On the weekend I visited my aunty in Casula, where I grew up. Her street has changed little in 30 years, which is why it was such a shock to drive past a construction site where a large house used to be, the only one in the area we’d call a mansion—it was an old building, long and raised up on a small hill, so its second level peeked out above the huge hedges that guarded the front-face of the place. Think decaying colonial manor. It belonged to the grandparents of one of the white kids I grew up with (his mother was on the outer with them, on account of being an unmarried single mum) and sometimes they wouldn’t be home, so we’d all be invited in to ogle the gleaming white tiles, the marble, the wide staircase, the pool and billiards room where we’d play at being men. I often fantasised about being fucked on that pool table by one of the other boys. Typical, I know: any space draped in testosterone, any place coded in refusal, where my body felt instinctively out of place, is a space and place I wanted to fuck and be fucked in, desire born as a means of reclamation. It’s all rubble now, the whole structure, the vanity hill, the screen of hedges, the memories and wet dreams.
I asked my cousin about it as he’s one of the workers on the site, and he told me that the block was being converted into two duplexes, the kind you see all over Western Sydney these days, and that the owner, who wanted to rent them out for $750 a week—I nearly choked on my Coke—wouldn’t stop ranting about the housing-commissions in the area dragging down the value of his real estate. My cousin scratched at his black beard. “Why buy in a housing commission area if you’re gonna complain about housing-commissions? Make it make sense, bro.” My aunty’s house, where I was raised, is housing commission. And some of these homes in the area are on the market for $900K—$1M, which is hard for me to understand, being the same streets and yards we got chased by cops in throughout my adolescence. Same streets we’ve been bashed and robbed and stabbed in. Large apartment blocks are rearing their ugly heads in Lurnea, Casula and Prestons, towers that loom above the sprawl all the way toward and through Liverpool.
I can’t visit without being overwhelmed by the past, or the scale of changes taking place. Much of my family, on the other hand, haven’t left, and are part of the changes, like my cousin bulldozing the long-empty house we had memories in. Most of them live in these suburbs with their own families now, a little village of their own making, and there is no rupture in their timeline, the past and present are continuous, and they are busy providing an inheritance to their kids that we had never had as the children of migrants: a sense of belonging that comes from knowing a place, and the people in it, across generations. It is illusory, and not a project worth investing in, in my opinion, rooted as I am in rejection, in unbelonging, but I understand the appeal.
I know it sounds like I live in a different country now, but I’m only 30mins drive away in Auburn; still, when you have multiple kids, and you exist in that complex web of relationships and daily support, 30mins drive might as well be the moon. This makes me think of how, in the first mass migrations of Arabs to the West, they would be asked where they were from and answer not with the country but with the village or town, their specific locality. The colonial imposition of national identities has only recently come to bear over an ancient, interconnected kinship network that extended across the Levant, and which, for all that, continues to function in its own way.
I’m thinking about these changes, these visitations, because I’ll be speaking on a panel at Casula Powerhouse this Friday, December 2nd, for Brave New Words, the festival run by Bankstown Poetry Slam. The panel is called Write On: Speaking Truth to Power, and it’ll be on at 7pm:
For the most part, my work doesn’t take me so close to where I grew up, there aren’t that many opportunities out this way, and truthfully, I’ve always been afraid of being accidentally exposed to my family, a fear which has lessened over the years as I came out to them. I’m glad for this change at least, and its thanks in large part to people like Sara Mansour, co-founder and director of Bankstown Poetry Slam, who are making these events and moments happen. I was talking to her recently about the workshops they ran at Liverpool Boys High, the school I went to, and we were both in a state of almost resentful disbelief. That place broke me, but it’s home today to budding poets. “Can you imagine if we’d had this growing up?” we laughed. We’ve managed to do incredible things despite that, but at great cost, and still we are among just a few exceptions when we should be the rule.
That day is coming, inshallah.