I used to wish I could advocate for refugees anonymously, from the shadows – like an advocate version of Sia. With my back to the audience. A mask concealing my face.
I didn’t want to disclose something profoundly personal to a room full of blank-faced strangers who could never truly understand the experience. And carry all the stereotypical baggage that comes with declaring oneself a refugee.
You’re never just a student, a law graduate, a lawyer. The word refugee stalks you through life prefixed to any other subsequent identity you develop in post-refugee life.
A “refugee” felt like a prior identity, a political status once ascribed to me that suggested vulnerability, inferiority, alienness, pity – everything I wanted to remove from my idea of myself.
Growing up in Adelaide and Melbourne, I was too immersed in Anglo-Australia to focus on anything but the need to look and act like those around me. And, even though I felt like an interloper, I worked hard to scrub out my strong Slavic accent, develop an Aussie drawl, take out the letter “j” from my name, even better anglicise it to “Dan”, get out of the ESL class, finish high school, move out, go to university, get a degree, get a job, take holidays and post selfies finished perfectly with a filtered smile belying the past.
To distance myself from my homeland – the antebellum Yugoslavia, a once peaceful and prosperous nation, but now synonymous with war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and deprivation.
Throw away my refugee hand-me-downs, slip into new clothes and accessories, morph into new habits and methods of behaviour that hewed to the various setting of my new life.
I was too insulated in safety to recognise how far I had come from my prior state of that traumatised 12-year-old boy lifted out of a refugee camp who landed on Australian soil gaunt and malnourished, wearing a Unicef donated tracksuit three times my size sporting a jagged fringe, the work of my mother’s kitchen shears.
By this stage, I had lost more family members to war than there were years in my life.
Better to call myself an immigrant, I decided.
To regard myself as belonging to a category of migratory humanity that is for the most part uncontroversial, less needy, less “frightening” than a refugee. The kind who came to Australia because they wanted to better themselves and their families, not because they had to in order to escape violence, war and persecution. Better to shed my old skin, to give up my former identity, every aspect that made me, me. To ensconce myself in my invisibility, in the safety of my new-found citizenship.
I didn’t want to be seen as some talisman. An exhibit. A token.
Invited to share a survivor’s story for two minutes to “warm up” the audience then take a seat at the back vacating the stage for the main event dedicated to someone who made a film about us, an author who wrote a book about us, an opportunistic politician who got elected on the back of us, or founder of some advocacy group purporting to advocate for us as though we are a homogenous block, but where refugees are never given the platform to narrate their own stories.
One could be forgiven for thinking we are some amorphous beings without agency, stripped off personality, colour, gender and character.
But anonymity would be anathema to the concept of “humanising” refugees. How can you humanise something unseen?
So, recently I’ve decided to come out of the refugee closet. To “own” my refugee identity.
Because no amount of assimilation will make that identity dissipate. With maturity, I realised I don’t want it to. And each day I switch on the news, I see newer versions of past me land onto these shores, and I feel their shadow is my shadow too. This identity – it sticks with you.
We belong to an age-old chain of survivors from Virgin Mary and Joseph to Irish famine, the second world war exodus, Holocaust survivors, Indochinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Koreans, Afghans, Iraqis, Darfuris, Rwandans, Syrians, Rohingya, Somalis, Central Americans, climate refugees, to others not mentioned here and those yet to come (unfortunately) whose stories we carry within us and will pass on to our progeny.
We will tune our voices, polish our stories – because this space is dull and stifling without us.
As refugees, we have been here for a long time, hidden in plain sight: in our workplaces, schools, factories, boardrooms, hospitals, unions, universities, sporting fields (indeed there are refugees representing Australia at this year’s World Cup) and even in unemployment queues, because human fallibility and mediocrity is not a privilege reserved only for the native born – you just never noticed or cared enough to notice us.
In the words of Vietnamese-American novelist and former refugee Viet Thanh Nguyen: “To become a refugee is to know, inevitably, that the past is not only marked by the passage of time, but by loss – the loss of loved ones, of countries, of identities, of selves. We want to give voice to all those losses that would otherwise remain unheard except by us and those near and dear to us.”
• Danijel Malbasa is a Melbourne based industrial relations lawyer, a refugee of the Yugoslav wars and a refugees’ rights advocate
• Comments on this article have been premoderated to ensure the discussion is on the topics that have been written about.
