Author: Feven Worede
Student at MacEwan University
Part of the Student Series on the “Brampton Renaissance”
About the Author
Feven Worede is a 3rd year English and Psychology student at MacEwan University, in Edmonton, AB, Canada. This blog post is the final project from her class, “The Brampton Renaissance,” taught by Dr. Sara Grewal, which covers Sikh artistic and cultural production coming out of Brampton, ON. As a child of immigrants, she is dedicated to examining issues such as race and gender, migration, intergenerational trauma, and mental health from a post-colonial perspective. Feven also enjoys interrogating the interconnection between social activism and music, crediting Dr. Grewal’s class for prompting her interest in post-colonial literature as both a field of interdisciplinary study and an impetus for meaningful social change.
Introduction
Amrit Singh, otherwise known as Noyz, is an MC, spoken word artist, community organizer, mental health advocate, and most recently, the author of Keep Moving On: The Migration of a Punjabi-Sikh Family—an immigration memoir that intimately explores the intersections of mental health, gender, and race through an intergenerational lens. While Keep Moving On serves as an authentic portrayal of Amrit’s experience growing up in Brampton, Ontario as a second-generation Sikh-Canadian, it ultimately functions as an ode to Amrit’s father, Satnam Singh, a Punjabi Sikh migrant who journeyed unfamiliar waters that took him from Punjab to Toronto, buoyed by the desire to provide a better life for his family.
Throughout Keep Moving On, Amrit transparently discusses his struggles with major depression and generalized anxiety that began to intensify when faced with the paralyzing pressure to live up to his father’s onerous expectations. Serving as a poignant critique of the rigid cultural conceptions of Sikh masculinity, Keep Moving On is an honest portrait of a loving but complex relationship between father and son that is threatened by silence and healed through speech.
Children of Immigration: Diaspora, Migration, and Mental Health
In his memoir, Amrit recounts how as the ease of childhood escaped him, the jovial voice of his father that lulled him to sleep each night, imitating book characters from the Bernstein Bears and Tyrone the Terrible Tiger (Singh 151), warped into long stretches of a deafening silence, frequently disrupted by the oppressive voice of a stranger, who welcomed him into adolescence by wielding a language that framed Amrit’s successes as expectations, rather than achievements.
Amrit’s father escaped his village in Punjab in hopes of attaining economic prosperity and employment opportunities in the west; he was seduced by the Canadian dream that promised him stability and freedom, but quickly grew disillusioned when faced with the reality of perpetual economic hardship—endless hours of grueling labor for little monetary compensation, and a failing furniture business, Custom Upholstery, from which Amrit’s father “didn’t earn a dollar…in the years he spent working there” (Singh 152)—and ultimately, this informed Satnam’s demand of his son to excel academically in order to secure a stable, white-collar job.
Having the opportunity to speak with Amrit during our English class at MacEwan University, I learned that his father, like many racialized immigrant parents, steered him away from pursuing artistic passions, urging him towards a more realistic career path, despite Amrit having an inclination towards hip-hop and music production. His actions were in pursuit of helping Amrit attain the Canadian dream Satnam had tried so desperately to make a reality ever since his departure from Punjab.
As a fellow creative and a first-generation Canadian, I can relate to Amrit’s struggles: I remember frequently visiting the Edmonton Public Library and obsessively taking out books such as The Babysitters Club, The Princess Diaries, and Harry Potter, thinking I had discovered an antidote to my childhood loneliness. Imagine my despair when my father, a refugee from Eritrea who, like Amrit’s father, escaped a country riven by state violence and poverty, urged me to stop reading what he called “imaginative books” and invest my time into something more practical. He was afraid I’d grow so attached to literature, I’d end up choosing an unreliable career path in the arts.
The pressure I felt in my adolescence to meet my father’s expectations at the expense of my own happiness is perfectly encapsulated in Amrit’s song, “Mind’s Eye,” in which he alludes to feeling a similar pressure to distance himself from his passions and creative outlets, which was a catalyst to his deteriorating mental health, rapping: “My psychosis came from living with a mask…resembling my father, can I live up to the task?” In other words, Amrit’s anxieties of failing to reach his father’s expectations, coupled with the discouragement from pursuing his artistic passions, felt like he was being forced to hide his authentic identity and present a constructed version of himself to the world, leading to serious mental anguish. As a racialized Canadian-Sikh with immigrant parents, Amrit was socialized to feel like there was as little time to find himself as there was to fail (Singh 151). His father made enormous sacrifices for him and it felt as if Amrit’s unwavering excellence was the only currency in which he could ever repay him.
Similarly, I remember having a conversation with my father in which I told him that the leading cause of homelessness was mental illnesses, such as depression. He looked at me stoically, his eyebrows furrowed, and echoed the words of Amrit’s father upon hearing his own son’s diagnosis with depression: “I grew up poor, but we didn’t ever get depressed” (Singh 154). I thought to myself, if depression isn’t real, then what do I call this overwhelming weight in my chest that shackles me to my bed in the mornings? But I could never say that aloud. How do you tell someone who doesn’t believe in depression that you’re depressed?
Struggling with the same internal conflicts, Amrit successfully situates mental health within the framework of immigration in his novel, showcasing that his father’s perspective and initial resistance to the realities of mental illness was informed by his impoverished upbringing, his migration journey and settlement in Canada, and the political and economic circumstances that stripped him of his youth.
That is to say, his father’s initial rejection of mental illness as a scientific truth is impacted by “what the world didn’t give him” (Singh 158). If Amrit’s father is expected to “earn money, “[run] a household, [be] a caregiver to growing children and aging parents” (Singh 158), all while operating within an environment that is inconsistent to how he was raised, and not a single person feels compelled enough to check in on his mental health, the inevitable question presents itself: How can one expect Satnam to so easily do for Amrit what no one has ever done for him?
Stoic Masculinity & The Religio-Racialization of Sikhs
Distorted views of masculinity and race also influence aversions to discussing mental health in racialized communities. As a Punjabi-Sikh man, Amrit emphasizes that his father was not raised in an environment that “valued or made space for men to talk about their emotions” (Singh 158); more often than not, men would mask their feelings, coping with the pain by using drugs and alcohol.
This expectation for Punjabi-Sikh men to struggle in silence and feign superhuman strength is propagated by the harmful stereotype of Sikh men as warriors—aggressive, hypermasculine, and militant. This racialization of Sikhs—initially constructed by the British to garner Sikh army service—continues to be perpetuated today. And yet, this continuing stereotype also allows both the Canadian and the Indian states to falsely situate Sikhs in close proximity to terrorism as a means of justifying systemic racism and state violence toward them.
This stereotype is diametrically opposed to Amrit’s desire for open dialogue about mental health and unapologetic emotional vulnerability within his community, even as he is hyperconscious of the history that continues to inform his present. In his song “Block 32,” Amrit raps: “And I’ll be labeled militant to justify the bullets that I’m riddled with,” suggesting that the violence perpetrated against Sikhs by the Indian state—specifically alluding to the Sikh Genocide of 1984—is justified by artificially constructed perceptions of Sikhs, such as the racialization of Sikhs as violent and “natural warriors.” And these constructions seep into the everyday lives of Punjabi-Sikhs, today.
In “Politics of Sikh Identity and Its Fundamentalist Assertion,” Paramjit Judge discusses how our conceptualizations of Sikh identity are rooted in the legacy of Jarnail Singh Bhindanwala— the militant Sikh leader and advocate of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution who called for military resistance in the pursuit of Sikh sovereignty (3947). Judge also suggests that the colonial construction of Sikh men as the “lions of British India” (3948) for the purpose of military recruitment has filtered into our contemporary conceptualizations of Sikh masculinity (3948), informing our current societal expectations of how Sikh men should behave and present themselves.
When such ideas become entrenched within our systems, Sikh men internalize false conceptions of themselves that inform their attitudes and perspectives in relation to masculinity, and emotional vulnerability becomes a foreign concept. During Amrit’s class visit, he stressed that men in Punjabi-Sikh culture have a “disciplinary role to be silent providers” that is passed down generationally. He feels that his father, like so many other racialized men, was trained to be silent, and that “silence is integral to his survival.” In other words, Amrit’s memoir and songs help us see that for racialized immigrants, to acknowledge the pain of migration is to actualize the pain of migration—the less we speak of the pain, the easier it is to deny its reality.
As our conversation transitioned to mental health assistance and accessibility, Amrit pointed out that people who belong to white spaces of high economic stature access mental health assistance at disproportionately higher rates in comparison to those of us with immigrant backgrounds, because racialized immigrants are in constant “survival mode”—expected to persist, to endure, leaving no time and space to reflect on how we are feeling let alone share it with others, whether that be a trained professional or a family member. He recited lyrics by Pharoahe Monche off the top of his head to underline his point, rapping: “My family customs weren’t accustomed to talking about mental health / it was more or less an issue for white families with wealth.” These lyrics signify the luxury that is afforded to white people of high socioeconomic status who are able to access professional mental health help, and openly speak about their mental health struggles with family members in ways that working-class racialized people are not due to inaccessibility and social conditioning.
Taking Back What’s Mine: Reclaiming Language as a Means of Healing
The process of departing from one’s “home” country and migrating to a new and unfamiliar country is disconcerting. The tangible bullets coming from the Indian state Amrit spoke of in his song “Block 32” become abstractions of systemic racism, economic hardship, and feelings of alienation in Canada, and while the environment in which you are surrounded may look different, the pressure to remain steadfast in your strength stays the same.
In his song “Speak Now” Amrit attempts to reclaim ownership of his voice, finding and engaging with language to cope with his pain. Unlike Divya Victor who admits to feeling plagued by anxieties that her written work, which documents forms of postcolonial—often autobiographical—trauma is being devoured and consumed by white audiences for their own personal comfort and reassurance, “positioning [her] emotional labor next to its purported utility” (2), Amrit’s audience is primarily made up of racialized people—many of whom are Punjabi Sikhs that belong to immigrant families. Thus, his audience is able to listen to his music through the lens of relatability or self-fulfillment, viewing his music as a learning tool from which they can extract wisdom and apply it to their lives so as to better understand their own ethnic histories and unlock hidden pieces of themselves.
In his memoir, Amrit shares that his father refrained from sharing the details of the grueling work he did as a sailor because “nobody ever asked him about it—not his parents [nor] his siblings” (Singh 158). It wasn’t until Amrit began interviewing his father, desperately hoping to uncover details about his life, that his father was able to properly digest and process the hardships he’d endured, escaping the shackles of a version of masculinity that prevented him from being emotionally vulnerable and communicative of his feelings—a version of masculinity that socialized him into silence.
At the beginning of Keep Moving On, Amrit’s relationship with his father was marked by silence, the two of them only speaking when “it felt necessary” (27). However, once the two began to engage in conversation regarding the process of migration, Amrit could tell that his father yearned to speak about his life as much as Amrit yearned to listen. He could tell that “there was something within [his father] that wanted to share these stories too” (Singh 27). Although Amrit was able to listen and subsequently learn from his father, their conversations showcased that teaching is as beneficial for the teacher as it is for the student, and when older generations share their knowledge with younger generations, it can be an empowering experience for both parties involved.
In “Speak Now” Amrit reminisces on moments in his personal life when verbalizing his pain to his loved ones provided him with solace. Rather than “hide when…at [his] weakest,” Amrit emphasizes that it was moments of open communication that provided him with the most valuable commodity—freedom, especially during times when the weight of his burdens felt too heavy to carry on his own, rapping: “For the hardships no man would have shoulders that wide.” Crediting his family for helping him manage his mental health struggles, Amrit raps: “Told her that’s why, it’s known but now I’ve gotta say it / That it’s because of y’all I found my way in,” and although he’s expressed this sentiment on an individual level many times before, he feels the need to immortalize his appreciation for his family in a song.
Later in the song, he recalls his last moments with his grandmother before she passed away, rapping: “We last chatted about her childhood and laughed / Bad as it seemed to see her weaken on a hospital bed / Those are moments that I cherish, giving solace instead / Because I really got to know her just talking, combing her hair.” Here, Amrit suggests that, while losing a loved one is inevitably marked by grief and trauma, it is his certainty that he spoke with his grandmother to the fullest extent that helped ease the pain. It was speaking that helped Amrit cope with the knowledge of his grandmother’s impending death, and it will be speaking that continues to help Amrit with the reverberating pain that catches him by surprise at family gatherings when he enters the room and instantly notices the empty space of her silhouette, or how loud the hum of the air conditioning is without her laughter to drown it out.
“Speak Now” explores the tension between silence and speech, functioning as a declaration to do away with the learned behavior of silence that has trickled down Amrit’s family lineage for generations. Amrit dedicates the song to “the times when I should have said the words they deserve to hear,” referring to moments he’s failed to express his love and appreciation to those that he cares about in order to maintain performances of Sikh masculinity such as the “brave warrior” stereotype that subsequently restricted his vulnerability. He then switches from the singular to the plural, rapping: “And for the times when the feeling was more than what we’re willing to share,” suggesting that Amrit’s struggle with silence extends beyond himself—it impacts an entire collective of racialized Punjabi-Sikh men that are entrapped within a cycle of shame that prevents them from verbalizing their emotions.
Work Cited
Judge, Paramjit S. “Politics of Sikh Identity and Its Fundamentalist Assertion.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 39, no. 35, 2004, pp. 3947–54, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4415477.
Singh, Amrit. Keep Moving On: The Migration of a Punjabi-Sikh Family. Noyzhiphop, 2020.
Victor , Divya. “Woman Wailing: On the Problem of Representing Trauma as a Brown Woman Within the Institution of Poetry.” Poetry Foundation, 30 Apr. 2019.