Thank you for writing this, Pragya! It feels to me that you could be telling part of my mother’s story. She is Malay (another country colonised by the British), and after a traumatic start in life (her mother died in childbirth), she was brought up by her grandfather, who offered her the chance to go to English school as a child — something uncommon for kampung girls who grew up in the 1940s. After further family trauma, she ran away to Australia on a Colombo scholarship in the early 1960s, studied nursing, and fell in love with a white man – also an immigrant, but from New Zealand — my father. More family trauma when she returned home to Malaysia, and she ended running away again to London, to meet him and get married. They returned to Australia, and I was born two years later in Papua New Guinea (then Australian trust territory), and my brother a few years later in Cooma, NSW — the first apparent Australian in our family. Due to Dad’s work, we lived a few years in SE Asia (Malaysia and then Indonesia) when I was young, before settling in Sydney when I was 10. And that was when I felt true culture shock.
Mum never pushed the Malay language on us, and to this day, I’m ashamed to speak very little of it. She identified as Muslim, and always wrote that on our enrolment forms at school — but never brought us up in the faith. As a child growing up in Australia, I identified more with the Christian religion, because it was all around me. Many years later, Mum told me she didn’t force a religion on us because she wanted us to be free to choose. Although she did celebrate the festivals — Hari Raya, at the end of the fasting month, but also Christmas and Easter. For my mum, it was more about tradition and culture.
In high school, in an upper middle class public school in a predominantly white and Bible Belt suburb, I worked hard on assimilation — picking up an Australian accent (which I put on and off at will), fitting in with all the white Aussie kids to the point that they forgot — or never realised — I was half Asian. But I never forgot. I didn’t quite fit in, and I thought that possibly my colour and (unstated) Muslim heritage got in the way of finding a boyfriend in such a white, Christian and church-going teenage crowd. So instead I chose to adopt the persona of the outsider.
However I loved my given names — the ones I publish under here. Mum said she made up “Zarina” — her name is similar, and of Arabic origin — but many years later (after years of feeling unique in Australia) I discovered my first name is very popular in Malaysia — and India — and is also of Persian/Muslim origin. And “Dara” means young girl, or maiden, in Malay. It’s only very recently that I’ve come to realise that I’ve grown up, almost undercover, with a Muslim name — but not one the average Anglo recognises as Muslim.
This is a long-winded way of saying — I understand what it is to be caught between cultures, and countries, and not knowing where I belong. Being the child of two immigrant parents, of mixed ancestry and culture, being born overseas, of adopting a foreign citizenship to come home (NZ — my dad’s citizenship) and growing up in Australia — all these years I’ve felt Australian, but not quite, and also not with the paperwork to prove it. And all these years I’ve declared my citizenship as New Zealand, though I’ve never lived there. Ironically enough, a few months ago Immigration confirmed that, after all these years, I am Australian, and by birth — that being born in an Australian trust territory counted for something after all. I’m still trying to integrate that fact into my self-identity.
And I think I understand why my mum tried so hard to fit in, and for a long time appeared to deny much of her own heritage. We have a large family over in Malaysia — product of a clan culture — and they claim my mum, my brother and I as one of them. But not quite. My mum is now rediscovering and planting new roots in Malaysia — for all of us, she says — but I although I enjoy a visit (and still feel a strange homesickness from time to time), I don’t feel I belong there. And my brother has no interest in this at all. His life is here, and he doesn’t look back.
This response is longer than I intended, but maybe that’s telling me it’s time for me to explore this in my own story. I’ve dipped into this territory through poetry, but held off on personal essay, as my story is so mixed with that of others. But maybe it’s time. The rise of White Nationalism across the world — even in pockets, here, in Australia — scares me, and is so counter to the way I see the world, a complex blend of countries and cultures bleeding into each other and creating something new, a hybrid, with aspects of what came before, and something more evolving. And maybe after all I was right, as a teenager, when I told myself (after not being able see myself in the faces shown on television in those days) — I am the new face of Australia. And these days I see people like me (though not entirely like me) everywhere I look. And thanks again for your story, which has triggered more exploration of my own.
