture and race), the Ontario Superior Court case and the ensuing challenge at the Ontario Court of Appeal primarily underlined the financial burden of the shisha ban on individual businesses. Nevertheless, media interviews with shisha lounge owners extended beyond individual impacts and stressed the consequences that the bylaw had on the Muslim community’s already limited places of gathering. In conversation with Mike Adler, anonymous shisha lounge owners expressed their fear that neighborhoods where shisha lounges made up a large part of the street life risked being “decimated” (Adler, 2017). Nile Palace Café owner Magdy Mehany predicted that, with the
56 passing of the shisha ban, “there won’t be a lot of Arab people gathering [along the Wexford Heights strip of Lawrence Avenue East] anymore” (Adler, 2017). Anxieties expressed by the shisha lounge owners are not unfounded but, rather, speak to broader feelings of unbelonging, forced closures, and surveillance acutely experienced by minoritized people navigating Toronto. These comments also speak back to the otherwise predominantly ‘colour-blind’ consultation and debate process that preceded and persuaded City Council’s decision to prohibit shisha lounges. As illustrated in her study of gentrification in Little Jamaica, Debbie Gordon (2018) connected municipal and provincial private investments in transit to neoliberal city building practices that intensified the displacement of Black residents and businesses along the Eglinton Avenue West strip. Gordon highlighted the coopting of terms such as “neighborhood health’ and ‘infrastructural renewal’ used towards the goal of attracting a ‘new population looking for a high quality of life” (p. 22), echoing Hunter et al.’s inquiry into “who is lost?” when city planners and political leaders are “rebuilding new structures with new people” (Hunter et al., 2016, 34). While Gordon affirms that “city infrastructure needs to evolve and change over time”, she cites the “blindspots” of planners who failed to detect how the transit development facilitated the displacement and erasure of low-income “Black and immigrant communities in and around Little Jamaica” (Gordon, 2018, 23). While Julie Guthman (2008) uses an “era of color-blindness” (p. 433) to describe the way that whiteness is coded as ‘neutral’ in North American alternative food institutions, this critique of an overall absence of discussions related to race and community health is important in pointing to the context that facilitates such ‘blindspots’ and erasures in Toronto. Despite the Board of Health, the Licensing & Standards Committee, Toronto City Council, and the Ontario courts all predominantly engaging with the shisha lounge owners’ claims primarily as individualistic business owners, the investment that most shisha lounge owners expressed for their community reflects that these places were more than entrepreneurial endeavours void of cultural significance.
V: Analyzing the legal challenge and discursive erasures of Muslim organizing
In conversation with Nathan, he noted that shisha lounge owners were only granted a six- month grace period by the City of Toronto before the by-law was enforced. Nathan argued that
57 “six months is ridiculous to transition people away from their livelihoods” and took up the political implications of this policy:
I think if you had a more politically connected and powerful lobby that would not have happened quite that way. And I don’t think that [the owners] weren’t politically connected enough (Nathan, 2019).
Nathan went on to say that it’s very unusual for a prohibition of this scale to be implemented, referencing the last time “a business was made illegal was in the 1930s with the banning of alcohol” (Nathan, 2019). Nathan associated the passing of the legislation with three main logics: 1) the longstanding influence of anti-smoking and tobacco prevention lobbying, 2) the fact that other equally harmful substances such as alcohol are “culturally entrenched”, and 3) the lack of response or protest from the Muslim community (Nathan, 2019). I take particular interest in the problematic claim that the Muslim community didn’t organize against the bylaw; a sentiment that was echoed in public deputations at Toronto’s City Hall as well as in my interview with public health advocate Stephen. In our phone conversation Stephen said he was initially concerned “equity seeking communities” would feel disproportionately targeted by the legislation but went on to claim he didn’t “recall much of that coming out of the consultation process.” Likewise, in her public deputation, Smoking and Health Action Foundation executive director Lorraine Fry (2015) also argued that while “a coalition of restaurant owners actively opposed the bill… Opposition from the province's Middle Eastern/Islamic religious and cultural organizations was notably absent” (Fry, 2015). Similarly, Nathan claimed there was solely “push back from a couple of owners” and that “City Councillors would have listened to [community push back] and weighed” its significance because “you gotta be forceful… to state your point” (Nathan, 2019). While Nathan wasn’t intentionally placing blame on shisha lounge owners when he questioned if the ban would have gone through “if the community had been more organized or politically savvy and sophisticated”, I believe these statements highlight an underestimation of Muslim peoples’ place-based organizing and an overestimating of City Council’s interest in protecting Muslim placemaking practices. The same advocates who had at best disregarded and at worst actively dismissed the significance of shisha culture for Muslim people in the city were, in the same breath, placing the blame for the passing of the shisha ban on those who faced the brunt of the bylaw’s consequences; Muslim shisha lounge owners and patrons. In an hour-long interview with
58 Munira, a young Toronto-based Black Muslim woman and former shisha lounge patron, Munira expressed aversion to these statements:
The blame shouldn’t be put on the owners [for not being able to organize and stay open], it should be put on the politicians and the system that doesn’t see these places as important (Munira, 2019).
By indirectly engaging with what Hunter et al. (2016) describe as why “marginalized populations cling so fiercely to places that powerful and privileged elites see as degenerate” (p. 34), Munira names City Council’s ‘blindspots’ and demands for the shisha ban to be understood within the context of systemic oversights that paved the way for its passing.
Katherine McKittrick (2011, I) takes up the ways in which Canadian multicultural “policy in fact disavows race” to emphasize that policy’s limited ability to enact racial and spatial justice “overwhelm”. In our confidential phone interview, a Toronto City Councillor further emphasized the limits of policy, noting that “There’s no realistic future for shisha lounges” and “There’s impossibility of [the shisha ban] being reversed” because “you would need 13 Councillors… [and] we don’t have 13 Councillors that care about shisha lounges [or] the folks that go to shisha lounges” (Anonymous, 2019). He went on to stress that “There’s no magic pill [and] there’s no magic wand for this!” For this reason, my research and collection of narratives does not seek to actively counter the bylaw. Rather, I look to Ruha Benjamin (2018) to consider how refashioning stories can be utilized towards imagining, dreaming, and materializing alternative futures for Muslim placemaking and racial justice that are not reliant on existing and notably obstructive Canadian policy frameworks. Within the context of Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Benjamin notes that “while we are drowning in ‘the facts’ of inequality and injustice”, “the most basic assertion that Black lives matter is [still] contested”:
Whether it is a new study on criminal justice disparities or another video of police brutality, demanding empirical evidence of systematic wrongdoing can have a kind of perverse quality. As if subjugated people must petition again and again for admission in to the category “human,” for which empathy is rationed and applications are routinely denied (Benjamin, 2018).
Benjamin puts storytelling practices forward as an urgently needed response and reworking of “all that is taken for granted about the current structure of the social world—alternatives to
59 capitalism, racism, and patriarchy” (Benjamin, 2018). While the shisha lounge owners’ legal case heavily relied on describing the Applicants as “law-abiding members of the community who simply want to run their businesses” (2326169 Ontario Inc. vs. The City of Toronto, 2016), my interviews consider the impossibility of Toronto’s Muslim people as ‘law-abiding’ within the context of the settler colonial state that always already treats non-white people as illegal, and which refuses to recognize the value and importance of their social and cultural practices. The coming interviews with a former shisha lounge owner and former shisha lounge patrons thus both reject the dominant narratives and, through storytelling practices, affirm alternative ways of being in the city.
In conversation with Lamiya Lamiya (pseudonym) operated her shisha lounge in North York from 2008 until 2017. She described her shisha lounge as the first of its kind in that neighborhood; filling a gap for Egyptian-Canadians who were looking for a place to socialize and congregate. In contrasting her business to places such as Habibiz Shisha Café which is popular among people in their 20s, Lamiya describes her business as catering to “a more adult crowd” as her clientele were people “25 and up” who wanted to smoke and play dominos, cards, bridge, and watch sports games (Lamiya, 2019). On the weekends, Lamiya hosted Tarneeb card-game tournaments for regular patrons. Lamiya compares her business to a sports bar however without alcohol to ensure the comfort of the predominantly Muslim patrons. Through a 45-minute semi-structured phone interview with Lamiya, she emphasized that the fines, the fear of being fined, and the inconsistency and lack of transparency she experienced dealing with bylaw enforcement authorities led her to close her business after 9 years of relative success. Prior to the shisha ban, Lamiya noticed increased difficulties operating and did not feel supported by the City of Toronto in making clear how to avoid the penalties and warnings she received. She notes that despite having a policy that ensured not serving minors, she received a penalty from a public health officer “because we didn’t have an ‘over the age of 19 sign’” and, to which she added, “they didn’t provide.” I questioned how the proposed shisha ban impacted her business in early 2015 to which she responded:
Sometimes it affected our business because there was no clear vision as how to run it legally. One inspector says we need a sign, and another said you don’t need a sign and there’s no guidelines to it (Lamiya, 2019).
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Lamiya’s sentiments mirror calls for regulation rather than prohibition as a means of ensuring the safety of patrons and staff without putting establishments out of business. Following the implementation of the shisha ban, Lamiya felt equally uncertain about guidelines and unsupported by the City of Toronto through this transition:
“It wasn’t clear – what is the reasoning for the ban and how to operate wasn’t clear!”
“There’s no support, no information. We don’t know what these people are doing at all.”
“As to why the ban was [administered], we have no clue. We were told by the media not by the government. They said that it’s [because shisha is] accessible to kids” (Lamiya, 2019).
Due to the lack of clarity regarding the operations of her business, Lamiya remained open for a few months after the ban was implemented and made some changes to her business model based on her, albeit limited, understanding of Toronto Public Health and Licensing and Standards guidelines. She noted that after the ban, public health officers were “out hunting” and they had forced closures on other locations. When I asked Lamiya to expand on interactions she and her patrons experienced with public health officers, she compared the feeling of the authoritative figures in her small and migrant centred business to “border enforcement assholes”, pointing to the feeling of surveillance that accompanied their presence2. Before and shortly after the ban, Lamiya repeatedly received fines ranging from $300 to a couple thousand dollars. While Lamiya refrained from naming the amount of her last fine she said that “After that last fine I said forget it!”, stating that she felt “no choice” but to close down her business (Lamiya, 2019).
VI: Bylaw analysis summary
While it may not seem economically sound for shisha lounge owners to have operated establishments that allowed for patrons to spend hours at while only spending $5-$15, Lamiya insisted that her now closed business had served as a community hub and that she was always
2 Relatedly, in Manchester, UK, during a 2018 police crackdown on indoor smoking at Al Qaza shisha lounge following Manchester City Council’s call to “protect public health”, 3 patrons who were fined by police for smoking were later identified by immigration officials and arrested (McGuinness, 2018). This example points to the direct impact of shisha ban’s in increasing surveillance of already hypersurveilled communities.
61 invested in creating an “easily accessible” (Lamiya, 2019) and affordable space. Lamiya also emphasized that she did not see herself as detached from the community hub and that she participated in “learning different cultural games like bridge” (Lamiya, 2019) that she had never previously learned to play. An analysis of the legislation enacted demonstrates the ways in which the dominant focus on public health as well as the overall dismissal of shisha’s cultural and religious significance paved the way for the passing of the ban as elected officials held a limited understanding of how the bylaw impacted a Muslim ‘sense of place’ for Muslim people in the city including but not limited to shisha lounge owners and patrons. The grievances shared by Lamiya as well the shisha lounge owners who collectively filed a lawsuit against the City of Toronto highlight the devastating effects that the shisha ban had on their respective businesses. In addition, these grievances were not limited to concerns about individual incomes which lawyer Ryan Zigler described as “a financial catastrophe” (Adler, 2017). Rather, the shisha lounge owners also took up the importance of their businesses as spaces for placemaking practices to be enacted, especially with regard to Muslim and/or Middle Eastern diasporas in the city, further pointing to the ways that the shisha ban implicated a Muslim ‘sense of place’ in Toronto.
CHAPTER 4: NARRATING FORMER SHISHA LOUNGE PATRON RESPONSES
I: Former shisha patron interviewees
I began interviews with former shisha lounge patrons by asking interviewees how they self-identify and where they’re from, noting their answers need not be limited to nationality or border demarcations. What grew from these questions were organic and diverse reflections about Muslim communities, and more broadly, a Muslim ‘sense of place’ in the Greater Toronto Area. As is recognized by participants, most often, their feelings of belonging and unbelonging intersected with or were augmented by processes of displacement and racializing surveillance in the city. I provide the following non-exhaustive sketches of five former shisha lounge patrons to introduce the interviewees and to share how participants engaged with feelings of belonging and unbelonging in their own words, paraphrased. As is further explored, participants pointed to the necessity of recreational community gathering spaces such as shisha lounges and reflected on
62 how feelings of unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance were intensified with the passing of the shisha ban. The sketches also briefly but importantly reject “flat representations” of ‘Muslimness’ and reveal the “embodied dimensions” (Ali, 2018, 5) of faith and identity oftentimes complicated by race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability. I embrace the diverse and sometimes diverging nature of participant responses to questions about community and belonging as a means of noting the limits and possibilities of this study. Despite all interviewees identifying as Muslim, this data does not and could not provide an all-encompassing overview of Muslim peoples’ responses to Toronto’s shisha ban. Instead, I narrate and analyze the perspectives of some of many Muslim people who felt left out of conversations at Toronto’s City Hall which resulted in City Council’s banning of shisha in licensed establishments. The coming sketches, interviews, and analysis thus provide a non-exhaustive archive of Muslim placemaking in the city with a focus on the shisha ban’s impact. As previously noted, all names are pseudonyms and potentially identifiable information shared has been modified to ensure the confidentiality of participants.
Amal Amal is a Sudanese-Canadian woman who regularly partakes in social and networking events related to her cultural and religious heritage, especially in and around Scarborough where she proudly identifies as “born and raised”. Amal began frequenting shisha lounges as an undergraduate student, mostly because of their convenience as places in the neighborhood where she could affordably congregate with large groups of friends and family. Despite shisha being present throughout her childhood, Amal doesn’t jump to name shisha as culturally significant. Instead, what speaks most to Amal is the importance of shisha in her social life, emphasizing that from friends she sees on a daily basis to cousins to “other people around [her] age”, shisha is the centre of all their social activity (Amal, 2019). Likewise, shisha also served as a place for Amal to horizontally network as she’s had valuable exchanges and made a lot of connections related to her education and her employment at shisha lounges. Overall, Amal feels a sense of belonging in some parts of Toronto more than others:
I don’t really know how to describe this. I’m going to try. For example, if I’m in Scarborough there’s a lot of minority groups that live here and I see a lot of faces that look like mine. I see a lot of communities that are similar to mine. I guess this is where I feel a stronger sense of belonging (Amal, 2019).
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Amal contrasts this experience with the 9AM – 5PM job that she works in downtown Toronto, noting that, it’s still in the city that she grew up in but that she feels “a part-time belonging” or sense of “belonging that ends at 5 o’clock” because after that she doesn’t “belong there anymore”. Similarly, Amal discusses the “stares and the judgement” she experiences at bars alongside hijabi friends, even if they’re not there to drink. Amal compares this to her and her friends’ experiences in shisha lounges where, in her experience “there is no judgement and it’s a space where people of all religions, of all races, and of all walks of life” can congregate (Amal, 2019).
Hussain Hussain is in his mid-twenties and identifies with multiple diasporic communities in the city. His relationship to his Middle Eastern heritage is particularly shaped and bound by religion, in part because of monthly congregations he attends with other Muslim people from Scarborough, North York, Richmond Hill, Pickering, Ajax, Mississauga, and Markham. Hussain said that his daily experiences weren’t impacted by Islamophobia, for the most part because he doesn’t really “look the part” but noted that his ‘visibly Muslim’ family and friends experienced discrimination differently, mostly from strangers (Hussain, 2019). He expresses that because of his interests and life choices he does however sometimes feel judged by some Muslim community members. As someone who spent his weekend nights at shisha lounges among mostly Middle Eastern and African friends, he notes that his sense of belonging “extends and transcends” religious ideologies. For Hussain, shisha lounges were “inclusive social settings” where he went to share space with “like-minded young adults” in the city. Most often he went with friends because it was an affordable hang out for larger groups however sometimes Hussain would “walk into a shisha lounge alone and end [his] night with new friendships”. While the shisha lounges in Scarborough that he used to frequent are now closed now, Hussain fondly reminisces on “making some solid friendships and meeting some past lovers” in shisha lounges. He also “started a business, held meetings, studied for exams, and wrote some essays over shisha.” Hussain observes that shisha itself is not very important to his daily life, stressing that he can “live without it” and would “probably live much longer for sure” if he didn’t smoke. Instead, he turns to the very important “cultural and social aspect” of shisha; noting that the shisha ban means “one less space” to gather with his community (Hussain, 2019).
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Jamila Jamila describes her upbringing in Toronto as “yo-yoing” between Scarborough and Downtown East. For Jamila, East African and Black diasporic communities shaped her social interactions and, in extension, her social understandings of self and community (Jamila, 2019). Jamila embraces “very broad and very vague” notions of community, noting that, in her opinion, community doesn’t point to a specific group and is instead an, oftentimes fraught, “soft line.” Be it with her mom or her sister or her aunties, for Jamila shisha has always been a normal and casual part of her home life. She attributes this to her family having lived in both East Africa and the Middle East as shisha is a prominent practice in both regions. Now in her late twenties, Jamila recounts growing up in Toronto and not always having a place to “just chill and have leisure time with friends” especially because going to the mall or restaurants involved spending money and staying at home meant being surrounded by family members. Jamila says that by being within “whatever our religious and our cultural limitations were”, shisha lounges brought an experience that was “controlled and safe”, playfully adding “and a little fun.” For this reason, for Jamila and her friends, shisha lounges have “always been home”:
There aren’t really a lot of options when it comes to being able to just chill somewhere and feel comfortable and maybe just spend hours there, right? It’s very unique in that sense. And very special. Special in an ordinary way (Jamila, 2019).
For Jamila, the specialness and the ordinariness are in reference to “the really beautiful” ways that relationships, coming of age moments, and feelings of belonging emerge in shisha lounges. Jamila traces the sudden closures of shisha lounges she frequented in different pockets of the city from the Danforth to Wexford to Moss Park to connect the shisha ban to municipal policies that increase hardships “that people like me and my friends and those I love” face in the ever- changing and gentrifying city.
Munira Munira is a Sudanese and Canadian woman in her mid-twenties who has lived across multiple geographies but currently resides in Toronto’s East end. Munira sees herself as part of multiple diasporic groups in the city including “the Sudanese community, the Black community,” pausing before adding “not so much the Muslim community, not gonna lie” (Munira, 2019). Munira stresses that, in her experience, entering Muslim spaces often means
65 having to challenge homophobic and transphobic statements made in the name of Islam. Notably, Munira rarely intentionally looks for spaces that are specifically geared towards Muslim placemaking as she feels that a lot of people discriminate in the name of Islam. For Munira, the “freedom to freely practice” her religion as an African Muslim and to express the “intersectionality of being” many things at the same time is central to her feeling belonging within any given community. Munira notes that she doesn’t necessarily feel belonging in Toronto and she wouldn’t go so far as to call it ‘home’ but that she likes that there are some spaces for “us.” Shisha lounges became one of those spaces for Munira and her friends, especially when going out with Muslim friends who “don’t feel comfortable going to bars.” Despite expressing gratefulness for opportunities to carve out places of belonging in the city among other Black, Indigenous, and racialized creatives, Munira feels the city is being deeply impacted by gentrification and notes that it is an issue that “goes hand in hand with the shisha ban.” From Regent Park to Scarborough to Jane and Finch, Munira cites a lack of places to gather with friends, especially “when it’s winter and cold and outdoors aren’t an option.” She also stresses that “gentrification is screwing up businesses… all over in the suburbs of the city” and that “white people are shutting down local immigrant businesses and making their own businesses” in their place. Navigating the closures of shisha lounges she used to frequent “because of the shisha ban” is a part of how Munira describes feelings of unbelonging and Toronto’s gentrification in her day-to-day.
Noura Noura moved from North Africa to Canada as a student just over 10 years ago. Since her move she has found herself a part of many communities in Toronto including the Arabic- speaking community, the Muslim diaspora, and what she describes as “the shisha community.” Noura traces her experience “happening upon” the strip of shisha lounges in Wexford, Scarborough “by complete accident”, noting she “got very comfortable there immediately”, and linking the encounter to a positive shift in her social life (Noura, 2019). While she was previously “unaware that places like that existed in Toronto”, she quickly began visiting shisha lounges regularly and expanding her social network through the meeting of new people. Expanding her social network was particularly transformative for Noura as it was a means of securing employment as an international student that had previously struggled to find work for reasons related to her visa. She named the people she met at shisha lounges as a community that
66 is very important to her, adding that “by proxy”, shisha is “very important to [her] life.” Noura notes that the closures and the “dwindling” of shisha lounges had an equally dramatic effect on her social life. In comparing neighborhoods such as Little Italy, Little Portugal, and Little India to the “not congregated” and “geographically distant” Arab community in the Greater Toronto Area, Noura suggests shisha lounges offered a place for Arabs to meet on a regular basis “regardless of where people lived in the city” from Milton to North York to Mississauga. In contrast, Noura says “now there are no spaces for us to meet” and notes that that it is “very saddening” that maintaining her community since the passing of the shisha ban has been “very, very, very difficult” (Noura, 2019).
Broadly, interviewees take up the importance of shisha lounges in their lives alongside friends and agemate cousins navigating cultural and religious beliefs, familial restrictions, the white gaze, and unaffordability. In the coming sections I expand on conversations with interviewees to analyze the ways that unbelonging, displacement, and racializing surveillance distinctly and systemically shape Muslim encounters with space in the city. I interweave this analysis with discussions of the dynamic ways that Muslim people transform their relationships to citizenship through radical placemaking practices including, as demonstrated by participants, in Toronto’s shisha lounges. Lastly and importantly, I draw from interviews to highlight how the shisha ban has implicated and even intensified spatial inequities faced by young Muslim people by pointing to processes of increased gentrification, intensified surveillance, and what some participants described as the City of Toronto’s mismanaged priorities.
II: BIPOC transformations of the city
While most shisha lounges in the West were established by new migrants as a means of creating feelings of familiarity and belonging, Viktória Nagy’s (2013) ethnographic study of Arab, Turkish, and Iranian-owned shisha lounges in Budapest draws attention to the natural shifts in shisha culture to highlight the way that migrant customs are both transforming cities and transformed by cities. In analyzing his conversations with shisha lounge owners and patrons, Nagy suggested that shisha’s shift from a custom associated with migrant nostalgia to a pastime widely taken up in Budapest for socializing reflects a “form from the past which is renewed to align to the frames and needs of the present time and place” (Nagy, 2013, 219). Similarly, in
67 “Banning Shisha in Toronto is About a lot More than Health Codes”, Huda Hassan (2016) recounts moments of warmth, intergenerational gathering, and placemaking for the predominantly Muslim and Muslim-raised Toronto-based shisha lounge goers who use the site as a place of halal, affordable, and alternative recreation that didn’t conflict with their religious or cultural values. As illustrated above, the former shisha lounge patrons I interviewed echo similar sentiments, linking the cultural practice to their social lives as young Black and brown Muslim people coming of age and transforming their complicated relationships to citizenship in an expensive, stratified, and systemically racist city. In an interview with Kalmunity, a Montreal-based Black artist-centred improvisation collective which has hosted weekly open mic events for over a decade, Amani Bin Shikhan (2018) traces the importance of the physical and sonic place that allows for Black artists across generations and across genre demarcations to find resources and space to experiment with musical expressions and to be free (Bin Shikhan, 2018). In naming the void which Kalmunity sought to fill in Montreal, Kalmunity director Preach Anakobia contextualizes the importance of their work, speaking to “the culture, the government, and the way of life [that] keeps [Black artists in Montreal] tremendously uncomfortable.” Bin Shikhan argues that the strength in this community space is in its elasticity, continuously “reworking the rules of borderlands” in the city and paving the way for new possibilities of Black Canadian artistry, unnegotiated (Bin Shikhan, 2018). In doing so, Bin Shikhan highlights the importance of tuning in to the way that internal borders delineate belonging for Black, Indigenous, and racialized people (McDonald, 2012, Walia, 2013) in urban space while also highlighting the spatial agency enacted through the weekly gatherings and against the structural conditions which shape the discomfort that Anakobia references. In the coming sections, I draw from Bin Shikhan’s engagement with place as a starting point to take up the way that interviewees identified possibilities of radical placemaking practices that emerged in shisha lounges while also recounting the ways that interviewees’ experiences were and are marked by unbelonging, displacement, and racializing surveillance. Additionally, I interweave former shisha lounge patron interview responses alongside my interviews with 2 Toronto-based Muslim creatives as well as artist statements from multidisciplinary artistic interventions that take up the importance of shisha and the impact of the shisha ban.
68 III: Affordable places of gathering
Despite not having included any questions related to the affordability of shisha lounges in my semi-structured interview questions, each interviewee organically touched on the value of having places they could congregate with friends that fit their oftentimes limited budgets. In a public deputation at the Toronto Board of Health meeting in June 2015, members of the Youth Health Action Network warned public officials of the rising prevalence of shisha use among Toronto youth and attributed this to shisha being seen as a way to “socialize with peers” that is “relatively inexpensive.” While the Youth Health Action Network members noted that “Going out to a hookah lounge with your friends lasts about just as long as a movie, yet it’s only half the price” to critique hookah lounges as “easily accessible” to youth, they inadvertently pointed to a lack of places for many young people in Toronto to congregate; an issue that was reemphasized by interviewees. For example, Amal, Hussain, Jamila and Munira all described shisha as an inexpensive way to socialize with friends which, as noted by Hussain, was particularly useful for birthday parties and other large group gatherings. Likewise, for former shisha lounge owners like Lamiya, the accessibility and affordability of her now closed down business was integral to operating the community hub. Similarly, for both Amal and Noura, the low cost of shisha paired with easy access to shisha lounges by public transit largely determined their significant relationships to shisha lounges. In response to questions about how the shisha ban impacted her ability to stay connected to the ‘shisha community’, Noura noted that a lack of adequate and affordable transit services left her feeling that “now there are no spaces for us to meet anymore” (Noura, 2019). Because she didn’t have a car, Noura stressed that going to Milton or Mississauga or other places in the Greater Toronto Area where some Arab community members still operate licensed shisha lounges was not an option for her. This feeling was echoed by Amal who is Scarborough-based and emphasized that she almost exclusively frequented shisha lounges in Scarborough. Both Noura and Amal connected the affordability of shisha lounges to the overall unaffordable experience of living and moving in Toronto, signalling to how Toronto’s transit infrastructure implicated their mobility and in extension their feelings of belonging and unbelonging in the city. In “Race, the ’burbs, and transportation”, Perry King (2017) names the racialized and spatialized inequities that define Black, Indigenous, and racialized peoples’ encounters with city transit such as the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC). King notes that “In the GTA, one of the
69 most diverse communities in North America, any discussion of public space… needs to be one about race” (King, 2017) and stresses that while “Transit in Toronto’s prosperous, increasingly white urban centre is far from great, the further one travels from downtown, the more racialized our communities grow and the more pathetic the transit options become” (King, 2017). King goes on to argue that the failings of our transit system are ones that put vulnerable people at a greater risk:
People who live in neighbourhoods like Rexdale and Malvern — areas with high levels of poverty and also many people of colour — spend far more time in transit than the city’s 32-minute average commute. Hours spent getting to work on circuitous bus routes, where vehicles sometimes simply don’t show up, are hours taken away from earning a living, not to mention family time and leisure.
King adds this experience is worsened by racist and sexist slurs to highlight the way that Toronto’s uneven transit system distinctly impacts low income Black, Indigenous, and racialized peoples’ living in the city’s suburbs, a feeling that Noura and Amal shared as people who did not maintain their traditions of going to shisha lounges in the Greater Toronto Area once shisha was banned in Toronto proper. In “Navigating the world of Scarborough”, Helen Lee (2017) links King’s systemic evaluation of the TTC to her experience coming of age and navigating Scarborough by bus. Lee describes herself as “a foodie without the cash to jet-set to foreign countries and sample exotic cuisines” (Lee, 2017) and highlights the ways she created a ‘sense of place’ stepping off the bus and “walking across parking lots to access strip plaza delights” (Lee, 2017). While Lee takes note of the fact that the “1960s era strip plazas, which were mostly built by the white people who suburbanized Scarborough,” were built environments that designers likely never imagined being used by herself or other bus riders, she recounts the “countless hours” spent riding TTC buses through Scarborough as a portal to “new smells, flavours, and textures” (Lee, 2017). Without disputing the disparities that King recounts in relation to transit infrastructure and discrimination, Lee shares the possibilities for placemaking she experienced on Scarborough buses and signals to what Jin Haritaworn et al. (2018) describe as queer and trans, Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (QTBIPOC) reclaiming and repossessing white, capitalist, colonial architectures. Like Lee, Noura also tied her placemaking practices to the albeit limited reach of the TTC. Noura wasn’t actively looking for shisha lounges when she moved to the city and “knew nobody”
70 however, as an affordable and easily accessible space, the lounges quickly became places for her to build a sense of community among other Arab people from across the city. As previously noted, for Noura, the passing of Toronto’s shisha ban severed her relationship to many people in her community as she didn’t have an affordable means of reaching folks in areas outside of Toronto such as Milton and Mississauga.
Reckoning with unaffordability and displacement For both Jamila and Munira, the affordability of shisha was explicitly tied to their concerns about Toronto as an increasingly unaffordable and gentrifying city. Jamila recounted her experience finding out about the shisha ban to highlight how quickly she has felt displacement take form:
So there was a spot that a couple of friends and I used to go all the time… and it was like a restaurant in the front and a shisha lounge in the back as most places are, right? I remember there was a younger dude who was the son of the owner and he would always come kick it with us as he was prepping our orders or getting our coals or whatever... I brought up [the shisha ban speculation] and said “Hey! Have you heard about this? Are you guys shutting down? What’s going on?” And he was like “Nah, they can come in here and raid me, I’m not gonna get shut down. There’s no way you’re gonna shut me down!” He said “It doesn’t make sense, we have a restaurant in the front, this is not some illegal thing… I don’t understand why it’s being done.” And he was obviously very vividly upset about it. And I was like “ok, bless, I guess it’s not that big of a deal, nobody is closing” and he was like “yeah, this whole block? Nobody’s closing! I don’t know why they’re trying to scare us” (Jamila, 2019).
Jamila paused to reflect on the interaction before going on to say that “Literally, not even six months later, they were closed and I never saw him again.” Jamila also noted that “to this day” she doesn’t know why the shisha ban was passed but she wonders how productive it is:
I wonder… what it is that's actually informing the decision. It doesn't really make a lot of sense to me at all. There's nothing illegal that happens in there… It's really chill, you go to any shisha lounge and it's usually just a bunch of like 20-somethings or whatever, sometimes older, just chilling with their friends and it just doesn't make any sense to me as to why that very particular space, in a city where that kind of space is dwindling, is being targeted in such a violent and urgent way (Jamila, 2019).
For Jamila, the shisha ban cannot be detached from what she describes as the “disheartening” ways that gentrifiers are “unconcerned with what actually predates them in the city”; including the value places like shisha lounges hold for her and her friends.
71 Similarly, Munira expressed appreciation for the affordable migrant-owned shisha lounges she frequented and questioned the logics of the ban within the context of gentrification and general feelings of unbelonging:
My Biggest concern [with the shisha ban] is that this is an issue of policing immigrant businesses and immigrant spaces – that’s where the problem lies. We already feel we have to deal with our spaces being monitored, being watched.
Even if the ban was lifted, I wouldn’t go to a shisha lounge owned by white people because it’s profiting off a culture that isn’t theirs and that they are less likely to be policed or shamed for (Munira, 2019).
Munira named the racialized policing, the closures, and the potential gentrification of shisha lounges to note that while Toronto celebrates “diversity” as its strength, in her opinion, the shisha ban “puts a damper on Canada’s multicultural thing” by further limiting immigrant spaces. In doing so, Munira names the socio-spatial organizing that seeks to maintain whiteness and exclude, displace, and erase non-white communities’ acts of life in the city. In doing so Munira also highlights the way that, in her experience, unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance are interconnected processes. Notably, the cover art for a ‘Cold Cutz’ digital mix produced by Brooklyn-based creative Ali Suleiman (that can be accessed at https://soundcloud.com/donothingclubny/donothingnyc- cold-cutz-mix-w-aliselassie) further demonstrates the interlocking relationship between unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance. The cover art (Figure 4.1), illustrated by New York-based DoNothingClub design project, portrays Suleiman smoking from an AK-47 shaped hookah pipe on a street corner in front of what appears to be a South Yemeni immigrant-owned Brooklyn bodega. Visible behind Suleiman is a poster calling for the release of imprisoned Brooklyn-born rapper Bobby Shmurda and a large sign that reads “Not for Sale”. While signalling to the experience of New York-based Muslims, the illustration mirrors some of the anxieties that both Jamila and Munira expressed and alluded to, especially with regards to the way that Black and/or Muslim people contest urban policing through placemaking and, as is highlighted by the “Not for Sale” sign, refute forced displacement which they often experience the brunt of across ‘the West’.
72
Figure 4.1: DoNothingClub ‘Cold Cutz’ digital mix illustrated cover art (DoNothingClubNYC, 2018).
Racialized placemaking and violent encounters Tracing traditions of racialized placemaking in Toronto suggests that from the Sakinah Muslim Community Center (Pagliaro, 2017; Valverde, 2017) to mosques (Isin & Siemiatycki, 2002; 1999) to Hip-Hop music venues (CBC-Radio, 2019; Bin Shikhan et al., 2016) to entire neighborhoods such as Little Jamaica (Gordon, 2018), and now, to shisha lounges, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour continue to “reckon with the familiarity of being re/moved” (Kirk & Fakhrashrafi, 2019). For example, in recounting his experiences as a hip-hop concert promoter in Toronto over the past 20+ years, Jonathan Ramos notes that although the rise of Drake’s international fame has radically shifted the way that tour agents view Toronto, it has long been difficult to book shows and find venues for hip-hop events because they are associated with “stereotypes attached to its primary consumer demographic of young Black males” (Bin
73 Shikhan et al., 2016). Rosina Kazi, a Toronto-based artist and champion for affordable and safe performance spaces for LGBTQ2 artists and/or artists of colour, expands on Ramos’ difficulties securing space, noting that racialized, low-income, and marginalized people feel the brunt of increased unaffordability and forced displacement taking shape due to the ongoing housing and tenants’ rights crisis (CBC-Radio, 2019). These incidents point to the difficulties that racialized people have in creating a ‘sense of place’ in Toronto and highlight the racial and spatial organizing involved in the mapping and maintaining of white settler society (Razack, 2002). Focusing on Muslim placemaking further demonstrates the processes of unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance that Black, Indigenous, and racialized people in Toronto face when creating spaces for and by their communities. In examining the bureaucratic red tape that Muslim people encountered at Toronto Community Council meetings in East York when trying to access permits necessary to build mosques in the 1990s, Engin Isin and Myer Siemiatycki (1999) demonstrate the relationship between planning regulations and ethno-racism wherein which, as Derek Gregory puts it, “law and violence are not opposed, but hold each other in deadly embrace” (Gregory, 2007, 211). Isin and Siematycki (2002) note that mosques take on a visible and audible form that doesn’t fit ethno-racists imagined white nation and that, as a result, Muslim community organizers faced continuous opposition, “NIMBYism” (Qadeer, 1997: 491), and “double-standards” (Ingar, 1998) related to bylaw requirements which churches in the area had successfully gained exemptions from. For example, East York Council which rejected a proposal to establish a mosque in a vacant factory building because the mosque was 26 parking spaces short of the required 130 spaces (Isin & Siemiatycki, 1999). Similarly and more recently, when members of the Scarborough-based and Black Muslim-led Sakinah Community Centre purchased a 72,000-foot warehouse in January 2014 with the intention of converting the space into a mosque, school, and community centre, their permits were denied by the city due to a bylaw passed in late 2013 which barred “places of worship and other ‘sensitive uses like schools” from being built on employment lands (Pagliaro, 2017). In early 2017, only a few days after the US President Donald Trump enacted the Muslim Ban and white supremacist Alexandre Bissonnette murdered Ibrahima Barry, Mamadou Tanou Barry, Khaled Belkacemi, Aboubaker Thabti, Abdelkrim Hassane and Azzedine Soufiane, and injured 19 others at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City mosque, hundreds of Muslims gathered at Toronto City Hall (Figure 4.2) to protest the bylaw which Muslim religious leaders argued “effectively pushed new places of
74 worship from the city at a time when mosques and Muslims are being targeted at home and in the U.S.” (Pagliaro, 2017).
Figure 4.2: Hundreds of Muslim community members demonstrate discriminatory bylaw at Toronto City Hall (Toronto Star, 2017)
Isin and Siemiatycki (1999) also note that, within the context of urban planning, “the most heated conflicts have arisen over attempts by immigrant and minority groups to establish collective cultural expressions of their identity in the form of places of worship, commercial environments, recreational facilities and community centres” (p. 13). The former incidents in Toronto as well as interviews with shisha lounge owners and patrons suggest this remains true for Black and brown Muslim people in Toronto. Notably, Zoe Samudzi and William C. Anderson (2018, 43) link discriminatory bylaws to processes of displacement by pointing to the relationship between gentrification and “the removal of undesirable aesthetics and behaviors (through, for example, imposed restrictions on loitering and noise)”:
Black churches have frequently been targeted during gentrification processes… In 2015, for example, Oakland’s Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, a predominantly Black church
75 that has been in its neighborhood for over sixty-five years, was slapped with over $3,500 in fines… because the neighboring residents filed noise complaints claiming the overly loud choir practice ‘may constitute a public nuisance due to its impact to the use and quiet enjoyment of the surrounding community’s [private] property (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, 43).
Samudzi and Anderson go on to note that the church sits in an area that has been rapidly gentrifying over the past decade; a process characterized by residential displacement, an influx of new residents, and skyrocketing rent costs and housing prices. Similarly, Jamila expressed feelings of fatigue and erasure in response to questions about how she views the state of Toronto politics and policy making, especially within the context of ongoing processes of displacement:
The immediate thought that I have is that the city is being really taken over by this demographic that is that is young and white mostly, but also not white, and professionalized and they have this veneer of progressive politics but a very capital or a liberal politics, right? Often this is the same demographic that are like the most enthusiastic gentrifiers, the ones that are most unconcerned with what actually predates them in the city… Not even in terms of a long history… I'm pretty young but you know, the vast majority of the Toronto I grew up in doesn't exist anymore (Jamila, 2019).
While maintaining that forced displacement is a result of white supremacist spatial organizing, Jamila described grappling with progressive politics and the ‘politics of representation’ while being “aware and alert” to the fact that those making harmful decisions didn’t always embody the typical trope of the “old white man” politician or planner. Within this context, Jamila centred structural conditions in her analyses of Toronto’s changes and suggested “we need to have more foundational understandings of what it is that’s happening.” In doing so, Jamila paves the way more nuanced discussions on “the making of liberal citizens out of subjects who exist in the margins” (Ali, 2018, 8), a relationship that, in tracing the ways in which it is devoid of calls towards racial justice, Mahtani (2014) suggests Canadian multiculturalism policy has distinctly shaped. Put differently, in exploring the way that, Canadian multiculturalism can produce racialized people as “pawn[s] of the multicultural game”, Mahtani (2014, 137) borrows from Rinaldo Walcott to suggest that “One of the triumphs of neoliberal ideology has been its very effective management of the imaginiation, alongside the management of the economy, the institutions, [and] populations” (Walcott, 2011, 26). Similarly, Marlene Nourbese Philip (1996) argues that Canada, as a nation founded on the principles of white supremacy and racism “cannot
76 ever succeed in developing a society free of the injustices that spring from these systems of thought, without a clearly articulated policy on the need to eradicate these beliefs” (p. 185); a task Mahtani (2014), Walcott (2011), and other critics of Canadian multiculturalism (Philip, 1996; Wood & Gilbert, 2005) suggest Canada’s policy falls short of taking on. Likewise, when I asked her how she felt about City Council voting overwhelmingly in support of banning Toronto’s shisha lounges, Munira also suggested the ‘veneer’ of progressive politics was failing people like her:
If a politician is progressive instead of speaking for a community, they should pass the mic. This is just another example of promoting multiculturalism as long as it benefits Canadian society, an idealized version of Canadian society (Munira, 2019).
In referring to an “idealized version of Canadian society”, Munira alluded to feeling that her recreational practices were legally treated as “inappropriate” ‘functions of space’ (Blomley, 2007, 1700) and described the ways that the state always already treats non-white people as outside of what is “allowably and imaginably Canadian” (Walcott 2003, 124).
IV: Citizenship and clashes over public space
Both Jamila and Munira’s reflections point to questions posed by Isin and Siemiatycki: “Who belongs? And on what terms?” (Isin and Siemiatycki, 1999, 12). Isin and Siemiatycki suggest that “underneath… representations of harmony and commitment to multiculturalism there lurks a more problematic reality. Many immigrant groups in Toronto occupy a marginal position in the social space”. Isin and Siemiatycki thus go on to note that “citizenship—defined not only as a legal status but also as a participation and influence over the city’s economic, social, cultural and political spheres—has eluded many members of immigrant groups” (Isin and Siemiatycki, 1999, 5). In the Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, Isin (2017) draws on the concept of “performative citizenship” to point to the overlapping ways in which citizenship is negotiated and practiced, asking how making rights claims brings subjects into being? (Isin, 2017). Articulations of citizenship thus extend beyond status “as a formal marker of belonging” or as “a legal institution which governs who may and may not act as a subject of rights within any given polity” (McDonald, 2012; Isin, 2017). Isin suggests that at the centre of analysis of doing, enacting, or performing citizenship is making rights claims. Isin draws from Judith Butler to
77 describe this performativity as “the moment in which a subject asserts a right to a liveable life when no such prior authorization exists, when no clearly enabling convention is in place” (Butler, 2004, 224), speaking directly to minoritized peoples engagements with public space3. Jin Haritaworn et al. (2018) draw from Katherine McKittrick (2006) to also take up these spatial engagements and to regard Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Colour as geographic subjects who model different ways of inhabiting and sharing space. By further highlighting the way that former shisha lounge patrons used shisha lounges to resist the ‘white gaze’, resist the ‘auntie gaze’, and build meaningful relationships to people, to communities, and to places in the Greater Toronto Area, I use the upcoming sections to demonstrate that Black, Indigenous, and racialized people have often sought to “claim their urban citizenship rights spatially” through placemaking practices (Isin and Siemiatycki, 1999, 13).
V: Resisting the white gaze
In drawing from Franz Fanon’s (1952) studies of the lived and embodied experience of Blackness, in part through a psychoanalytic framework, Lindsay Dillon and Julie Sze (2016) name racism as a structure and a “feeling of being ‘fixed’ and confined by the white gaze and by colonial categories” (Dillon & Sze, 2016, 3). Understanding this embodied experience is particularly important within the context of surveillant assemblages which are “fundamentally classed, racialized and gendered in ways that target marginalized people by profiling certain bodies and the spaces they inhabit” (Paik, 2017, 17). I draw from these reflections on ‘racializing surveillance’ (Browne, 2014) to explore the embodied nature of spatial structuring that seeks to maintain whiteness and, in the process, produce a ‘feeling of being watched’ experienced differentially by Black, Indigenous, and racialized people. In response to a question about the increased police presence in shisha lounges with the passing of the shisha ban, Munira said she took issue with the “public health angle” used to justify City Council’s vote in favour of shutting down the lounges because “If the shisha ban is about public health, what about mental health?” (Munira, 2019). As noted, for Munira, shisha lounges were affordable places to meet with friends
3 This reading of citizenship is not meant to discredit the value of immigration status as a means of increasing safety and access for illegalized people. Rather it is an important theoretical approach for acknowledging the way that minoritized and/or illegalized people take up space and, in the process, transform their environments without the state which isn’t broken, it was built to function at the expense and exclusion of Black, Indigenous and racialized people.
78 where they, for the most part, felt safe and removed from being subject to the ‘white gaze’, especially when going out with Muslim friends who didn’t feel comfortable in bars. In noting that “it’s not as easy as it should be” to support Black and brown owned businesses without intention “in a city as diverse and quote unquote multicultural as Toronto”, Amal expressed similar feelings of unbelonging and pointed to some ways she created a ‘sense of place’ in shisha lounges:
Some of my friends are, I’m just going to use the word “visibly Muslim” as in wear-the- hijab, and for them, they feel safe in these spaces because it’s not like going to a bar. For example, even if they’re not drinking, [at bars] there is stares and judgement and stuff like that.
We get a sense of excitement when we go somewhere and we learn that this place is owned by another Black person or brown person or another Muslim person or another Arabic speaking person. It's just like there's a sense of familiarity there. And it just feels more welcoming (Munira, 2019).
Both Munira and Amal indicated a ‘feeling of being watched’ that shaped their experiences when going out to socialize with friends. In response, they recounted negotiating this unbelonging and surveillance by patronzing places they felt welcome. Like Munira and Amal, Jamila and Hussain also made note of how they spent their time and money as a means of being comfortable and supporting their loosely defined communities. From restaurants to grocers/butchers to health practitioners to tech support to legal aid, Hussain noted that he was raised to support “people who are immigrants” and it is a practice he continues to value to this day:
For me, when going out and spending a night at a place socializing or catching up with friends, I would prefer a shisha lounge over a Jack Astor’s or something of that nature… If you are a rooted individual and want to see your community thrive, then you would buy from a shop because they are owned by a community member, strengthening their practice, your energy, and the community as a whole – even if a mainstream store has more options or better prices…You nurture the growth you want to see (Hussain, 2019).
Hussain signalled to the importance he places on self-defining his relationship to the city and notes that “These things are important in strengthening my sense of community and helping me identify better as a Muslim Lebanese.” At the time that we spoke, Hussain was in the process of supporting his mosque’s expansion, a process that proved difficult because “with the hot real
79 estate market, developers have been paying 3-6 times the market value for a parcel of land” (Hussain, 2019). Being involved with his community was deeply important to Hussain’s ‘sense of place’ and frequenting shisha lounges was a part of this process. As someone deeply invested in naming and addressing the ongoing and intensifying gentrification of Toronto, Jamila noted that she had also appreciated frequenting shisha lounges as a means of supporting Black and brown migrant-owned small businesses:
Every time I go into an establishment that doesn’t mirror [Black and Brown people] I feel like I’m a part of the problem… I genuinely feel a guilt… It 100 percent deeply informs my choices (Jamila, 2019).
Jamila questioned “what kind of bigger factors are shaping the way that we spend our money and the way that we spend our time?” to challenge gentrification, displacement, and the neoliberal principles of city building that produce “the city as a product for consumption by a distinct group of people” (Gordon, 2018, 22). Both Hussain and Jamila noted that shisha lounges, in and of themselves, were not particularly important to their lives. Rather, they put forward the ways that shisha lounges had served their community building practices as Muslim people navigating Toronto. In The Feeling of Being Watched (2018) (Figure 4.3), journalist and documentarian Assia Boundaoui investigated rumours about the FBI spying on her predominantly Arab-American community living just outside of Chicago and, in doing so, made visible a large-scale surveillance program that was and is targeting Muslim people across America. Boundaoui et al. uncovered the use of informants and highlighted the “chilling effect” that paranoia (with reason) had on Muslim people’s growth and mobilization as a community (Boundaoui et al., 2019). Likewise, by revealing that the FBI tracked Muslim peoples’ phone calls and money transfers such as donations to mosques, Boundaoui et al. exposed the FBI’s characterizations of Muslim placemaking traditions as suspicious:
The things that they found suspicious about us are actually things that are the most important characteristics of our community; we’re very philanthropic and we’re connected to each other (Boundaoui et al., 2019).
From navigating ‘the white gaze’ to intentionally supporting and creating communal spaces that, to the best of their capacities, rejected neoliberal uses of space, interviewees exhibited the ways
80 in which shisha lounges were tied to their spatial agency aka their “ability to be in, act on or exert control over a desired part of the built-and-natural environment” (Montgomery, 2016, 777). In doing so, I suggest that in the face of unbelonging and the racializing surveillance that seeks to shape and maintain deeply uneven spatial stratifications from Toronto to Chicago, shisha lounges acted as places for patrons to creatively transform their relationships to citizenship.
Figure 4.3: Still from The Feeling of Being Watched (2018) (Source: Boundaoui et al., 2018)
VI: Resisting the auntie gaze
While resisting the ‘white gaze’ and unbelonging was a part of what had drawn many former shisha lounge patrons to frequent Toronto’s shisha spots, resisting the gaze of family members was also named as important to Amal and Jamila. Although the Toronto Public Health consultations carried out from 2013-2014 suggested the primary patrons at shisha lounges were young brown men, interviewees of this study reveal the significance of shisha in the lives of Muslim women in Toronto. I suggest the methodologies utilized by Ipsos Reid, the company that carried out ‘intercept interviews’ on behalf of Toronto Public Health, were limited in a way that privileged young men’s experiences with space and place. Intercept interviews, the process of gathering strangers’ data on-site by stationing oneself in public and requesting that people walking by partake, does not attune to the needs of people who identify as Trans, non-binary, or
81 women, and who continue to face street harassment disproportionately. In regard to age it’s also worth noting that reasons for not reaching older participants may include language barriers and/or discomfort towards engaging with officials connected to the municipal government due to varying degrees of legality that people in Toronto navigate. Moreover, in “Watch out for the Aunties! Young British Asians' accounts of identity and substance use”, Hannah Bradby (2007) traces the interrelated role of religion, ethnicity, gender, and generation in shaping the perception of young British Asians who engaged in smoking and drinking with emphasis on the way that the gossip about young women ‘damaging their reputations’ “was keenly felt” (p. 656) by the young Pakistani and Indian women interviewed. Bradby’s discussion of women avoiding or hiding their substance use, motivated by the ‘auntie gaze’ and the highly gendered fear of being discovered and shamed by elders, further clarifies unaddressed discussions related to why women were not well represented in Toronto Public Health’s report. In the Toronto context, Amal recounted going to shisha lounges with friends “whose families didn’t necessarily know they were there”, a gendered experience that Ipsos Reid failed to capture in this important urban debate because of their methodologies that didn’t accommodate Muslim women. Bradby and Amal reveal encounters marked by ‘gendered- Islamophobia’ (Zine, 2006; Ali, 2018) as well as interpersonal surveillance by ‘aunties’, ‘uncles’, ‘cousins’, parents, and religious leaders. If Islamophobia is a “Muslim management regime, wherein… bodies, religious practices, and cultural practices” become intimately linked to imperialist policy and notions of Islam as “antithetical to modernity and white Judaeo-Christian values” (Ali, 2018, 6), ‘gendered-Islamophobia’ names the specific scrutiny and management reserved for Muslim women. While ‘gendered-Islamophobia’ takes up the violent implications of Liberal white feminist paternalisms (Zine, 2006; Abu-Lughod, 2002; Mohanty, 1988), in conversation with Najma Sharif (2018) and with emphasis on her experiences as a Minnesotan Somali woman, Ifrah Ahmed expands on the way that Muslim women also experience this ‘management’ from within the Muslim community:
Somalis not only deal with state surveillance of our communities but Somali women also navigate surveillance on an interpersonal level within our own communities. Surveillance in our community in often gendered and can be a form of enforcing patriarchal cultural norms (Sharif, 2018).
82 Both ‘gendered-Islamophobia’ and the interpersonal surveillance that Ahmed describes are gendered encounters, often heightened by ‘multiple jeopardy’ (King, 1988) wherein “The modifier ‘multiple’ refers not only to several, simultaneous oppressions but to the multiplicative relationships among them as well. In other words, the equivalent formulation is racism multiplied by sexism multiplied by classism" (King, 1988, 7). For Ahmed, finding spaces and friendships where she can be her true self with fellow Somali women and without the “anxiety of interpersonal surveillance” is a means of existing on her own terms (Sharif, 2018). To this point, the 2018 opening of Lady Hookah, a Berlin-based and women only shisha lounge predominantly serving Arab and Turkish new migrant women points to the possibilities of shisha lounges as places where Muslim women go to subvert the “scaffolding of scrutiny” (Zaal et al., 170). Similarly, I discuss the way Jamila described visiting shisha lounges as a means of creating places of belonging for herself and friends within their capacities and on their own terms. Jamila recounted ‘coming of age’ moments to note that, because going to restaurants involved spending an “excessive” amount of money and staying at home meant being surrounded by oftentimes strict family members, shisha lounges provided a space for Jamila and women-identified friends to socialize in a way that was “controlled” and “safe” and “fun.” To this point, Hassan (2016) described feelings of warmth and belonging evoked in a now closed down shisha lounge that was frequented by Black and/or Muslim young people from Toronto’s East End:
It’s Friday night in late March at Cloud9 shisha lounge… (Locals call the spot Rotana’s.) Large, semi-private booths divide the room, and the cliques congregated in it. In one booth, a group of young East African women pull on a collection of shisha pipes. They’re sipping pineapple Barbican sodas, and occasionally dab to Drake and Future’s “Jumpman” before transitioning to the Ethiopian eskissta dance. And they’re acting a bit coy because, in another booth, there’s a group of young men. Some are playing dominos, while others rap and sing along to the music. In fact, the whole place is mostly filled with East African men and women in their mid-20s. It's an ideal social environment for these students and working people from one of Toronto's largest diasporas in search of Friday night fun (Hassan, 2016).
While Hassan goes on to note that Cloud9 closed just over a month later and signals to this closure as “a precursor of many possible closings to come under” the shisha ban, she makes visible the possibilities of placemaking which, as expressed by Amal and Jamila, is particularly important for Muslim women transforming their relationships to citizenship while negotiating
83 gendered islamophobia, interpersonal surveillance, and other structures that shape Muslim women’s experiences with placemaking.
VII: No safe spaces
While the former sections illustrate the significance of shisha lounges for interviewees and highlight the way that young Muslim people utilize placemaking practices as a means of resisting the white gaze, resisting the ‘auntie gaze’, and transforming the functions of citizenship, I draw from comments made by Noura, Munira, and Jamila to reject generalizations about shisha lounges as ‘objectively’ ‘safe spaces’. For example, as previously noted, when I asked Munira if ‘Muslim placemaking’ was important to her, she responded by saying she doesn’t “intentionally look for it cause a lot of people discriminate in name of Islam.” Munira went on to indicate that racism, transphobia, homophobia, and sexism were among issues she observed and experienced. Within the context of shisha lounges, a Twitter thread by @frankoceanhafiz revealed a transphobic and homophobic incident at Layali Dubai Restaurant & Hookah Lounge and spoke to the reality of Munira’s concerns:
Layali Dubai, a hookah and belly dancing lounge in NYC, kicked out paying and non- disruptive trans and queer Bangladeshis on the grounds that homosexuality is not tolerated. (@frankoceanhafiz).
@frankoceanhafiz went on to describe experiences recounted to him by queer and trans friends who went to Layali Dubai:
I was talking to someone else who went to this place - they’re also in a queer relationship and also make out, but they often pass as het. But when these people did it, both femmes, they’re immediately told it’s a “family place” (lol) and [asked] to leave (@frankoceanhafiz).
While Layali Dubai sits among other Arab restaurants, cafés, halal butchers, and bakeries in the historically diverse neighborhood of Astoria in Queens, New York, the incident recounted speaks to the limits of ethnic enclaves in providing safe spaces for as long as transphobia, homophobia, racism, sexism, as well as classism, ableism, and other hegemonic power structures remain under- addressed in Muslim placemaking spaces. While Noura expressed feeling a strong sense of belonging and community at the shisha lounges she frequented, issues she raised about policing within shisha lounges further point to
84 the limits of shisha lounges in providing ‘safe spaces’ for many Muslim people. When I asked Noura if she had ever experienced surveillance in shisha lounges, she said an anecdote about CSIS is what first came to mind:
It did remind me of something that had happened many, many years ago… People at a certain shisha spot, they were talking about one person who no longer appears and either they heard or they knew that he was basically working for CSIS and he was just coming to these places to, um, I guess collect information on certain people (Noura, 2019).
Noura maintains that the story is anecdotal but uses it to think through the ways “these spaces were and are being used” (Noura, 2019). In doing so, Noura pointed to the scope and reach of the white gaze in managing, surveilling, and policing even within spaces that have been both inadvertently and thoughtfully been marked as places for Muslim people to create a ‘sense of place.’
VIII: After the ban
As previously identified, situated against the structural backdrop of “whiteness as a cultural signifier for innocence in [the] airport and other border spaces”, Finn et al. (2018) take up the policing of Canadian Arab youth to assess the way that it leads “many… to see themselves as second-class citizens” and often results in both conscious and unconscious self- policing (Finn et al, 2018, 669). Surveillance and navigating the ‘feeling of being watched’ was also taken up by Boundaoui et al. (2018) who pointed to the “chilling effect” being rightfully paranoid had on Muslim peoples’ growth and mobilizations as a community. Similarly, when I asked former shisha lounge patrons about if or how the passing of the shisha ban changed their relationships to Toronto’s shisha lounges, most interviewees noted “behaviourally manag[ing] their lives” (Finn et al., 2018, 670). Racializing surveillance thus not only manages who is ‘in or out place’ but also functions as a “social sorting” that further demarcates parameters of inclusion and exclusion and lives on through its byproduct manifestation: paranoia. Former shisha lounge patrons also drew from the stories of friends who continued to go to shisha lounges to point to, for the most part, increased feelings of unbelonging and unaffordability experienced after the ban. To this point, Jamila noted the increased unaffordability of shisha lounges because “even in the past three- or four-years shisha has got more expensive and I think that that’s not a
85 coincidence” and recounted her experiences with carding practices. To emphasize intensifying experiences with unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance, Jamila described trying to get into a shisha lounge shortly after the shisha ban was announced but before the bylaw was implemented:
I’ve been subject to increased carding and stuff. I was at Habibiz one time and there was a bouncer and I laughed and I said, “I’m not going to show you anything, who the hell are you?” And he said “if you don’t show me your ID you’re not going to get in” and he was very rough. And we were like What the hell, we could just go somewhere else, That's such an abuse of power! And for what reason? For smoking shisha? No, I’m good, I’d rather go home. Which is what [the ban] is supposed to do.
They’re either going to close or make you feel unsafe and then you just go home instead so either way it’s a tactic. Which is deeply unsettling and just.. disheartening, you know? I don’t know (Jamila, 2019).
From the perspective of a public health advocate invested in barring youth under 19 from shisha lounges, asking for patrons to produce IDs may not seem unwarranted. But Jamila’s deliberate use of the term carding points to the way that, in her experience, this encounter cannot be interpreted within a colour-blind public health lens and without attuning to anti-Black policing that was and is used most excessively towards Black people. Footnote: Notably, while only about 8% of Toronto's population is Black, research shows that Black people account for 25% of the cards filled out by police from 2008 to mid-2011 during the supposedly arbitrary stopping and questioning of persons whereby data and information about one’s movements are collected by the state (Rankin and Winsa, 2012). Being forced to produce ID and other tactics used to make shisha lounges unwelcoming are becoming increasingly common in Toronto and other cities that have passed bylaws regulating shisha. For example, in Edmonton, following claims that Nyala Lounge owner Mulugeta Tesfay had violated new conditions imposed on his license, police began visiting and ticketing his shisha lounge on a weekly basis. When Tesfay filed a formal complaint on the basis that officers had harassed his customers who were mostly of African descent, Tesfay said he felt inspections ramp up and expressed feeling as though this was the police’s way of saying: “We're going to give you tickets until you close down” (Huncar, 2018). In conversation Andrea Huncar, Tesfay noted some of the conditions imposed on his business license which police said he was violating and insisted were necessary for “public safety reasons”:
86
Among the conditions Tesfay took issue with, he was required to scan customer identification. But Tesfay said police were randomly searching the scanner, which amounted to an electronic form of carding, or street checks, that violated the privacy rights of his customers. He also said he could no longer make a profit under conditions that shrunk customer capacity from 120 to 44 and required at least three security staff in place after 9 p.m. (Huncar, 2018).
These conditions point back to comments made by Jamila who, before the ban had even been enforced, expressed that being subject to surveillance left her feeling that she would rather “go home”. Tesfay’s experience thus further demonstrates the way that city regulations have increased racializing surveillance in shisha lounges and, in the process, limited important spaces for Muslim placemaking. Likewise, when I asked Amal if she noticed any shifts in the way that people interacted with each other in shisha lounges following the ban’s passing and before its implementation, Amal noted that shisha lounges became (or felt) increasingly unsafe for some Muslim women; signalling to what Browne describes as the role racializing surveillance plays “in reinforcing traditional gendered patterns of power and authority” (Browne, 2014, 114). As previously identified within the context of gendered-islamophobia and interpersonal surveillance that Muslim women distinctly face, Amal noted that “a lot of people I know that frequent these places… their families don’t necessarily know they’re there.” She went to say that fear of a police raid or something of that nature discouraged people she knew from going to shisha lounges before the ban was even enforced:
Ever since the talk of making [shisha] illegal and banning it… Going out for shisha, you become more aware of who's there.
I feel like a lot of people stepped back from it because they didn't want to get involved with something that had so much stigma all of a sudden. And they were really scared of because, [at the] time there was a lot of talk going around about places getting shut down during operating hours. I remember a lot of people being really scared and paranoid, like they don’t want to be caught inside a shisha lounge… A lot of people pulled back during that time (Amal, 2019).
Amal’s observations parallel comments made by Lamiya, the former shisha lounge owner who described tobacco enforcement officers looking and feeling like border enforcement when they entered her (now shut down) small business predominantly serving middle aged Middle Eastern
87 new migrants. In line with sentiments expressed by every other former shisha lounge patron interviewed, to this day Amal noted not fully understanding why shisha was banned and expressed feeling that making it “such a stigmatized thing” was a means of “disintegrate[ing] these communities that are forming together in these locations.” Amal’s comments further point to the ways in which, with the passing of the shisha ban, experiences with racialized surveillance felt intensified for many young Muslim people, especially Muslim women.
IX: “Where now?”
In “A Symposium on Soundtracks”, Amani Bin Shikhan (2018) explores geography, sound, and freedom by narrating her day in Toronto as shaped by Black artistry. Bin Shikhan begins her day in Kensington Market in the company of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”, Drake’s “Nice for What”, and Toronto DJ collective Baby Blue Soundcrew’s “Money Jane” and ends her night in a shisha lounge blasting Ray C and Cardi B. Bin Shikhan looks to the spatial presence of sound and turns to Robin D.G Kelley’s who said “All the placards of segregation could not stop a Black voice” (Bin Shikhan, 2018). For Bin Shikhan, “Kelley’s point was a simple one: voices carry. Sounds of life, and of love and protest and the everyday, will always bleed through” (Bin Shikhan, 2018). Bin Shikhan points to the important link between sonic memory and placemaking while, at the same time, expressing growing concerns about the gentrification in the city:
What happens when the sounds of your life—the music, the diaspora-derived language, the named and freshly extinct sites of interaction and home-building—are extracted, leaving nothing behind but a deafening silence? (Bin Shikhan, 2018).
To this point, Bin Shikhan said “Nightlife venues are vanishing before our eyes [and] other sites of congregation are increasingly criminalized” (Bin Shikhan, 2018). In looking to shisha lounges, what Bin Shikhan described as “among the few casual, affordable, Black and brown immigrant-run establishments left” in the city, she stressed that “these, too, are being hastily shut down.” In a more recent conversation with Bin Shikhan, she expanded on concerns about the futures of Black Muslim Torontonian spaces in the face of, among other things, increased cuts to
88 public services both preceding and following the election of conservative Ontario Premier Doug Ford:
Even the small gaps I saw myself and people like myself sitting and living and thriving in, I feel those are just closing at a remarkable speed. That’s not to say we’re defeated, I don’t… think that will ever be the case. I just feel that my own understandings have gone from overly optimistic to more sober (Bin Shikhan, 2019).
Bin Shikhan rejects the notion that these spaces could be erased but notes that, for her, it’s become more difficult to even want to be “invested in placemaking here” (Bin Shikhan, 2019). I began this research by drawing from an interview between Huda Hassan and Habibiz Shisha Lounge owner Ali who, in the face of the potential closure of his business/cultural hub asked “What am I supposed to do now?” In response to Ali’s question, I draw from Bin Shikhan who says “What comes next remains unsettled” and poses the question: “where now?” (Bin Shikhan, 2018). To close interviews with former shisha lounge patrons, I asked interviewees what they envision for the future of Toronto’s shisha lounges, and more broadly, what they envision for the future of Toronto. In response, participants shared anxieties and hopes related to futures of Muslim placemaking. For Noura, the “ideal future is that the shisha ban is reversed somehow and [that] these places continue [to] exist” (Noura, 2019) especially because, to this day, she doesn’t understand why the bylaw was imposed. While the City of Toronto stated that their education campaign would include: conducting outreach to operators of hookah establishments, providing information about the regulatory changes to businesses licensed by the City of Toronto through the licence renewal process, targeting key audiences/users with educational materials in areas where hookah businesses are located, posting educational messages about the health risks associated with hookah use at post-secondary campuses in Toronto, and increasing hookah specific messaging on social media platforms, the general misinformation and confusion that interviewees unanimously expressed in regards to why shisha was banned suggests that the City did not follow through on these promises in a meaningful way. While Jamila described the shisha ban as “disheartening” and Noura described not having the “shisha community” in her life as “very, very sad”, most participants said they didn’t feel like the passing of the shisha ban would kill Toronto’s shisha culture, signalling to the power of community in resisting hegemonic surveillance and the many forms it takes.
89 For example, for Hussain, the ‘ideal’ future for shisha lounges was tied to self- determination:
Just leave the mans alone, if people choose to get cancer early and put themselves in these spaces, then let them be, its 19+… Ok, white people don’t fucks with the space? Then don’t go. Ideally, I envision that these ethnic enclaves will be left alone (Hussain, 2019).
Hussain went on to say that he thinks shisha lounges will have a place in the future of Toronto because, “you can regulate the enclave, but you can’t erase the culture. While noting that she wasn’t sure if it was realistic, Amal hesitantly spoke to her belief that the shisha ban would be reversed:
I just see a lot of advocating against the ban and I see it being done properly this time, present[ing] these places as the regular social gathering spots that they are… I really do see these places as very important in our community and I just don't see them disappearing overnight (Amal, 2019).
Like Bin Shikhan who made clear that Black Muslim Torontonian communities are not defeated in the face of increased displacement and surveillance and like Hussain who noted that Toronto’s ethnic enclaves cannot easily be erased, Amal also named the vision she saw for the future of shisha lounges as one of endurance. Amal added that if the ban is not reversed and if existing shisha lounges face increased policing, “then 100% people will advocate against that” and there will be “really, really strong resistance from the community” (Amal, 2019). While the future of shisha lounges remains both disputed and unknown, the sentiments that former shisha lounge patrons express point to their belief in the endurance of Muslim placemaking and the possibilities for transforming relationships to space because of and in spite of continued unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance.
Habibiz art exhibition In February 2019, I had the privilege of curating Habibiz alongside co-curator Jessica Kirk, as a homage to and an exploration of radical placemaking traditions in Toronto enacted in places like shisha lounges. Habibiz, a month-long multidisciplinary art exhibition hosted at Margin of Eras Gallery in Parkdale (a rapidly gentrifying part of Toronto’s West end) featured artworks and interventions by Black and/or Muslim artists invested in preserving stories,
90 preserving physical spaces, and questioning what it means to “illegalize already hypersurveilled” communities in the city (Kirk & Fakhrashrafi, 2019). To accompany the exhibit, Kirk created a playlist that offered sonic exploration of key themes addressed by artists. From Toronto-born rapper Drake’s “Scheming Up” (2014) to Atlanta-born and Lagos-raised singer-songwriter Davido’s feature on “Hookah” (2015), international pop stars have been referencing ‘shisha’ and ‘hookah’ in their music over the past decade. Other notable musical references of shisha include UK Hip Hop artist AJ Tracey’s “Shisha” (2017), Nafe Smallz, M Huncho and Lil Pino’s “Keeper” (2019) and Swedish-based rap duo Aden x Asme’s “Vossi Bop [Remix]” (2019). Likewise, from Lebanese-Canadian R&B singer Massari’s “Hookah” (2012) music video which portrays Massari smoking shisha with the CN Tower in the background (Figure 4.4) to Atlanta- born rapper Young Thug’s verse on “Hookah” (2015) which portrays Young Thug in a dimly lit shisha lounge, shisha imaginary has been extensively captured in recent popular cultural productions, especially as related to contemporary Black musical traditions including but not limited to Afrobeat, Hip Hop, Grime, Rap, and R&B.
Figure 4.4: Screenshot from the music video for “Shisha” (2012) by Massari featuring French Montana (Source: Youtube)
Kirk’s playlist documented songs commonly played in Toronto shisha lounges such as PartyNextDoor’s “Break from Toronto” (2013) while also looking across eras, genres, and
91 geographies to explore sounds that both narrate and challenge relationships to place, placemaking and displacement. For example, on “LSD” (2016) by Jamila Woods featuring Chance the Rapper, Woods recites a complicated love song to the city of Chicago:
I like water that don't burn my eyes when they open I won't let you get inside My city like my skin, it's so pretty If you don't like it, just leave it alone
We the number one gentrified Run inside, gimme my land, the new Chi tits’ perky Face lift and makeshift spaces
Like Marcus Anthony Hunter et al. (2016) who link urban planners’ lack of regard for Black placemaking in Chicago to the attempted destruction of Black neighborhoods and the ensuing building of “new structures with new people” (p. 34), Woods draws attention to Chicago’s changes by referencing a “face lift” and pointing to the making of precarious, “makeshift spaces” (Woods, 2016). Woods pays tribute to bodies of water that shape her experiences in Chicago while also naming and rejecting increased gentrification of the city, especially as experienced by Black people in Chicago. Within the context of Toronto’s shisha ban, looking to Kirk’s playlist is a particularly useful as the lyrics of “LSD” (2016) mirror sentiments shared by former shisha lounge patrons such as Hussain who, as noted, candidly requested that if “white people don’t fucks with” shisha lounges, rather than banning places which held significance to his day-to-day belonging in the city, they should simply not go. Similarly, Kirk’s drew from a skit by Jean Deaux on Saba’s “Symmetry” (2016) to look to futurities of Black, Indigenous, and racialized peoples’ placemaking (Figure 4.5):
My last minute bucket list, ok… I wanna degentrify our neighbourhoods, like buy property and rent it back to the people who grew up there. And last but not least, I want to smoke a blunt with Beyoncé. That’s the most important for sure (Saba ft. Deaux, 2016).
Similar to former shisha lounge owners who name their hopes and demands for shisha culture and other places of belonging for Muslim people in Toronto, Deaux playfully and purposefully engages with the future, making space for imaginings that include smoking, socializing (with
92 Beyoncé!), and reclaiming land made inaccessible to lower income Black people displaced through anti-Black and anti-poor urban planning.
Figure 4.5: Jessica Kirk’s playlist listening station and Jean Deaux lyrics as seen at Habibiz multidisciplinary art exhibition (Source: Roya Del Sol, 2019)
5: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
I: Study objectives, restated
In looking to the reach of racializing surveillance, through this thesis I put forward a discussion of Toronto’s relatively newly adopted shisha ban and point to the ways in which it implicates Muslim peoples’ ‘sense of place’ in the city, especially as related to unbelonging, forced displacement such as gentrification, and ‘the feeling of being watched’. Through this thesis, I point to the centrality of community or Ummah in creating a Muslim ‘sense of place’ and, in conversation with a former shisha lounge owner as well as former shisha lounge patrons, name the ways that the city’s now banned sites offered space for intergenerational gathering, migrant ownership, and radical placemaking, especially in ‘ethnic enclaves’ bordering the wealthy and ever-gentrifying downtown core. An accompanying objective of this study was to
93 create a non-exhaustive archive of Toronto’s shisha culture as related to Muslim placemaking and, in doing so, name the cultural and religious significance of shisha lounges for Muslim people facing, reckoning, and transforming systematically uneven relationships to space and place in the Greater Toronto Area.
II: Limitations and recommendations for future research
Throughout this study I seek to embrace the diverse and oftentimes diverging nature of participant responses as a means of noting the limits and possibilities of this study. Despite all former shisha lounge owner and patron interviewees identifying as Muslim, this data does not and could not provide an all-encompassing overview of Muslim peoples’ responses to Toronto’s shisha ban. Instead, I narrate and analyze the perspectives of some of many Muslim people who felt left out of conversations at Toronto’s City Hall which resulted in City Council’s banning of shisha in licensed establishments. Of note, this study would be strengthened through more interviews with shisha lounge owners and patrons and deeper community engagement with Muslim people impacted by the shisha ban which the timeline and length of the MA thesis restricted. Likewise, it would be interesting to hear more about how decision-making was undertaken if public officials and bureaucrats had been more willing to speak with me. Furthermore, Within the context of tobacco use, Huda Hassan (2016) notes that Black and brown peoples’ histories of tobacco consumption are long:
Assigned with protective, healing, and sacred significance, tobacco was given a divine status in cultures from pre-Columbian North America to parts of Africa. Whether chewed, swallowed, or inhaled—tobacco was thought to have brought both empowerment and solace to consumers. But this ancient relationship was complicated by colonization and slavery in the Americas, and through commodification of the crop from the early 1600s to present day (Hassan, 2016).
While I trace a concise relationship between racialized capitalism and the law in producing culturally entrenched designations of drug licit-ness and illicitness, especially as tied to racial capitalism and whiteness which, in its pervasiveness, renders itself “non-category, normal, natural” and invisible (Fariaa & Mollett, 2016, 79), expanding on the relationship between Toronto’s shisha ban and the malleable nature of policy would importantly add to a literature on
94 the intimate relationship between placemaking and surveillance as experienced by Black, Indigenous, and racialized people including Muslim people. Lastly and importantly, in 2019 a state Senate California bill that proposed banning all flavoured-tobacco was, shortly after, amended to exclude hookah products over lawmakers concern of impeding a “Middle Eastern tradition” (McKay, 2019). As one of the first instances where shisha’s cultural significance was acknowledged by lawmakers in North America, this example signals to possible community organizing against the ban and future research towards better protecting shisha lounges and the people who frequent them. To this point, as cities like Montreal, Ottawa, Edmonton, Seattle, New Jersey, Manchester, and London increasingly consider or enact respective shisha bans, I hope this thesis provides some insight and tools for organizers looking to stop the bans and/or resist increased policing that distinctly impacts Muslim placemaking practices.
III: Conclusions
In the curatorial statement for Habibiz, Jessica Kirk and I drew from Michelle Murphy (2018) who, at a Toronto-based symposium on ‘Alternative Urban Futures’, asserted that Indigenous land protectors, sex workers, and other people who are experts on navigating breaches of consent should be at the forefront of discussions around urban infrastructure. In centering the perspectives of a former shisha lounge owner and former shisha lounge patrons, I sought to extend Murphy’s call and look to the lived experiences of people whose lives have changed with the passing of Toronto’s shisha ban, especially as their perspectives remain underacknowledged in the dominant discourse pertaining to the relatively new City of Toronto bylaw. Through interviews with former shisha lounge patrons, Muslim young adult participants shared intersecting and diverging experiences navigating belonging/unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance in Toronto. In linking shisha lounges to their experiences with placemaking, Muslim young adult participants narrated their experiences before and after the shisha ban, looked to the futures of Muslim communities and communities of colour in Toronto, and touched on citizenship and, more specifically, the ways they have shifted, altered, and transformed relationships to placemaking in Toronto. By locating interviews within the context of increased gentrification and by analyzing these works alongside art, organizing, and scholarly work that
95 takes up fraught and contested Black, Indigenous, and racialized placemaking practices across North America, throughout this thesis I sought to highlight the interlocking relationship between unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance. Like the Habibiz exhibition which used art and organizing to extend a broader discussion on placemaking and the shifting relationships to belonging/unbelonging, displacement, and surveillance in this ever-shifting city, through this study I hope to offer space to archive complicated histories and futures of Muslim placemaking and acts of life in Toronto.
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@frankoceanhafiz, (2018, August 11). I was talking to someone else who also went to this place - they're also in a queer relationship and also make out, but they often pass as het. But when these ppl did it, both femmes, they're immediately told it's a "family place" (lol) and to leave [Tweet]. Retrieved from: https://twitter.com/frankoceanhafiz/status/1028372526613835787.
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