Yassmin’s Story Read online

  I’m by no means suggesting that my mother’s experience is the norm, rather highlighting the terrific range of diversity within the Sudanese and Muslim experience.

  Mum often talks about how her father’s passion for education came from watching the English kids he saw heading to schools run by the church. He would tell them stories about how the children wore new clothes, polished shoes, looked well fed and like they lived a good life. My grandfather didn’t have that growing up, but he knew that he wanted it for his children. He believed that if they could get that education, his kids would have a chance at living life with the comforts of the British. My grandfather didn’t want to become British, he just wanted his children to be afforded the same opportunities and so worked every possible job to make that dream a reality.

  My mother’s heritage is mixed. Her father was part Egyptian (maternal) and part Sudanese (paternal), which meant that he was able to identify as Sudanese from the Ja’afari tribe (tribal affiliations are passed through the father). My maternal grandmother is even more of a mix, part Turkish, Moroccan and Sudanese. Unlike my mother, my father’s family was from a line of merchants and businesspeople who migrated from Egypt and so they have no tribal Sudanese affiliation. Nonetheless, they played a role in Sudan’s politics, economics and social fabric. There was apparently a time you could say ‘I am an Abdel-Moneim’ to a taxi driver at the airport and they would know where to take you.

  My full name is Yassmin Midhat Abdel-Salam, Abdel-Magied, Hassan Bey Abdel-Moneim.

  Hassan Bey Abdel-Moneim was the big dog, my great-great-grandfather or the OG (Original Gangsta). He moved from Egypt to Sudan in the 1800s and became a wealthy businessman. He had nine children – six daughters and three sons. The women married into other wealthy Sudanese families, which is how I am related to almost all the big names in Khartoum, and the three boys married a number of women and had a multitude of offspring. Polygamy was the norm at the time, which resulted in us having an enormous and diverse family tree. The wealthiest brother was Ahmed, who had a total of twenty-four children – eighteen daughters and six sons. Ahmed and his family descendants are my business-focused uncles and aunts. Super sharp, always on point. The second brother, Mohammed, had the fewest children; with six sons and daughters in total, they could fit the family into a minivan.

  My great-grandfather, Abdel-Magied, fathered a modest eighteen children. He was particularly focused on education, so my line of the family spent their inheritance on educating their sons and daughters to the best of their ability. The strength and value of education was heavily emphasised throughout the Abdel-Magied line and resonates strongly with both my father and my mother. This inherited focus shapes the way my brother and I view the world.

  The Abdel-Moneim family was one of the most influential in the development of the capital. Today, the families with influence are different and much of the Abdel-Moneim asset base has been sold off, but the old-money pride and correlating conservative values still remain.

  My mother’s family was from a line of rural villagers who moved to the capital city for a better life. The standing of the family is incredibly important in Sudan; individuals don’t just get married, families do. When it came to my parents being together, the fact that they had equivalent levels of education reduced the difference in social stature significantly. The relationship was made easier again because my father was a long-time friend of my mother’s older brother and so the families were already well acquainted.

  My mum is a lot like me (or rather vice versa). When I see her running a community forum or organising a conference, I sometimes wonder what she would have achieved if she’d been given the same opportunities as her children. My parents sacrificed their place in their community, the support of their family and their professional careers to secure a better future for my brother and me. Even though my parents were still quite young when they moved to Brisbane, not having grown up in Australia was always going to be a barrier to them realising their full potential here. The lack of shared memory, the absence of school and university networks, the slight xenophobia that characterised the 1980s and 1990s in Queensland all meant that my mum was at a disadvantage, but she accepted that so the next generation would have it better. She did everything in her power to make sure we would – not only my brother and me, but an entire generation of young Muslims in Australia and around the world.

  Was there then extra pressure to ‘succeed’, given my parents had sacrificed everything for my future? No more than for any other migrant kid. There is a level of existential responsibility, debt even, which sits in the mind of migrant children that means sometimes our decisions are made, whether consciously or unconsciously, out of respect to our parents and the sacrifice they made. It is not something that can easily be explained in cold, rational terms. Understanding that your parents thought your future was more important than theirs can be a burden, or a boon, depending on numerous variables: the way your parents moved (refugee arrivals can have a different outlook to skilled arrivals, for example), the way you were raised (whether or not your parents expect you to live in exactly the same way they did, or adapt), their expectations and ideas of success, and so on. There’s no doubt, though, that the knowledge of the sacrifice your parents have made weighs heavy on your consciousness. To know that but for one decision made by our parents, our lives could have been entirely different – that tugs on a person’s soul, either anchoring you to reality, or drowning you.

  For me, my parents’ sacrifice grounds me to the reality that the world isn’t fair and we must all work to change that, particularly if we’ve been able to somehow ‘succeed’ despite the lottery of birth. Looking at it this way, I see my parents’ sacrifice as a blessing – an opportunity that must be capitalised on, otherwise the sacrifice is wasted. I see their move as incredibly selfless and generous, and wonder whether I would ever have had that courage. It is inspiring. Constantly and unchangingly inspiring.

  My father has a brilliant mind. On a good day, he’ll pull out his PhD from Imperial College with pride and flick to a page towards the back. ‘You see this?’ he says, pointing to an equation that covers the entire page. ‘I made this equation up! Look at what your dad did.’

  Dad hasn’t worked as an engineer since leaving Sudan, mainly because the market in Australia was tough. He joined a group for unemployed engineers and some of the people he met there are still family friends. When he couldn’t find work in engineering, he set about searching for another way to support his family and began studying IT. I never questioned his reasoning for leaving engineering behind, but I can only imagine the bittersweet pleasure he must get from having both his children work in the field of his beloved passion. I am not sure if we were directly influenced, but somehow both my brother and I ended up studying engineering. I majored in mechanical engineering with a focus on structures in motorsport – designing a racing car chassis – and my brother also studied mechanical engineering, with a second major in aerospace. My brother has a different personality to mine, and even though we studied the same course at the same university, people often don’t realise we are siblings. Yasseen doesn’t tell people we’re related if they don’t ask, and in some ways I understand that. His reasoning is ‘that it just never comes up’.

  We’ve never really talked about why he doesn’t mention that we are from the same family, largely because he doesn’t like these kinds of conversations, but I imagine Yasseen wants the space to create his own identity outside what others think of me, and he is succeeding at doing that. My identity at university was built around advocacy and motorsport; his is in the field of aerospace, mechatronics and robotics, where I’m sure he’ll be outstanding. I probably don’t tell him enough, but truth is, I’m proud of my little bro.

  I eventually moved from structural and design mechanical engineering to drilling engineering – more linked to the oil and gas industry, but with some of the same core concepts. Drilling engineering is focused on the design and delive
ry of drilling wells in a manner that is as safe, economical and environmentally friendly as possible. Although both of our fields are from the same world that my dad specialised in, the concepts and analytical tools Yasseen and I use became different after the first year of university. My father had always been someone I could ask for help when solving a problem in physics or maths at school, so I distinctly remember the moment at the end of the first year of university when my father looked at a question on dynamics I was doing and shook his head. ‘I didn’t study these concepts. Khalas, you are on your own now. Baba can’t help you with these.’

  He may not have been able to give advice, but he did want to learn and so would often ask me to explain a concept back to him, not only helping me to understand but sharing that love he has for the logic of the discipline. My dad still loves getting the Institute of Electrical Engineers magazines and passing on articles of interest to my brother and me, hoping for a technical discussion. He gets great joy out of learning about the technology behind drilling then surprising me with oddly detailed questions about my job. ‘See, Yassmina!’ he might say after a particularly gnarly question on the use of magnetic interference in intercepting another well, deep underground. ‘Your dad knows what’s going on, ah?’

  Although I’ve always been aware that my father was a significant figure during my upbringing, his personality has shaped me in ways I’m only just beginning to understand. Baba has a presence larger than his physical stature; as an academic in Sudan he was respected in the community and built his identity around being a learned person with authority. He expects to be listened to and his opinion deferred to and it’s difficult to change his mind once he sets it. An engineer through and through, Dad prides himself on being objective and logical, sometimes painfully so, which is one of the main reasons I had to learn to articulate my point of view growing up: my household trained me from a young age in the art of debating.

  In late 1992, my family arrived in the big country town that was Brisbane then with $2000 and a couple of suitcases. University lecturers were denied exit visas under the new government, so my mum and dad had no option but to leave Sudan via Egypt under the pretence of a weekend away with the family up north, packing only bare essentials and holiday clothes. My parents hadn’t announced their departure to the extended family and they were initially criticised by some in my father’s family for running away from home. ‘Sudan isn’t too bad yet,’ they said, ‘so why would you leave?’ It was a time when many people were unsure about whether to stay or leave because nobody knew what life under the new government would be like. One person from almost every family with the means left Sudan during this period, which eventually led to the incredible Sudanese diaspora around the world that I so strongly identify with. We stayed in Egypt for a few months with my father’s extended family while we finished up the paperwork for his skilled migrant visa and then snuck away on an EgyptAir flight to Brisbane, where we were met by Ian Hamilton and his family. He’d assured us that the weather was fine: that although it was humid, our landing was going to be much better than my aunt’s experience in Norway.

  I was a shocking passenger on the flight to Australia. It’s a twenty-four-hour journey and I was not a quiet, calm or obedient child. My mother says I cried almost the entire flight. As she has told many friends, the only time I stopped crying was when I realised my bassinette was right underneath the screen the film was being shown on, and that if I stuck a limb up, I could create shadows. Just another way to be a right nuisance, really. I am not sure my family thinks much has changed since then!

  We stayed with the Hamilton family for a few months while we found our feet and my parents adjusted to a new world and an unfamiliar system. The family shared their old Queenslander with us, a fitting welcome into the nation and state. The house sat right at the back of a large plot, seventy metres or so from the front gate down a concrete pathway, cracked by the heat, leading to the front veranda. I remember the door opening into a family lounge area, wooden floors worn from the pattering of so many feet, with the bedrooms and kitchen off the main space. It was homely and the family embraced us, sharing their lives.

  ‘We met your parents at the old Brisbane international airport in mid-1992,’ recalled Ian. ‘A day or two after you arrived, Faiza and Midhat weren’t feeling well and it turned out to be chickenpox.’

  What a start to the journey of a lifetime.

  We had caught it on the plane over from Sudan. Apparently my parents offered to move out to protect the host Australian family, but the contagious period had come and gone. My parents and I got sick, and it was the first of many bonding experiences! The Hamiltons are still family friends, although the children are now scattered around the world. When we do get the rare opportunity to meet up as a group, they fondly share stories of our arrival and gradual adjustment, and how the first word they learnt in Arabic was ‘La’a!’, meaning ‘no’, something my parents were constantly yelling at me as I tried to stretch the boundaries as a toddler.

  It seems I’ve been predisposed from the get-go to seek forgiveness rather than permission (if I end up seeking anything at all). As a child I always did what I wanted, regardless of whether that was approved of or not. I pushed the boundaries as far as I could, discovering my limits by gauging the reactions of those around me. Rightly or wrongly, this is an attitude I’ve carried with me throughout my life, and it has led to both good and bad outcomes. Pushing boundaries in the social space is a great way to break stereotypes, create new narratives and, possibly, change the system completely. Pushing the boundaries when it comes to safety in a workshop or speeding on a car or bike is less intelligent, but I’ve always been one to learn the hard way.

  Brisbane was a monocultural town in the early 1990s. Baba claims we were one of the first Sudanese families in the entire district, and we were most definitely the first in our neighbourhood. I don’t quite remember what it was like, but I have no doubt it was a memorable transition for my parents. Being so visibly different, both as Africans and Muslims, meant that we were quite the novelty and there was no hiding from our difference, for better or for worse.

  We were constantly reminded of our ‘uniqueness’, mostly in small ways – people staring, or not knowing how to refer to my mother’s hijab. There were also the little, humorous cultural differences, often manifesting themselves in the way we used the English language. A good example that gets told around the dinner table whenever we meet up with Ian’s family is the time they invited Mum and Dad to a get-together with some friends who asked them to bring a plate.

  ‘We thought they just must not have enough crockery for everybody!’ my mother laughs when retelling the story.

  ‘Aywa wallai,’ my dad says, agreeing with my mother in Arabic.

  ‘So we took a few plates, and knives and forks as well. They must have been struggling, we thought; they’d need more than just the plates if they didn’t have enough for all the people they invited and were asking us to bring our own! We can be generous and take more cutlery! When we got to their house and gave them the empty plates, they were just as confused as us!’

  There was mostly novelty in the interactions my parents had with the locals, although occasionally there would be the exception. People often thought my parents were either Aborigines or Malaysians, because Sudanese people hadn’t quite entered the consciousness of your regular Queenslander.

  At times, my super chubby two-year-old figure, overly gregarious personality and voluminous afro acted as an icebreaker. I was that child who wandered over to random families’ picnics at Southbank and sat down on their mats, trying to make new friends. My innate friendliness, combined with the naivety of my youth, plus the novelty of being African-Arab meant I was always seen and heard as a child. We spent a lot of time in parks as a family, partly because green, open and public spaces were so special and rare in Sudan that it was a luxury for my parents, and partly because social activities in Australia were built around alcohol. As practising
Muslims, my parents don’t consume alcohol, so they weren’t going to spend their downtime in pubs, bars or clubs and this restricted their socialising options. We were also on government support to start with while my father looked for work, and so parks were cheap entertainment. It became tradition to spend weekends in the ‘Aussie’ way, having a barbie in the park. My father loved the concept of free barbecues so much that years later, when my mother bought a barbecue for him as a gift, he still preferred to use the one in the park down the road. Why? Because it was free, he said, and easy to clean and use! My mother’s exasperation was lost on his engineer’s logic and I think we’ve used the purchased barbie a total of three times.

  I once asked Ian whether he felt any cultural shock when writing the letters to Mum or when my parents came to Australia. His response confirmed the power of personal connection; by corresponding with someone so far away, he said, Sudan was no longer just a country on a map but a beautiful land full of actual people, living their lives, just like him.

  The way Ian speaks about the change in his perspective reinforces a notion that is relatively undisputed – that human connection can have an enormous impact on humanising any seemingly foreign or remote community or group of people. The focus these days is on advertising and campaigning; however, they are only part of the solution. To fundamentally make a foreign people seem familiar, some level of human connection is required.

  ‘It was probably more of a shock for your parents,’ Ian reflected. ‘One meal time Midhat [my father] looked at the table and said, “But where’s the bread?” We hadn’t realised bread was an essential element in the Sudanese culture, whereas it was optional for us.’