Ana Asanovic shares her experience of displacement, arguing that too often the stories of refugee women are spoken over, misunderstood or reduced to stereotypes
It was at an after-work drinks event when I realised things had to change.
A kind, male colleague asked about my childhood experience of displacement and becoming a refugee, curious to learn more. At a loud Melbourne rooftop, before I could even say a word, another colleague, this time a female one, started answering that question, and talked about my life. The life she had almost no idea of, only collecting bites of information casually shared over the microwave at lunch.
Those bites were somehow enough for the confidence to talk about the life of a former refugee, now a migrant woman, despite not having any connection to either of those life circumstances. The common pattern of confidence speaking over competence emerged, even outside the boardrooms and working hours.
We hear a lot about giving refugees and migrants a voice. But is the voice something migrant and refugee communities need? Or is it that they already have it, but have over the years learned that it’s not safe to share? Could it be that the communities need access, training, understanding, encouragement? And genuine attention?
I was 11-years-old when my family left former Yugoslavia and settled in Toronto, Canada. We didn’t stay long, only a year, and returned to what was left of now Serbia, to live through years of civil war, and four months of intense NATO bombing in 1999. Everyone who has ever heard the sounds of warning sirens, low flying fighter-jets, detonations and destruction, while sleeping in windowless rooms for safety, never forgets these feelings.
Despite low-flying planes today triggering those memories, refugees get asked to share these stories at rooftop parties, like it was a casual footy chat, while the atmosphere is vibrant and everyone is at least on their second beer. We get only minimal attention, if any. If we don’t get interrupted with someone’s perception of our lives first, that is.
Refugee Week events should be safer spaces for us to share lived experience stories. We expect more from the audience, the host, the questions. We walk in hoping for empathy, understanding and care, bringing a deep desire for our stories to mean something, to lead to meaningful social change. And I say “should” because there is still work to be done – knowing the difference between Serbia, Syria and Siberia could be the first step. Context matters because where we grew up shaped our values and what we can teach others today.
A couple of months ago, I was having a coffee with a woman who has a remarkable personal narrative, arriving in Australia alone at just 18 years old, more than two decades ago. Today, nobody could easily tell she wasn’t born Australian, but she still firmly believed she couldn’t write her story because English wasn’t her first language.
This broke my heart. I could see years of shrinking to fit in, years of unlearning accents, years of being told what migrants and refugees can and can’t do. Years of being the “diverse” one.
Has anyone actually encouraged her to take some time and write down her story?
Writing is one of the most powerful tools we have for making sense of our lives, and it is one of the most underused when it comes to supporting refugee and migrant women in particular.
Writing is a form of therapy, with its healing effects well-documented. When we write our own stories, we move from passenger to narrator. We discover, mid-sentence, things about our experience that we didn’t know we understood. The act of writing asks us to find the words, and in finding them, we find a new kind of ownership over what happened to us and our people.
As adults, creative writing helps us process what happened to us as kids, when we had no control of decisions and events. In times of war, it’s the women’s stories that are often missing, as men’s stories have been turned into movies and TV series. Often, it’s the women who hold families and communities together, long after the men are gone, and before they even know if they’ll ever return.
These women are heroes, across cultures and timelines, and deserve to tell their stories, uninterrupted.
In August, I’ll be facilitating Stories Between Lands, a creative writing program for people who have always wanted to share stories of migration and community, supported by a Banyule Arts and Culture grant.
The stories are already there. They just need space, and someone finally paying attention, while personally understanding what it means to call two counties home.