Finding My Place Read online

  Christine was a kid who had been taught to hate. She was a pudgy ten-year-old with a frothy orange mane that was always tied in a single braid with a blue ribbon. Her frizzy hair formed a haze of orange sherbet around her crown so that it looked like she had tried to braid her own hair and completely missed the front of her head. Her ruddy complexion made her look like she was always angry – which she was. Christine was never without her sidekick and silent bystander Iris. Iris had mousy hair cropped into a short boy cut, pale skin and a manly gait – okay, maybe manly gait is a bit much, but she certainly wasn’t a delicate flower. From my first day at school, Christine and Silent Iris made it known that they hated me. In fact, they hated all Muslims, which meant that, living in Belmore and Lakemba, they had a hell of a lot of hating to do. With so much hating to get through and only before -and after-school hours to do it in, Christine and Iris would have to do most of their hating in the school yard. When a new dark-skinned, bespectacled Muslim girl named Anne arrived at Belmore North Primary School in 1977, I was just what the pair needed.

  A lot of kids get tormented at school. They get teased for all sorts of things – being too fat or too thin, too smart or not smart enough. Christine didn’t tease me. She didn’t call me names or give me wedgies or mock me or laugh at me for my nerdy glasses. She would send me notes in class, telling me that I was going to hell and then, when I wrote a note back calling her an arse (because she was), she gave it to the teacher and got me sent to the principal’s office. She would come right up next to me and whisper in my ear that I was dirty. She would walk past me and snigger and then tell Iris to do the same. She was what my dear father-in-law, Alfie Allen, would have called a ‘snider’.

  One day, as I was walking through the playground at lunchtime minding my own business, Christine and Iris stopped me. ‘Here we go,’ I thought as I steeled myself for another snide comment or filthy look.

  ‘Do you believe in Jesus?’ Christine asked the question like some kind of charismatic preacher frothing at the mouth at the pulpit of an evangelical church, arms and legs thrashing, ‘Doooo yooou belieeeeve. I say. Praaaaise the Lordah. I say yeeeeesah.’

  I didn’t know how to answer the question because it’s not every day that you get asked if you believe in Jesus, especially when you’re ten.

  ‘You don’t believe in Jesus. My mum said you don’t. My mum said you’re a dirty Arab Muslim and you’re going to burn in hell.’

  And before I knew it Christine hocked up a huge wad of saliva from deep in the back of her throat, and with one loud heave spat the foul mass square into my face.

  I went straight to the teacher, Mrs P, who I was sure would at the very least chide Christine and Silent Iris. I was hoping she would send them to the principal, the same way that she had sent me. Mrs P was a newly minted teacher in her twenties. I often got the feeling that she didn’t like me very much or that she just didn’t like teaching a bunch of ten-year-olds very much.

  When I approached her, she was busy writing on the board preparing our next lesson, her face and clothes smeared with telltale chalk marks. I held back the tears as I told Mrs P what Christine had done and then waited for my teacher to respond. Maybe I expected her to be shocked. Maybe I expected her to be at least a little disappointed in Christine. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn’t expecting her to roll her eyes and say, ‘Don’t be stupid,’ before shooing me away dismissively. My protests only earned me threats of being sent to the principal’s office again, which I didn’t want to do since I imagined the principal knew me only as the girl who said ‘arse’. I walked out of the room dejected, disheartened and most of all confused.

  I don’t ever remember believing in Santa Claus or the Easter bunny or tooth fairy. We just didn’t have those things in our house growing up. We celebrated Christmas in a low-key Muslim kind of way – we sometimes had a tree and my parents would sometimes bring home presents that their colleagues at work or friends or my mothers’ patients had given them, but we never really celebrated as a tradition – religious or otherwise. We never left out cookies and milk for some rotund red-suited bloke who didn’t need to be eating more cookies and who came down a non-existent chimney on Christmas Eve. Nobody I knew even had a chimney. When we lost a tooth, we never put it under our pillow and expected money the next morning (I always thought that was just a little bit macabre, to be honest).

  But I believed in the system. I believed in justice. I believed that adults, my teachers, my principal and my parents would protect me. There’s all this advice out there for parents about how to tell your kids that Santa isn’t real. Apparently it’s a thing. But what do you tell a kid who suddenly discovers that the world is not a perfectly ordered system where bad behaviour gets punished? What do you tell a kid when they find out they can’t rely on adults to tell them ‘that was wrong and you have a right to be upset’? What do you tell a kid who knows that something wrong happened and they can’t find anyone to make it right?

  For all her snickering, tormenting and bullying, nothing that Christine had done to me that year affected me as much as Mrs P’s curt dismissal that day. I will always remember her as the adult who shattered my idealistic childhood notions of a world where the bad guys don’t get away with it. She might as well have told me that Santa wasn’t real.

  I’ve often reflected on the story of Christine, Silent Iris and Mrs P. Because it wasn’t that Christine and Iris tormented me or even that they hated me. I could have coped with that. After all, I had Harry calling me a ‘four-eyed monster’ at least five times a day (until he had to get glasses) and Xavier threatening to flush my head down the toilet every other day. It was the reason why they said and did those things and the reason why they thought it was okay to say and do them. That’s the big difference between the teasing that sort of comes with the territory of being a kid – you know the stuff that doesn’t kill you but makes you stronger – and being tormented for your identity – for the things that make you, you. I knew the difference back then. I knew that being called a four-eyed monster by Harry (who, by the way, was not going to win any prizes in a cute kiddie competition) was not the same as being called a dirty Arab Muslim who was going to burn in hellfire and being told I was stupid for thinking it was wrong.

  That experience could very well have shattered my confidence in the institutions and systems of society. It could have turned me into someone disaffected and disengaged. I could have turned my back on school and decided that nobody would fight for me, that nobody would stand up for me. I could have decided that I was wrong to believe that I deserved a resolution which confirmed what I instinctively knew to be wrong. In some ways it did do that. It gave me a passion for justice and helped build my empathy for people who have lost their trust and confidence in everything – in the school system, the economy, the media and politics. It taught me that words can be bullets: when we are staring down the barrel of a loaded gun cocked and ready to be fired in a war for hearts and minds, words can be bullets.

  I asked my parents if we believed in Jesus. I had to tell them the whole story of Christine and Silent Iris when they started interrogating me about my unusual question. ‘Stupid?’ my mother screamed. ‘How can your teacher call you stupid?’ That was it. It wasn’t the spit or the insult from Christine that my mother was angry about. Or that Mrs P had refused to even acknowledge that it was wrong. It was that Mrs P had called me stupid. That set her on the war path, and the next day she went to the school and demanded to see the principal to complain about the teacher who called her daughter stupid – especially because her daughter had topped the class in every exam since starting at the school.

  I didn’t finish my final primary school year at Belmore North. My parents used the proceeds from the sale of our rumpus-room-flood home in Brisbane to buy a brand-spanking-new home in a suburb far, far away called Chipping Norton. We moved into our newly built, single-storey, four-by-two brick-and-tile just a few weeks before the end of 1979 and I
finished the year at the local public school. We became residents of the new outer suburbs in Sydney’s south-west, where they cut down the trees, put them in a tree museum and then name the streets after them. The empty lots that surrounded our house quickly disappeared as the houses sprang out of the clay soil, bringing with them parents and children and their pets. By the end of our first year there, the view outside our front window had transformed from scrubby Australian bushland to a streetscape of modern single- and double-storey brick homes out of the pages of a Home Beautiful magazine.

  As the families came, the local kids were the first to get to know each other, as kids do. Our parents followed suit and it wasn’t long before we were part of a local community. Next door lived a youngish pregnant couple who had migrated from England. On the other side, a family from New Zealand with two daughters. Two doors down, the Chinese couple who owned a restaurant and their two sons. Across the road in a sprawling double-storey home lived the policeman and part-time pastor, his wife, five children and two dogs. Next to them were the Yugoslavian couple who covered all their furniture in clear plastic with their two sons, and down the road were the Greeks.

  During the long hot summers when the days faded unnoticed into night, all the children would congregate on the last empty block on the street right across from our house to play cricket or softball. We improvised wickets out of tin garbage bins borrowed from our neighbours, temporarily halting play and moving the garbage wickets to let approaching cars pass. We played for hours, interrupted intermittently by a parent standing on the front porch letting their child know that it was dinnertime. We played until the last couple of children got their call for dinner and departed grudgingly kicking at the ground and blaming their parent for ruining their promising career as a legend of Aussie driveway cricket. With each child’s name called out into the dusky sky, a different accent could be made out: Greek, Italian, English, Irish, Swedish, Chinese, Arabic, Australian. Nobody cared. Nobody made fun of each other’s strange names or the funny ways that our mothers called for us. Nobody cared that my skin gradually became almost black over the course of the summer. Nobody asked if I believed in Jesus.

  As more houses were built, more children were welcomed into our fold. As long as you knew how to play cricket, could yell out ‘howzaaaaat’ with your feet hip-width apart, knees slightly bent and arms raised to the sky and run back and forth, you were welcomed. When the family across the road built a swimming pool, Marco Polo was favoured over cricket on the cooking-hot tarmac. When the last house on the block was finally built, we looked for adventure in the bushes surrounding our street and along the banks of the Georges River. They were our communal backyard until the Yugoslavian who lived in the house behind us, ironically also named George, drowned in the river while out fishing one day. We made up stories about his ghost haunting the riverbank and, though we acted brave, none of us was game enough to go back to the river for fear that George’s spirit would rise up from the riverbed and entice us to our own watery graves.

  If all we know about a place can be reduced to the sum of our memories of that place, then my memories of the streets of Chipping Norton in the twilight years of the decade of hippies, disco, ABBA, female eunuchs, Margaret Thatcher and international terrorism defined for me what it means to be Australian. I had all but forgotten about Christine and Silent Iris, and though I still got teased at school for my glasses, second-hand jeans that were too short in the leg and for being too smart, I knew that my home was a place that embraced me with all my awkwardness and for all my difference.

  I’ve carried those memories with me all my life. They’ve given me comfort and solace at times when my home didn’t seem so welcoming. Whenever I am asked if I think Australia is a racist country, I have to stop and think. It would be easy for me to ignore my own biases and view my country through the narrow prism of just one or two aspects of my identity. Yes, I am a Muslim. Yes, I am a child of the Naksa. But I am also a mother, sister, wife, friend, academic, writer, politician, educator, community worker, coffee drinker, avid gardener and average cook (maybe average is a bit of a stretch). And it is all these things that I am and how I have become them that fit together in a perfectly formed kaleidoscope. So when I say that the Australia where the so-called silent majority rues the demise of a ‘white’ Australia that never really was and wishes away Muslim immigration, is not the Australia that I know, it’s because I have known a different Australia. And it is that Australia that I choose to remember.

  7

  Ignorance

  As the world was bidding farewell to the 1970s, I was saying goodbye to my childhood. The year 1980 heralded a decade marked by extremes of unabated enthusiasm and apocalyptic dread. It was the decade that saw the end of the Cold War, the assassinations of John Lennon and Anwar Sadat, Reaganism, Thatcherism, MTV, Madonna, the advent of the computer and electronic gaming, the end of the Berlin Wall, AIDS, Chernobyl, the Challenger disaster and bad fashion choices. Big hair, big shoulders, bold colours and bright lipstick weren’t just the fashion faux pas of the 1980s: they were the icons of a decade of excesses and the ‘me first’ generation.

  I was about to enter the 1980s as a teenager. The year I turned thirteen was my second year at Moorebank High School. The school classified us into streams based on our academic ability. I had already proved myself as one of the academically better performers and was in the ‘A’ stream, and could be assured that my classmates wouldn’t tease me for being too smart. If there were cliques at our school, I was too young, or too preoccupied to notice them. I had a good group of friends – both female and male – and was fast getting a reputation for being witty in class, though my teachers would probably have described me more as a smarty-pants.

  There were still the occasional remarks about my dark skin by some kids, but as American pop culture saturated our TV screens with shows that made being black and/or ethnic cool and almost normal, my skin became something that made me ‘exotic’ – like an iguana or a giant penis-shaped plant that traps live bugs and dissolves them in digestive fluid.

  Most of the time I thought of myself as a fairly typical Aussie teenager, though I was acutely aware that there were things about me and about my family that marked us as different – as ‘new’ Australians. We never went to the movies because my parents preferred to watch Arabic films at home and bought a video recorder as soon as they came on the market so that we never had any excuse to go to the movies. We never ate at restaurants because as my father would say, ‘Why should I pay someone to cook a homemade meal for me when I can get your mother to do it for free?’ We never took family trips to the country during school holidays or lazy long weekends. We were never allowed to stay the night at a friend’s house because as my mother would say, ‘Why would I let you sleep in a stranger’s house. If your friends want to sleep, they can sleep here where we can keep an eye on you.’ There were lots of things that we never did and that I’d wished we did do, because if we did those things maybe that would make us more Australian.

  As I grew out of my obsession with the Brady Bunch, finally coming to terms with the fact that Bobby Brady was never going to visit Australia, find me and make his TV parents adopt me, I began to imagine the quintessential Aussie family by observing those around me.

  My dearest friend in my early teens, the closest thing I had to a second sister, was a girl who lived in our suburb. Tracey’s family was one of the last to build in our street. She was a year younger than me and at first I was wary of her, thinking that we could not possibly have much in common. Physically, we were opposites. Tracey was petite and small for her age – like a child yet to catch up with her taller, broader, more physically developed peers. Her blonde hair framed her elfin face in a popular Princess Diana hairstyle of the day. I rarely noticed her slight awkwardness around other teens or the way she giggled shyly whenever she drew unwanted attention. She was, I thought, as beautiful as a delicate porcelain doll.

  Sometime during the summer of my
thirteenth year, my body decided that it was time for me to grow up. I wasn’t ready for round hips and breasts so big they strained against the fabric of my school uniform, causing the seams to split and the buttons to pop. They were just another feature that made me stand out as ‘different’: Anne Aly, the dark-skinned wog with the big boobs. I was so conscious of my gargantuan chest that I wore a school jumper over my uniform all through the year – even in the height of summer when the mercury would regularly reach forty degrees. While some teased her for her prepubescent boylike body, I envied Tracey and her flat chest and slim hips. She glided effortlessly in her aeronautically engineered frame; I carried my burden of a body like the mythical Atlas.

  Had I been left to judge a book by its cover, I probably would have thought of Tracey and her family as part of the ignorant and uneducated masses who believe Australia is in danger of being swamped by ‘insert group here’. But stereotypes cut both ways and ignorance is not something any of us are immune to if we live our lives separated by assumptions of difference – never having the opportunity to glimpse in others that which makes ourselves frail, vulnerable and just human.

  Quite by chance, Tracey and I ended up walking to school together one morning, and soon enough our twenty-minute walk to and from school became a ritual. We spent all our time after school, on weekends and on school holidays together. We tracked imaginary animal prints in the bushes, pretending that a giant feral cat was on the loose and inventing wild new contraptions to capture it. We went jogging in the early mornings with our dogs and swimming in our backyard pools until late at night. We went through puberty together and shared the rites of passage into womanhood – make-up, our first concert (KISS), first heels and first Cosmopolitan centrefold (which didn’t impress us much but provided us hours of laughter).