Yassmin’s Story

by Yassmin Abdel-Magied

  Knowing which battles to pick is important, and this was definitely not the last time I would have to make such a decision. There is rife injustice in this world, and as a woman of colour and of faith, injustice affects me on a daily basis, but if I got frustrated or tried to fight every single inequality, not only would I burn out, but I’d be ineffective. This is why I won’t pick a fight with every single guy on the rig who says something misogynistic, or every random colleague who’s a little racist or sexist. I will try to find ways to influence those situations, but my focus is on battles that deal with structural inequality. It is important to persuade individuals, but the system is a lot harder to change. If you’re going to take on the system, you want to make sure you’re prepped.

  Which battles to pick became a decision I had to make almost everywhere I went, whether it was school, the rigs or the sailing club. I had thought things might be different, more professional and less biased once I joined the workforce and ‘grown-up’ sporting clubs but it turned out that I was mistaken.

  I never had any desire to sail until the opportunity presented itself. I was a few years out of university by now, and my colleagues in Perth were part of a sailing competition and invited anyone interested to join in. I thought, Why not? I was curious as to what type of people I’d meet in the sailing sphere.

  As to be expected with any sport that combines water and a desert-born human, there was an adjustment period. There was a 30-knot wind for my first afternoon on the water, which wasn’t the perfect environment for beginners but I was not to be dissuaded. Committed to learning this new skill, I wriggled onto the boat, locking my feet under the strap and heading out towards the buoy.

  As my boat sailed faster, the hull started flying. I was right in the middle of the pack, loving the feeling of the wind rushing over my hijab. This is easy! I thought, and glanced over at the drilling engineer on the boat beside me.

  ‘Hey!’ I yelled. ‘Look how fast I’m going!’

  Max smiled, but the next moment his face changed –

  THWACK!

  My boat careened into the front of his and launched me up, across and into the water. My boat capsized, I put a huge dent into the front of Max’s boat and I ended up at the bottom of the river. I gave the sailing instructor heart palpitations that afternoon. It was the start of a strange love affair with sailing.

  Sailing the surf cats became so addictive I joined the local yacht club – fancy indeed. Apparently you’re supposed to find someone to introduce you so you can gracefully enter the society. Not me, no, sir. I simply went online, looked up a course that would teach me how to sail, and registered myself into a sailing club course.

  People ask why I constantly put myself into situations where I don’t quite belong, and the answer is that I love the adventure of novel experiences, of trying something new in an unfamiliar environment. I’m always fascinated by other people’s lives and their stories. By gaining access to their world I get to learn how another type of person lives, thinks and exists in the society around them. In doing so I know that I’m also showing people the value of my perspectives and cultures.

  I had a quite close friend who once said our friendship ‘pretty much single-handedly knocked my views into shape’. When I pressed him on what he meant, it became clear that when he was growing up he had no exposure to Muslims and so his opinions were based on what he saw on TV. He was biased, and frightened of what he saw.

  The reality for my friend, as for so many others, was once he met me – a real-life Muslim – and we began to connect, he moved past the one-dimensional view of Muslims he’d been fed by the media. When people are able to openly ask questions, their ignorance and hate is diluted – even if they don’t come around to the ideology, something violent and dark is turned into simple disagreement. I hoped that if I encountered any bias at the yacht club, I could do something similar and open the members’ minds as we became mates.

  The weekend sailing course sessions were relaxing, picturesque and full of new skills to learn. We were taught how to handle the wind, how to jibe and tack, what beam-reach and close-haul meant and when to shout ‘Starrrrboaaard!’ Once I befriended the instructors, they let me into their club, and when I asked if there were any boats that needed an extra member I found my way onto a crew.

  I met the team on a Saturday morning as they were preparing for the race: three older Anglo men who were brave enough to take on my fledgling sailing skills.

  The skipper introduced himself, but when I gave him my name he said, ‘I’ve got a terrible memory, and I won’t remember your name. You remind me of Serena Williams, though, so I’ll just call you Serena from now on.’

  As I laughed along I wondered if I should be outraged. I wasn’t – but was that wrong? I chose not to be, storing his remark as a funny anecdote. This sort of casual racism happens all the time because banter by its nature often walks the fine line between edgy and inappropriate. I allow some of it to pass, picking my battles.

  In theory, if you thought something was inappropriate you would explain why to the perpetrator and they would listen and adjust their attitude. In reality, the world is not so clear-cut and it can be more effective to influence the person’s attitude by becoming part of their domain and then slowly asking questions that challenge their accepted world view. During conversations, I also like to insert stories and anecdotes that come from a completely intersectional perspective and subtly contest all the views previously articulated. Change from the inside, right?

  I have also learnt to never take things personally. Australian ribbing is like a game of air hockey – lightning-fast back and forth – with points scored easily on both sides of the table; and points are how you climb the social totem pole in Australia, among men at least. How do you climb that greasy banter totem pole as a woman in a male-dominated space? When talking to a group of men, for example on a sailboat or on the rig, I occasionally choose to use ‘the sassy black women’ trope that most men would understand from music, movies and TV through the likes of Nicki Minaj, Miranda Bailey from Grey’s Anatomy and the caricatures in White Chicks. Slipping into this character allows me to signal that I’m powerful without having to use the men’s language. You could argue this isn’t authentic and that using tropes is damaging, undermining a black woman’s agency. But sometimes it’s an invaluable way in for me, a way to speak in a language Australians have at least heard before. People already know that I am a brown Muslim woman. How do I come into a white male world and get respect? I show them that my sass and my wit and my banter game is just as good as theirs, and there is no getting anything past me. All of a sudden, I have established a place in the pecking order that they understand, and then we can go on from there.

  Chapter 14:

  Oriental or Official?

  ‘So, Yassmin. Do you think you Orientalise yourself by allowing yourself to be used as a token on the councils and boards you’re on?’

  Ohhhhhh. I froze as my brain scrambled. I’d been thrown into the deep end and was going to sink, fast. ‘Wait, what?’

  ‘You know you’re just there to fill the diversity ticket, so they can say there’s a young Muslim person and that makes their decisions legitimate, right? How do you live with that?’

  I was keen when a couple of Muslim ladies from Western Sydney said they wanted to interview me for their local Islamic radio show, especially since they suggested meeting at a local restaurant that sold Afghan halal food. I was beyond excited to be eating at a place that didn’t just serve kebabs or Nando’s – Brisbane still had slim pickings.

  As we said our Salaams [hellos] and sat down, I wondered if this was going to be a tough interview. They were both smart and charming and it was clear they wanted genuine, considered answers to questions that went beyond the superficial. This was an unusual situation; more often than not I was explaining very basic Islamic concepts to an uninformed audience. This interview was likely to put me through my paces.

  I paused, taking sto
ck of all the times I’ve sat on an executive board. The very first was in 2008 when I had just turned seventeen and I joined the board of the Queensland Museum. For a long time, I didn’t quite know how I made it onto the board. The invitation came entirely unexpectedly in a letter from the Queensland Museum and it took me years to understand the opportunity that I’d been presented with. A policy change requiring the Museum to have a stronger focus on engaging young people had brought my break. My name had come up through a board member who had seen my announcement as Young Australian Muslim of the Year in 2007. I took the chance without a second thought, the way I did most things then.

  I was in my first year of engineering at the University of Queensland and I arrived at my first board meeting straight from class, board papers heavy against the calculus textbooks in my Country Road bag. Deep wooden double doors opened up into a chamber that would become familiar to me over the next eight years, but at that moment, I couldn’t believe I had made it here. An enormous timber table gleamed in the centre of the room, overlooked by glass windows offering panoramic views of Southbank. The back wall was decorated with framed pieces of the Museum’s collection. I strode in and took the first available seat – the seat, as it turned out, right next to both the Chair and the CEO of the Museum. My board adventure had begun.

  It took me some time to understand my role. I would read the board papers but sometimes skip over the finances when I didn’t understand what was going on. I just tried to see if anything didn’t quite add up, making notes like ‘Whoa, this looks like a lot for lightbulbs?!’ and ‘What is this expense, anyway?!’ I felt the weight of responsibility and treated the process seriously even though I often felt a little out of my depth. I wondered if the others could tell, but years later, when I asked a board member for some insight into this time, she put a different spin on it, saying that the Chair of the board had appreciated my engineering training, which meant I often asked concise questions about systemic change. Thinking back on it, I began to appreciate how the Chair had created space for me at that table by asking my opinion and considering my contributions sincerely. These established professionals were listening to the thoughts and musings of a teenager, one who hadn’t even finished her degree. I realised these board members used their privilege not only to sponsor me but also to actively enable me to contribute to the board. In fact, it was these board members who would later nominate me for Young Queenslander of the Year.

  This is an example of how those with power, particularly wealthy white men, can use their privilege to enable people from marginalised groups without co-opting their voices. They got me to the table and legitimised my voice. The power had been shared and become more abundant, leading to positive outcomes for all.

  For the first few meetings, I observed how people spoke, mirroring the tones and language they used. I’d discovered, through hanging with the boys at school, this was a good way of short-circuiting the assumptions people held when you didn’t look like them, as using familiar language can give you credibility, and I’ve used this technique to great effect in many other situations since. I didn’t know much about the museum industry, so I needed to figure out how I could be useful, and asking questions became my ticket. Trial and error taught me how to ask the right questions, but I still felt I needed to contribute more substance, so after a year, when my mother asked me how it was all travelling, I still wasn’t sure. I felt like I didn’t have anything to offer alongside the other board members’ experience.

  ‘Yassmina, they didn’t approach you to be a copy of a fifty-year-old white man. They brought you on the board for who you are, so just be genuine. They want your voice – don’t tell them what you think they want to hear, just tell them your thoughts.’

  Ah, okay. Try to be myself and to not be embarrassed I wasn’t like everyone else. I redoubled my efforts to understand the board papers, and then asked the questions I genuinely felt like asking, but using language that would translate in that forum:

  ‘Why are we still doing this? Does it fit with the strategy we’ve agreed on?’

  ‘Are we thinking about people aged thirteen to twenty-five in any of these programs? Why can’t they become part of our demographic?’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like an event I would attend; it is more aligned for this other demographic …’

  Sometimes, I let my own language slip through.

  ‘Let’s do that! That sounds awesome.’

  I probably offended most of the people around the table at some point, but change takes some discomfort. Age didn’t matter, and I was told that I was both fearless and funny, a combination that enabled me to say what I wanted and often needed to say, while still being taken seriously. It was one of the nicest pieces of feedback I have ever received.

  But of course, finding my voice wasn’t just about the language I used but what I contributed and the reminder came sternly from my father. During a conversation with him about my role on the Board of the Queensland Museum, he reminded me not to be a coconut.

  Being called a coconut implies you are ‘culturally white’ even though you are black (or brown). It’s an insult mainly used in jest, particularly between friends, when you participate in activities that only white people usually do: learning guitar, eating organic food or surfing. It’s an innocent gibe, but saying that people of colour shouldn’t do the activities white people do reinforces the notion that we are fundamentally different and not able to be upwardly mobile without losing our culture.

  From my father, though, the term ‘coconut’ suggests failure – that you’re not quite brown enough on the inside to be ‘ethnic’ and not white enough on the outside to be accepted as one of ‘them’. Dramatic, I know, but it’s all about representation.

  ‘Yassmina, if you are there as a diversity representative, whether token or not, you can’t let yourself be exactly the same as them on the inside. Remember not to be a coconut!’

  ‘What do you mean, Baba?’

  ‘You must keep connecting with al-Sudaniya [the Sudanese] to stay true to your roots. Remember that you are not a white woman. If you end up saying what the rest of the board members are saying and just learning their opinions and not adding anything different, what is the point of you being there? You are then just legitimising their position because they can say “Well, we had a young Arab African hjiabi woman on the board and she didn’t seem to have a problem with it.”

  ‘You are there to bring diverse views to the table. Don’t be scared to say something different – that is what you are there for. Remember to be grounded to the community, remember you are there to empower the communities we came from.’

  I would have to find a way to be a Caramello egg – brown on the outside, and a mix of white and brown on the inside. A mixture whose composition I decide. It is about adapting to change and finding a way to flourish in a new environment. If that meant going from being a Milk Chocolate Lindt ball – brown on the outside and brown on the inside – to a Caramello egg – then so be it. Everyone loves chocolate, anyway.

  Chocolate chat aside, if you want roles like this to come your way it helps to maintain a level of visibility to those making decisions, then making sure that when an opportunity does come along you make the most of it so that other breaks follow. There’s nothing more powerful than a good word or whisper between the right people.

  My second major opportunity came on a mundane afternoon in an email with a nondescript title: Opportunity with Queensland Design Council. I was in second-year university at the time and the council was a new initiative whose remit was to influence the nature of design in the state – not simply product design, but the design of policy, infrastructure, communications. The email was an invitation to be on the board, which was responsible for instilling the principles of good design in everything the state did. It was an awesome opportunity and talked to me as a technical person; engineering is all about finding solutions to problems. I would go from focusing on the number of teeth on a gear in d
esign class at university to sitting in a meeting discussing the future of design policy in the state. It was kind of cool to also be able to contribute more in line with my profession and area of expertise: being an engineer on a design council was seen as a slightly better fit than being one on a museum board.

  The Queensland Design Council would also introduce me to a woman who would have an enormous influence in shaping my life for years to come: Julianne Schultz, the editor of the Griffith Review and then Chair of the Queensland Design Council.

  Early on, Julianne suggested my name as a potential subject to a journalist friend for an article that appeared in The Age in January 2011. The headline used was a quote from the interview where I shared my dream of reaching Formula 1 and read ‘Fired up to be the first female, Muslim F1 driver’. The article went viral. I got interview requests from the USA, the UK, Austria and further afield, along with messages from people around the world wishing me luck on my quest. I got recognised in the street in Western Sydney by another Muslim girl who was like ‘You’re that F1 chick, right?’ At that point, I was a car enthusiast as well as a member of the University of Queensland’s race team, which would design and build a specialised race car that would compete annually against universities in the Australasian region. I worked with my mates on their cars, replacing gearboxes and pottering around their workshops, I attempted to fix my own (but anyone who has owned an Alfa Romeo understands the futility of that ambition), and I would regularly (but unofficially) race my mates at any given opportunity, learning how to rip ‘sick skids’, trying to drift and generally having a mad time in anything with wheels.