In early 2015, a young Anglo guy was arrested after a homemade bomb containing shrapnel, ball bearings and fishing sinkers was found in his house. You can bet your bottom dollar if his name was Mohammed his actions would have been attributed to terrorism. The police statement simply stated ‘this is being investigated as a one-off incident, there were no threats made and no person was put at risk by this incident’. The twenty-two-year-old had a criminal history but was only charged with ‘possession, supply or making a prohibited device and possession of a prohibited device’, not with terrorism-related offences, which may have been the case had he been Muslim. It seems not much has changed since my time at Al-Nisa.
I spent all my spare time during high school with the Al-Nisa ladies. They were strong female friends going through the same battles that I was. My parents trusted them so I was allowed to spend time at their houses, discussing politics, eating and occasionally playing sport. I was a young girl trying to find a group to belong to, and I had found one: this was my community, my grassroots.
I never spoke about my Muslim friends or activities at school; I didn’t think anyone would be interested, and I was uncomfortable talking about my achievements. Australian teenagers aren’t keen on people who boast about how good they are, so this was also instinctual self-preservation. I kept my worlds apart, even at the beginning.
Al-Nisa set me up for years of running organisations. As well as marketing and logistics, I learnt how to manage a group of diverse people and personalities – foundational skills I still use daily. I had to learn to manage up, to control a room or table of people older than me, and that facilitating a collaborative environment meant listening to other ideas before contributing my own, bringing quieter people into the conversation by directing questions at them, and diffusing tense situations by finding common ground.
Al-Nisa also introduced me to working with government. It was an amicable relationship, driven by my mother, who knew how the world of grant applications and ministerial appearances functioned from her job with the state government. Unlike many young Muslims at the time, I didn’t see the government as the ‘enemy’ or ‘out to get us’, but more as bumbling older people who didn’t understand what it was like to live as a Muslim, but who could provide support and funding. They used the wrong language and made the wrong assumptions, but I saw the effort being made and appreciated it. Engaging with government from an early age played a crucial role in setting up my beliefs and expectations of political institutions. Rather than viewing the government as an amorphous, malicious system that loathed Muslims, I saw it as a collection of individuals with biases but with whom we could work and influence, although this belief has been sorely tested lately following recent rhetoric that has been immeasurably damaging.
The realisation that I could have influence was astounding! Running events with Al-Nisa, consulting with government departments and realising we could directly talk to people who could change policy taught me I could potentially make a difference through legitimate pathways. That was a powerful realisation for a young migrant kid whose parents come from a place where change requires anarchy. Here, anarchy was seen as uncivilised and people made change through articulating their cause and then speaking to the right people, and I began to form an ideology around working from within the system. Some grassroots groups view working within the system as selling out. I guess there is purity in anarchy, but I am not sure purity on its own will get us the results society needs – and who gets to decide what is pure? Each of us chooses a different mode of change and for now, I had chosen mine.
My involvement in Al-Nisa ended a couple of years later. I was untethered again, but it was my final year of high school, so I had other focuses.
A number of things were happening around the world: Israel was entering another conflict with Lebanon. Australia’s involvement was another reason for Aussie Muslims to be angry. Young Muslim women, particularly those who wore the hijab, continued to be a visible minority, copping hatred for violence happening on the other side of the world. People were speaking about us all the time.
I was in Sudan when word of the 2005 Cronulla riots reached us, making the news in Khartoum! Imagine. My grandfather’s brother turned on the TV while we were visiting, and Kahk [biscuits] were passed around in front of visions of Anglo-Australians clashing with the Lebanese lads by the beach. Cousins, aunts and uncles were all concerned about our welfare, asking how we dealt with that kind of racism. I understood this part of our nation’s dysfunction. It was a reflection of the world I had personally experienced at school and on the streets. ‘Ah, it’s unfortunate, yes,’ my father would reply, ‘but Sydney isn’t the same as Brisbane. We are different types of communities.’
The size and density of the Western Suburbs makes Sydney’s migration politics different; large cultural groups aren’t forced to interact with the wider community in the same way my family was. There weren’t enough Muslim Sudanese people in Brisbane to even consider forming a gang. However, it is misleading and offensive to call Western Sydney ‘ghettoised’. There may be some subcultures with those elements but today the region has thriving metropolitan cities, fourteen local councils and 2.5 million people. It is a wonderful world of its own.
The Cronulla riots informed the impression that the world had of us. I was torn: on one hand I saw myself as Australian and neither race nor religion changed that, but the government and media demonised people who looked like me. Not only did I have to deal with puberty, migrant identity issues and parents with high academic expectations; but I also had to justify my belief system to every Tom, Dick and Harry (or John, Bruce and Shane)? Oh, life!
There is this strange dissonance when I write about my time as a teenager, because on one hand there was frustration and anger at how unfair it all was, but I had also started to understand that I needed to be measured in my response to the vitriol. So, although I was mad, I felt like I couldn’t express it. Did I really want to play into the angry black woman stereotype?
It was a fun smorgasbord of issues that I was trying to understand. Why did I care? My parents constantly discussed issues, and I was surrounded by people who campaigned, lobbied against, and decried what was happening to our society. My environment was politically active.
Outside Al-Nisa, I found an outlet through charity groups like World Vision’s ‘STIR’ platform online, a forum where young people signed up and talked about international issues, poverty and ways to save the world. I was one of the first to sign up globally, and my friend Katie and I would sit in class refreshing the forum page to see if anyone had replied to our messages. Katie was on my debating team so she got things like social justice, and she was from South Africa so she understood Africa and the impact of inequality in a way that most people in my school didn’t.
I also flirted with several other groups: I attended various Oaktree events, went to my first national conference for young Muslims, checked out Oxfam events, volunteered at the local Islamic schools as a support teacher during my school holidays. I played with the kids and tried to help them learn the content: English, maths, science and general primary school subjects. I wasn’t allowed to do part-time work, but my parents wouldn’t let me lounge at home either, so I had to find ways to keep myself busy. All my activities were social but all had meaning.
When I wasn’t volunteering, my parents would help me organise work experience; this was their way of introducing me to different life avenues so that I could figure out what I was interested in. I found myself in all sorts of fields: marketing, marine policy, graphic design, composite manufacture and aged care. I even tried to get into panelbeating, but the workshop owner didn’t think I would ‘fit in’.
It turned out that I liked building things and making things work. I liked hands-on projects and problem solving. Dad must have loved it; his daughter wanted to be just like him. She wanted to be an engineer.
Chapter 8:
Building Stuff
Woodwork class in
grade ten introduced me to a whole new world. Walking into the workshop felt like coming home: the smell of varnish and wood shavings imbued the room with a feeling of industriousness, like things were happening. It was a world where only the tools and the pine mattered. I could leave my stress at the door. This is where I learnt that the simplicity of the physical, mechanical world is my panacea for the burnout-inducing complexity of social change.
With my love of palaeontology, rock and random diseases, I had always wanted to be a scientist, so when we got to choose our subjects in the first semester of grade ten I chose chemistry, biology and physics without hesitation, and design and technology for a bit of fun. I’d always thought building stuff would be cool.
There were a couple of other girls in the class, but it was dominated by boys – and these weren’t sensitive, book-reading boys; these were the rugby boys, the players and the jokers. The kind of boys I’d never hung out with because, well, girls like me didn’t hang out with boys like them, although they mirrored the masculinity approved of in Sudan.
I had a few things going for me that made fitting in slightly easier. By this point, I was totally obsessed with cars, ever since my brother rented Catch That Kid, a B-grade bank heist movie that introduced me to the world of go-karting and racing. It was the beginning of a love affair with the sport that would take me to Barcelona, Malaysia and even Monaco.
I announced to my mum that I wanted to be a Formula 1 driver – the first black, female, Muslim on the grid. Then I started researching cars, borrowing basketfuls of books from the library, collecting pictures, and covering my walls with posters of Lamborghinis, Dodge Vipers and Supras. There was no way my parents were going to fund a driving career because they said it wasn’t ‘serious’, but I could love cars anyway, right? I spent hours trawling online forums and learning about engines. SeriousWheels.com was my favourite haunt because it gave me the specifications I was after for almost any car and listed all the new models hitting the market.
I often get asked what I love about cars, which highlights an unconscious double standard because we never ask guys the same question or expect them to justify their interest. When I saw Catch That Kid, I fell in love with speed and all that it represented. The kid in the go-kart looked like nothing could stop them. Something in the simplicity of perfecting a drive was entrancing: a person and a machine, going faster and faster around the track each time. My love of cars persisted because there was so much to learn and it was such an exciting world. Structurally, cars are more or less the same at a base level, yet there’s enormous variety, every possible type of expression in their shape, the way they drive and the amount of power some have. Every detail, every flourish – every car has a story.
I learnt to reel off names and statistics about Formula 1 drivers, fastest production car specifications and the best set-ups for getting the Nissans and Toyotas to drift. I had no practical experience yet but I could hold my own among the boys when it came to our knowledge, which it often did.
I had a father who got me involved in home maintenance early: Yasseen and I would be called upon to lug out his toolbox whenever something needed fixing. Baba’s toolbox was a tan briefcase filled to the brim with tools from his university days in London. It was beaten and worn shiny from years of use, but it was more than double my age, so it was treated with respect, love and care. As he worked, Dad would tell us the story of each and every tool and how his toolbox was the target of many a theft attempt in Sudan. I never got tired of those tales.
In between stories, he would talk my brother and me through whatever process we were undertaking. Fixing leaking taps was a common task; firstly we would go to the shop and find the jumper valve, o-rings and washers we needed, then we would all crouch in front of the water main control panel sunk into our lawn to switch off the house’s water supply. Yasseen would try to get involved, despite my overbearing body language, but I was too wrapped up in my own world to pay him much attention. My brother had a heart of gold and he looked up to his sister, so I regret how I often treated him as a competitor rather than being a caring older sibling. My idea of being nurturing at the time was setting up a mini-blackboard to teach Yasseen basic literacy and numeracy skills.
After we’d watched my dad replace a washer or change the oil in the mower engine a few times, Baba would hand the tools to us: ‘Yalla, Yassmina! Khalas, you’re a big girl – it’s your turn.’
I could have had an alternative career as a plumber or a handy-woman. Dad never treated me differently because I was a girl; he shared his love of engineering with both his children in equal measure. He took us to science museums to explain the history of technology and how the world works. One of the first gifts that I remember making a real impression on me was a microscope I used to investigate objects around me, comparing strands of my hair to my neighbour’s, looking at flies and ants up close. When my brother got into Meccano, Dad always encouraged me to get involved building those worlds as well.
Although these things didn’t make me want to be an engineer, they did divorce my interests from my gender. The social cues and expectations we get as children have an enormous impact on how we see the world, whether we realise it or not. In some ways my father is quite a conservative man; he is more right wing than left, more capitalist than socialist, and he believes in traditional gender roles within the social and family context. Despite this he actively encouraged me to be independent and resourceful from a very young age, because he doesn’t believe gender roles apply to your intelligence or career path. My father saw education as the great equaliser, and didn’t think that it should be confined to men, whether that was learning complex mathematical equations or how to fix a tap. His teaching me practical skills from an early age also meant that I had a head start in woodwork class and so I was more than able to hold my own.
Another woodwork teacher may have thought girls didn’t belong in the class, but Mr Stumpf’s encouragement was instrumental in shaping my positive experiences. He was one of the first of many mentors who have pushed me.
It turned out I was pretty good at building stuff, partly because I wanted to prove that I was more than the academic chick I was known as. My father often talked about how many academics were divorced from society, and about how important it is to know how contractors and tradies work, as they create the world engineers design. Many years later, this is what drove me to take a hands-on operator’s role in the field rather than an engineering role when I graduated from university. I wanted to understand life in the ‘trenches’, and also be able to gain the added respect and legitimacy from having experienced that perspective.
The workshop benches were pitted and marked with years of high school student abuse: chips from dropped chisels and planes, budding artists’ graffiti and varnish stains. Beside the doorway were the bench drills, and large windows let in natural light and air. The back wall was an enormous pegboard that stretched from the floor to the roof, home to all the hand tools – wood saws, metal saws, screwdrivers, various sizes of chisels and wood planes - each outlined so it was obvious if anything was missing.
The workshop was hidden away from the rest of the school and before class we would mill out the front, generally ending up in a big circle, exchanging verbal blows.
A new part of me thrived on being able to speak the language of the lads; I had access to a new club, and with it a level of legitimacy and social currency. Diverging from social expectations gave me leverage and connected me with others outside of my usual groups. I’ve always been super curious about how people who aren’t in my world live and operate, fascinated by characters from worlds where I don’t feel I inherently belong, and the workshop was filled with those.
One of the first guys I met was a short blond surfer with a false front tooth that he would wiggle menacingly to freak out the girls. He always hung out with the leader of their group, a tall brunette with a smart mouth who I often had good chat with.
Then there were the ‘lads’
– the guys who dated the pretty girls and strutted around like they owned the playground. They either wouldn’t say much to me or were total jokers, and I loved seeing these seemingly unflappable lads at their goofiest.
One of the coolest guys in the class was a football player who wandered around with his socks sagging and a swagger that belied his private-school white-boy background. Even though he was too cool for me, the nerdy Muslim girl, we both liked cars and so when I saw the ride he had as his laptop wallpaper I couldn’t resist asking him if he actually wanted a 180 SX, as I preferred Supras. We’d never had a reason to talk before, so he looked slightly taken aback. ‘Yeah, it’s the first car I want to get,’ he replied cautiously, and with that began a strange, secret sort of friendship. We would email during class, passing notes about the different kind of rides we were interested in and what had piqued our interest in the motorsport world. It was the end of Michael Schumacher’s era and the beginning of Alonso’s, so a lot was happening, and it was nice to have someone to share it with. And it didn’t hurt that he was kind of cute.
My fourteen-year-old self would never have imagined that within a decade I would be travelling to the very races I watched on TV.
Once this car-loving football player established my credibility at the beginning of that first conversation, he never again questioned it. He took me seriously as a fellow car lover, and his early acceptance allowed me the confidence to feel like I could claim the space as my own. I learnt that if you establish credibility as a car person, the usual identifiers of race, religion, gender, sexuality and able-bodiedness become unimportant. All you need to do is speak ‘car’.
The rest of the woodwork class were gamers, skaters or kids from the usual high school groups.
Yassmin’s Story Page 12