When I moved out of home, I swiped something belonging to my father and took it for myself into my new house. It wasn’t expensive but to me it was precious – a book about Lebanese people in Australia, published in 1981 by a woman with an Anglo-sounding name but who captured the essence of my very diverse community and their way of life.
By the time I found it in our family bookshelf, in the early days of the new millennium, it was already outdated. And yet I still cherished it, because it represented those early experiences of settlement and the negotiations of otherness and assimilation that reflected the lives of migrants back then – negotiations which, unlike now, barely warranted a mention in art, entertainment or literature, and which were considered more personal than public.
But the book was special for one additional reason: somewhere in its pages I found a photo of my dad from his pre-marital days as a Lebanese Folk Dancer with the Cedars of Lebanon Folkloric Group, founded by Elie Akouri in 1977. The group was on stage at an NRL Grand Final in the early 1980s as part of the pre-match entertainment, dressed in their traditional Lebanese clothing, the goalposts behind them.
Writer Sarah Ayoub. Source: SBS
Back then, when I was a lot more naïve, the picture seemed to capture both my past and my future. I had known that parts of me were foreign, but seeing that foreignness in something so typically Australian as a major football game filled me with a sense of optimism about my place in the world.
Fast forward 20-odd years and now I am not so sure. Today, contemplating folk dancers in something as mainstream as a football game seems inconceivable, so I think about how special – and how rare – that sort of pre-match entertainment was.
These days, pre-match entertainment offerings are often the domain of established celebrities. Folk dancers of any nation – or any other cultural offering – are often relegated to local council events where whatever ethnic group forms a majority, or to weddings and cultural events.
My Dad’s picture, although no less loved, now seems like a symbol of regression as opposed to optimism. And even though Australia seems more culturally diverse than ever, there seems an that perceives that diversity as a threat, and young people navigating life at universities or in the workforce are changing names or in order to seem more white-adjacent and thus, a lot more acceptable.
The magic of Jane the Virgin was not just the relationship between the three women at its centre, but the lack of inhibition over their cultural identity.
I thought about this more as I wrapped up the series finale of CW’s Jane the Virgin, which recently landed on Netflix Australia. While I should have been pre-occupied with the Rafael V Michael debate, I was more concerned with the show’s obvious display of cultural difference, and how shows with effortless and honest depictions of racial diversity were still so few and far between or a rarity on our screens.
The magic of Jane the Virgin was not just the relationship between the three women at its centre, but the lack of inhibition over their cultural identity. For five seasons, we got this Latin American family as they were: everything from their spoken language to the grandmother’s struggles over being undocumented was unashamedly ‘othered’ and there was no attempt to hide that. Their cultural identity – with all its familial and religious trappings – wasn’t toned down for the masses. The grandmother didn’t stop speaking Spanish. Jane didn’t anglicise her child’s name. Even the boardgame played at family game night was culturally-specific, all South American imagery and language.
And there was nothing unrealistic about it.
Last weekend, the Cedars of Lebanon of Folkloric Group, which my Dad left in 1985, was the subject of a small exhibition at the NSW State Library. I had my pick of two days to share that part of my identity with my daughter, and after that, it’s back to family events and the picture in my Dad’s book.
But after those two days, all around Australia, people of various cultural backgrounds, from various migrant experiences, will continue to wake up, catch public transport, go to the supermarket, study, run in the park or head into an office.
Their stories shouldn’t just be contained to museums and memories and multicultural broadcasters. Jane the Virgin has highlighted that there’s a merit in the multicultural going mainstream, in the personal becoming public, in our entertainment becoming a lot more reflective of our reality.
