Finding Her Voice
For a DU staffer and grad student, music is literally her life
On an unseasonably warm evening in December, DU grad student and staffer Tanya Salih stands backstage at a Denver bar, wearing a shimmering gold headdress. Henna climbs her arm like a vine.
Confident, poised, proud. The crowd knows her as Zanib. A violinist, vocalist and songwriter ready to own an identity she attempted to hide for so long.
The name Zanib, which loosely translates to “growing dreamer,” comes from Salih’s parents. It’s her middle name, though her high school classmates made her wish it wasn’t.
“They made such a big deal out of it,” recalls Salih, a program coordinator at the University of Denver’s Barton Institute for Philanthropy and Social Enterprise. “I didn't want to hear people slaughter my name and ridicule me for it, so I just kept it under wraps.”
The discomfort was inescapable when Salih was growing up in Cheyenne, Wyo., where nearly nine-in-10 people are white. The daughter of immigrant parents from the African region of Nubia got used to sticking out. She remembers feeling different, caught between cultures, leading a double life.
At home, she spoke Arabic and listened to recorded readings of the Quran. (Her father is an imam, a leader in a mosque.) Once she stepped outside, she was just like every other kid, trying to fit in and find her own path.