When he starts a sentence with ‘we’, it’s invariably in reference to people from his culture. For someone belonging to a diaspora, for someone with a history of dispossession, this identification makes perfect sense. When he talks about his culture it has a weight to it, and in comparison my own feels altogether nebulous.
When someone living in Auburn has a relative die, hundreds of compatriots will stream through the house, paying their respects. If the bereaved is going home for the funeral, everyone will pool money to help out, even though they are struggling financially. If my boyfriend has a friend over (who is then no longer just a friend but also a ‘guest’), then his code of hospitality means absolutely everything must be done to make the guest feel welcome (no matter how exhausted or unsociable the host may feel).
When his ‘we’ doesn’t include me, I can’t help but bristle. Perhaps part of me is envious that he feels such belonging and tenderness towards his culture when I lack such an allegiance to my own. This bristling bothers me too. It makes me feel self-absorbed, too Western. I feel as if I can never possess the grace, humility and elegance that I imagine women in his culture possess. (When I was teaching in detention centres, and my students occasionally told me that I was not like other Australian women, or that I reminded them of an Afghani girl, I used to feel so pleased.) Despite being – by my own culture’s standards – quiet, modest and fairly ‘low- maintenance’, I nevertheless feel that – by the norms of his culture – I am too needy, too ambitious, too feminist, too scruffy. He, too, can suffer a similar sense of inadequacy. He can feel that he is not educated enough, not adventurous enough, not modern enough.
In the evenings, my boyfriend sets himself up to pray in the corner of our lounge room, between the bookshelves and the spot where we keep the vacuum cleaner
He gets annoyed that major incidents ‘over there’ don’t even make the news ‘over here’. Within days of being in Iran (visiting his ill mother, who on account of being Afghan has no access to medical treatment), Sydney features in their news for its record-high temperatures.
In late January this year, attackers drove an ambulance packed with explosives past a police check- point into a crowded Kabul street. More than one hundred people were killed and several hundred others injured. Yet every time I turned on my radio in Sydney, the ABC news had an update on the embarrassing saga involving a minister rigging a ballot to decide on a name for one of Sydney’s new ferries (and opting for ‘Ferry McFerryface’).
In the evenings, my boyfriend sets himself up to pray in the corner of our lounge room, between the bookshelves and the spot where we keep the vacuum cleaner. And when we’re away somewhere, he consults an app to work out which direction Mecca is (which, since I went to school in Penrith, I’m used to thinking of as in the direction of the Blue Mountains). It amuses me slightly, when a new flatmate sees him praying for the first time, freezes and starts tiptoeing around like a well-meaning tourist in a temple.
It seems I’ve grown used to him praying. I’ll busy myself by putting the kettle on or cutting up veggies for dinner. ‘Used to’ is not quite the right way to think about it though. That makes it sound like I’ve learnt to put up with some kind of irritating habit, like his snoring (which I have not gotten used to). The truth is that I’ve come to see the beauty of his prayer. In our rushed Sydney lives, where our sleeping patterns and routines are dictated by work timetables, there is something so elemental and ancient about rising with the sun and beginning the day by acknowledging something greater than us. I like how the ritual ties him to the day, how it calms him and gives him solace. I like how this sacred and intimate thing doesn’t need to happen in a mosque, but takes place here, before my very eyes.
Now, my boyfriend’s praying is part of the mental list I keep of things to tell new housemates: make sure to pull the bathroom door shut tight, until you hear a click, otherwise the wind makes it slam; the rubbish gets taken downstairs; keep this screen door closed so the mozzies don’t get in. Oh, and my boyfriend tends to sleep on the lounge-room floor. I can’t sleep through his snoring, and he gets up real early to go to work. Plus he prefers it to sleeping in a bed. And if you come home and he’s praying, don’t think you can’t make any noise, or you can’t use the kitchen – he’s really not fussed.
Who knows how many months more we’ll be able to keep on extending our lease? I try not to think about it. I recently stopped using Blu Tack. Now I just hammer nails in
At the start it seemed somehow fraught to tether myself to someone so tenuously attached to this place, someone so uprooted and so homesick. But as every year unfolds and passes, I come to believe more in the love that he’s swathed me in from the start. I come to trust that he’s here to stay.
On our street the old quarter-acre blocks are being sold off in lots of three or four to developers. Across the road, Lume – a soulless, hideous apartment block promoted as a ‘boutique development’ with a ‘contemporary cosmopolitan perspective’ – went up in the space of a few months. Who knows how many months more we’ll be able to keep on extending our lease? I try not to think about it. I recently stopped using Blu Tack. Now I just hammer nails in. When, inevitably, we get moved on, I figure my boyfriend can always patch the holes with No More Gaps. Hopefully our elusive landlord won’t be able to tell.
When he’s not here, in our little apartment, his possessions take on a poignance, all the more so for being so few. When he’s not here, I miss the smell of the Deep Heat that he rubs into my knees when they get sore, and the smell of the rosewater that I drop into his eyes when they’re red and painful from the day’s dust and paint. When he’s not here, I get a feeling like homesickness.
This piece is an extract taken from the original essay 'Homesick' and is republished with permission from GriffithReview 61: Who We Are (Text), ed Julianne Schultz and Peter Mares .
GriffithReview 61: Who We Are Source: Griffith Review
Adele Dumont studied Australian literature at the University of Sydney, then spent two years teaching English at the Curtin immigration detention centre. In 2016 she published her first book, No Man is an Island (Hachette Australia).
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