Arzu Yildiz at work as a court reporter in Ankara, Turkiye. Photo taken inside the courthouse.
Written by Arzu Yildiz
Do Canadian media truly reflect the voices and colours of everyone who lives here?
They claim to embrace diversity, yet too often stage it as a spectacle: “Show us how you paint,” or “Tell us about playing in the park with your friends.” Treated like exhibits in a multicultural fair, we are invited to be observed – not understood.
I’ve lived here for ten years. When I arrived, my English was limited. I got by with simple sentences, but I could barely speak properly or fully understand what was said to me.
When I started working in a restaurant, my accent and limited language skills made people treat me as though I had just landed from another planet. I quietly watched them explain the most basic things. I’m not joking – someone once introduced me to vegetables.
In professional settings – media institutions, publishers, writers – I was given lessons on how to behave, how to read aloud, how to speak. Before one speaking event, someone even gave me a full lesson on how to deliver a talk: “Try it out at the podium. Are you ready?” they said. I pretended not to know what I was doing and read it the way they wanted.
A fellow exiled journalist once messaged me: “They’re trying to teach me how to read. Do they think I’m stupid? I’ve earned two university degrees and a master’s. I’ve written some of the most dangerous stories in my country. I’m one of our top journalists. This is humiliating. What should I do?”
I told her, “I’ve been through the same. Just pretend you don’t know – because even when you do, they won’t believe you.”
Growing up in a safe, comfortable country doesn’t make you more competent or correct. Are you aware of how you dismiss our education, our experience, our backgrounds? I doubt it.
We didn’t come to this country to become journalists. We were already journalists.
In my case, I covered trials in the harshest courtrooms during my country’s most censored years. I wrote truth others tried to silence. I paid the price. Many of my fellow exiled journalist-writers did too.
Here in Canada, while learning a second language again, I’ve also learned something else: many people see themselves as complete and capable – and see us as the ones who need fixing. They are more eager to talk than to listen.
For the first time in my life, I heard someone in a media organization – a director, an editor – ask:
“Why would Canadians read this?”
In all my years of journalism in Turkey, no one ever asked, “Why would Turks read this?”
Because journalism isn’t based on who will read it. It’s based on whether it needs to be written.
A story is not a product. It doesn’t aim to sell or comfort. It exists because it holds knowledge.
News doesn’t serve a market – it serves memory. It speaks to the moment and carries it forward.
At Taraf, the newspaper where I worked in Turkey, our editor-in-chief Ahmet Altan used to say:
“Real news isn’t what gets published – it’s what gets suppressed. We’ll publish what others won’t.”
Journalism and literature aren’t about audience – they’re about urgency.
A journalist doesn’t convince people that life is fine.
A journalist disturbs comfort.
Nobody likes to hear about problems, but that’s the point.
Discomfort is the first step toward change.
The urge to speak for others, the way stories are shaped by commercial concerns, and the criteria for who gets to speak all reveal something deeper:
A culture of exclusion, of arrogance, of closed-mindedness.
You judge exiled writers not by the languages we speak – but by the ones we struggle with.
You expect us to adapt to your world, while showing no interest in understanding ours.
Even when we try to share our culture, you insist we do it using your methods.
Speaking English as a second language doesn’t make us second-class people.
Having an accent doesn’t mean we lack intelligence.
Hesitating to find the right word, making a grammatical mistake, pausing to build a sentence – these are not signs of ignorance. They’re the marks of navigating a new language.
But you treat them as evidence of inadequacy.
You try to teach us not just language – but life.
And in doing so, you look down on us – whether you mean to or not.
So what gives you the right to teach us?
Does growing up in comfort make you more qualified?
When you say, “Canadians wouldn’t understand this,” you draw a border around imagination.
You invent a flat, simplified identity called “Canadian” and ask us to fit into it.
You even assume the right to speak on behalf of an entire population.
We write from where we’ve lived, what we’ve survived, and how we’ve carried ourselves through exile.
We are writing ourselves. Asking us to write like you is asking us not to exist as ourselves. You don’t want to understand us – you want to transform us. But behind every language – spoken or unspoken – is a life.
We may be starting over, but we are not starting from nothing.
This essay is not only for me. It’s for anyone who’s ever been underestimated, silenced, or “taught” because their English wasn’t good enough.
Canada may be multicultural. But if its culture isn’t multivoiced, then that multiculturalism is only a façade. To truly understand a foreign culture, you must let it speak on its own terms. Otherwise, it’s not cultural sharing – it’s reshaping.
Teaching people how to sit, speak, eat, and think according to one dominant norm…
Distributing wisdom instead of listening…
This doesn’t create a diverse society.
It creates an isolated one – one that rejects anything unfamiliar.
This mindset carries echoes of past systems that tried to erase difference rather than understand it.
We can only express ourselves through the truth of our own cultures.
Not by abandoning them.
Arzu Yildiz graduated from Istanbul Bilgi University in TV Journalism Department and has worked as a journalist, editor and senior reporter. She has written critical pieces of investigative journalism about unresolved murder cases in the Southeast against Kurdish businessmen and illegal weapons supply to Syria. This piece originally appeared on her Medium blog, available here.
