Finding My Place Page 15

  The second are those people who manage to stay friendly with their ex-partners. I would have liked that for myself, but it has never been that way. I would have liked to be the kind of person who has their ex and his new partner over for dinner and gets an invite to their wedding. My break-ups have always resembled an Adele song – you know, those groany, moany songs where the ex picks up the phone at some ungodly hour with a creepy ‘Hello, I just want to say I’m still here’ to let you know they’re stalking you.

  None of my relationships has ended easily. I don’t know if that says something about me or about my relationships – perhaps it says something about both. Perhaps it goes back to that very first relationship where I found myself walking away and never looking back. Maybe I haven’t lost that girl, after all. Maybe she’s still here and she’s stalking me.

  On the eve of the first day of the new millennium when the world was divided into those who locked themselves in their well-stocked bunkers in preparation for the apocalypse and those who flippantly dismissed any fears of a time–space continuum meltdown, we spent a quiet evening at home on the sofa. We watched the eastern states see in the new year with the usual fanfare and fireworks, and went to sleep before the clock struck twelve. We awoke the next morning to a world that was much like it was the day before and the day before that.

  But it was a world that was about to change forever. And if I had thought that the new millennium would bring an end to the turmoil of the 1990s, I was wrong. Again.

  18

  Because They Hate Us

  They say that 11 September 2001 was a day that changed the world. I’m not so sure I agree. But then again, if you haven’t already guessed, I tend not to agree with many of the things claimed by the ‘thems’ and ‘theys’ of this world, whoever the thems and theys are.

  It was a Tuesday. I remember that part much like I remember it was a Sunday when I heard that Princess Diana had been killed. On both occasions, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing. When Princess Diana died I was in Fremantle at a coffee shop called Old Papa’s along the terrace that earned itself the name the Cappuccino Strip. A group of us single mothers used to gather every second Sunday or so to catch up, let our kids play, and sip lattes and hot chocolates. Our conversations usually revolved around just how deadbeat our deadbeat ex-husbands were, but that day we sipped coffee instead and picked at fruit tarts in stoic silence, trying to make sense of the needless death of a woman we thought would live forever.

  At around 9 pm on Tuesday 11 September, four years after Diana died, I was about to start relaxing in the living room, having put the boys to bed, made the school lunches for the next day and prepared for my next day at work. Dennis was already there and had turned the television onto our usual show. As I made my way into the living room, I glanced at the television show that was suddenly interrupted by the image of a cloud of thick smoke billowing out of a tower somewhere familiar. Then the image of a plane heading towards another tower and then . . .

  It all looked surreal. Like the trailer for the next Bruce Willis action-packed Hollywood blockbuster. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked as I perched myself on the edge of the sofa.

  ‘I think it’s a movie. Don’t know why they interrupted Rove to show this,’ Dennis said.

  ‘It’s not a movie. It’s real,’ I mouthed in utter disbelief.

  This was happening. This was real. And it was now. Through the magic of television, a tragedy thousands of miles away was unfolding in our living rooms and we were witnessing it all in full technicolour.

  My mind stumbled from thought to thought with no coherence as I tried to make sense of it all. Dennis and I exchanged rambling sentences: ‘That’s a plane’; ‘What was that explosion?’; ‘Oh my God’; ‘How is this real?’; ‘That man . . . no’.

  And as the enormity of what we were witnessing there on our screens began to hit me, my thoughts turned to the perpetrators. ‘Please,’ I whispered to myself, ‘please don’t be Muslims.’

  We watched in disbelief for the next three hours and imagined that much of the world was doing the same. United in our grief, we were part of an imagined community of millions of people around the world – witnesses to tragedy. I went to sleep wondering what would happen to the world.

  The morning came eventually. It had happened. The inconceivable. Planes had been used as weapons. Buildings had toppled. People had died. Lots of people. I turned on the television and flicked through the channels. All of them were showing that same image over and over and over again. That image has become one of the most iconic images of our modern history. It is etched in our collective memories forever.

  Twelve hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, Australians gathered in their workplaces, play groups and shopping centres. In the stark light of day, they assessed the events and wondered what it all meant for them.

  Travelling to work on the train that morning, I saw in the faces of the people around me something I had seen in the mirror earlier. It was a look of disbelief and confusion. In a strange way, we were all detached from each other as we tried to work through our own thoughts, but we were also united that morning. Some of us were buried in our newspapers, flicking from page to page, devouring all the horror buried within. Others sat in stunned silence, and others still gathered in small groups, talking through the events of the previous evening. Nobody was talking about the weather or what they did on the weekend or how Aunt Mavis was coming to visit next weekend and how much she complained about the fold-out bed in the spare room. People held back their smiles or their laughter, as if doing so would appear callous and disrespectful – or maybe they just didn’t feel like smiling that day.

  I didn’t say anything to the boys. They hadn’t seen any of the news yet. How do you explain the inexplicable to an eight- and eleven-year-old? What do you say about death and destruction and evil? I wish I had the words. I wish that I knew what to say to them and how to explain it, but I couldn’t even explain it to myself. When I picked them up from school that day, they had heard about the attacks. Of course they had. There was nothing else to talk about. They asked the questions I dreaded answering: what happened; who did it; why? I’m a parent. I’m supposed to have all the answers. I’m supposed to know what to say and how to make sense of stuff like life and death. In all the movies that’s what parents do. But that’s not reality. My boys had already been forced to deal with loss. I didn’t want to explain death and murder and evil to them. Not yet and not in this way. I must have told them something though. I don’t remember what I said, but I imagine it was something about bad things happening to good people and the nature of tragedy.

  The media embraced the full force of the September 11 attacks with the vigour and vulgarity of all disaster marathons. Disaster marathons are those handful of events in one’s lifetime that dominate the airwaves and the public consciousness for days and weeks without reprieve. They follow a familiar pattern of reporting – a disaster happens, usually an attack of some sort or the unexpected death of an iconic figure; the media report the events and intersperse the 24-hour news cycle with personal stories of witnesses, family or friends or even distant acquaintances of victims and the occasional expert analysis; this is followed by a search for the perpetrator and then comes the inevitable question – Why?

  Almost immediately, the September 11 attacks were declared an act of war. The Australian press worked through the night to produce front-page headlines the morning after that proclaimed in loud black Helvetica, ‘This is War’ – a disconcerting omen of what was to come. And keep coming.

  I spoke to my parents. ‘Did you see what they did?’ my mother asked (as if I could have somehow missed it). ‘Those fanatical sons of dogs are going to cause a war. They are cursed. They are evil. These people who did this, they aren’t Muslims. How could they be?’ she reasoned. Her anger was overcome by a kind of quiet sadness and she whispered, ‘This is terrible. All that death. What a
disaster.’

  ‘Sons of bitches,’ my father said when I spoke to him. It was all he could say. Over and over again. ‘Sons of bitches.’

  The disaster marathon continued. Weeks after the attacks, newspapers and television were still using the image of the plane slicing through the Twin Towers. Six weeks after the attacks The Courier Mail featured a six-page spread that regurgitated hours and days of coverage that included a full-colour wraparound.

  I will never forget watching the news on Channel Seven one night in utter disbelief as the presenters actually compared the Twin Towers to Perth’s Bankwest ‘Tower’. They even went to the trouble of showing the buildings side by side in a ridiculous attempt to make some kind of ludicrous connection between them (other than them all being buildings). Indeed, by the second week the news coverage had descended into the absurd as the media scrambled to find a new angle. People began to weary of the constant news coverage and discussions turned to debates about whether the media should continue to use images of the tragedy in its reporting. Water-cooler conversations provided an opportunity for people to express their anger at the media for milking the tragedy, and their exasperation at the constant bombardment of irrelevant facts and tedious interviews with people only remotely connected to the events.

  As the general public were growing tired of the same old same old on their screens and in their headlines, I was becoming more and more aware of the subtle changes that were happening around me. It was that same feeling of uneasiness that I had seen before during those times in Australia’s history when people turned their gaze to the ‘other’ in the room as if they were statues that suddenly came to life. It happened in the 1990s when Pauline Hanson spouted her opinions about Asians and Aboriginal people, claiming that they were swamping us and taking all our money and jobs, but also not working or some nonsense. It happened when Australia joined the coalition in the first Gulf War and people wrote letters to the editor demanding that people from Iraq be interned in camps because they were our enemy, just like they did to the Germans in the Second World War. And it was happening now.

  It didn’t take long at all. Maybe a few hours or a day or two, before the search for the perpetrators led the media to Muslims. And then the answers to the inevitable questions came. They did this because they hated us. They hated our freedoms. They hated our democracy. They hated our lifestyle and they hated everything we stood for. This wasn’t just about America. No. This wasn’t just an attack on the United States. This was an attack on the United Kingdom, on Europe, on Canada. This was an attack on the entire Western world. And that meant Australia. We were attacked. They hated us. And they didn’t hate us for anything we did – but for who we are.

  There’s something disempowering about hate. If someone hates you for who you are, there really isn’t anything you can do about it. I learned that from Christine and Silent Iris all those years ago. I never wanted an A plus from them because I knew that no matter what I did I’d never get one. Their hatred of me was not something I could change or control – I was powerless. There really aren’t many ways to respond to hate. You can let it break you. You can respond with equal vehemence. Or you can stick up your middle finger and tell it to fuck off, then turn right around and moonwalk out of the room.

  I suppose that the answers our leaders gave us were meant to mobilise the final kind of response – a kind of ‘we will overcome’ meant to stick it to the terrorists by getting on with our freedom and our democracy. But that kind of over-simplification has a couple of side effects. It shuts down any kind of nuanced analysis or discussion and draws big, fat red lines that mark ‘us’ from ‘them’. If you’re not with us, then you must be with them – there are no compromises in war. That’s okay if you’re us. But what about if everyone thinks you’re them, even if you think you’re us and you’ve always been us?

  It also transports terrorism from a political or social phenomenon and places it in the category of crime of passion driven only by emotion. But terrorists are rarely emotional. The September 11 attackers were cold, calculated and prepared. This was an attack of immense proportions. There are only a small number of mass-casualty attacks in modern history and none as devastating in terms of lives lost as the attacks in New York and Washington that day. This took months and months of planning and careful coordination. They didn’t just wake up one day and say ‘death to America’. This was bigger than that. We needed to understand that and I’m not sure that we did at the time.

  I was only going to stop at the shops for a few things before picking up the boys from school. We were out of bread and I needed some pasta or something for dinner that evening. I saw her from the corner of my eye. Her face wasn’t familiar to me, but she could have been any one of the women I had seen a thousand times before. She could have been a relative, a sister, or just cultural kin. She was probably in her forties and normally wouldn’t have attracted any attention at the Thornlie shops, where a Muslim woman in traditional hijab was not an unusual sight. The shopping centre was just a street away from the Muslim school and many of the parents shopped there before and after dropping off their kids. But this woman was alone there that day. I didn’t think to notice that then. But now, thinking about it, it seems strange that there weren’t more hijabis milling around the shops as they usually did at that time of day.

  I was looking for a particular kind of pasta because Dennis didn’t like the thick kind of spaghetti and I was still wanting that A plus. Shopping for pasta is frustrating because there’s just so much of it to choose from – fat, thin, thick, short, long, bows, letters, big shells, small shells, egg, rice, fast cook, slow cook, dried and fresh. Who needs that much choice? Mesmerised by all my pasta choices, I forgot to look where I was going and almost tripped over the lone Muslim sister in the aisle. I apologised and smiled and she smiled back.

  Then, I looked up to see them. A mother and her teenage daughter had turned into the aisle and spotted their target. They gave each other knowing glances and then turned to their prey – shooting her a look of disgust before making their move.

  The Muslim woman, unaware that she was being hunted, stepped back from the aisle, perusing the offerings. Was she also confused by the myriad pasta choices?

  The pair choreographed their way towards her with stealth-like moves. They nodded to each other one last time before the younger one launched the verbal attack while her mother stood by brimming with pride at her offspring. What a fine young woman she had raised! It was swift and it was ugly. And when it was over, the mother gave her daughter an approving smile – as if she’d just won first prize in a dance competition and they marched off. They didn’t even look at the pasta.

  ‘Hey,’ I called after them, ‘hey, you can’t do that!’ But they weren’t interested in me because they didn’t know me. But they knew her. They knew this woman with her scarf that covered her neck and ears. They knew that she was one of ‘them’ and that was all they needed to know. They knew that meant that she was bad and it also meant that they could do what they did and it didn’t matter what I said. They had been given permission. We were, after all, at war. This was a battle they could fight in the pasta aisle of their local shopping centre and they weren’t about to be told that they couldn’t.

  I don’t know if 11 September 2001 was the day the world changed. I do know that it wasn’t so much that heinous attack that changed my world but what came after it. I suppose that the attacks were the impetus for a worldwide response that set into motion a chain of events that impacted even the most mundane of lives. Action and reaction.

  A few months after the attacks the world really did go to war. Australia joined the ‘coalition of the willing’ in an assault on a country few Australians had ever heard of. The United States led by President George Bush was after justice for the thousands killed by a little-known group called al-Qaeda (which literally translates to ‘the base’ in Arabic). By the end of 2001, al-Qaeda, its leader Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan had become familiar na
mes.

  But before all of that, Australians went to the polls in a federal election where John Howard issued a rally cry as his election slogan. ‘We decide who comes here,’ he declared, echoing the fearmongers who had come before him, and issuing a subtle dog whistle that cut straight to the heart of the mothers and daughters and fathers and sons who believed that the enemy was already among them. Howard rode a wave of fear to victory with the promise that he would protect Australia from those who wished to do us harm ‘because they hate us’.

  19

  Evil Foes and Willing Friends

  Thirteen months after the September 11 attacks on the United States, the world had settled into a new kind of normal. A normal where the spectre of evil foes and willing friends jumped out of the pages of Marvel comics and childhood fairy tales and into our living rooms, our backyards and our workplaces. The first anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks reminded us all of the pain and suffering that lingered thousands of miles away in a city once renowned for its iconic skyline. One month and one day later, Australians would know their own pain and suffering.

  I had started working at the Office of Multicultural Interests within the Western Australian Government. I had taken an acting policy role at the Western Australian Department of Education and Training and had been there for around four months when I was offered the job of senior policy officer. The offer came after I had attended a meeting about the settlement of new migrants and refugees, where I asked a question that embarrassed the chairperson. I didn’t mean to do it. Well . . . not really. I’ve learned though that it’s just one way of getting things done. Especially when you’re the one person around the table who’s expected to be grateful just for having a seat at the table – like it’s some kind of privilege to sit with the men in suits and drink shitty coffee while they all talk at each other about whose penis is bigger. When you’re expected to sit quietly and smile sweetly, you learn to find ways to make your point. Come to think of it, it’s not unlike flower arranging – not my mother’s version, but the delicate art of balancing disparate shapes and shades into an aesthetically unified arrangement.