Meet Me at the Intersection

by Ambelin Kwaymullina

  I swear, all at once, everyone turns to look at me. It’s scary, like some thirty-headed Nagini staring at me, just waiting for Voldemort to say ‘Kill’ the same way he’d say ‘Walkies’.

  Mr Yeo is confused, as if he just doesn’t understand the question, so I ask it differently. ‘Well, you know how some people use science to say that LGBTQI people are freaks of nature, well what is it about nature that makes non-LGBTQI people the way they are?’ Then I get a bit fiery again and add, ‘and if it is so natural to be hetero then why are there a-sexual people and why …’

  But before I can finish, Dion Kovanis says ‘WTF is this LGBTXYZ shit anyway? Why not just say faggots and muff—’ and before he can finish Mr Yeo cuts him off by saying, ‘That’s enough Dion. Michelle has an interesting question, I think.’ And Mr Yeo is tilting his head, looking at me and all the Naginis are still looking at me and why do I feel like I’m the only person in the room who’s thought of this stuff? Then Mr. Yeo says quietly, ‘Go on, Michelle.’ So I take a breath and I do.

  ‘DNA has no bias. It has no agenda. DNA doesn’t tell us what to think. DNA doesn’t control our behavior. It doesn’t have to come out. Also, if we have cisgender like it’s some birth-induced DNA thing, then why don’t we have the term cissexual, which we don’t?’

  Some of the class have turned back, but most of them still stare like I’m raving and maybe I am, but I think about this stuff all the time because it’s who I am. It’s who I am. Isn’t it?

  Mr. Yeo nods, so I go on, even though I’m getting angry. ‘If we have asexual why not just use the term ‘sexual’ instead of lesbian or trans or whatever? Gender is a sense; it’s not science. Sexuality is behavior; it’s not science.’ And now it feels like my words are coming out all wrong and I can feel my face going a little red and my breathing is faster and my chest is tighter and my brain feels like its going to burst.

  And I see Voldemort disintegrating into those countless fragments of his no-love skin and bone, bits of his sociopathic self shattering, dark, light, power-obsessed, that weird almost-nose, no-light eyes, no-hair, blood, half-blood kill all mudbloods, hating but snake-loving, each part reduced to dust until nothing, not even a must-not-be-named atom remains. And I feel that I may be falling apart too. Countless Michelle fragments of skin, bone, whitish-brownish-yellowish, Asian, Australian, caring, hurting, not-surfing, science-loving, whatever-sexual, whatever-blood, it all starts to fracture and fly away because I cannot hold it together anymore.

  But it’s kind of liberating. I imagine those little strands of DNA, not flying away but bending and twisting and flexing. All the little strands that make my hair brown and my eyes hazel and my skin olive and my heart strong and my teeth straight and I know that DNA does not make my choices for me. I do that. I will tell me what kind of person I am and what I think and how I live and who I marry or not marry, who I love or do not love.

  I am not falling apart. I am moving forward, always — three minutes ago before I spoke in class, last Sunday when I was under attack from Auntie May, the Sunday of the Soy Wars, the week my parents divorced all the way back to when I made my first best friend, whose name was Scott, by the way, and he moved to Adelaide and we still send each other birthday gifts.

  And out of all that, something comes right to the front. I remember saying to Auntie May, ‘I mean, look at the stuff DNA is made from, it has no beginning and no end. And if DNA is the basis for everything, then how can anything be for always?’ and I realise that it can’t and everything changes, including me and everything in my world. And I know that what matters is not what my DNA makes me, but what I make of it.

  RAFEIF ISMAIL

  Rafeif Ismail is a Perth-based, emerging Muslim writer who is a refugee from Sudan identifying as queer. While the story is fiction, parts of it were inspired by true events, personal experience and the desire to see more representation of queer, black Muslim women in fiction. Rafeif writes, ‘I hope the story highlights that there is no single refugee story, queer story, migrant story, African story, Muslim story, etc. The danger of a single narrative is that it leaves individuals vulnerable to the dehumanisation that is at the core of all institutions of oppression.’

  Almitra Amongst Ghosts

  Houah Maktoub, your grandmother always used to say, It is written. She firmly believed that everything that will ever happen had already happened, that distance and time were no obstacle. You used to sit by her side, in the shade of a veranda overlooking a courtyard, in that house surrounded by tall walls painted white, with its metal gate that was green with age, always open. You listened, your fingers sliding across the imperceptible thorns of the okra you handed her, which she expertly cut for that night’s dinner as she told stories she had grown up learning, in the village on the island between two Niles. Stories of family, friends and legends, she had weaved them together like a dark Sahrazad. It is where you first heard of Mohamad, the village boy who lived on the edge of the savanna, who cried, Tiger! Tiger! Tiger in the grassland! Until no one believed him, and his whole village was massacred as a result. Of Fatima, who sang so sweetly that a ghoul stopped the Nile for her, so that she may retrieve her lost gold. And of the spirits in the rivers, those on land and ancestors who whisper in dreams, reaching out from some other world with warning and advice. Years later, you will learn that quantum entanglement posits that two objects may exist in reference to each other regardless of space-time, and think on how much physics sounds like your grandmother’s folklore and faith. At her side you learned of a world three parts unseen and believed in it. Now those days seem hazy and distant, and there is a space in you that twinges like phantom limb, as though you lost something you did not know you had, somewhere along the invisible borders between what you thought was home and here.

  Your house is like every other, with three bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room, and your house is full of ghosts. You see them pass across your father’s eyes as he stares at a wall, seeing a place that is not there anymore. They follow your mother into the sunlight as she gardens, they inform the heaviness of her step, the creaking of her bones. She is trying to grow chili, aloe vera, and a lemon tree — much smaller than the one that grew in your old home — that doesn’t seem to want to flower. You see the ghosts on your way to the bus stop, where every day without fail, in the space of a single step, the street becomes dusty and you can smell sandalwood in the air. It is almost as though if you walk down that road, you will see your grandmother, sitting outside that green metal gate with a big wooden bowl at her feet, cutting okra. The ghosts thankfully don’t follow close behind you at school, although they linger at the edges of the classroom, and in the shadows of the trees dotting your school oval. You get used to them over time, those flashes of scent, of memory, and you learn how not to react the same way you learn not to hide under your bed when you hear fireworks, or jump every time a car backfires. The dreams are more difficult to control but as the years pass you form an understanding between yourself and those haunting you.

  It is 2016 and your newsfeed has been full of stories from the Orlando massacre, and suddenly the world is tilting much further along its axis, and gravity seems much stronger, every breath feels like a battle. You do not attend the vigil to commemorate the victims and survivors. You cannot bring yourself to leave your house. Adrift from your body, you feel trapped, unable to look away as the news shows people becoming hashtags, becoming tombstones. You finally understand why your mother cried that day two years ago, when you, eighteen and giddy to the point of intoxication, tried to find the words to explain something you did not have the language for, when you tried to tell her about Dunya.

  ‘Everyone feels this way about their friends at some point!’ she had screamed, when you’d both lost your tempers — yours in frustration, hers in something closer to desperation. ‘It does not mean you act on it.’

  In your stunned silence you had offered no response.

  ‘This will pass,’ she had said, ‘and we’ll talk no
more about it.’ Ending the conversation. The distance between you grew, until now, where it feels like you are standing on opposite shores of the same river.

  Now you see her words for the plea and prayer they were. There is so much that is unspoken in that ghost house of yours, the silence is often straining to burst as it rings on every wall. But, like bullets, words can ricochet and fragment, so you all keep your silences. You had called Dunya earlier that day, tired of navigating minefields in your living room. She had deactivated her social media accounts earlier that week, always much more practical when it came to dealing with grief, better at avoiding it, putting up walls and daring it to come closer. You, on the other hand, soak it up like injera does mullah, your comfort food, until it becomes all you can taste. Travelling to meet her is the first time you are out in the sun in days and everything is just a bit too bright, the bus crowded enough that you have to sit next to someone.

  It is sometimes easy to fall into the dream of this country, to walk towards that mirage of blind equality and for a moment forget that your life has always been shaped by the actions of others, from centuries and continents ago to just now, as you step onto a bus and strangers with frightened eyes uncomfortably avert their gaze and shift as though shielding themselves, praying you don’t come near them. As always, your embarrassment comes unbidden, rushing through you, prickling your skin like tiny okra thorns and your every movement automatically becomes an apology. You remember that so much of you is not your own. Maktoub. But not the way your grandmother believed. No, in this nation people assume they can write your story from beginning to end, and wait for you to fall into place on the stage that has been set. It is why every conversation scans like a hostage negotiation, with your humanity being the item that’s up for deliberation.

  Once, when you were fourteen and Dunya was still just one of the many girls you meet in passing twice a year during an Eid barbecue and your futures were not yet this possibility, there was a boy who walked home with you every day after school. You talked in a way that you never did on campus. Those conversations became the very best part of your day. He was different and made you laugh. He called you beautiful, for a black girl, and you kissed him. It would not be the last time someone would pay you a provisional compliment, nor the last time you accept it. Back then, you had not yet realised that those who viewed your beauty conditionally, undoubtedly felt the same towards your humanity.

  With Dunya, you found a love without stipulations and it was at once both a revelation and revolution. She walks proudly in the streets with her dark hair beneath brightly coloured hijabs so obviously herself and it terrifies you that she may not come back one day. As report after report makes its way onto your newsfeed of attacks on women who look like her — like you — you pray more fervently than you have in years. Even if you’re not sure who you are praying to.

  It’s one of those dime-a-dozen, cannon-fodder days that roll on lazily through the summer, with a too hot sun and clear skies, when you meet her, under a jacaranda tree in some park you’d found when exploring the city — its biggest attraction is that it’s located several suburbs away from where you both live. You have both learned to compromise. You speak English with American accents and Arabic with Australian ones. You hold hands but only in places where you cannot be seen, because gossip spreads faster than bushfires and neither of you would survive the burn. Yet in those compromises of all that you are, you still carve out spaces for yourselves. You sit for hours under the shade of that tree, and remember stories from an ocean ago, and Dunya reads out loud from her favourite book. You listen to the cadence of her voice, as she recites poetry the way she was taught to recite prayer. It is almost undistinguishable from singing.

  And there is a way to describe this moment, the shade, the tree, the breeze; this brief respite from the world — in the language you were both taught as children — Al dul al wareef. There is no comparable phrase in English. That is fine, there are no words for who you both are either in the language of your grandmother and your parents — the one you now speak with an accent. In that language love is described by forces of nature, monstrously destructive and divine, and in all of that is possibly an explanation as to why its words for breath and love are indistinguishable by sound. It is probably why songs only croon phrases like ‘You are the Nile’, ‘She is like the Moon’ and ‘You are the hawa coursing through my veins’.

  ‘So speak to us of love, said Almitra,’ Dunya quotes in Arabic. Stories like yours don’t have happy endings, not any you have seen. But you are not only beautiful in your tragedy. One day you will write this story, and speak of love; it might be read under a different sky, it might have a happy ending. Just for now though, you think, your eyes drifting shut, I can keep living it.

  OMAR SAKR

  Omar Sakr, Arab-Australian poet, editor and emerging author based in Western Sydney, is a half-Lebanese, half-Turkish, bisexual Muslim man, raised in a Lebanese family. This story is a work of memoir about kinship and the author meeting his Turkish half-brother for the first time. Omar writes, ‘While I am attuned to the various nuances of being in specific spaces, politically I aim for solidarity across the spectrum of all the communities to whom I belong. I am disinclined to align with halves, and so seek the whole.’

  The Other Son

  I first met Attila in the Turkish funeral house where our father’s body was being washed and prepared for its final bed. Chairs lined the walls of the large square waiting room, one filled by Babbanne, another by my aunt Yasmine, and three by my sisters Gulsah, Tugba, and Sumi. Several other miscellaneous older women drooped in their seats looking like sad bulldogs wrapped in blankets. The tacky red rug on the floor was an unnecessary reminder of blood in a place flooded with it. Attila stood in the empty space in the middle. He was unmistakeably a boy — slight, his hair thick and wavy, his body somehow casual. I was standing outside, looking in through the bell-shaped doorway, separated from him by two metres, a decade, and an affair.

  A harried, bearded man poked his head out of the office opposite the waiting room, and reeled me in with his eyes. He said something in Turkish, the slurping sound of which I was at least familiar with, if not the meaning, and I stared at him.

  ‘English, sorry,’ I said.

  He frowned. ‘You knew the deceased?’

  ‘I’m his son,’ I said.

  ‘Aha,’ he said, picking up his pen. ‘Was he married?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  He glared. ‘You knew the deceased?’

  ‘I … I’m his son.’ I shrugged, helpless, and backed away from the door. The man came out babbling, but at the same moment my uncle Sedat stepped in from the cold where the men were gathered, letting me off the hook. Relieved, I rushed into the waiting room. I swooped onto Babbanne who was keening and rocking on the spot, interrupting her with my kisses, and then moved through the others one by one with a series of swift pecks on wet cheeks. My autopilot greetings stuttered into awkward silence around Attila, before finally I moved past him, and on to our sisters, who I at least knew. Gulsah, the eldest, held her newborn up like a shield to keep everyone at bay. Tugba came next and seemed more selfie than person, every hair immaculately arranged, a shining light brown crown. Sumi, the last of the girls, was younger than me and the donkey of the family, working twice as hard as everyone else. She was only twenty-five, but defeat had already stamped its fist on her round, kind face.

  I sat next to her, and listened to them talk. Attila kept walking back and forth in front of us, constantly flipping his iPhone around in one hand, until I pointed at the chair next to me and said, ‘Sit’. He flopped onto the seat without a word, like he’d only been waiting for a direction. He had faded light blue jeans on, and one of those stupid puffy jackets, khaki green. He leaned over in his seat, staring at the ground, the dark mirror of his phone highlighting his pale face, his sharp jawline. He was pret
tier than our sisters, even though his nose was as big as a baby’s fist. It worked for him in a way that it didn’t for the rest of us. It worked for him like it once worked for our dad.

  Our knees were almost touching, but he might as well have been in another country. I wanted to stare at him forever, kept sneaking looks, kept opening and closing my mouth. How do you talk to a brother you’ve never known? Everything I could possibly say to him ran through my head and all of it was dumb. I told myself it wasn’t my fault that a dead man’s hand was covering my mouth. Attila’s screen lit up with a notification. I seized on the light, taking the phone from him, dizzy with the force of sudden revelation.

  ‘This is my number,’ I said in an undertone, tapping it in. ‘Call me whenever you want, okay?’ He nodded slowly, then called my phone so that I had his number, too. I let out a long breath. Nothing separated us anymore.

  I slept in Attila’s bed that night.

  When my sister Sumi suggested I stay with them I barely put up a fight. Truthfully, I was so hungry to know them, it scared me.

  ‘What about your mum?’ I asked. Her mum, like my own, had never been keen on us all mixing. ‘What will you say?’

  ‘I’ll say: Omer’s staying with us tonight. She won’t care.’ I love the way Turks say my name, a soft ‘er’ sound on the end making it a purr. Not like the Arab family I grew up with, who make it a hard ‘ar’. Sumi was right about her mum not caring. Though she and I wouldn’t speak for days yet, she didn’t batt an eyelid at my staying with them. I guess after nearly thirty years I was an old sin, a scar past hurting. For her and for my mum, at least. Their place was a new duplex in Guildford, a shiny display house, and it was packed full of Turks. For the next six days, seemingly every relative or random person who had come into contact with my father, paraded through with their families to pay their respects. It was mayhem, with at least sixty kids at any given moment running around hounded by parents shouting their names, while separate clumps of men and women sat in the lounge ignoring each other. Like Arabs, whenever a Turkish family comes together, in grief or joy, it can only be described as a riot.