I didn’t get Todd Fever, which wasn’t to say I didn’t notice the cute guys in the grade. I thought every second boy was cute; it was just something I kept to myself. In fact, everyone thinking Todd was good-looking made me decide not to like him. A guy knowing his own universal desirability – it smacked of arrogance, and I couldn’t stand being one of the masses chasing a boy. It gave him such power! My gut reaction to guys expecting deference because of their inherent qualities has always been simple and clear: no. Find someone else to stroke your ego; you won’t be getting that from me.
Placed next to each other, we chatted a lot, which gave our classmates plenty of ammunition. ‘Ooooh, Yassmin! You liiiiike Todd, don’t you?’ the girls would taunt.
‘Eww, no!’
Unfortunately it was one of those situations where denial only exacerbates the situation.
Being his girlfriend was never my aim, but I did want his respect. Todd was the sort of bloke who other boys wanted to be like, and other girls liked, so if he was friendly with me, it meant that the other cool kids had permission to like me too. He was the key to my legitimacy. I was determined to make him see I was just as capable as him, particularly in the fields where he thought girls didn’t belong. I knew that was how I could get his respect. Despite this, our friendship was begrudging, but it existed. Todd would ask me pointed questions about my faith, sometimes making fun of me like any other grade eight boy, but sometimes out of genuine interest.
Walking to the bus stop one afternoon, in the middle of an argument about something superfluous, he went for the jugular: ‘How can you be cool? You can’t even go to the beach!’ he yelled as we walked through a roundabout in front of the school. We were on opposite sides of the road, people milling around us, all privy to this public argument.
‘What do you mean?’ I yelled back, my bulging maroon backpack slung over one shoulder as I tried to be nonchalant, while my thick, ankle-length skirt swished with every step like an Imam’s robe. ‘Of course I can go to the beach! My family goes all the time!’
Which was a lie – we mainly avoided the beach because we couldn’t be bothered and burkinis hadn’t been invented yet.
‘Oh really?’ Todd said accusingly. The people around us had started listening in, heads swinging back and forth as they followed the action, their very own Melbourne Open. ‘What do you wear then? Like, a full-length nun’s outfit or a wetsuit?’ He laughed.
‘Yes!’ I stammered out, not knowing what else to say. ‘But so what?’
The conversation ended shortly after as we converged onto the same path to walk side-by-side. ‘You’re such a nin,’ I said, the shortened word for nincompoop, which I’d been pushing to make part of the school slang all year.
‘I just don’t get how you do things, you know?’ he said. Post-9/11, it seemed like no one did. But we were on good terms again and I felt like I had won: he saw me as a person and not as just a girl or a Muslim.
It wasn’t until the end of the year, during a basketball game, that I truly felt like I earned Todd’s approval. It was nearing the end of the match and tempers were as high as the temperature, which is pretty damn hot in Brisbane in November.
The ball was passed to a boy on Todd’s team and he made a run for it down the centre of the court, while Todd peeled off to the side to set up for a shot.
‘Pass it, man!’ he yelled. Not only was he good-looking, he was also a great athlete. Typical, urgh. It was not his day for glory, though – his teammate looked over his shoulder, decided against passing and took a shot at the hoop.
The ball sailed through the air … and missed.
Todd was devastated. ‘You nin!’ he yelled at the guy crouched on the ground in defeat and embarrassment.
Caroline and I turned to look at each other and then looked back at Todd.
‘OMG, yes! Todd called him a nin!’ We pumped our fists in excitement. All year we’d been derided for cursing that way, and here was Todd, the coolest cat in town, using our word. We felt like we’d won the lottery.
My high school taught me how to survive in the ‘outside’ world, to learn the language of the people I was engaging with, and how to rock the boat in a way that wouldn’t make people feel too uncomfortable. Usually it was about using humour to point out an inequality, or sharing a story that described a personal experience of discrimination without apportioning blame to any one party, allowing people to draw their own conclusions. Sometimes it’s as simple as asking a question from an angle they may not have considered, so I am not telling them what to think but allowing them to come up with the answer themselves. Like when a white friend suggested someone shouldn’t be offended by a certain comment about people of colour and I asked, ‘Well, who gets to choose what is offensive – the white person or the person of colour?’ Their pause was all I needed to know a seed of thought had been planted.
Sometimes, though, I wonder if people do need to feel slightly uncomfortable in order to grow and change. These days my aim is to use the platforms I am given to ask some unsettling questions and create just enough unease that, without thinking, people slowly shift their perspective to become more inclusive.
I learnt how to speak to haters; to never rise to the bait but to be patient, understand where they are coming from and meet them, if not in the middle, then in their court – all the while wearing your team’s colours.
My Muslim primary school taught me who I was; my Christian high school taught me how to be that person in a world that wasn’t ready to accept me just yet.
Chapter 7:
Jumping In
My father encouraged me into debating as soon as he saw my speech at the grade seven graduation. ‘Khalas, Yassmina. Do you want to speak on important issues?’ he asked me on the way home, and I nodded.
‘Tayib [okay]. When you start at JPC, make sure you join the debating team. If you’re going to speak, you have to learn how to debate properly. The people you’ll come up against will be great speakers – you have to be better.’ With that, my speaking career began in earnest.
I joined the school team the following year, and immediately loved it. I had found a way of expressing myself that people would listen to, which crystallised when my grade nine debating coach, Mrs Lepp, taught me the power of the anecdote. Even now, I try to start almost every speech with a little story, to hook people in straight away.
I relished using this technique at every possible opportunity in our debates and it became my competitive advantage. Often the opposition speakers would use the traditional structure we were all taught: greet the people in the room, introduce and define your topic and theme, signpost your arguments and then get into the body of the debate. Who needs a traditional speech structure when you can start with a story?
When the timekeeper called my name, I’d take a moment to gather my rebuttals and summary.
Head down, I would pause.
Head up, face the crowd.
Let the silence build.
‘Imagine a world …’ I would say.
I discovered that I could make an audience lean in if I whispered, and sit up and take notice if I changed tone. I learnt how to command a room, to use my voice as an instrument, what it meant to hold a silence. I found there was power in simply standing up straight. My love for the art of oration was born.
Soon after we started, Mrs Lepp moved me to third speaker, so from the age of twelve I learnt to listen to an opponent’s argument, understand the underlying concept and then shred it to pieces, eloquently and resoundingly.
My father was right: debating gave me clarity of thought about difficult moral issues, and an appreciation for the art of discussion and dialectic. It also taught me that any topic has two or more angles, depending on your perspective: I could argue that we most definitely had to change the voting age to sixteen then vehemently and convincingly argue the opposite.
Debating has served me well throughout the years, particularly as a technical person. There is a dearth of technical
minds and voices in the public space and so policy debate has become dominated by people with moving oration skills, like lawyers, but they may not have the technical grounding or scientific knowledge to be able to provide the context and content required for deeply informed debate. It is important that those with technical backgrounds involve themselves in public discussion so that members of the public can be legitimately informed and ensure their decisions at the checkout and the ballot box are made accordingly.
At the same time I was learning how to formulate an argument, I began building connections with the social justice world. The Amnesty International Camp I attended at thirteen forms my first memory of being involved in social justice work. I was in grade nine, a little younger than most of my classmates, but I wanted to fix the world’s problems; poverty, lack of education for girls in countries like Sudan and the treatment of asylum seekers all drew me to the space. There may not have been a lot of world-saving happening at the camp, but it was the first time I’d been around young people who shared my views and were equally into world issues.
‘Yassmin Abdel- Uh … Yassmin, please come to the office.’
It was like high school all over again, where no one ever knew how to say my name.
I logged off my cash register and stepped out from behind my platform of newly found freedom.
In 2004 I’d signed up online to work at one of the Coles Myer stores, clinching a spot at my local Kmart. Not only did I now have autonomy, I also had something to talk about at school.
I’d had enough of being left out of conversations because I lacked the shared experience of having a part-time job. My friends talked about being on shift, having annoying bosses and hanging out at the shopping centre afterwards, and I was missing out. All I did on the weekend was family chores, go to barbecues with the Sudanese community or volunteer with the Islamic Women’s Association of Queensland (IWAQ). None of my friends wanted to hear about Sudanese community gossip and they couldn’t relate to the aunties’ critique of my tea-serving skills (an important accomplishment for any respectable Sudanese lady). As a practising Muslim with strict parents and an even stricter curfew, I couldn’t get up to the same shenanigans as everyone else, but at least as a Kmart checkout chick I’d witness some of the action.
I lasted a total of three days.
When my name was called over the loudspeaker, thoughts of what I could have done wrong ran through my head as I approached the store manager’s office. Maybe I was too loud? People always say I’m too loud, but I had been trying so hard to keep my laughter at a respectable decibel range.
‘Yassmin, please come in.’ The store manager, who was probably in his mid-twenties although he seemed so old at the time, turned around in his chair and gestured at the seat in front of him. ‘When is your birthday?’
‘Uh … March?’ I had an inkling this wasn’t going to end well.
‘That means you’re too young for us to hire you, I’m afraid. We just didn’t check because you seemed older.’
My gamble hadn’t worked out after all, and he let me go. I got fired and my father was so pleased, because he didn’t want me taking the job in the first place. How was he always right about these sorts of things?
The store manager offered an olive branch before I left.
‘How about we give you a call when you turn fifteen so you can come back in and work?’
I watched him put my birthdate into his calendar, but I never did get a call. I was too busy fighting the world to be a checkout chick by that point, anyway.
My major break came from a little closer to home. As my mother had left her architectural career behind in Sudan, she needed an alternative outlet and threw herself into community work. She channelled her passion and skills into developing the capacity of communities from the ground up and creating opportunities for my generation to contribute fully to the society we lived in. She convinced two other ladies in the community to start the first group for Muslim girls and women in Queensland, naming it Al-Nisa, which means ‘The Women’ in Arabic.
Al-Nisa became the part-time job I’d been hoping for. It wasn’t the same as a department store gig, and it wasn’t paying me, but being involved in a youth organisation set the scene for the next few years of my life by introducing me to the world of community organisations, social issues and the skills required to run a not-for-profit. Mum was the agitator in the organisation – she had the big ideas while her co-founders brought the operational ability and community networks. The organisation was revolutionary for its time: we ran sports programs, had forums where we discussed the issues facing us and submitted recommendations to government, and we even ran ‘meet and greets’ for ministers who wanted to engage with real young Muslims.
I was selected as secretary in a bid to keep me busy, so I attended all the meetings with my mother, recorded the minutes, organised the events, and was given more responsibility than I ever would have had at my Kmart job. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I was seeing aspects of organisation management and leadership that fourteen-year-olds don’t usually get exposed to, which meant I was comfortable with the language of management, leadership and strategic thinking from a very early age. As I grew, so did my responsibility. No one coddled me; I was treated as an equally contributing member of the organisation, and so I went to facilitator training, wrote a strategic plan and helped deliver the first Brisbane sports day for Muslim girls, all thanks to the support of the women around me.
Being involved in community organisation wasn’t considered too unusual for the girls and women who joined Al-Nisa, since migrants are often involved in community events and organisation. For migrant communities, these activities bring families together, allow people to stay connected to their heritage and provide the social interactions other people get from hanging at the pub. My experience at Al-Nisa meant starting my own group from scratch, as I would a few years later, was nowhere near as scary as it could have been.
The ladies in Al-Nisa were some of my best friends, and I’m so grateful I spent my teenage years surrounded by independent, confident Muslim women. Women like Salwa, a Lebanese girl a few years older than me who dripped punk-rock cool and was an activist through and through. She had a skateboard, smashed the guys at basketball, was an amazing graffiti artist and wore silver rings on her fingers and a plain white hijab but her clothing was always political, with badges shouting ‘Close Gitmo’, ‘Rights for Aboriginal People’ and a Palestinian flag. Or Sara, who studied make-up even though she did really well at science at school, because she wanted a challenge. Nadiah was an academic and Islamic scholar; she was the first to help me understand that there were different interpretations of the Qur’an, and how they varied depending on the world view of the translator.
Being involved in Al-Nisa meant that I was part of a healthy community who never doubted the capacity we had to create change. If doubt ever did arise, my mother, as one of the leaders of the organisation, would stamp it out. ‘We are not victims!’ she would remind us. ‘We can’t just blame everyone else. At some point we have to take ownership.’ Al-Nisa was the realisation of that desire to take ownership.
That being said, the environment made it difficult for Muslims not to feel like the odds were stacked against us. We were still in the shadow of 9/11, and the Bali and 7/7 bombings. The West had undertaken military activity in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite public protests and weak evidence. The emotive language on TV, on talkback radio and in our newspapers was divisive.
As a Muslim, it took no stretch of the imagination to believe that all white people thought we were terrorists: when you turned on the TV, the only people on the news who looked and dressed like us were terrorists, even if the accusation wasn’t explicit. We all joked about ASIO tapping our phones; on some level we all believed there was truth in it. There was the possibility of any Muslim ‘disappearing’ without reason because Guantanamo Bay existed. We knew that if anything did happen, for example, if we went to the ‘wrong�
�� mosque class, spoke to the ‘wrong’ people or made the wrong joke in the airport, justice would not be on our side and we would be presumed guilty until proven innocent. Ultimately, we understood that no matter how ‘Australian’ we were, different rules applied to us as Muslims in this society.
The language being used and the stories being shown by most media outlets made us feel like we didn’t belong. The media constructed Muslims as ‘the other’. Islam and Muslims were often correlated with Arabs, but the language used by the media othered an ideology, an entire faith. Muslim men were labelled as terrorists, women as subjugated by the patriarchal oppression of their own faith. The word Jihad was hijacked and turned into a colloquial reference to any violent act committed by a Muslim, instead of its actual meaning: to strive, struggle, persevere, usually in the context of one’s faith, trying to be a good Muslim. Holy War doesn’t exist in the way the media portrays it, but this is difficult to communicate. There was a dangerous lack of nuance and comprehension in a lot of reporting, and that made issues of faith and culture difficult to debate. The terms ‘Muslim dress’, ‘Muslim attitudes towards women’, even ‘Muslim leaders’ made it seem as though the Muslim community was one homogenous group, which is far from the truth, and made it hard to break away from that single story. The implication was that Islam was fundamentally incompatible with ‘the West’ and that all Muslims were just biding their time.
We were forced to choose one of two camps – moderate or fundamentalist – so we had to call ourselves moderate, even if that word didn’t sit comfortably with most Muslims.
‘I believe in the fundamentals of Islam, which are all good things, so that makes me a fundamentalist, right?’ said Nadiah as we prepared for a Fair Go For Palestine protest. ‘But I couldn’t possibly say that, or they’d call me a terrorist!’ If you were labelled an extremist or a radical sympathiser it was the end of your legitimacy in the mainstream. The War on Terror made people pick sides, and the media clearly demarcated the sides.
Yassmin’s Story Page 11