Last week, I took my white husband of eight years to see his first Arabic-language film. I’d chosen Wajib, a Palestinian flick about a son who returns to his home town in Nazareth to join his father in handing out the invitations to his sister’s wedding, as is Arab duty, or, in this case, wajib.
My husband loved the love and tension between father and son and their clashes over everything from parental exaggeration to wedding entertainers to inviting an alleged Israeli spy to a Palestinian wedding.
I loved it too, but for different reasons. Reasons that saw me cry silent tears in the darkness of the theatre, as I reflected on how wonderful it was to watch a movie in my native tongue, to hear words I hadn’t spoken in ages but still understood. I wondered, as we drove home that evening, why it took so long for us to go watch an Arabic movie, and why we hadn’t gone to other Arab cultural events in the years we’d been together.
No one explicitly told me this, but it was implied. I thought that I had to act ‘white’ in order to get somewhere. In some ways, I didn’t think it OK to be so obviously (and so honestly) ethnic. It’s not like I had role models.
One week later, I am still unpacking my reaction to the film. It has meant confronting something about my twenties that I hadn’t thought about before, something my mother had warned me about and which I, in my stubborn youth, had shrugged off. Back then, I was so certain that all the parts of my Lebanese identity that I took for granted would stay with me forever – the language, the customs, the food, the cringe-worthy quirks.
But my mother was right. Securing a job in the media with my background – despite the years of unpaid work experience – was difficult. My cultural and religious baggage (Lenten fasts and the outrageous crime of having never lived with my boyfriend) meant I never really fit in at the two prominent media organisations I worked for, and my hang-ups about the ethnicity I constantly felt I had to justify – cultivated over years of sensationalised reportage about Arab gangs – only added to my awkwardness. I was in the workforce for two years before I succumbed and left; choosing a dead-end job not at all related to my skills just because the people ‘got me’ more. I told everyone that I had chosen to go freelance because I could pick and choose what to write about, but the reality was I had run fast from places that felt foreign because I WAS foreign.
Jeanette Francis, host of SBS’ The Feed, last year that when she started out, she took one look at the commercial networks and knew they weren’t right for her. "I didn't even consider it," she said. "I thought, 'Focus your energy on places you believe will get you somewhere'." I wasn’t that clever. I abandoned my aspirations instead, something which, in hindsight, I deeply regret.
I told everyone that I had chosen to go freelance because I could pick and choose what to write about, but the reality was I had run fast from places that felt foreign because I WAS foreign.
And yet, I unwittingly still assimilated. In some ways, I felt that I had to. I limited my use of Arabic words in conversations I had in public because they made people feel uncomfortable, as if two women discussing how they like their kibbe (no pine nuts in mine, thanks) on the train was threatening. While others wore their heart on their sleeves – via heated social media discussions about Arab issues and politics – I wrote about other things. I played the role of the good migrant. And even when I published my first novel, an adult’s re-draft of the sad teenage diary that reflected my adolescence as an Australian-Lebanese girl caught between her identities, I toned down the culture, depriving my character of a richness that could have made her real.
Back then, I thought that I had written my cultural awakening novel, but the reality is that I barely scraped the surface of what it was like growing up the way that I did. I didn’t give the wider world a chance to know or understand me, because subconsciously, I had perhaps already accepted that they wouldn’t. No one explicitly told me this, but it was implied. I thought that I had to act ‘white’ in order to get somewhere. In some ways, I didn’t think it OK to be so obviously (and so honestly) ethnic. It’s not like I had role models.
I played the role of the good migrant. And even when I published my first novel, an adult’s re-draft of the sad teenage diary that reflected my adolescence as an Australian-Lebanese girl caught between her identities, I toned down the culture, depriving my character of a richness that could have made her real.
It turns out, that in a diasporic environment, even those of us so very attached to our cultural heritage still risk losing it. It’s a by-product of our expectations that only certain elements of our difference are acceptable. The white masses will gladly accept our food, our proclamations of cultural pride and our successes, as long as they don’t encroach on theirs.
Last week, Pauline Hanson filed a motion in the Senate, stating ‘It’s OK to be White’. Senator Hanson has enjoyed the privilege of being at one with her wider community for her whole life. Many young Australians don’t have that privilege. I was one of them. I am in my early thirties now, a product of a country I proudly call home, and a culture I am no longer just learning to live with but fiercely embracing. It shouldn’t have taken this long, but it did.
For as long as I have been a thinking, functioning human being, I have known that it is OK to be white. But what I really needed to hear was that it was just as OK not to be.
