Week 12 - How do we own our own myth?
I truly didn't expect to write this today, but alas...
When I started this newsletter at the beginning of this year, I committed to three months - 12 weeks - of weekly newsletters. Although I didn’t hit all 12, I got pretty close… and along the way built a small community who - to my own surprise - read my weekly meandering thoughts. Your comments, emails, and reactions have reminded me that this whole writing thing does have some sort of impact. So, thank you. Thanks for joining this little experiment, and for being so generous with your engagement.
In January, I genuinely wasn’t sure whether or not I’d continue past the three months… but since we’re over 1000 strong, and many of you seem to enjoy, if not get some value from, these pseudo-journal entries, I shall continue. I may occasionally miss a week or so - life sometimes gets in the way of considered reflection - but I pray that you will forgive any lapses. Allez-y, yallah. Let us continue together, inshallah.
‘It’s hard when the worst parts of your life has been an inspiration’.
Oh, did that line hit me in the solar plexus.
It’s a quote from the trailer of a new HBO documentary (that I have not yet seen!) on Tina Turner.
The documentary is characterised by a review as thus:
In capturing the 81-year-old singer’s reflections while she is still alive to give them, Tina offers an intimate examination of what it means for any artist—and especially a Black woman whose music has challenged the narrow confines of genre—to create her own mythos. It lets viewers, even those familiar with the arc of her career, appreciate the monumental work it took for Tina to make rock her own.
Although I am not, and will never be, a rock star (one would have to be able to sing in tune, for a start), that idea struck home with unexpected force. How does one make a story their own?
Some part of me has always resented that some of what folks find most ‘impressive’ about me is going through what I have not chosen. It’s partly why I almost always reject interviews about the events that led to my leaving Australia, it’s why I rarely discuss my ‘past life’ when I meet new people here in Europe. Yes, I had to endure. Yes, I rebuilt. Yes, it was uniquely horrific, despicable, etc etc etc… but I’m not sure that going through horrific public experiences are inspiring so much as they are embarrassing for everyone else involved. Because in those moments, I can’t help but think: where were you, oh interviewer? What has changed, dear sir or madam? Nothing? Well then, why are we having this conversation? Have you personally changed anything in your life as a result of witnessing horrific abuse in the public sphere, time and time and time again? Oh, you haven’t? Nothing at all. Oh, delightful. I’m glad we’re here, I’m so pleased to be tearing my wounds open again, for your viewing pleasure. How wonderful for us all.
If I sound bitter, it’s because I am. I haven’t been able to shake that bitterness, especially towards those from the country I grew up in, Australia. It’s a feeling that’s changed over time; it has cooled from the brittle and incandescent rage I was filled with for a good year or so after I left, matured slightly from the utter devastating betrayal I nursed, alone, in a country halfway across the world, where I knew no-one and started life again from scratch.
It’s personal, and it’s not. It’s well documented, but not quite. It’s a myth that I am apparently meant to be responsive to - responsible for - but I cannot think of anything I would like to do less.
‘Do you regret what happened’, people ask, as if I had any hand in it. ‘Don’t you realise the impact this has on others,’ they say, as if it is somehow my responsibility. The way my body responds physically to lines of questioning, even from friends… oh, sometimes my smouldering anger still surprises me.
There’s always a side of me that wants to soothe, that wants to say to my friends, family and supporters that it is okay, it’s fine, I am fine, it wasn’t that bad, it’s all forgiven… but I cannot abide being turned into a liar, as well. I’m not sure everything is forgivable. And as much as I would like to tell myself otherwise, I have neither forgotten, nor forgiven…I have simply disengaged and moved on. Closed the book and stared a new one. Some might call it a coping mechanism, I call it my choice.
Here’s the rub: I absolutely detest that the country that I grew up in, the place I thought of as home for over two decades, a nation I adored with all my heart, now brings out the absolute worst in me. I am in no way my best self when it comes to Australia, that is a truth that makes me indescribably sad. What an awful, desolate outcome for us all. I want to be my best self. I want to be able to forgive. I want to be gracious, and constructive, and unfailingly generous… but I am just not there yet. And to be honest… I worry that if I am, folks will be let off the hook, no accountability will ever be taken. A part of me believes that my bitterness and fury and self-exile are necessary to remind people of their failures, and lack of repentance.
EDIT: On a re-read, I noticed what I left out. My shame. My shame at feeling this way. For allowing these experiences to disrupt, interrupt, change me… the shame at event putting these feelings down on digital paper…
If you’ve only known of me since I left Australia, I do apologise. Sometimes I speak about what happened in broad brush strokes, assuming everyone knows what I refer to… and of course, that’s not the case. I did this in my essay in the anthology, ‘It’s Not About the Burqa'. I couldn’t bear to go into details, because my own version of the story, the version I wanted to own, hadn’t been written yet. A reviewer found this frustrating, writing, ‘It would have been better if she’d explained what happened’. On reading this, I laughed darkly. I’m sure it would have been. And yet… I still don’t really know what the story is either.
I refuse to let anyone tell the story on my behalf, because I am almost certain they will get it wrong. But then again… I am not sure I am the most reliable narrator, either. But sometimes I worry, that by not letting anyone tell the story at all, I will somehow relegate my own experience to the forgotten annals of history, I will unwittingly disappear it, ‘remove myself from the narrative’, to borrow from the words of Eliza Hamilton.
I’m sure that won’t be the case. Or at least, I hope not, inshallah. But until I figure out what version of this story I want to own, the one that is my truth, I will continue to plow ahead, looking forward, looking for a place to rest my hijab and a room to call my own. Wherever I can get a visa and an internet connection, inshallah.
What I’m reading this week: A few article recommendations for you: this piece on the ‘narrow path to victory’ chosen by the current Australian PM, this short explainer on the newest term in French public debate, ‘Islamo-leftism’, and a long read on a book that I have had strong disagreements with, ‘Caste does not explain race’.
What I’m listening to this week: Y’all should all get into this NYT limited series podcast, ‘Nice White Parents’, recommended to me by Jessie Taylor, a reader of this very newsletter! The blurb: “If you want to understand what’s wrong with our public schools, you have to look at what is arguably the most powerful force in shaping them: white parents.”
What I’m watching this week: If you haven’t seen the documentary on the USA’s College Admissions Scandal, it’s a fun one to dip into - and by fun, I mean ‘deeply irritating but ultimately unsurprising’.
Also, a gentle reminder that my latest novel, Listen Layla, is out now (you can also request it from your local library!). You can listen to an interview I did this weekend here, where we talk girls in STEM, everyday racism, and the importance of being true to life, even in fiction for younger readers.
Thanks for subscribing and reading this week’s edition of Diasporan Diaries. Please, comment with thoughts, questions, critiques…and share if it resonated.
Much love, strength and safety to you all.
Best,
Yassmin
Thank you, for discussing this so candidly and thoughtfully. I'm an engineer from Perth in Western Australia, you gave a talk dialled into my company a few months ago (6 months?!) for Black History Month in the UK. It really stuck with me, among your other topics (I did not know about the Barbados Slave Code) you spoke eloquently about the intersection between process safety and a lack of inclusion, that all voices should be respected and heard to allow correctly considered (safe) decisions. Personally, this has helped me articulate why inclusion needs to be part of my core role when I help train engineers and guide teams, instead of an adjunct initiative. We have recently been making good steps towards getting some organisations here to report and manage incidents of discrimination, harassment, violence and bullying like we do safety KPIs (reported transparently, vigilantly watching for issues with a sense of chronic unease) and having outlines of these behaviours discussed within operational teams (training us to ask what should we have done, what could we have done, etc) just like we do safety incidents.
If it is not too personal, if permissible (I acknowledge we haven't met), I would like to switch focus and also discuss what you've written here about your thoughts relating to Australia. Just like the example you gave in your talk (wrt to Deepwater Horizon), we as a country did not respect your voice or allow the context of your message to be understood. We as a country did not act as bystanders, we did not listen as you called out the injustices and hypocrisies you saw. And then did not act to prevent the character assassinations in our press and by our politicians - just as we had failed to help a few years previous with the ongoing harassment of Prime Minister Julia Gillard a few years before, just as we failed to rebuke Dutton over his dog-whistling about Sudanese communities in Melbourne a couple of years ago, just as we have failed to do for hundreds of years for Indigenous Australian people.
I would dearly like to be part of an Australia that treated you fairly. I would dearly like to help Australia be a nation that would deserve to have you back, one that would have had your back. As an Engineer, I dearly want to build organisational cultures that would have respected you, watched for your psychological safety and then protected you from corporate retaliation when you spoke out. And I am heartened for the incremental progress we are making, that the recent March 4 Rallies were decidedly intersectional, that there is an understanding that cultural change doesn't just come from factional solidarity rather by developing systemic empathy. I am heartened at the continued outrage, and the acknowledgments that many people have been fighting for a very long time and it is acceptable to be angry, it is acceptable to be tired, it is acceptable not to remain polite. And I am heartened that so many people listened to the Australian of the Year Grace Tame give her National Press Club talk where she admonished the media for insensitively asking people to relive their trauma for public spectacle rather than helping them build a discussion toward constructive transformational change. And I am heartened I have heard more hope from some marginalised people recently - if you saw Julia Gillard's recent TikTok interview about the Misogyny Speech, she was quite hopeful about the new voice coming up speaking to defend others (and Grace Tame's speech was quite hopeful too).
You spoke here about the burden you place on yourself to maintain your rage and enthusiasm to admonish us so that we might remember to be better. (It might be effective and visceral,) but that should not be your responsibility, it should not fall to you. It should not be an expectation on the marginalised to overcome the barriers we have placed in your way. Just as women should not be asked to Lean In to help change corporations, and LGBTIQA+ people should not have to publically campaign for their human rights and every single new group of people who come here should not accept vilification for a generation or two before we move onto the next group of people to be racist about. You should find no shame in detaching from Australia to protect your sense of self-worth or your health. Especially an Australia that has so readily shirked accountability in recent years. The standard is elect is the standard we accept. You shouldn't ask yourself to forget or forgive - we should never have accepted our behaviour, we need to elect better people, we need to keep them accountable, we need to be better people.
I would like that this could be a nation and society that you could feel at home in again. And while I fear it won't be one for a while yet - perhaps those willing can offer you our hearts as safe harbours, that you could reside (holiday?) here in spirit.
Sorry - longer response than I had expected ... but for what it's worth:
What a great commentary and question. I am a (white) transman who has often been told that I should write about my experiences - by which I think people mean, my life (they assume) of extraordinary suffering leading up to my finally having transitioned in middle age, my having lived gender on both sides (as if there were only two) of the normative divide, and my current situation hiding out as a supposed cis-gendered man amongst women in my job as an oncology nurse. But I have a terrible time attempting any such writing, because I can't actually decide on anything to say: it is all too complex to be rendered in one long, single line, one sentence after another, and I can't make up my mind what the meaning (my meaning) actually is, since it is always shifting.
This may be a characteristic feature of grief itself; part of the load it imposes on its bearer is that it is explicitly a profound interruption of the meanings we have operated by, or the meanings we have been told were operating. I don't know if, having experienced such deep grief, we (beings who live intimately with grief) can ever return to a life where there can be ANY settled structures of meaning. Their fictional and provisional nature has been all too clearly demonstrated, now. Attempting to solidify meaning to the point of occupying "our own myth" may itself be a kind of violence against the reality of the originary (grief-provoking) experiences and the resulting force of dislocation.
The desire people have to lock one into a story of a specific and well-narrated suffering, is always perplexing to me. For me, the marker of this is the behaviour of some of my one-time friends who could not seem to come with me on my transition: not explicitly trans-phobic, they nevertheless "liked" me much better when I was a figure of indeterminacy and ongoing suffering (ie: me, pre-transition, when I suspect - to my own humiliation, but to their apparent interest - I was very obviously struggling and malfunctional). I think people - maybe especially "progressive" people, who are locked into an impulse to a kind of appropriative empathy - require other people to represent the suffering of the disadvantaged or the minority. Unlike the overtly hateful, who violently require "others" to represent the (fictional) negative of themselves, the progressive requires "others" to represent the victimhood produced by their (the progressive's) own privilege: empathy is implied, but the other person is still required to be identifiable (mythologized) by their victimhood.
I don't know if any of this is actually parallel to your experience - my guess is that analogy-making is the best tool we have (the best, but by no means a perfect tool) for attempting to understand across cultural and experiential divides, and against power gradients. Certainly, I will be spending some time, going forward, repeatedly thinking over your piece, and I am grateful to have encountered it.