George Haddad

There is a peculiar practice in immigrant Sydney that I know well thanks to being born to a pair of Lebanese settlers. It is when a set of beliefs that parents hold true about other ethnicities (usually groups of people who migrated earlier than they did) are told to their children as a kind of forewarning.

His characters are men I have known, men with whom I have lived, hooked-up, been frustrated. They skirt around what they ought to say and try to reinvent themselves and downplay their opportunities and make geographical excuses for their oddities.

I have a beard. A thick black beard, a monobrow, a shark-fin nose, and caramel skin. I look undeniably Arab. I’ve been held-up in airports in L.A, Tel Aviv and Wellington. I speak Arabic, I wear a gold chain that Mum bought me from Tripoli, I have a tattoo of Horus on one arm and a Phoenician sun symbol on the other. When people ask where I am from, I say Australia. When they ask what my ethnicity is, I say Lebanese. I look Lebanese, I sound Australian.