Western Sydney

My faith and culture were still paramount to my identity – but so was my femininity. I grappled with my desire for equality and my quest to assert myself.

It wasn’t surprising for the Prime Minister to say what he did to me the one time we met in person at the Sydney Olympics in late September 2000.

‘I think it is important for women of colour to know that we are not objects or tokens to be used and dispensed.’

What I do know is that, while once simply writing the west was a threat to the status quo now the real political imperative is to stand in the dark with our eyes wide open, welcoming the uncertain. It is an invitation to undo the ways ‘things are done’ and invite alternatives into the equation. Bad writing has always been about having the last word and leaving others in silence. Good writing opens up a conversation about who we are that may never end.

‘Things that I took from the city: the experiences of walking, wandering and being ensconced in communities of school and church.’

‘Non-Muslim friends often comment that the Prayer Centre looks like an RSL – a nondescript rectangular building with glass windows, flanked by a car park. ‘

In 2017, I found myself back where I began, in Parramatta. I was excited to make a difference in my community through my new job: as a producer for a local literature organisation. The work felt like it was going to be important, and I felt like it had to be me who did it. All my life I had been a chubby, crooked-toothed, glasses-wearing nerd – not a self-declared nerd, either, and therefore the bad kind. I had been fortunate to discover literature at an early age, and spent most of my formative years at Max Webber Library or the Angus & Robertson in Blacktown Westpoint, accumulating a tiny empire of books which I buried myself into, to make up for my dearth of friends or much else.

As daughters of migrant women we inherit these stories and all the work that comes with them. We carry, keep, care-take, preserve and interpret, sometimes reinvent this inheritance

‘I am really interested in the language that my family speaks, and one day, in my head, I’d like to write a book around all of the idioms I’ve been taught, because Turkish idioms are so much more complex, as well as profane, than English words.’

‘I really wanted especially to have a voice for those kids who think they’re weird, think they’re strange, and there’s always going to be kids like that.’