Purple Prose

by Liz Byrski

  The mango, like the tide, reminds me that people fall in and out of love and the world goes on regardless. Somehow, for me, this is comforting.

  My Descent into Purple – Hanifa Deen

  I live in Melbourne and most of my clothes are black. Wearing black is an unwritten law one doesn’t easily put aside, especially in writing enclaves and other avant-garde circles where the inner-city suburbs of Carlton and Brunswick are home to black-clad warriors of every age. Black is also the literary establishment colour and although I rarely cross this hallowed threshold, or consider myself a paid-up member, I do my best to abide by the ‘bylaws’ of bookish circles and my adopted city. Add to this the absurdity of walking down the Paris-end of fashionable Collins Street without showing a predilection for black!

  Ten years ago, when I first came to Melbourne, I eased into my new tribal colours without any shilly-shallying. Farewelling Perth’s magnificent beaches, cotton clothes and deep suntans, I said Guten Tag to Melbourne’s European-like autumns and winters. In Melbourne, black and I adopted one another; I felt reborn, although discreet touches of red, burgundy and purple were permitted to signify that I was not trapped in perpetual mourning and I never deserted my footy colours, remaining true blue to the irreconcilably ugly yellow and blues of my West Coast Eagles, in the good years – and the bad. But let’s put black to bed for the time being.

  Investigating my purple past in search of inspiration led me to recently conduct a wardrobe inventory. Patches of purple soon emerged: purple shoes and hats, mauve gloves, scarves and – the pièce de résistance – a magnificent aubergine-coloured, anklelength woolly coat from the 70s. On top of the pile I reverently laid my most recent purple purchase, a hooded raincoat bought for five dollars from my local drycleaner who, after waiting six months for its absentee owner to return, eventually released it into my eager hands: a perfectly legal, if somewhat opportunistic transaction. So I slowly came to realise that a purple portfolio had been with me for years; purple lurking in the background, silent, regal and as enigmatic as purple should be. The evidence mounted that, once upon a time, I had made a pact with purple.

  How had this come to pass, I wondered? How had this penchant for purple slowly dislodged the reds and burgundies that I was once so fond of and which, I hasten to assure any Muslim Urdu readers, had nothing to do with wine or ‘booze’ – although Sharab may sound like Shiraz to the uninitiated. Oh haraam, haraam!

  Intoxication with certain colours, and snubbing others, enters women’s lives from an early age. We begin to slowly understand the place of colour in our lives, and identify with certain pigments at our mother’s knee. My mother used to dress me in pink when I was little and to this day I associate its tender tones with a lack of will, or independence; a certain passivity verging on sulkiness. As I grew older I came to despise pink and to this day I avoid pink. Pink seemed vague, weak and stood in contrast to my mother’s steely will (forcing my straight black hair into ring curls was another of Mum’s daily regimes). Mum abided by the rule that little girls wore pink and little boys blue – blue was bold, blue was strong – pink was gentle, pink was ‘nice’.

  I, on the other hand, felt uncomfortable in pink partly for reasons that I only came to understand later in life. Growing up in the days of the White Australia Policy meant I encountered politics and racism at an early age, long before I knew the meaning of the two words. Immigrants who looked too beige, brown or black, were not allowed into the country and this may have led me to subconsciously identify pink with ‘whiteness’; a skin colour I never aspired to – we were a proud family of Pakistani-Punjabi origin on Dad’s side and Kashmiri-Welsh on Mum’s. Both my grandfathers had entered (legally, I hasten to add) in the 1890s before the doors closed in 1901. Dressing me in a dainty pink dress with pretty smocking, pink socks, and a shiny pink satin bow in my hair was not going to turn this little brown girl into a little white girl – never my mother’s intention – she only wanted me to ‘fit in’, to look ‘nice’ at birthday parties and the like.

  My mum armed me well for combat; I’d come home from the playground upset and she would comfort me. ‘If the Prophet Jesus Christ wanted to enter this country, they wouldn’t let him!’ she would say. Hooray! Jesus was brown – just like me! I inherited Mum’s sharp tongue and irreverent outlook and these two gifts I nurtured at a time in our history when terms like ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘cultural diversity’ were not part of the Australian lexicon.

  Much later in life I came to a better understanding of the mother–daughter connection; that first binding relationship in a young girl’s life that falters but never fades; where a daughter struggles to control her own life without losing her mother’s love. Reading Nancy Friday’s My Mother, Myself, explained certain tensions between my mother and me as I was growing up, even in the small matter of choosing colours.

  Under a maternal dictatorship we have no ‘free colour will’, so to speak. As we mature, our preference for certain colours emerges and becomes linked to our identity – some may be subconscious like a yearning to disobey, break the rules, become independent while others are more obvious – let’s not mince words here. Doesn’t vanity play a role? Men do not suffer from this malady: this obsession to enhance one’s appearance through the magic of colour, although I’ve been told that generation Y males are heading down the corridors of colour consciousness.

  Looking back over time at the palette of colours I have selected as an act of free will, I now understand that my real rapprochement with purple began much later in life and really had little to do with purple as a feminist emblem. I’m not embarrassed to admit publicly, for the first time, that purple appealed to me because it suited my brown hair, complexion and eyes – yes, ‘colour conceit’ conveniently cloaked under the feminist ‘ism’, added to my library of other ‘isms’. Although this may shock some readers, I admit, from the distance of this page, that I possess a shallow streak of egotism. In the past I was happy enough for sister feminists and passers-by to assume what they liked – and besides I was a ‘bloody feminist’ so did it really matter why I donned the purple?

  For the moment, however, let me take a pause from purple as I return to an earlier period in my life where the lessons I learnt formed part of my personal self-help manual on ‘How to Manage Difference in Ten Difficult Steps’.

  In the early 1970s I set sail for exotic shores, places and people. I was heading for ‘Europe’. I was youngish, smug and adventurous. Yes, I would stay overseas in a non-English speaking country and experience the life of a foreigner. Often I’d had a taste of that at home when sometimes asked, ‘Where were you born?’ or ‘Hanifa is a lovely name – where does it come from?’ ‘I come from a desert country’, I would answer, trying hard not to smirk, before adding with a theatrical flourish that I was born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. Now I sensed that, once outside Australia, this insider joke would no longer serve me.

  For nearly a decade, my colour of choice – the shade that held deep political and emotional significance for me – was red: stark, startling, dramatic, socialist. All of this took place in what I think of as my ‘German period’. ‘Radical Red’ took hold of me. One might say I was wed to red!

  I had eventually made my way via Holland to West Germany where I taught English at the Moltke Gymnasium (high school) in Krefeld for eight years. My German students dubbed me ‘Skippy’ during the era of the television show of the same name. This happened in the years before German reunification, when two Germanys existed – West Germany and East Germany, separated by the Berlin Wall.

  I stood out: a foreigner who looked Turkish to most Germans, and was often taken for a Gastarbeiter (‘guest’ or foreign worker). The term ‘guest’ made me smile for I knew that, like all visitors, you were always expected to one day pack up and leave.

  Gastarbeiters carried out the work no right-minded German would do, and returned to Turkey or Spain a little richer but much wiser as to the ways of the West. But that was in t
he bad old days. Germany has changed over the last three decades since the two Germanys were reunited and citizenship laws reformed.1 This is not the Germany I remember. In the 70s my own nationality and background were often questioned. English might be my mother tongue but I didn’t look American or British in most people’s eyes. Perhaps people were just curious, but I’d had a lifetime of answering this question … some were more than inquisitive.

  What did I do for a living? Was I really a high school Lehrerin: teaching at an elite German school? I knew what they meant. I looked like a brown Turkish guest worker – maybe a Putz Frau, a cleaning lady – why masquerade as a teacher? They were signalling, politely, that I should know my place. All right! I might not look like a ‘dinky-di Aussie’, I decided, but doubting my professional credentials was beyond the pale.

  I am sitting with friends at a crowded local café when a man, listening in from an adjacent table, interrupts and proceeds to inform all and sundry that I, most certainly, am not an Australian! I’m a Schwindler (imposter, poseur). He’s been to Sydney, he says, and Australians don’t look like me.

  ‘Wetten wer?’ I reply. (You want to bet?)

  Off I race in my red VW Beetle (dubbed ‘Eric the Red’) returning fifteen minutes later, passport in hand, whereupon I take a 100 Deutschmark off him with a smile. If I remember, he was, more or less, a good loser. I knew my dad – staunchly Muslim, but in his younger days occasionally tempted to have a ‘flutter’ on the ‘gee-gees’ – would have been proud of me.

  By then I belonged to a posse of outsiders comprised of non-Germans and ‘naughty’ Germans. The non-Germans were mainly from Turkey, Spain, Chile and Ecuador. I remember the Chilean male students – the guitar music they played, their mood-swings from laughter to melancholy, how they relived the overthrow of their elected Socialist President Allende by General Pinochet in 1973. The 1982 movie Missing based on the book of the same name by Thomas Hauser relates in detail what happened to three thousand Chileans. Two hundred thousand went into exile.

  As for the ‘naughty Germans’, they were members of the Deutsche Kommunistische Partei. These were the folk who nurtured my ascent into ‘redness’. In 1972 party members were trapped in a catch 22 legal paradox, the so-called ‘Edict Against Radicals’.2 The Communist Party might be legal under the constitution, so was their daily newspaper, but members of the party were Berufsverbot (forbidden) from working as teachers, social workers, and in other public sector jobs, and branded as ‘the enemy within’ – even a poor old ‘town postie’ was sacked. More than three million people were put through loyalty checks resulting in eleven thousand ban proceedings. Admittedly this was a reaction to the Red Army Faction terrorism at the time. Careers, marriages and lives were ruined.3

  The red brigade and I got on well. They liked foreigners, displayed a droll sense of humour, were the ‘full bottle’ on international politics (albeit with a ‘twist’ of Lenin), opposed South Africa’s apartheid policies and the Vietnam War; they were a collective of motivated journalists, actors and artists – altogether a loquacious lot and maybe a reflection of myself at the time. They were not as ‘correct’ as my teaching colleagues who, while friendly enough in the staff room, never invited me into their homes. With the latter I remained ‘on the outside looking in’. So I became redder and redder: jackets, scarves, boots, my auto Eric the Red and more importantly a way of looking at the world that crossed borders of race and ethnicity. Social Justice was the rallying cry for the red posse I rode with.

  At around this time I encountered my first red feminist heroine – Clara Zetkin. I’d never heard of her before. Originally a Socialist Party leader, she became a member of the new German Communist Party in 1919. Clara and her colleague, Luise Zietz, founded International Women’s Day (IWD). More than a million women across Europe marched on March 19th, 1911.Why was her name missing from the books I’d read on feminists?

  Almost overnight I morphed into a conspiratory theorist. As history shows, the second wave of Anglo-American feminism in the 70s carried the day: purple and green prevailed and won the tug of war against red; the latter becoming passé except in certain labour movements around the world where you can’t keep a good Red down.

  Today in the twenty-first century, there’s room for everyone. IWD is a global phenomenon, albeit a rather commercialised Remembrance Day laden with lunches, speeches and twenty-four hour bonhomie. Modern histories now include Clara. I am content – Clara has emerged from ‘exile’.

  Non-conformity and defiance are traits that fascinate me perhaps more than they should. I associate them with history, politics, literature – and the wonderful world of cinema. I’ve been a movie buff practically all my life and used to wag grade seven primary school to sneak into picture shows (globite case in hand) and gaze enraptured at the big screen and the big stars. My parents and teachers never found out and of course I forged my mother’s signature on notes to the teacher, claiming, ‘poor Hanifa wasn’t well yesterday …’ Sometimes I wonder if I’d not ‘descended’ into writing non-fiction, might I have written the odd (perhaps very odd!) screenplay? How do you define a feminist movie in the twenty-first century? Thelma and Louise, The Colour Purple – so many contenders – surely not ‘chick flicks’ – I hope not.

  A screenplay about Clara that oozed box office appeal? Somehow I doubt it. Yet the material is all there even if the audience isn’t! The closing scenes all based on a day in August 1932 … not fiction but fact.

  Physically frail, seventy-five-year-old Clara travels 1,000 miles by train from Moscow (where she now lives) to Berlin to claim her right, as the Reichstag oldest member, to open Parliament. Leaning on her walking stick, she denounces her old enemy, Paul von Hindenburg, President of the Weimar Republic. On that day SS troops wait outside shouting battle cries, demonstrating what is yet to come. A year later the way is clear for Hitler. Clara dies that same year.

  Wake up! Time for a reality check! Even if Clara was played by the ever-imperious Dame Maggie Smith, looking down her nose, ready to box ears and thump anyone in her way with a black ebony-handled walking stick, it would be a flop. Sixty or so years after the end of McCarthyism and the Un-American Activities Committee, I somehow doubt that Hollywood is ready for Lenin’s voice-over at the end.

  ‘The German Communists have only one good man and that is a woman: Clara Zetkin.’

  Music swells … Camera fades … credits run – and there’s my name on the list. Curtain descends.

  The road to purple was a long and winding road with rest stops along the way. Every few years, for a month or so, I left Germany and returned to my hometown Perth. To my surprise I found that hems were longer, a new ‘ism’ called ‘multiculturalism’ was hailed as a prestigious government policy and, following the end of the Vietnam War, South Vietnamese refugees (dubbed ‘boat people’) were settling in, plus – lo and behold – some women were keeping their maiden names after marriage. And long overdue changes in some aspects of Aboriginal affairs had begun – Land Rights in 1976. The Deaths in Custody Commission and the Australian Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation were yet to come.

  On each visit I noticed the exciting development of the second wave of Australian feminists. These were heady times; I read one feminist book after the other …: I fell in love with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Anne Summer’s Damned Whores and God’s Police, Marilyn French and a host of others. I finally returned home for good in late 1979 and nearly drowned in the new wave of purple. Wearing purple became a statement, but the colour didn’t move me emotionally. I ticked the box but worried that I was becoming an ‘absentee feminist’, just as I had once been an absentee Australian.

  Dale Spender used to say, ‘If someone says, “Oh, I’m not a feminist,” I ask, “Why? What’s your problem?” Spender, in the 1980s, began wearing purple in recognition of the early suffragettes and this rich colour now became ‘ours’. But as I have already confessed, that is not why I befrien
ded purple. In the 80s, Reclaim the Night marches and the colour purple took off with a vengeance. I joined the marches but not the organisations for two reasons: firstly, I felt Australian – I always had but saw no traces of me in these new organisations; secondly my energy and commitment was focused on the nascent migrant workers’ movement and the emergence of ethnic communities’ councils around Australia supporting the new policy of multiculturalism, which in those days was not a ‘dirty’ word. Multiculturalism to me meant more than applauding culinary exotica and smiling on Harmony Days. Harmony has never been one of my strengths; as a writer I am more interested in clarifying conflict. I smell conflict and I see red!

  After a stimulating and unsteady career in the public service in the government bureaus of multiculturalism, equal opportunity and human rights, I grew weary of my Yes Minister style reports written in turgid prose that dulled the senses and should have led to my arrest for murdering the English language. Finally, I handed in my public service uniform of cream suits with padded shoulders, stocking tights and mini-heels and turned to full-time writing about people who were reflections of me and my family – my tribe in the good times – and the bad.

  By the mid-1990s there were approximately 350,000 Muslims in Australia – the White Australia Policy was over. The vast majority of Australians looked at Muslims with indifference – the term ‘Islamophobia’ was not yet a part of Australian mainstream language. September 11, the Bali bombings, and other murderous outrages committed in the name of Islam would one day change this. Being ignored but nevertheless getting on with your life wasn’t possible any more – mindsets hardened. Muslims became trapped in an age of circling the wagons, forced, or ‘seduced’ into constantly defending Islam. I took another way out: writing non-religious books about Muslims as people who mowed their lawns (or didn’t), worried about losing weight or paying the mortgage, who fell in and out of love or told their kids bedtime stories.