Interview #214 — Shakira Hussein

by Adalya Nash Hussein

Dr Shakira Hussein is a writer and researcher based at the University of Melbourne. Her book, From Victims to Suspects, was published by NewSouth and Yale University Press, and was included in Top 10 Books: the International Affairs Summer Reading List in 2019. She has recently been awarded a Neilma Sidney Grant to work on her essay-memoir manuscript Nine Elevenitis.

Shakira speaks to her daughter, Adalya Nash Hussein, about growing up in Bjelke-Petersen-era Queensland, covering far-right protests as a racialised person, and being suspicious of collective pronouns.

This interview was conducted in 2021, for Liminal Volume II.

I’m going to be honest: as your daughter, I’ve grown up hearing all your smart thoughts all the time, and I feel a bit like, if I was just asking you about your smart thoughts, I could write this whole interview by myself (I remember when you started stuttering at that roundtable in Sydney and I, at about ten, took over, saying, “I think what my mother is trying to say is…”). So, instead, I’m going to mostly ask about the pathway in life that took you to those smart thoughts, and the people who want to read your smart thoughts in full will simply have to buy your book.

Starting from the start, I wanted to ask what it was like to grow up in Joh Bjelke-Petersen–era Queensland. A lot of people my age, especially those who aren’t from Queensland, don’t really know about him, but his political presence was kind of massive.

I’m a member of the final cohort of Queensland high school students to undergo the traditional coming-of-age ritual we used to call “going down south to get away from Joh Bjelke-Petersen”. He was the National Party politician who was premier from 1968, the year before I was born, to 1987, the year before I started university—by which time I’d already made the decision to leave. Bjelke-Petersen was authoritarian even by National Party standards. Abortion, homosexuality and street protests were all illegal under his regime. Being brown-skinned wasn’t illegal, but it was definitely frowned upon; the White Australia policy was very recent history, after all. And, although many of the landmarks in the neighbourhood where I grew up had Gubbi Gubbi names, a clue about what had happened to the Gubbi Gubbi themselves lay in another placename that no-one seemed to know how to explain: Murdering Creek.

I stood out a lot in Nambour, the Bible-belt country town where I went to high school. My Pakistani father lived far away in London—he claimed, at one point, that he was unable to visit us because then–Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew would have any airliner transporting him shot out of the sky as it passed over Singaporean airspace, in retaliation for some long-ago feud. However, the existence of his three other families scattered across Singapore, Lahore and London, which he’d somehow forgotten to mention to my mother, also seems likely to have played a role. The very visible physical differences between me and my white mother led to a lot of intrusive questions about my family history. I had to figure out what racism was and how to deal with it all by myself—not that there was any shortage of white people trying to protect me from it. I had a lot of love from my mother’s side of the family, and the surrounding physical landscape was extremely beautiful (and fast being bulldozed by developers), but I still couldn’t wait to get away from Queensland.

I spent hours trying to sew myself a patchwork hot-air balloon, which I planned to use to flee the country (look, the internet hadn’t been invented yet; it was a lot more difficult to do your own research back in the olden days). But, in the end, I settled for a more conventional escape route by finishing school and enrolling in an Asian studies degree at the Australian National University in Canberra.

As well as the typical racism you experienced as a child (slurs, violence, etc.), you spent a lot of time around the kind of ‘well-meaning’ racists on the hippie farm. Nowadays, there’s a lot more language and media with which to unpack this kind of stuff, but I’m interested in how you processed that at the time.

[Interviewer note: Mum grew up in a sort of commune for the guru my step-grandfather follows. This is very fascinating, but obviously I know all about it, so again, we’re not getting into the details of it here.]

The hippies definitely projected their Orientalist fantasies about India onto the Indian-looking child in their midst. Sometimes, this was funny, like when one of them would claim to have detected perfectly balanced chakras in my soul or the ancient wisdom of long-dead Tibetan spiritual masters in my eyes. But it was also damaging to spend so much time around people who exoticised me and, as I grew older, increasingly eroticised me on the basis of my racial identity. My first piece of writing to receive positive external attention (unless you count the ode to a donkey that won first prize in the local eisteddfod) was a monologue satirising a hippy’s disastrous first trip to India. My high school speech and drama teacher gave this script a very ordinary mark, but it won me a place in the National Young Playwrights Weekend in Sydney (so fuck you, Mr Allen).

I’ve always been so fascinated by the idea of you writing scripts and working in theatre spaces. I think it’s partly a ‘hard to imagine your parents before you’ thing, but also—I hope you don’t mind me saying this—you’re kind of intense about your work. I wouldn’t necessarily say there’s a clear separation between your work life and home life, so it’s hard to imagine that work life being different. Obviously, it was still writing, so it’s not completely out of left field, but your research and activism, I guess, feel so front and centre of your mind that it’s hard to imagine that you ever thought about anything else.

Even though it didn’t end up being the genre that I ultimately pursued, my early adventures in scriptwriting were a very useful exercise to undertake early in my writing life. For one thing, it helped me to develop a thick skin about criticism; nothing could have been more of a trial-by-fire than seeing my work performed for the very first time, then having other writers and theatre professionals tell me everything that was wrong with it. And it also provided the experience of putting my work in the hands of other people—directors, actors, stage crew—and seeing how they could make it work. Much more than prose, scriptwriting brings home that writing isn’t something that perfectly transmits your thoughts intact from your brain to the outside world; it always undergoes some kind of alteration from whoever is reading it. Something happens in transmission—and that process of transmission can be exciting and creative, but also very fraught. I was hooked.

I thought of university as something that I was doing to kill time until my career as a playwright took flight, but I was also enthralled by the material that I was studying. The excitement of reading Edward Said for the first time!

The Satanic Verses affair in 1989 was a huge turning point for me. I had always thought of books and writing as a safe space from racism, so it came as a shock to hear writers whom I had always admired—not least Salman Rushdie himself—describe Muslims as “those people” who posed a risk to “our” freedom of expression. I didn’t identify as Muslim at that point in my life, but, once people started talking in that type of us-vs-them language, I understood that I was always going to be one of ‘them’.

After university, I spent a couple of years living in London, getting to know my father’s side of the family and working as a live-in housekeeper for an elderly Iraqi Jewish lady. I also travelled through the Middle East and through regions of Europe that had once been part of the Ottoman Empire—Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. The war in Bosnia was underway only a short distance away, with horrific reports about the ethnic cleansing of Muslims, including mass sexual violence committed against Muslim women. This was another very formative event for Muslims living in the West, or at least in Europe. It made second-generation migrants from locations like Pakistan aware that they weren’t, in fact, the first Muslims to have established communities here, and that those communities were now being subjected to extermination. Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations, which forecast a civilisational clash between Islam and the ‘West’, was published around the same time. Hybrid identities—particularly hybrids between the West and Islam—were increasingly seen as a dangerous contradiction in terms, which terrified me.

I started to write a novel, actually, that was me trying to push back against those narratives. At one point, the main character says, “What is supposed to happen to people like me, who have loved ones on both sides, when civilisations clash? Are we going to be ripped in half? Are we going to be crushed between them?” But then the novel started to feel a bit ‘tenth of September’ once 9/11 happened. By that point, it felt like, Okay, now it’s about really fighting the narratives that are forming around this; now it’s about bearing witness to the violence that is being done because of this. The clash had happened.

You’ve always been a little hazy with sharing when you planned to attend various far-right events that might be risks to your safety. And, despite being your daughter who cares strongly for that safety, I don’t really have a timeline on when you started writing about that and realising it was important to pay attention to. What has it been like covering that material as it has become more and more prominent in the news?

The far right was never very far below the surface during my Queensland childhood. In fact, my first publication back in high school was a letter to the local newspaper, pointing out that the author of a previous letter denouncing the commercialisation of Christmas by “our culture’s traditional enemies” was a vocal supporter of the notorious anti-Semite David Irving. The following week, some anonymous person posted me a newsletter from the far-right League of Rights.

The first time I wrote about a far-right event was in 2013, when Geert Wilders gave a seminar in Melbourne. I flatter myself that the article I wrote about it for Crikey is the reason the security at all of his subsequent events was much tighter, with no journalists whatsoever admitted. The News Limited media outlets described the atmosphere at the seminar as “serene”; I described it as “menacing”.

There is always a fine line in covering the far right—and the same is true with reports about ISIS recruitment, including their notorious snuff films. In writing about them, you might be adding fuel to the fire, giving them free publicity. Prior to 2016, I often questioned whether I ought to be writing about them at all instead of just hoping that they’d wither unnoticed on the vine. But Pauline Hanson’s return to Parliament, Brexit and then the Trumpocalypse illustrated that the ‘ignore them and they’ll go away’ tactic was never going to work.

There’s a sort of sneering tone that often gets used in coverage of the far right that I don’t like. It just makes people who already dislike them feel smug, and that smugness doesn’t undermine far-right beliefs; it reinforces them. At the same time, there’s an inherent absurdism in being in a room full of people who think what you know they think about you, and I hope that humour comes across in my writing. If I don’t reflect on it with a dry distance, I’ll fall into melodrama, and I don’t believe that helps, either. There’s a certain kind of journalist—among white male journalists, in particular—who positions themselves as a kind of hero and, in turn, almost romanticises and inflates the groups they’re attempting to report on. They seem to feel as though my presence there, as a visibly disabled brown woman, writing about the same topic as them, is somehow a challenge to their masculinity.

You’ve talked a bit about how your awareness of and relationship to Islamophobia have changed over the years. I want to ask a kind of similar question around solidarity with Indigenous people, because I know that’s something you try to foreground in your work now, especially through collaborations with Eugenia Flynn.

When I was an undergraduate, I would go along to anti-racist protests about Aboriginal land rights, but there was always this kind of binary at those events between white people and Indigenous people, and I wasn’t really sure where I fitted into that.

I’d always assumed that multiculturalism and anti-racism were the same thing—particularly during the John Howard era, when multiculturalism was so under fire from right-wing politicians. I remember being shocked when I used the word ‘multiculturalism’ to mean ‘anti-racism’ in conversation with an Indigenous friend, only to be told, “Well, multiculturalism never did anything for us.” Now, that seems such an embarrassingly obvious point, but at the time, I hadn’t thought about how multiculturalism was not only an ineffective vehicle for solidarity with Aboriginal people, but explicitly working against their interests by perpetuating the belief that colonisation had somehow managed to produce this apparently beautiful ‘melting pot’ of immigrants in which First Nations people (if they were mentioned at all) were just another culture.

Migrants from non-Anglo backgrounds often use the fact that we were/are targets of racism as an alibi for not needing to deal with the reality that we’re also living on stolen land. There’s just an attitude of Oh well, let’s just let the Indigenous people and the white people sort that one out between themselves. I remember suggesting to a prominent second-generation Muslim at one of those Howard-era ‘What are we going to do?’ forums that we should build solidarity with Aboriginal people. He said that this approach would leave us stuck in the corner with the Green Left Weekly crowd—that, instead, we should be working with the Roman Catholic Church because positioning ourselves as basically a socially conservative religious lobby would be the most effective way of escaping racism.

It’s still bumpy; it’s still not always done perfectly. But, seeing so many Muslims now who are working in solidarity with Indigenous people rather than the fucking Roman Catholic Church (#notallCatholics), I guess it feels like a meaningful growth as a community.

The academic transformation that I have witnessed the most clearly throughout my life has been how your multiple sclerosis (MS) has led to your work in the disability space. I remember, early on in your diagnosis, that you were very adamant that, yes, this was part of your life, but no, that didn’t mean you had any desire to write about it. Obviously, that’s changed now.

The disability narratives that were on my radar at the time of my diagnosis were all either sentimental stories about disabled children (generally written by a parent or carer) or what Stella Young termed “inspiration porn”. You could hear the sentimental music in the background as you read them. Anyway, I already had more than enough to write about for one lifetime. I didn’t need a neurological disease to liven up my boring, white-bread life.

That changed partly because the MS became impossible to ignore, but also as I became aware of the cohort of exciting disabled writers whose work actively resisted the slot of inspiration porn. And I also realised the connection between ableism and my familiar stamping grounds of racism and sexism.

What does being Asian Australian mean to you?

For me, being Asian Australian has made me extremely suspicious of collective pronouns. Whenever I hear the word ‘us’, I’m pretty certain that I’m one of ‘them’.