In 2006, Nurjahan Boulden was visiting Toronto to meet her cousins. Fresh into her senior year of college, she went to a party with them. Within a few moments, someone there opened fire and multiple gunshots rang out. People screamed and everyone bent down. The man beside bled to death in front of her. Nurjahan was shot in her right leg and she could not move. It took the SWAT team almost 30 minutes to clear the area and evacuate them. “When I got shot, the first thought that came to my mind was that I can never dance again,” says Boulden, who had been belly dancing since childhood.
On top of this physical pain, she also had to face criticism for getting shot. After the accident, someone close to her said: “Of course she got shot, she went out dancing. What did she expect?” That comment got “programmed in her head,” Boulden says, and she internalized that getting shot was her punishment for going out to dance. That trauma – both physical and emotional – caused Boulden to gradually shrink and avoid her love of dance for the near future. She had to spend the rest of her 20s with a cane to support her in walking. Since then, the biggest trigger that lived on somewhere in Boulden’s subconscious was that “everybody is always blaming women for everything,” she says.
Now a belly-dance teacher and decolonization advocate, Boulden has been garnering a huge following on social media platforms by breaking myths around belly dancing. Boulden, along with two other friends, first started belly dancing publicly in a community in 2004, when they were college students. Privately, she has been dancing ever since she was a kid, because this artistic skill of belly dancing has been passed onto her through generations of East African women from her maternal side.
“My aunt and mother, they grew up in Tanzania during a time when it was still colonized by England,” says Boulden. They had to grow up with the conditioning that when girls dance or play, being comfortable in their bodies, bad things happen to them. To avoid that, the thinking went, you do not do any of those things. This idea is familiar to many women of color: Dancing is encouraged only during festivals or within closed spaces, never out in the open. Boulden grew up watching her mother throw only-female parties in the USA where their family and friends would come, play traditional music, cook together, eat hearty home cooked meals and dance – all of it in their own personal space. She has always wanted to sustain this practice.
As a woman of color from mixed races, Boulden credits her maternal side for teaching her belly dancing in its rawest form. She shares, “Our family is very matriarchal. We trace everything through our mom. It is not how our ethnicity dictates, it’s just how our family functions.” Boulden is proud to be a descendant of women who broke stereotypes and made history in their own ways. Boulden’s great-grandmother, Bi Sharifa and her youngest daughter, Bi Rosy (Boulden’s grandmother) were from the Manyema ethnic group and lived on the borders of Congo and Tanzania, before Tanzania gained independence and became the country it is today. They lived in Congo, but both the mother and daughter fled from their husbands, along with four children. They went to Tanzania and started a seamstress business for the military, to be financially independent. They were resolute that all their daughters would get an education and not be married off at an early age.
Boulden’s grandmother’s first language was Lingala, which is a language from Congo. While her daughter and Boulden’s mother was born and raised in Tanzania, hence her first language is Swahili. She pursued higher education and came to the United States, becoming the first woman in her community to attend college. Boulden’s first language is English as she was born and raised here in America. “So much of what I share is lost in translation,” Boulden says. Translating from three different languages, it has been hard to trace exactly where Boulden’s belly dancing roots are derived from. But her mother believes that the particular style they practice came from Boulden’s great-grandmother, Bi Sharifa.
Sharifa taught all her grandchildren belly dancing, including Boulden’s mother. Boulden also teaches the same style, often called “Kucheza Kiuno”. Kucheza means “to play” and Kiuno means “waist” or “hip dance” in Swahili. It is a significant cultural practice throughout East Africa. This style of belly dancing is different from many parts of North Africa, as well as the Middle East, but the whole concept of belly dancing is mostly seen from an Oriental perspective, popularized by mainstream media, so it is hard for everyone to know about the nuances amongst these styles. “If you look at each dancer, you can see the distinct little pieces of them that come from the different regions,” Boulden says. “Our form is core-focused, which is very similar to Manyema dance practices.”
Although Boulden grew up amongst women who loved to dance, their movements happened in closed, private, all-women circles. It was never meant to be for any spectators, it was only for fun amongst themselves. Dancing in public was attached to shame, and women who did that were considered of loose character. Even though she had started dancing out in public with her friends after she went to college, that came to a halt as soon as she was shot.
It took Boulden thirteen years to resume dancing again. All of it started with a run. There was no special day or event when she felt like moving again. After years of walking with support, she wanted to run; but almost everyday she would give up due to the pain. Until one day, when she felt it was enough. No pain can be more than what all she has already been through, so why not just try running slowly, even if it is hopping with one leg that makes her look funny, she thought. After the run, Boulden realized safety is within the body,” she remembers. “I worked on the emotions in my body through somatic healing.” In the early days of her recovery, Boulden would often feel horrible about her leg. But gradually, as she started showing her leg compassion and understanding the pain, it felt better. Tapping into the body’s potential got easier. Her right leg now has a metal rod and screws following the shooting, yet she can move like water. It took quite some effort to move like water again: lots of unlearning and feeling safe.
In 2019, Boulden wanted to write a memoir about her experiences. After noticing she did not have much social media presence, her publisher suggested she start creating content and posting it online. Then when Covid hit in 2020, her page took off, drawing hundreds of thousands of followers. She chose something she was comfortable to share with people publicly – the belly-dancing culture and myths around it. She was not just dancing to make content; she was trying to educate everyone by breaking down hip and chest movements, how to do isolations, and why those movements help the female body. She believes that social media has given her the platform to share about her history and belly dancing as a cultural practice of indigenous people of the land, as opposed to what is shown in the mainstream media. She has received multiple rape threats and hateful comments, but there have also been supportive comments and women have come together to share space and community with her. Boulden meets with the women in her community online at least thrice a month and often plans in-person gatherings and dance sessions as well.
By decolonizing, Boulden refers to the practice of belly dancing being accessible to women of all body types, from all kinds of diverse backgrounds, reclaiming their space — and not in a performative way, but just to enjoy and feel comfortable within their bodies. “There is competitive belly dancing happening nowadays and I do not feel good about it,” says Mar (who chose to not share her full name due to privacy reasons), an Egyptian belly dancer and Boulden’s friend. Boulden thinks that not everything has to have a meaning. In her view, she moves in certain ways just because it feels good; the mainstream media needs to let things just be. “I hate it when someone asks what the meaning is when I shake my booty,” Boulden says. “I just want to shake my booty, that’s all!”