Finding My Place Page 19
I’ve never believed in ‘the one’. To me it’s just a worn-out concept desperately clung to by hopeless romantics who also believe the shit written in Hallmark cards. I also don’t believe in soul mates, love at first sight or till death do us part. I don’t want to be married to my best friend. I want my best friend to be the one I go to when I need to have a nice long bitch about my husband and his annoying little habits that can sometimes make you rage with anger. You can’t do that when your husband is your best friend now, can you! For all those reasons, I have never been good at marriage. I suspect God really had nothing to do with it.
In celebration of International Women’s Day 2011, one hundred Western Australian women were selected for the inaugural WA Women’s Hall of Fame. I was honoured to be inducted into the Hall of Fame along with some of the most accomplished women in the state. I stood there on the stage accepting my commendation as Jessica Mauboy belted out a chorus of Helen Reddy’s ‘I Am Woman’, singing ‘Isn’t it Ironic’ in my head and wondering what the felafel I was doing here. I was in the presence of some women who had achieved some pretty amazing things and who had some inspiring stories to tell: women who had survived cancer, set up foundations, fostered hundreds of needy children, started orphanages in Third World countries, won gold medals, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity, built empires . . . and me. I was humbled and almost embarrassed to be sharing the stage with them.
‘Just look at your life. Look at everything you’ve done,’ Dave told me. We had grown very fond of each other over the year (I know that sounds like it’s come out of the mouth of a proper lady, but it’s the most accurate way I can think of describing our relationship at that point). I didn’t think I had achieved much at all. Still, for whatever it was that I was being recognised for, it was nice to be recognised.
It was through the Hall of Fame process that I met Rebecca Britten. We met in the bathroom of the Duxton Hotel, where some of the Hall of Famers had been invited to attend a radio breakfast. All good relationships are forged in bathrooms. Women’s bathrooms are set up that way. It’s much harder for men to strike up a conversation at the urinal – and it’s just a bit creepy to talk to the bloke next to you with your dick in your hand. But women’s bathrooms are the perfect meeting place.
Rebecca and I bumped into each other as we dried our hands and smiled at each other in the mirror. ‘You’re Anne Aly, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘Yes and you’re Rebecca?’ Rebecca was the Secretary of the Bali Peace Park Association Incorporated – a group of people affected by the Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005 who had started a movement to have a peace park built at the site of the Sari Club in Kuta. Her connection to the bombings was her husband, Phil Britten, whom she had met and married after he survived the Sari Club bombing with severe burns to over eighty per cent of his body. Phil was in Bali that evening with twelve of his teammates from the Kingsley Football Club. They were young, fresh-faced Aussies, many of them not quite out of their teens yet and many of them on their first trip away from home. After a successful season, they had travelled together to Bali to celebrate reaching the grand final – it was to be their induction into adulthood and, sadly, their initiation to terror.
Seven members of the thirteen Kingsley Amateur Football Club perished in the attack that night. Phil’s story is one of incredible survival, and he has since become one of the most inspirational speakers on the circuit as well as a close friend of my family.
It was that chance meeting with Rebecca Britten that morning that got me thinking about people who survive terrorist attacks and how they handle all that grief and guilt and everything else that must come with being a victim/ survivor. Terrorists aren’t very good at communicating. When a stranger offers a smile, the message we get is friendship, happiness, maybe even those first flushes of love (if you happen to be one of those hopeless romantics). But when people blow shit up and kill others – we don’t get love. So we think about terrorism as ‘they must hate us’ because that’s what the physical act of terrorism gives us – hatred, revenge, anger and aggression. Not everyone who has been affected by terrorism is willing to accept that. Some people are driven to ask questions to understand what happened to them, whether that question is ‘Why do they hate me?’ or ‘Why are they angry?’ or just ‘Why me?’
Phil Britten had travelled back to Bali during his physical healing in search of mental healing. He attended the trial of the Bali bombers and found clarity in letting go of his anger and frustration – channelling his energy instead into inspiring others to let go of hate and fear.
I in turn channelled my research into survivors of terror who become activists and discovered an entire community of terror survivors who are actively making change. My research led me to the incredible Gill Hicks, who lost both legs in the London bombings and who set up MAD for Peace – an organisation that works to end conflict through dialogue and interfaith work. I connected with the 9/11 survivors’ groups and with the Omagh Victims Association. I travelled to the United Kingdom and to Northern Ireland to meet with Michael Gallagher, the president of the Omagh Victims Association whose 21-year-old son Aidan died in the bomb attack that killed thirty-one people in Omagh’s main street in 1998. Closer to home, two survivors of the Sydney siege in 2014 – Jarrod Morton-Hoffman and Louisa Hope – reached out to talk to me about their harrowing experience as two of the eighteen hostages.
Back in 2011, there weren’t many scholars or people in counterterrorism talking about the internet. It really wasn’t on anyone’s radar in Australia. The idea that young Muslims were hiding away in dark bedrooms in the suburbs of Melbourne, their faces lit only by their computer screens and their mouths wide open inhaling violence like an intoxicating vapour fuelled theories about online radicalisation – but they were just theories with no real research or evidence to back them up. For the most part, counterterrorism discussions were dominated by the military conflict against al-Qaeda and the ongoing search for Bin Laden. There weren’t too many people listening either whenever I talked about the internet as the real battleground of terrorism. Some dismissed it as irrelevant to the real fight against terrorism and others saw it as a distraction. But even as far back as 2009, when I won an award from the Australian Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers for my paper on internet radicalisation, I knew that in a few years’ time, the world would turn its attention to the internet and just how important it had become for terrorists and their target recruits.
In August of 2011, I was invited to attend an international scholars’ program in India. It was a six-day event involving twelve scholars from around the world to discuss religion and the internet at the University of Hyderabad. A lot of people out there will tell you about how they discovered their inner om during spiritual journeys through India. I’m not going to tell you that. I wasn’t there for the eat, pray, love of it. I was there to present my paper on Sheikh Google – the phenomenon that saw young second-generation Muslims living in the West turn to the internet for their spiritual consumption. It was internet evangelism accompanied by a rise in the proliferation of Muslim ‘scholars’ who dished out religious advice on everything from masturbation to marriage to a diaspora audience whose knowledge of their religion extended only to haram this and halal that.
This was a generation that was growing up in search of answers that their parents and their leaders either could not or would not give them. Instead, they turned to Google to ask questions about violence in Islam, whether meeting someone on Facebook was acceptable and if having phone sex meant you were no longer a virgin.
I arrived a day early in India and made my way to the hotel and resort where the delegates were meeting. I didn’t know any of the other delegates, but had referred to some of their works in my research on the internet and terrorism, so I was looking forward to making the connections. On my second day, I went to breakfast where I was introduced to the eleven other scholars from countries throughout Europe and from the United States. I make
a habit of drinking the water wherever I am. I don’t guzzle big gallons of it – just a small sip. I haven’t been sick yet and I’ve drunk the water in every country I have ever visited. So I drank the water in India. Apparently, it’s not something you’re supposed to do because all kinds of nasty buggy things live in the tap water in India and all the other academics looked aghast when I told them. To be fair, they were all Caucasian (and you know by Caucasian I mean white-bread, vegan, latte-sipping, don’t-wear-leather types). That makes a difference because it’s not like their parents ever let them eat mud or their siblings made them believe that dried dog shit was a chocolate biscuit. By the end of the third day, half the delegation was sick in bed – despite cleaning their teeth with the bottled water supplied by the hotel. Me and my guts of steel felt just fine.
So it was just me and around half the delegation on the tour bus the evening we went out for dinner at the home of a local professor. No matter what time of day it was, the traffic was always horrendous and the half-hour bus ride turned into a two-hour journey. I leaned my head against the cool glass of the bus window and looked out to the bustling streets. Perth never had that many people – not even on a Saturday night in the middle of the city after a Beyoncé concert. The bus stalled in the downtown traffic outside a local cafe. I watched the people walking in and coming out with their takeaway meals – not much more than a piece of bread filled with tiny morsels. Three steps led to a dirty brick wall with scratched window panes. On the second step I saw a woman. She was old and frail. A halo of woolly white hair framed her tiny face and her clothes draped over her frame like dirty wet rags hung out to dry. Her eyes were grey. Not grey like a colour or hue, but grey like muddy water – like they were supposed to be some other colour – bright blue maybe or green – and maybe once upon a time, a long time ago, they probably were. She sat on the stairs and scratched at the floor as people stepped over her. As if she wasn’t even there. She scratched out her existence there on the stairs of that busy cafe in the busy street where the busy people came and went, and nobody knew she was even alive. I thought to myself what it must be like to just exist; to not live or be alive but just exist. Like a stray cat.
I wasn’t in India to eat, pray or love. But seeing the stray-cat lady there on the steps that evening, I couldn’t help but feel that there was something about this place that made you question things about yourself beyond just how resilient your guts are.
23
Grounded
At the end of 2011, my dad got sick. I mean really sick. He’d been kind of sick for a while, but it was the kind of sick that comes with old age and with living alone – more of a kind of permanent state of frailty than an actual sickness.
He and my mother had split up (again) several years earlier. It was a relief when they finally did. They could never live together in harmony, though I have to hand it to them both for trying again and again. Dad found single life harder than Mum. Men usually do.
I tried to get him to look after himself more. I took him to senior exercise classes because he refused to walk or do any activity during the day, even when his doctor ordered him to. His care became a point of tension between my brother and me. I wouldn’t say my brother and I were ever really very close. For much of my life, it seemed that our relationship was one of detached kinship – as if we were each observing each other’s lives like familiar strangers. We lived only a short fifteen-minute drive from each other but rarely spent time together. I’ve often craved a more intimate connection with my younger sibling, but somehow that has always evaded me. As my dad’s health deteriorated, the strains in my relationship with Hosam surfaced and I sometimes think that part of that is the deep disappointment we both hold that our sibling bond has never been as deep as either of us might have liked.
Hosam took on most of the work – visiting Dad, taking him shopping and regularly checking up on him. We resolved that I would take care of his medical needs and Hosam would do his everyday care tasks.
I often thought that my father had given up on life in the previous few years. I didn’t visit him as often as I should have, but when I did I enjoyed spending time just having a conversation with him about various things. It was a different relationship than the one I had with my mum, where we talked mostly about daily stuff like grocery shopping and cooking (yes, I can talk about cooking even if I don’t actually do it). I could talk about things with my dad without fearing his judgement or his disapproval. I didn’t feel like I had to prove myself with him. I’ve often thought that was because we shared a love of the arts and culture – at the very least it gave us something to bond over and talk about if there was nothing else left to talk about.
The love for life that I saw in photos of his early years – a young Omar Sharif lookalike, clowning around with his roommates, wearing a metal colander on his head like a hard hat and banging away on a frying pan with a wooden spoon – that was gone. His eyes were clouded over with the weariness of a life lived, at least partly, in tedium. Had his life been harder than I imagined it to be? It can’t have been easy for him to leave everything he knew and come to a strange country only to be told he was not good enough and then to have to take a job for which he was too good, too qualified. It can’t have been easy for him to drive that bus day in and day out. Had I made it harder for him? Was my tempestuous nature, my rebellion in those teenage years more of a burden to him than I had realised? Had my disappointments unduly burdened him and caused that sparkle his eyes once had to fade just that bit more?
Dad took a fall in the second half of the year and ended up in hospital. Hosam and I alternated visits to him so that one of us was there at least once a day. By my third visit, I knew something was wrong. Dad just sat there staring straight ahead – looking right through me. All my attempts at making him laugh and engaging him in conversation failed. I was getting nothing back.
The doctors said that he had something called vascular dementia. It was not something that crept up on you so that you could prepare for it – burdened with the knowledge of how he would spend what was left of his life in a state of existence. The rapid-onset dementia was brought on by a series of small strokes. One day he was still Dad. The next he was somewhere else. There was no time to prepare. No warning, no family meeting about how we would handle his care needs when the time finally came when he would need care. We were plunged head-first into the unknown of finding a care facility and ordering his affairs. I must have visited ten aged care homes. I parked my car and walked towards the gate of one of the facilities near my house. A middle-aged woman approached. ‘Can I help you, dear?’ she asked.
‘Yes please. I’m looking for a place for my dad. He needs a locked facility. He’s just been diagnosed with dementia.’
She must have seen the exhaustion in my eyes and heard the pain in my voice because she touched her hand gently to mine and asked, ‘Do you love your father?’
‘Yes. Of course I do.’
‘Then don’t send him here. Find somewhere nice for him. The people who are here are here because nobody cares about them.’
I thanked her and walked back to my car, thinking about the cat lady scratching out her existence on the steps of the cafe in India.
You can have more degrees than a thermometer and still not be able to navigate the aged care system. It’s complicated and involves reams and reams of endless forms and questionnaires. I finally found a place for my dad in a home that was nice enough. On the day before Christmas in 2011, he was transferred from the hospital to his new home, where he shared a room with three other residents. We spent a sombre Christmas Eve by his bedside as he slept – none of us sure whether he would wake up or, if he did, whether he would recognise any of us.
Dad did wake up on Christmas morning. Hosam and I visited him every day along with Mum in those first few months – eventually easing off to regular Sunday visits and once or twice during the week.
* * *
It was a Saturday afternoon in 2012. Karim
had marked his nineteenth birthday during the week and I was busy preparing for a house party he was having to celebrate with a few friends that evening. It was the day before Mother’s Day. I remember that irrelevant detail because Karim’s birthday always falls on or around Mother’s Day.
The home phone rang. It never rang unless my mother was ringing and there were very few reasons for her to ring me.
‘Aaaaaaaaaane,’ she sang in a high-pitched, joyous voice like a soloist in an acapella rendition of ‘Ave Maria’, ‘somebody want to maaaaaaarry yooooooooooooooooo.’
Oh dear. ‘Mama, what have you done with him?’
‘Nothing. He sitting on the sofa here like a little cat. Meow meow,’ she said with a laugh. At least she thought it was funny.
‘Mama, please be gentle with him. He’s not used to this.’
In the background I could hear Dave protesting cautiously, ‘But, but I haven’t asked her yet. She’s not supposed to know. I’m supposed to ask her.’
‘What? You ask me, I said yes. You go to mosque this Friday, get married, and you move in. Is good.’
‘Mama, Mama,’ I called over the phone. ‘That’s not how it’s going to work.’
‘It’s okay. I come now. Dave, you take me. We go Anne’s house. Okay we coming now. Bye.’
Oh shit!
‘Boys, boys,’ I called from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Teta’s coming!’
Mum arrived with Dave ten minutes later. ‘I tried to hold her off as long as I could,’ Dave mouthed from behind her head as she bounded into the house with him following. That’s what my mum was like. She commanded attention when she walked into the room – she always had. She was at her best when there was something to be done – something to be organised or a crisis to be managed. She morphed into a powerful matriarch, taking over with the boundless passion of a three-year-old and the precision of a professional event planner.