Beyond pity - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Robert Hillman
WELL BEFORE ZARAH LEFT HER HOMELAND IN 2004, it had been claimed that Muslims of a certain sort were capable of drowning their own children on the high seas, if that was what it took to gain entry into Australia. Further revelations established that this dire practice was a local political concoction, but some Australians – perhaps many – remained persuaded that, under the right circumstances, Muslims would sacrifice their children.
Before she left Tehran, I kept Zarah well informed of the toxic anti-Muslim atmosphere building in Australia. My indignation tended to override my judgement. After all, I lived in an area of Melbourne where Muslim women from a dozen countries went about their business traditionally garbed and I'd never witnessed a single incident or insult. If I'd thought about it a bit longer, I would have realised how capable these women were of looking after themselves. I might have reflected on my own experience of living and travelling in Muslim countries, and recalled the wit, humour and cool mockery of male posturing that I'd noticed often enough amongst Muslim women.
Without intending to, I was contributing to Zarah's anxieties about the reception a young Muslim woman, a citizen of the pariah state of Iran, would meet in Melbourne. This had the perceptible effect of nudging her along a path she would have negotiated herself, but with more care and reflection. Her spiritual allegiance was divided between the Muslim faith of her father and the Zoroastrian faith of her mother, but preparing for her journey to Australia, she opted for Zoroastrianism.
Still severely traumatised by what she had endured in Evin prison, Zarah's attempt at recovery in Melbourne was hindered every time a government minister censured Australia's Muslims. She had enough political savvy to discern the government's strategy and, left to her own counsel, would have coped nicely. But she had to contend with both my pique and my concern:
"Did you see that stuff on the news? Costello?"
"Of course, Robert."
"Don't take any notice of him. It's crap."
"I know."
"What he said, that's not what all Australians think."
"Yes, I know."
"Still, better keep an eye out."
"An eye out?"
"You know, just be careful."
"You want me to be careful?"
"Yes."
"Okay. Careful of what?"
My concern for Zarah extended to her wardrobe. I was most relaxed when her choice of clothes matched that of every other casually dressed young woman on the streets of Melbourne: low-cut jeans, broad belt, simple top. Then, perversely, I began to worry that she looked too much like every other young woman. When we went to meet publishers to discuss a book we'd written together, I almost suggested that she wear a head-scarf with her jeans.
I was not only unwittingly amplifying the government's invidious message, I was on the verge of suggesting that Zarah perform the unspoken obligation of all immigrants to Australia: to be exotic and different – "colourful", in fact. We have come to approve of the exotic complement to the Australian way of life; we attend the festivals of colourful newcomers, celebrate their enrichment of our cuisine, endorse their right to be a little bit different. But we ask them, the colourful newcomers, to accept that we are not interested in changing anything. Colour is fine, but we want it as ornament, hundreds and thousands sprinkled on a blancmange, the blandness beneath untouched.
Najaf told me of a time in the Woomera Detention Centre when anxiety over his wife and baby daughter, still in Afghanistan, reduced him to despair. He wandered about the camp looking for a place where he could suffer in privacy. He had only one shoe; the other had been left floating somewhere on the Timor Sea. It was spring in the desert, but spring that year was unseasonably cold. He settled against a brick wall, drew the grey blanket from his bed around his shoulders and, without thinking about it at all, began to sing a shepherd's song of Northern Afghanistan:
Let us go to Mazar, oh my beloved
Let us see the red flowers bloom,
The red flowers of Mazar
Go tell my sweetheart her lover has arrived!
She is a daffodil. A buyer has come to take her.
Go tell my love that the unending days of love have arrived,
For her sweetheart has come, her true love has come.
Come, oh my beloved!
My desire for you has made me mad
Your wine-coloured lips have made me mad
But while I wait to drink from your glass
My heart is full of fear.
The place Najaf had chosen was under the balcony of the office where immigration officers spent the day. As he sang, one officer, then another and another strolled out on to the balcony, attracted by the song. Before he'd finished singing (the song repeats its final five lines as a chorus and can go on for some time), six people were standing on the balcony, smiling down at Najaf. He grew self-conscious and stopped singing.
"Go on!" one of the officers called.
Najaf waved his hand and shook his head.
"Go on! You sing beautifully!"
"Finish," said Najaf, employing one of his twenty words of English.
"Sing it again!"
"Finish," Najaf repeated. He got to his feet and went in search of a more genuinely private place. He walked on his one shoe, his blanket still drawn about his shoulders.
I HAVE NOW RETREATED FROM MY INSUFFERABLE supervision of Zarah's resettlement in Melbourne; I have stopped worrying about what Najaf wears, says and does. The Damascus moment came for me a few months ago when Zarah asked me about the term "thought police", which had appeared in a newspaper article on the war in Iraq. I summarised Orwell's 1984, and the conversation led to a discussion on torture – a subject Zarah knew more about than the average person. When I spoke of Room 101, Orwell's vision of the ultimate hell, Zarah nodded and unconsciously put her hand to her head – an associative mannerism she has whenever the subject of interrogation comes up. "We have one in Evin," she said, and went on to explain that the chamber had been established by Savak, the Shah's secret police, and was preserved by Iran's present regime. I waited for her to say more, but she didn't. "You didn't go there?" I eventually asked, and Zarah laughed, not with mirth. "I'm sitting here talking to you, aren't I?"
In the days that followed this conversation, I thought of Zarah in her tiny cell in Evin Prison – a prison the size of a city. I thought of her seeking a way she could rest that spared her back and shoulders and arms, where the lash had landed, that spared her bruised legs and ribcage. A few floors below, Evin's version of Room 101 was awaiting her, for all she knew. Her great hope was that she would be asked to confess and sign a document of some sort. At her final interrogation, the document was offered but, before agreeing to sign, she suggested to the interrogator that he simply have her killed. The interrogator declined.
What did I think I was doing in trying to shield a young woman with such wherewithal from the foolish bluster of our politicians? I should have been thinking of the grit and anger and spiritual ambition that Zarah had brought with her to Australia. I should have been thinking, too, of Najaf's daring and intelligence, not his wardrobe. I had to concede that I had adopted a version of the Australian multicultural conceit: genial assimilation. A cynical reworking of that conceit informs the repeated rebukes of Muslims, but even in its uncorrupted form – expressed as a collage of variously pigmented folk singing We Are Australian – the conceit adds to the sentimentality sloshing about. It does not add to the nation's vigour.
The vital life of any nation, I have come to believe, is better served by the arrival of immigrants who take a look around and decide to change things, just as they may have wished to do in their first homeland. Or, if they are happy with what they find, well and good. At least let them be free of the pity of people like me. ♦