The room wasn’t big enough for eight bodies yet each night my mum and her seven siblings crammed grimy limbs around each other on a makeshift bed on the floor. They’d bring the day with them, the dirt from marbles matches on dusty streets, sore fingers from work on the cotton field, restless stomachs ringing with hunger. As Mum explained, she would toss into someone’s back and turn into someone’s stinky feet and cry from frustration. It was in this room with the iron barred windows where the children fought, laughed and went through puberty that I was born a few years later. In Adana, Turkey, where roads are rocky, men are tall, dark and hairy, and streets are cramped with tattered kids and vendors who showcase their goods on wooden carts.
Mum delivered me into the hands of a local midwife at fifteen. I received a sticky initiation to life. My mum’s aunt sprinkled sugar all over my naked new flesh so I’d be sweet and not resemble her mother-in-law whose wide nose I’d inherited. She got to work on my nostrils, squeezed and squeezed them until my nose shrunk to her liking. I was welcomed into the world with a body scrub and a nose job. Try getting that at a maternity ward!
“We never had dolls,” said my aunt Esin on my last visit, “we had you to play with. Your aunt Pervin would crack your toes one by one until you’d scream.” No wonder they’re a little skewed. Mum would breastfeed me, wash my cloth nappies, and hand me back to her eager family. By fifteen, she’d worked on a cotton field, learned to sew, become a wife, a mother. At fifteen I was figuring out how not to leak on my jeans, how to tame the brown, wiry shrub on my head and how much work I’d need to do to scrape through high school. Mum had a head start in life but it came with many losses.
I owe my name to the girl at the birth registry office who advised my indecisive dad that Hatice, my grandmother’s name, was archaic and Demet was more modern. Don’t get me wrong, Hatice is lovely but it’s a name that works in Turkey where every letter is pronounced. In Australia, however, I would have been lost in pronunciation and found on the tongues of many children who’d nickname me Hat-Ice. ‘Damn it, Demet’, was more than enough thank you.
Two months after my birth, my mum turned sixteen. In a few months she’d be old enough to go to Australia, leave the backyard with the small cement well my grandfather used to fill up on hot days for his kids to cool off. Leave the street where her and her sisters used to board the tractor to the cotton field, laughing and singing with the rest of the workers. Leave her home with poverty etched into her hands and memories that I’d watch resurface years later. She was leaving for a new country, with fear, excitement and a new family in her lap.
‘The Slap’ by Christos Tsiolkas unveils a thin layer of smog from our eyes to expose the chaos that lies beneath the veneer of our multicultural society. When a child is slapped by another parent at a backyard barbecue, the effects ripple through the North, South, East and Western suburbs of Melbourne testing beliefs, morals, friendships, loyalties and the truths of the main characters in an uncompromising, unpretentious and honest narrative that captivates and awakens the reader. In one chapter each, eight characters present at the barbecue share their views on the slap and its many consequences on the friendship circle. Tsiolkas’s characterisation is fearless, he places us into their minds, their desires, fantasies, and their pasts enabling us to better understand their present. Each chapter has enough to constitute a short story but Tsiolkas threads their stories together with such expertise they make an irresistible whole.
Don’t Settle for Someone Else’s Kebab
October 28, 2009 in Social Commentary | Tags: A.R.A.B, Anti Racism Action Band, beating stereotypes, Tackling racism | 2 comments
Two weeks ago, the Northcote Town Hall was buzzing with another energetic performance by the Anti Racism Action Band (A.R.A.B) who hip hopped, sang, belly danced, rocked and Krumped their way through their latest production Conjure. The story was about a brave young writer from the ‘burbs’ who’s chasing a dream that’s not restricted by her past, her family or cultural comfort zone and follows her desperate attempts to please a demanding publisher. It opens with a young boy, Habs, who owns ‘Hab’s Kebabs’ a small, popular stand in the North. He is the boy next door, the one you pass at train stations with the loud wog accent and gold chains and quickly look the other way, the one you write off because of his Broady slang or his background which suggests his dreams can only reach as far as kebab stands or take away shops. But that night, the Northcote Town Hall was the writer’s imagination and her stories starred kids like Habs who did not disappear in the backdrop of society but raised their voices and conjured bold futures beyond the suffocating mould of their stereotypes. The publisher was going insane demanding “more Neighbours,” not Bollywood, not Broadmeadows, not reality. More fake backdrops, sterile characters, whiter streets. After all, who wants to read or watch a reality cluttered with migrant kids caught between two worlds, who are daring to believe in another future? These stories have always been reserved for budget productions, not for the big screen. Not anymore. As I watched the A.R.A.B kids act, dance, sing, and believe, I saw passion. These kids are no longer settling for “someone else’s kebab”. So line them up, Habs. We’ll risk the onion breath, the heartburn. Give us kebabs with the lot!