Powerful thighs. Golden eyes. Black robes. Swords. And fury. In romance fiction, it is not enough to have a set of muscle-toned thighs. They must also be powerful. Eyes cannot be brown, they must glow with the fire of a thousand suns. This is the world of desert dreaming. Of thinly disguised oil-rich kingdoms. Of exotic romance with the bad boys of the Arab world—ridiculously good-looking men with more money than sense.
In 2019, I was invited to present a love letter to a book at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Nawal El Saadawi’s seminal creative non-fiction book, Woman at Point Zero, edged out any competition. No other book I have read, which centres a flawed but authentic heroine, has affected me as deeply, a fact that played into my own understanding of how we talk about women, their issues and the cultural differences that influence how these manifest. I cannot dilute the significance of the book’s exploration of an Arab woman’s life. This is a book that did not just point out injustice, it ripped it apart, exposing the bones of our broken humanity.
It was a random post on social media, but it unexpectedly moved me: a woman asking, for research purposes, what is something your mother can do that you cannot? There are many in my case, but my instant response was: I can’t cook like my mother. Soon followed a deeper realisation: I wish I could cook like my mother. I am a Third Culture Kid, belonging everywhere and nowhere, proficient in Arab- lish (that odd combination of Arabic and English that forms a new word). As an adult, I take some strange pleasure in this lack of belonging, and yet the moment I return to my parents’ house and smell the aroma of Arabic food, I feel like I am home.
It was a couple of years after September 11. But the Australian media had its Muslim spokespeople, and I had no desire to be a mouthpiece in this excruciating moment. So in my debut mainstream piece, I didn’t write about being Muslim in an increasingly Islamophobic world. I wrote of my struggles to transform the high of graduating with a challenging degree into a meaningful career, one where the pile of rejection letters grew so thick I went from paper clip to bulldog.
Ordinary life for minorities is a constant stream of, ‘Yeah, but …’ We are question marks, worries to be flagged. I have tried for many years to focus on a way forward. I loathe the idea of Muslims, or anyone from a minority, feeling that their worth is tied solely to whether or not they are a threat, to how they can peacefully present themselves to a society that doesn’t go to any pains to disguise its hatred. But sometimes this feels like an impossible task.
