SuKha Never Dies and the double-edged sword of “Goddess” life
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In the opening lines of the first song she ever wrote, SuKha Never Dies offers a dramatic introduction over booming drums and a pitch-shifted oud riffing in the phrygian mode.
“Gliding sand on some dirt wheels,” SuKha incants on “Goddess.” “Scarf blowing, stunting hearts / Breaking windshields.”
Born in Saudi Arabia of Bangladeshi descent before immigrating to Toronto, those first lines offer a nod to SuKha’s desert upbringing in West Asia, followed by a reference to the long, flowing headscarves she wears and an allusion to the confrontational image she projects, exploding the lenses through which she’s often scrutinized.
The track first appeared on the mixtape she released under the mononymous SuKha banner in 2020, but this past November, “Goddess” received a stylish, open-air video treatment filmed in Cape Town, South Africa, when she revealed the song was an emotional response to the “second-class” status she shouldered growing up in Saudi Arabia.
“You can’t be a citizen unless you’re by blood Arab. Like, Saudi Arabian. And I wasn’t,” SuKha explains ahead of her March 11 appearance at Long Winter. “Even though I was born there, I was never considered a citizen.”
Without citizenship, SuKha’s family was relegated to a segregated housing compound and denied access to public schooling, forced to enrol SuKha in private school. Despite the Saudi government manufacturing these immersive material restrictions from artificial notions of difference and citizenship, SuKha looks back fondly on the years she spent growing up in the country, sharing anecdotes about forging easy friendships with similarly situated children with roots in India and the Phillipines and learning how to speak Hindi and Urdu instead of Arabic.
“My life was really, really good there,” she confides. While her ethnicity dictated the structural conditions of her socio-economic existence in Saudi Arabia, alienating new ‘lacks’ and resignations suddenly invaded her psyche in privatized, peer-sized packages when her family arrived in Toronto in the early 2000s. Integrating from the eye of the melting pot, she felt her differences magnified from every direction.
“Coming to Canada was a terrible experience,” SuKha reflects. “A lot of Brown kids were embarrassed of being Brown. I remember when I first came, the clothes I used to wear were kind of like… I guess they gave off vibes or something, so all the Brown kids would never associate with me or play or hang out with me. I got bullied by the kids here just because I was so culturally different.”
It wasn’t until she physically outgrew her clothes that she began to feel at home in the new city.
Discovering fashion as a vehicle for social navigation, she eventually followed her interest to position herself as a fashion designer, often noted for the long flowing head scarves she styles in reference to goth and anime hairstyles, although some have mistakenly identified them as stylized hijabs, drawing misguided conclusions about SuKha’s faith in Islam.
Insisting that she does not characterize her scarves as hijabs, SuKha has previously spoken about this perception in interviews with INFRINGE and METAL, using the platforms as opportunities to explain how the headscarves are often politicized in the west to suggest Muslim women’s oppression within their faith, whereas one’s wearing a hijab simply represents their individual chosen interpretations of the Qur’an and its requirements for modest behaviour.
Suggesting the pinnacle of feminine power, “Goddess” speaks to the omnipresent baggage of femininity, especially as SuKha experienced it on the other side of the Red Sea and continues to endure it, compounded by her ethnicity.
“The song’s about growing up and just realizing how much gender shapes a lot of your expectations in life. Who you’re meant to be, how you’re meant to look, how you’re meant to behave, how you’re meant to uphold the honour of your family,” she explains. “It’s really draining being who I am, because there’s constant scrutiny and expectation where people think the North American idea of being liberated is to be hypersexual and being the opposite of veiled as possible, and Islamic feminism believes in veiling and silence and empowering yourself and your community members.”
Drawing attention to the tension can be a double edged sword, but she owns it with her trademark wit, doubly trolling racist assumptions about the culture she comes from while interrogating some of its absurdities. In “Goddess” she interpolates contested interpretations of the Qu’ran (“I’m about to blow up the sky”), while spending much of the video mugging with swords and guns. Elsewhere, she alludes to honour killings (“Kill your daughters, weep your losses”) to address the predation of young women the world over.
Even the title of the song is a joke at the patriarchy’s expense.
“Allah is just Arabic for god. It’s supposed to be an infinite being — you don’t really know if it’s a man or a woman — a genderless being beyond your comprehension. It’s the universe, it’s within you. It’s beyond your senses. But at the same time many people who follow our faith come from patriarchal culture. So they always speak of God as a He,” she points out. “You’re also not supposed to call yourself a god. Is it less offensive if I say I’m a goddess?”
“Trust the process.”
SuKha Never Dies performs at the Tranzac as part of Long Winter’s 2022/2023 season finale on March 11. Tickets.