Identity: Travelling to Yourself
I never feel more Australian than when I am abroad, which is funny because no one else thinks I am Australian. The question ‘Where are you from?’ is inevitable when I am overseas, and ‘Australian’ rarely cuts it. People take in my dark skin and ask sceptically, ‘Where are you really from?’ It’s a question I get with depressing regularity in Australia as well, so often that it leaves you questioning yourself too: ‘Where am I really from? And where do I belong?’
Paradoxically, when I leave Australia, I ache for the beach and the sand, a café latte, the open space, Medicare and free doctor visits. I long to be able to drive my car on highways and know the routes. I love the opportunity to eat every kind of food from every culture. But when I was growing up in Australia in the 1990s, I often felt stifled by the lack of diversity on screen and in media where I felt like the odd one out.
When I was growing up in Australia in the 1990s, I often felt stifled by the lack of diversity on screen.
The Australian history I learned at school was a 200-year history of English settlers and convicts who arrived on the First Fleet, often bypassing the First Nations history of the continent.
For those of us with mixed or immigrant heritage, travelling can compound those feelings, making us face painful questions from people poking around and judging the authenticity of our identities: too Muslim, or not Muslim enough.
For Dr Umber Rind, a First Nations Badimaya Yamatji and Pakistani woman, travel has unearthed painful memories of not feeling like she belonged anywhere. In the mining town of Pilbara in Western Australia, where she grew up, she copped racist abuse from the white kids. Later as a teen visiting Pakistan, she felt she did not fit in there either. As an adult and medical student in Melbourne, she struggled to find a place within Muslim immigrant communities.
The fraught feelings of identity and safety that a place can conjure up is particularly pronounced for Dr Rind. Her great- grandfather Gulam Badoola arrived in Australia in the late 1890s, recruited from British-colonised India as a cameleer to navigate Australia’s deserts. He married Mariam Martin, a Badimaya Yamatji woman. When Mariam passed away in the 1930s, Gulam fled Australia with his four young kids, fearing his children would become part of the Stolen Generations, a state policy of removing First Nations children from their families. He feared they would lose their connection to their identity and religion.
Mariam’s kids grew up and got married in India, in what is now known as Pakistan. In the 1950s, Umber’s grandfather Numrose decided to return to the land of his birth, the Pilbara, his traditional land. He found work in transport and later brought his Indian-born children. One of them was Dr Rind’s dad, who went on to marry a Pakistani woman and had Umber and her two younger sisters.
For Umber, the journey of finding yourself through place starts with becoming unapologetic about who you are and not ‘trying’ to fit into an identity box others are so keen to put us in.
‘Just remember that even though you feel like you’re the only one being othered, there’s a lot of us,’ Umber tells me. ‘I think we just need to find each other because I think there is a bit of a tribe we could create here in our home countries. You’re not alone in that feeling. Lots of us have gone through that feeling of being othered. Remember you don’t owe anybody any special explanations for your identity, especially if you are still working it out.’
As Umber said this to me, I could literally hear myself exhaling.
So other people felt like this too? I asked her how to deal with strangers who were too persistent with questions and comments about your nationality or race, in an intrusive rather than curious way.
For Umber, the journey of finding yourself through place starts with becoming unapologetic about who you are.
‘You say what you’re comfortable with. I personally am more comfortable with saying I’m a Muslim before Australian. Australian identity is very tricky for First Nations people. You look at the history of colonisation. Not a lot of us like to call ourselves Australian for that reason – what comes with it. So I’m just proud. My identity is: I’m Muslim. I’m a First Nations Muslim woman with Pakistani heritage.
I don’t speak the languages of my parents. That’s okay, too. My advice is, you don’t owe people an explanation. ’
When overseas, though, an easy answer is sometimes the best option when buying a burger or getting change. She acknowledges the curiosity can be well-intentioned. When the question comes up, Umber will often say: ‘”Well, we’re from Australia.” But then they look at us and go, “But what is this?”, pointing to the hijab. And I’d say, “Oh yeah, we are from Pakistan too.” You don’t want to sit there and open up the book of your history to every single person in every shop. You do definitely have to have your easy answer ready.’
Sometimes travel can liberate you from some of your identities, freed from the expectations of how you should behave. Aliya Ahmad was born in London, grew up in Vietnam, studied in Melbourne, and also identifies as queer. Her identity has always been multifaceted. Her Pakistani banker father had a job that kept the family on the move from Asia to the Middle East, and home was always where you made it. This roving childhood made Aliya more open to allowing her identity to shift with place and allowing place to do the same with her.
‘Being Muslim, people have an idea about me. Being Pakistani, people have an idea about me. Being queer, people have an idea about me. Those identities often don’t intersect neatly. I find that when I am travelling, I can be all of those things at once. All I have to do is bring myself to a country – all of myself.’
‘When I’m travelling. I’m just travelling. I’m here to learn from you. My identity becomes the background because I make the foreground where I am. If people ask me about my identity, I share it. But at the same time I can put the intersecting pressures of that identity on the back burner, which is why I love travelling. It is an escape from all the different social pressures. When I’m travelling, I just meet people where they are and they can share as much or as little as they want. I meet people based on who they are rather than meeting people based on different groups.’
In Australia, a country she calls home, Aliya often felt torn by her identities. When she travelled to Russia for the first time after university, she felt free of herself in a place that was completely disconnected from her own history. But she also felt deeply connected to Russian history, as a researcher who had spent a lifetime obsessed with the Cold War and the Soviet Union. Inspired by her high school teacher Sally Painter, who taught by illustrating the places she had travelled, Aliya too wanted a front-row seat to a history she could touch.
‘There can be a personal sting when travelling to a place where you see the remnants of a history that excluded you.’
‘There can be a personal sting when travelling to a place where you see the remnants of a history that excluded you.’
For Aliya, that is going through her parents’ city of Karachi and seeing the vestiges of English imperialism, from statues to exclusive country clubs named after white men, places that still exclude women. ‘I absolutely love going back to Pakistan – it is amazing – but there is a deeper baggage that comes from people who have been colonised. You feel, “Oh I’m navigating this space, where I would have been subjugated and treated like a lower person.”’
For Aliya, navigating this baggage meant creating an identity different from that of her mother and grandmother who were not granted the luxury and privilege of travelling alone. It was learning from the past to embrace opportunities without fear or guilt. ‘For people of colour and also women, you have to carry the baggage of your mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, of being a Muslim woman, and all the expectations of family, as well as colonialism.
I find that when you travel sometimes it’s like, you’re taking the baggage off. And hopefully for the next generation, maybe that baggage is lighter.’
This is an edited extract from Safar: Muslim Women’s Stories of Travel and Transformation by Sarah Malik (Hardie Grant), available now at your local independent bookseller.
Illustrations by Amani Haydar.
