political – The Concordian

Le Frigo Vert is back to offering students food, education and community

As the semester begins and students head back to campus for the first time in months, there is more to look forward to than just classes. Many student fee-levy groups are getting the opportunity to open their doors to new and old students for the first time since March 2020.

One such organization is Le Frigo Vert, an alternative health and community organization. Le Frigo Vert celebrated their grand reopening last week on Sept. 16, offering door prizes, free samosas, and kombucha.

Students were given the opportunity to check out some of the services Le Frigo Vert offers, of which there are many. They operate as a lounge and café, along with selling herbs and wellness products. One of Frigo’s most prominent resources is the pay-what-you-can food baskets, which give students and Frigo members access to affordable, healthy foods which are grown in a garden on the Loyola Campus.

Hunter Cubitt-Cooke, is a western clinical herbalist and a collective member at Le Frigo Vert, who has worked with the organization for six years. He says that over the pandemic the food baskets became even more essential.

“Obviously it’s harder to access food. Food prices have been going up and up. A lot of people just need access to healthy food, so we’re doing only the food baskets now, instead of more grocery items.”

Le Frigo Vert also hosts political debates and other information sessions, though they are currently on hold due to the pandemic. In addition to their food baskets, they offer pay-what you-can herbal medicines as well as natural menstrual products, free supplies for safer sex and drug use, and they have a kitchenette that is available to students.

Everything Le Frigo Vert does is centered around their mandate and constitution. The constitution focuses a lot on their values of anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, and ecological sustainability and integrity — just to name a few.

Some of their goals are to be able to provide vegetarian nourishment to marginalized groups, while challenging corporate involvement in food production and distribution.

With the space being fully open, more students will be able to take advantage of the organization’s services, and join in the community.

“Today seeing the lounge filled up, that was great. People were meeting each other and discussing ideas and hearing about [new] things,” Cubitt-Cooke said. “That’s been a huge loss of the pandemic. People don’t care about other political struggles going on, they’re not meeting each other. So we’re excited for that to continue.”

It‘s safe to say that the organization does a lot of different things. It’s tough to pin the space down as just a café, or a shop. More than anything, it’s a community centre for students and members to make their own.

“[We want] more students to come to us and use the space as they see fit,” Cubitt-Cooke said. Students can rent the space after hours, for clubs or other gatherings.

Vikram Iyer is one of the students that came to check out Le Frigo Vert at the grand reopening for the first time.“I like these student cooperatives and initiatives, especially in social spaces,” Iyer said.

“It’s a pretty chill place. It’s a great place to have a conversation and meet like-minded people. […] A lot of cool hangout places have been closed down due to COVID and it’s great to see them open back up again.”

Students can find Le Frigo Vert and access all of the services they offer at 1440 Mackay St. Monday – Thursday from 12 p.m. – 4 p.m.

Photograph by Evan Lindsay

The debate surrounding the hijab should be seen as more than just conservative versus liberal

As the debate about the place of hijab rages in Western nations, Arab feminists and scholars are still rarely consulted or referenced when analyzing this important issue, especially in Western public spheres. As a highly political Arab in Canada, every single time I participate in a debate about the hijab, I feel that I’m sorted into one of the camps that dominate Western political discourse: liberal vs. conservative.

When I tirelessly try to convince the debaters that Arab intellectuals and feminists have dealt with the issue of the hijab from every standpoint possible, long before it started gaining momentum in the West, and that their intellectual endeavor was neither liberal nor conservative, the reaction I get is shock, and most commonly, disbelief.

The question is how can Western people believe that there are other theories, which can extend beyond the fruitless debate between “people should wear whatever they wish to” versus “the state and public spaces should be religion-neutral”? Meanwhile, the media is using these lines of thought to provide a Western framework for cultural translation of a non-Western issue.

Yes, I am writing this article because I refuse to be “Westernly” dichotomized, with all the preconceptions that are attached to each camp. The issue is deeper than this though, and it is very layered and nuanced. One can infer from this forced dichotomy that Arabic intellectuals are not sophisticated enough to empirically and scientifically analyze a social phenomena like this. Or, at least, analyze it to the level of complexity needed to relax the political anxiety that people in the West have. The focus on complexity is perhaps connected to the focus on academia as a source of intellectual authority in the West.

When I was able to get over the dispiriting part of this feeling of intellectual inferiority, I started looking for ways to further analyze this Western belief, and then professor and literary critic Edward Said came to my aid. His famous concept of Orientalism teaches us that Western colonialists planted the idea that the East is primitive and needs rescuing, but not in the traditional sense; they need to be rescued intellectually.

Therefore, Orientalism can explain why Western media rarely quote famous Arab feminists, such as Nawal El Saadawi, who adamantly argues against wearing the hijab and supports the French ban on religious garments. Nawal gives a nuanced and complex analysis of the idea of choice, and how religion, with all its pressures, can prevent Muslim women from taking an independent choice. Be it political, economic, spiritual, or even the societal and state pressures, which she faces on a daily basis in Egypt—she was imprisoned multiple times for being a radical feminist.

Nawal has been dubbed the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arabic/Islamic world due to the sheer amount of research and work that she has done on the topic of women’s rights. In spite of this, she among other Muslim/Arab feminists, will continue to be excluded at worst and marginalized at best from the Western political discourse. This will continue as long as the political climate and discourse does not go beyond the subtle Orientalist thought, which prevents Westerners from achieving a successful cultural translation. It is about time to start thinking outside the box of liberal vs. conservative. This is where change happens.

Graphic by @spooky_soda