I don’t believe in fate, but sometimes things go wrong in the very best ways.
At some point in 1992, my parents were panicked to learn, way too late, that we weren’t actually living in the Grammar Zone for high-school entrance purposes. We were out by a hair’s breadth, but it may as well have been a thousand miles. We had no contacts or family links to draw on, so my mother started writing and asking for appointments with local politicians. She felt strongly that meeting with elected officials was something we should embrace as good citizens. Some actually met with her, if only to apologise and tell her there was nothing they could do. One local representative told her it may be my lack of sporting prowess that was holding me back from out-of-zone entry. This was a deficiency we could all easily accept, one which I was thoroughly comfortable with at this point.
Having made no inroads with local politicians, my parents reluctantly decided I would go to the next best school we could manage. Auckland Girls Grammar School (AGGS) had a fancy-sounding name and was the country’s oldest high school for girls, but in 1993 it wasn’t considered a top school. For one thing, it was in the inner city and smack bang in the middle of the red-light district of Karangahape Road (a detail of which my parents were unaware). The plan was for me to go there for a year while we sorted out the zoning issue. My parents were already moving us into yet another decrepit unit, even worse than the last but more expensive, because this time we would be properly ‘in the zone’. But I never went back. I was elated at the thought of a clean break from the fancy kids I had only managed tenuous acquaintanceships with over my two years at intermediate. I could never endure high school with an even bigger horde of haughty rich kids. AGGS saved my soul.
By 1993, I was a thin, ethnically ambiguous thirteen-year-old, with a little bit of a tough exterior and a slightly angst-ridden disdain for anything ‘popular’, because frankly popularity was none of my business. Not by design, but I was perfect for an inner-city school tucked between the red-light district, the rainbow community, and downtown Auckland.
The story of Auckland’s urban poor and Pasifika communities was integral to the school’s unique culture and diverse student body. The suburbs around AGGS had once been the centre of state housing and the Pasifika community. But by the time I got there in the 1990s, most of these people had already been pushed out by rising housing prices into the outer suburbs of South and West Auckland.
The student body at AGGS was and still is filled with girls who gained entry by virtue of their grandmothers, mothers, and older sisters having attended the school when their families still lived nearby. Families generationally send their girls to AGGS for a better education than might be available in the far-away suburbs where they now live. This meant that when I first walked through the big towering iron gates at AGGS, the 2000-or-so strong student body was around seventy per cent Māori or Pasifika. That population was peppered with the daughters of a free-spirited Pākehā community, who began gentrifying the neighbouring suburbs in the 1980s. The area wasn’t yet solidly fancy or desirable like it is now, though it did boast some of the city’s best cuisine and nightlife. The white middle-class families there were either hippies, running organic food stores and wearing hemp, or baby boomers, who at least considered themselves enlightened enough to choose life among student flats and a thriving LGBTQI+ community. Sending their daughters to AGGS was part of that casual rebellion.
But AGGS also has a haughty history of old money — as old as money gets in the youngest of British colonies — that built the nation’s first-ever grammar school for girls. That was reflected in the school’s name and physical aesthetic.
AGGS is on Howe Street, a leafy oasis lined with towering oak trees and fallen acorns, detached from their polluted urban setting. The school’s buildings looked like nothing I had ever seen around Auckland. The first sight as you walk in is the main building, A Block, which stands at the centre of the top lawn, an immaculate English lawn fenced by a surreal thicket of native flax and dense bush. A Block itself could be a small castle or some hall in a Katherine Mansfield story about fancy garden parties in colonial New Zealand. The old manor stands gloating at the end of the winding path into the school. Of course, it has a bell tower and is covered in worn ivy. This is no fresh aspirational wisp. No, this is forever ivy. That alien vegetation tells its lies about culture and prestige so well that the building could, at first sight, be mistaken for one on the grounds of Oxford University, or on a Harry Potter movie set.
All this was in wild contrast with the loud unrestrained manner of the girls walking the halls. Most of the uniforms were worn, hinting at hand-me-downs or second-hand purchases. Some wore non-regulation flip-flops. There were constant eruptions of scream-laughing, singing, casual twirling of poi on the way to class. On the lawn, people played kilikiti rather than cricket. Nothing of the life vigorously lived there matched the school’s exterior. This was unmistakably a Pacific institution housed in a fancy old English grammar school. This was quintessential Auckland. The contrast was stark but beautiful. I had never even been to a proper big school before and I had certainly never seen a non-white majority population since I left Iran. Walking into AGGS was exhilarating.
Though the suburbs around the school and their cultural history defined the student body, it was Karangahape Road that most defined our experience of attending AGGS in the 1990s. K Road sits in uptown Auckland and, because most bus routes stop there, a sea of navy blue–uniformed AGGS girls walk along it twice daily. That made us inadvertently part of the most eclectic community in New Zealand.
The road is best known as a red-light district to most Kiwis who’ve heard of it. In the ’90s, that meant walking past strip clubs, peep shows, and sex shops optimally named Vegas Girl and The Pink Pussy. If we left school late and darkness was setting in, it might mean walking past sex workers arriving at their spots for the night along the side streets of K Road, including Howe Street. It also meant regularly encountering trans women, who seemed more open to interacting with us girls and were protective of us.
My Iranian friends were always a little perplexed about my school choice, but, at least in my mind, they were also in awe of the adventure I was having. I was in turn very protective of AGGS and K Road. The sex workers were not a threat. The trans women were funny and warm and beautiful. Nothing there was to be stared at or run away from. It was all just misunderstood. It made me feel good to think I got it, that my new schoolmates and I were part of something less ordinary. Mercifully, my parents remained very much in the dark about K Road.
In reality, it wasn’t the sex industry that ruled the K Road experience. This was a place of inexhaustible variety. For one thing, it has been home to an established homeless community for some time. This was well before homelessness was a city-wide problem of displacement based on economic inequality and housing shortage. That’s not to say the K Road homeless community wasn’t there for all sorts of distressing reasons, including poverty, racism, untreated mental illness or addiction. But most were there — as opposed to anywhere else in the city — by choice. The geography worked — it was urban enough not to alarm suburbanites, but far enough out of the soulless, unforgiving financial centre. In fact, the other residents and businesses there were actively open to fringe dwellers. In a sense, they fancied themselves ‘vagrants’ in one way or another.
The homeless community was still vulnerable to all the things that make them targets of violence and illness. But from what I saw, physical harm was almost always inflicted by visitors from the ‘respectable’ side of town. These were people who came to K Road to be depraved for a night, then forget the mess they left behind. They’d come for a ‘boys’ night out’, a debauched corporate do, a trip to the ‘Big Smoke’. They’d come from sheltered small towns and the polite decent suburbs. For the visitors, ‘having fun’ ranged from drunkenness and a touch of nudity to beating trans sex workers and urinating on sleeping homeless folks. That’s when K Road became frightening for its residents. As the suburbs and the heartland descended on K Road every weekend, there was blood on the footpath most Sunday mornings. It’s a scene I’ve seen repeated in recent years, as I’ve ended up living just off this haven of chaos most of my adult life. They smash up the street and the people, then they retreat.
The sense of belonging on K Road had a lot to do with its business community too. By the early 1990s, it was a little gentrified, but still terrifying to most of society: there were dive bars and underground music joints; tattoo studios and piercing salons. The cafes were grungy — needles on the floor and soiled upholstery grungy, not mason jars and ironic tattoos grungy. K Roaders of that era remember Brazil, the café with its rickety iron spiral staircase into the darkness above. There was the Lost Angel at the top of Howe Street with its cheap toasted sandwiches and, well, needles on the floor. That was an easy place to skip to from AGGS during lunchtime. It was also the heyday of Verona, dark, with DJs that spun long into the night, but strangely also filled with delicious homemade counter food. Grunge itself was a bit new but definitely deliberate and on the mainstream radar given Kurt Cobain had hit hard. So while as AGGS girls we couldn’t take any credit for being there by choice, K Roaders were proud to be part of the ‘original’ grunge scene.
Karangahape Road’s crowning jewel, and its safest drawcard, was St Kevins Arcade overlooking Myers Park, itself a scary landmark at night. The arcade was filled with second-hand clothing stores and headed by the sprawling Alleluya Café at the far end. All have since been driven out by renovations, though the general vibe is at least still broadly bohemian.
Because Alleluya was so far down the arcade and safely away from street view, it made the perfect hiding place for truants and became central to my life in the K Road ecosystem. A bunch of us spent half our school lives there. Coffee culture had just hit New Zealand, so we would pool our money and order a cappuccino between two or three people and sit there for hours. We felt like serious vagrants and very adult.
Peter, who owned Alleluya for some twenty-one years before the arcade was sold to developers, had created a community hub. In my mind he was a priest-like figure, floating around between the spaced-out tables and chairs that eventually took up half the arcade with a wise half-smile on his face. He was a bit of a father figure who had seen it all and didn’t mind the mess that came and went from his domed house of refuge. Alleluya was warm and bright from the sunlight that poured in through the massive ceiling-high windows overlooking the park and washed over the mismatched fading furniture. You could see the glowing promised land as you walked into the darkened arcade. Everything from the carved ceilings to the wooden tables and chairs were covered in washed-out chipped paint, revealing bursts of red or blue or green, jewel tones grounded down to pastels on wood or plaster.
Some of the most intimate secrets shared by my friends and me in high school were whispered in darkened booths in Alleluya or Verona. We went to Verona after one of my best friends came out to me at fifteen years old. It’s also where a friend first told me her dad, who I knew and loved, was schizophrenic and she grew up scared of his episodes, which were starting to come back with a change in medication. We talked for hours about going to art school, as I wanted to do with my two best friends, Anna Jackson and Alicia Frankovich.
Those of us who grew up there never stopped going because the serenity of that meeting point between grit and open sunlight is hard to find. Peter left and the space where Alleluya once was became a new café, something freshly painted with uniform furnishings in 2016. The staff are still young and consciously very street. They were born in the mid-1990s, when Alleluya first opened. The spirit has endured a bit, I guess because of the location and who it inherently attracts, and the strength of Peter’s own spirit. Most of this book was written from under that domed window, decades after I first started smugly hiding at Alleluya to compare Dr. Martens boots and avoid handing in unfinished homework.
Arguably, what brought true eclecticism to Karangahape Road was that it was also home to businesses from old and new ethnic communities. There was the best Hare Krishna restaurant in Auckland, where you washed your own tin plates and didn’t need to pay for food if you couldn’t. Today, a few of the other little Indian eateries still stand, including one with windows stacked full of fluoro-coloured geometric sweets. There was the Cambodian food court and the Chinese grocers. There were tiny girls often playing and giggling on the footpath in front of their families’ hair-braiding salons, catering to tiny African and West Indian communities around Auckland, as well as anyone tapping into the reggae revival back then.
None of these outlets — from the sex shops to the dive bars to the bourgeoning ethnic eateries and services — had found a home in the sedate suburbs and most hadn’t wanted to be there anyway. It brought the community together as equals and it meant we had prominent elders, so to speak, from all walks of life.
I remember Margaret Hoffman was queen. Though few knew her name or story at the time, we all wondered who she was and how she had come to be here each day. An elegant wiry figure who towered over the strip, Margaret was ageless and unapproachable. She was immaculately dressed, sometimes even in furs, in what were likely outfits gifted to her by the many gorgeous vintage stores dotting her home street. I would call her aesthetic ‘worn ’70s glam’. Her hair was big. It changed between blonde, red and brown, with grey roots and a big protruding fringe that hit just above her brows. The hairdressers must have taken care of her when it got too unkempt. She often held a hip flask–sized bottle of liquor in a paper bag, sometimes a paper coffee cup as well. She was always smoking. The image burned in my mind’s eye is of Margaret sitting on her usual bench, her long, statuesque arms folded across her gaunt, slightly hunched torso, cigarette tipped between her fingers. Her incredible, long legs would be crossed and sometimes swinging a little agitatedly. She would watch us AGGS girls as we passed her and sometimes let out a loud, threatening hoick of her throat that made us think she would spit at us at any moment, which she never did.
When Margaret passed away in April 2011, hundreds turned out for her funeral, including politicians and prominent entertainers. That’s when most of us who knew her as a K Road icon first learned her full name. We also learned that she had been institutionalised and received electroshock treatment in her youth. We heard her family challenge the government to better support people like Margaret, at a time when funding to mental-health services had long been inadequate. Those in most need of support were either in prison or living on the streets like Margaret, or, as was often the case, trapped between both nightmares. Even today, night shelters still don’t exist for Auckland’s homeless community, which has ballooned since Margaret’s day. Margaret, who even in her staunch demeanour was still so palpably vulnerable, was almost always on K Road alone. She sometimes slept through the night exposed to the elements and drank all day to forget it.
I was glad that, as I went through high school, I got to see the facets of life that were not all picture-perfect, because deep down I had felt so excluded from that picture already. The friends I made at AGGS astound me. We are largely soulmates to this day, though scattered around the world living vastly different careers and lifestyles.
Alicia holds the most defining space in my AGGS circle, with her wild hair always in a forced low bun behind her head. Having since become a successful globetrotting artist, she now has her head shaved, apart from a declarative thicket at the top. She was a perpetual ball of nerves in the way I imagine every true original must be as a teen, smothered by the rest of us plebeians. Her family lived in an old villa in Grey Lynn. Part Samoan and Croatian, Alicia was raised Catholic, and was the oldest of four. What we shared was a penchant for observing absurdities in the world around us, in our families, in ourselves. We would sit for hours laughing at dark jokes, noticing how everything ordinary was too strange to bear. A lot of it stemmed from a very teenage delusion of grandeur. We probably also overblew our own wit. But it was a great time.
Alicia and I were deeply committed to art and photography. A great side effect of the posh history of our school was that the Old Girls donated lots of money, so our facilities were top notch. We spent hours in the enormous art rooms perfecting our end-of-year boards.
I remember realising I wasn’t an artist after the very first project, because it was when I also realised Alicia was an artist. We’d been given a simple brief: create a photo series based on something in our environment. Everyone rushed off school grounds, because we were allowed to for the assignment. I embarked on an awkward portraiture project of the people who ran and patronised the hair braiding studios, though I was never skilled enough to get close or use the medium to capture anything more than each person standing in their shop looking directly at my camera. But Alicia stayed. She took photos of the enormous old oak trees on the fringes of the school, angling each shot at the base of the trunk looking up. The tree itself was towering and insurmountable with a bright light at the very top. She said she wanted to show how things can seem distorted sometimes, how everyday life can seem so intimidating. She found everyday life intimidating, I learned a short while later, because she was gay. She felt like everyone around her could tell, like they could basically see the gay in the way she moved and talked and evaded their eyes. She felt like we were all normal and normal was intimidating to her, because it was out of reach. I was in awe of her ability to express this feeling, the anxiety of being different, in her art.
Though we had often talked about going to art school together, it was then I knew this would not be my path. Still, it was heart-wrenching for me to go to university without Alicia and Anna. In the end, I wanted to do something more outwardly focused. I felt like art would be an indulgence I couldn’t allow myself full time.
But the art block and its reigning sovereign, the head of department Trixie Illingworth, remained central to my high-school life until the end. Mrs Illingworth must have been in her early sixties, small in build and always in sensible trousers and button-down shirts. Her hair was cut in a short, grey crop and she had light blue eyes and a pierced smoker’s mouth.
By turn of fortune, Mrs Illingworth was our class’ art teacher from the start. Our opening assignment was to paint a simple landscape scene. Trixie walked around the class with a deep scowl on her face, checking that everyone had their materials ready. She stood in the middle of us all, looking up at her for instruction, and said, ‘If any stupid girl paints the sky as a blue strip at the top of her canvas, she will have to leave my classroom.’ Then she marched outside for a cigarette.
The scowl was a permanent fixture, but it only thinly veiled a great magnetism that cut through regardless. She had an open hatred for teaching art to the giant hordes of girls who were forced to take it in the early years of high school, because of her own deep love and commitment to both the practice and study of art. It was difficult for her to share it with an indifferent group.
As the classes got smaller and we were interacting with her as fellow artists, the warmth poured out. She remained a harsh critic, but no teacher was as nuanced in their engagement with our work. Trixie told Anna, Alicia and me that she would make sure we were always in her form class, so we were always housed in the beautiful art block, next to the dark room, where we’d often share passing quiet moments with her.
It was also around this time that we learned about the complex injustices behind the hardened chain-smoking woman before us. We found a class photo of her early years of teaching. She was beautiful, with dark long hair and vibrant blue eyes. We asked her when she’d begun teaching. She told us she had been an artist herself, and had been so passionate about art that she had saved to travel to Europe and dropped to her knees weeping when she first got to see the works of the old masters. But in her day, it was hard for women to be taken seriously as artists. The most you could hope for was to be an art teacher and produce your work as a hobby, more or less on the side. She was married to another artist for a time. Later, she said, she watched as he got to be paid to practise his art, as he gained recognition and lived the life she had wanted for herself, while she raised their son on her own.
That was the story of generations of women. I felt the weight of expectation on me when I heard those stories. What would we do, as the generation that could ‘have it all’? Would we practise our art? Would we loudly create rather than quietly teach and nurture others behind the scenes? Not that there’s not tremendous value in teaching — those who teach often change the world more than those who insist on fronting movements. But Trixie didn’t want to teach. It was the weight of expectation bearing down on her generation that had defined her life. Other women had persisted and forged paths. But they were few. Young Trixie, weeping at the foot of the old Madonna, couldn’t turn away from motherhood in the suburbs once her husband was gone. She never got the space, the room of one’s own, to think and feel and create. Her feet were in wet cement.
I feel the weight of that expectation. The expectation to be visible and unapologetic about my background, to lead the way for others. I’ve spoken about it to other women of colour in politics when we quietly talk about the incredible barrage of resistance that we each receive daily. It is a perpetual fight to be taken seriously as experts where we have expertise, to have our talents recognised, and even just to face our day without vitriol. The thing is, as much as I want more and more women and minorities in politics, I am hesitant to put that expectation on them knowing what they will face in response. We can’t keep telling women to ‘lean in’. It isn’t safe. It certainly isn’t safe for women of colour. We know that because we see the abuse plainly online. We see it in the unequal treatment by the media. We hear about it constantly from women who have opened up briefly only to have to pull shut that iron curtain we’ve all woven around us. It isn’t fair to place the burden of change on individuals. That ignores millennia of systemic oppression. It ignores that culture needs to change, that the systems are prejudiced. Trixie was strong, but she wasn’t strong enough to pour herself into her art, then fight against all of society for recognition, while she starved with her baby under one arm. So she cut her hair short, taught art for the rest of her life, and smoked two packs a day.
Of course, she did inspire another talented woman whose salvation lay in her passion for art, who did get to travel the world and have her work celebrated, while being a woman who loves other women. I don’t think Alicia would have made it through high school in such high spirits had it not been for that safe space Trixie provided us, a space to create, but also to be angry about the world we couldn’t control sometimes, to be passionate and fearful. At the end of it all, Trixie’s enduring anger was a testament to her uncompromising passion for her art and the world she wanted to live in. Alicia and I certainly thrived having that as our standard.
There were inspirational antidotes to Trixie’s pessimism among my AGGS teachers. Mrs Cotter, the head of history, was a ball of energy, part doting mother, part witty orator. She deliberately included histories that remain untold to many students in New Zealand, like the Palestine/Israel conflict, the American civil rights movement, and apartheid in South Africa. She avoided World War II and almost all English history, but made sure we studied the New Zealand Wars and even forced us to compare accounts between Māori and Pākehā historians. She signed us up to a saving plan in Year 11, so we could go on an overseas history trip in Year 13. She came on the trip to supervise along with a couple of other teachers, all paying their own way. She said she did it to encourage us to save and travel, because she knew most AGGS girls wouldn’t think of it otherwise, given our socioeconomic backgrounds. My year went on a cross-country tour of the US, which inspired my history degree with a focus on modern American history, gender and consumerism.
There was Michal Denny, the biology teacher. She was tall and slim, with a short brown bob framing her beaming young face, a cross between Miss Honey from Matilda and Madame Curie. Ms Denny was as dry and serious as most scientists are about science, but she was also an engaging teacher. She had a commanding presence in the classroom enhanced by a profound joy she took from both her subject matter and being able to convey that subject matter to fresh minds.
I was uncharacteristically good at science. I even got an interview at Auckland Medical School. My goal was to eventually specialise in psychiatry, because I was interested in analysis and in people. I had initially thought about doing psychology, but my mother had talked me out of it. Although at one time that had been her field and her passion, something she had defied her family to study (ironically, they’d pressured her to go with medicine), she said she knew psychologists didn’t make good money and she now knew how hard life was without it.
I told Ms Denny this one afternoon, late in my final year of school, as I was acting as her teacher’s aide in a Year 9 class. I remember she was standing in the middle of the room, sorting things on a desk. The students had mostly left for their next period. When I told her what my mother had said, she stopped and looked straight at me. Her tone was serious and a little alarmed.
‘You can do anything you want to,’ she said.
Then she smiled and talked about teaching. It wasn’t a moneymaking profession, but it was what she loved doing. ‘I earn enough to take care of myself and that’s enough,’ she said. Then she added, ‘I’m not married either,’ though she did live with her partner.
Here was this woman, strong and educated, choosing convention in her choice of profession, and throwing out convention altogether in her personal life. It made me realise that every life choice is worth making consciously. That it’s important to challenge the assumptions behind the norms and ideals we’re fed at every turn. It made me realise I didn’t need to get my life’s path from a bank commercial or anyone else’s hopes and dreams.
While some teachers were personally defining for me, the formidable force and reigning matriarch of the school was the deputy principal and PE teacher, Di Hatch. At first blush, she made for a peculiar figure walking the halls at AGGS. She looked like a powerful corporate executive, always in perfectly fitted, expensive suits and sky-high pointed stilettos (I guess her athletic prowess helped her manoeuvre the school’s steep incline and hundreds of steps in those shoes). In those days she sported a blonde Princess Diana crop. She was beautiful, impeccably put together, and always stood and moved like an athlete or a soldier, shoulders back, feet apart. It was hard to know how she had ended up in this loud, chaotic school, with its working-class, very brown student body, rather than holding court at a posh private school, teaching decorum and posture to wealthy heiresses. But she was nothing if not a paradox once you stuck around long enough to get to know her. She was simultaneously a lofty and feared disciplinarian, and a loving, hands-on teacher.
The lesson I learned from Di Hatch was the power in being a woman. She would constantly make us aware that we were women. She spoke about our health, our different physical needs. She told us to look at our bodies, to explore ourselves, to bend over: ‘Have a look at up there, before anyone else does.’ She was the first person to make me aware that I was experiencing the world as a woman, and that women could lead as women. It was a powerful lesson.
In my final year of high school, already wise to the implications of living in the world as a woman, I began to remember that I was also a refugee. With that came turmoil. It was a prelude to the even bigger eruption of turmoil that would come three years later with the fall of the Twin Towers and the start of the now eighteen-year-long War on Terror.
In about 1997, I started to notice a new bunch of girls at AGGS. Well, I didn’t so much notice them as they noticed me. We had all watched them in passing, a little curious about their different fashion sense, haircuts, names and accents. There were only a handful of them, so the commotion wasn’t enough to disrupt the order of things — other than for me, because, as it turned out, they were refugees. They had been resettled in New Zealand from the soon-to-be-former Yugoslav republics of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia. Their stories were a little different than mine, in that they had had normal lives until the war broke out. They had actually lived under bombardment in refugee camps in Europe. This all meant that although they had experienced trauma that was in many ways more extreme than mine, they didn’t have a whole childhood of surreal oppression. They were secure in their culture. Being older at the time that they left, they also knew who they were within that culture. They weren’t shy. They were confident and bold in their distinctiveness. They stuck together and invited me to join.
It was a first for me to talk to people my own age about our shared refugee experience. What was even more interesting was that they weren’t happy with things in New Zealand. They knew full well that they did not fit in, but their reaction was to reject the culture here as backward. They wanted to go dancing. They wanted to dress up. No one here was interested in glitzy fashion or throwing their kinds of parties. People our age would hang out in someone’s backyard and drink. There was music and the odd make-out session, but nothing they would count as fun. They talked about ‘our’ cultures being warmer, more exuberant, more political. They were bored here.
With this takedown of their new home came a very unabashed mourning for the loss of their birth homes. I had never felt free to openly grieve for the loss of my life in Iran. Among this new group, we could talk candidly about what might have been. I shared the stories my parents told me about their colourful lives in prerevolutionary Iran, about my cousins, aunts, and uncles, whom I realised I missed. I missed the unknown life of growing up with them. I suddenly missed, as they did, a life that was whole, where I fully belonged. Of course, I would not have felt that sense of belonging had I gone back to Iran then. I had become too Kiwi. But at that moment, it was easy to glorify those lost lands.
In retrospect, I think I knew full well that their defiance came from the rejection they felt, and which I was rediscovering. It was a rejection that comes from being marginalised, that comes from being expected to adapt while no one adapts to us. I had been safe. I had friends in that enormous, diverse school. But I knew that I would one day go out into the real world and back to being some woman with a weird name, never the pretty girl, not ‘normal’. The elaborate teenage angst spat out by this group of new arrivals came from that same knowledge. It was akin to saying, ‘He didn’t dump me. I dumped him.’
Soon, I stopped going to school much. We would sit around talking in Myers Park, go window shopping. At night, we would dress up and talk our way into bars to dance or drink. I was never much of a drinker as a teen, my dad having taken away any rebellion factor long ago. But we did hang out with boys. I had hung out with boys at parties before, but realised I had never considered I would possibly date them. As popular or accepted as I became, I still felt, deep down, that I couldn’t have a normal love life, not with a normal Kiwi boy. I couldn’t even imagine it.
So it made sense that my first-ever relationship grew from a shared understanding that we were not ‘of’ this place.
It began the summer before university. I was still confused about what to do with the rest of my life, but going to study was never in question. Both my parents were fairly obsessed with higher education and frankly it felt like I was buying time. I knew I couldn’t quite call myself an artist, so art school wasn’t a serious consideration anymore. I ticked Medicine to make my parents happy at first and waited nervously for my interview at Auckland Medical School. This was meant as a path to psychiatry, analytical and people-focused enough to feel right for me. In a moment of clarity, I realised I wasn’t ever going to make it through all the chemistry and physics, plus the actual medical training it was going to take. My home was in the humanities. I decided to be a historian, to analyse society, all the progress, the prejudice, the movements, and the methods by which we had thus far done that analysis. I did know that an Arts degree on its own would give my parents rather a fright. So, I ticked Law as well. I would study a conjoint degree, then one day they would wake up to a history professor for a daughter. Obviously, my eventual devotion to legal advocacy was a slow burner.
That first summer between school and university felt exciting. It felt like freedom with more of it on the way. I put in a lot of hours for my parents in their new venture selling Mexican food in a cinema food court. We weren’t allowed to sell Iranian food since no one had ever heard of it, and there was already a Turkish kebab eatery there, staffed by Jordanians. Apparently we looked right selling Mexican food. We secretly sold a few Iranian classic slow-cooked lamb and chicken dishes on rice among the burritos.
As it turned out, the first few years of university were tumultuous for me and study was not front of mind. He was a bit older, in his twenties, a little bit hostile, a little bit dark, but with a presence that dominated the room. It sounds cliché now, but I felt like he was an enigma to the rest of the world and it made me feel special to solve him. We started a whirlwind romance at the beginning of my first year at university, and this tumult became a defining feature of my life at law school. It went on for three years, on and off, and finally ended when I secretly moved and didn’t give him the address.
Last year, I suddenly found myself for the first time identifying publicly as an abuse victim, with all the criticism, disbelief, and belittlement that comes with that. Ironically, this happened when I spoke about abuse during the filming of the documentary Women in the House, commemorating women’s suffrage, by filmmakers Vice New Zealand. Serendipitously, filming covered the day Parliament passed Jan Logie’s ground-breaking Domestic Violence — Victims’ Protection Bill, which makes it possible for victims and survivors of intimate partner violence to take ten days of annual leave. The reason I felt it was important and safe to speak about my experience of abuse when the filmmakers asked me about it was that I was infinitely excited about Jan’s achievement. To me, what we were about to do was the ideal of law-making, for the affected community, by the affected community.
The backlash that came after the film was released has made me very hesitant to talk about it again. In fact, I resolved not to write about it in this account, because I didn’t feel ready to face that abuse again. Eventually, I realised the hesitation I now feel was a reason to write about it. To write, too, about the hesitation. I realised this fear is quintessential of the post #MeToo experience for women who have shared their accounts of abuse. It seems like a reason to keep speaking, or the silence may set in even more terrifyingly than before.
A moment after I described my experience of abuse on camera, I imagined the headlines and the hateful comments. I knew instantly that I would be accused of seeking undeserved victimhood, of lying; I knew I would be told I deserved what I had got. All that happened. The sad realisation was that the real-life reaction to my public disclosure would answer the central question of the film: how far have we really come in empowering women in 125 years of formal equality?
Countering the misnomers contained in that backlash is key to ending violence against women in all its forms. For one, I know that my story is not exceptional. In fact, it is peppered with the usual tropes of relationship violence. But I know I don’t fit the typical profile of ‘abuse victim’ portrayed in narratives of violence against women. I was a university student, ambitious, independent, a feminist. I appeared by objective estimations to be high functioning. But abuse is a dynamic inside the relationship. The power and control cycles apply no matter what we look like as women out there in the world. We need to accept that abuse is so widespread as to have no externally discernible profile among its victims or perpetrators. New Zealand will always lead the world with our record of granting women the vote in 1893, which I believe is the reason it’s so difficult to allow the reality of our harrowing domestic and sexual violence statistics to enter our national psyche. It is indisputable that intimate partner violence takes up forty-one per cent of the work of frontline police here, even though we know only around a quarter of abuse is actually reported. Those statistics speak of mass violence, overwhelmingly against women.
When I think about my personal experience, what’s shocking is that I didn’t recognise it as abuse until it got physical. I was only eighteen years old when the relationship began, and for most of its course I saw it as intense ‘first love’. He would send hundreds of messages each day, turn up to my university and workplace without my asking. I spent every free moment with him, either in person or responding to the deluge of messages. He was moody and I felt responsible for mitigating these moods. If he didn’t like one of my friends, he would insult them or storm off. He once left me on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere for talking about someone he didn’t want me to hang out with anymore. If I went out without him, the messages turned ugly. It would be a barrage of ‘Bitch. Bitch. Bitch,’ ‘Slut. Slut. Slut.’ I justified it as he did: it’s normal for men to be jealous when they’re in love.
I know that my affinity for this tumultuous relationship was intrinsically linked to the dark realisations about my own place in the world at that age, to my ethnicity, and to my status as a refugee. Feeling inherently less than perfect in every way meant I was attracted to the imperfect. I felt we must have kinship in our rejected imperfection. I believed myself wrong and ugly, so why wouldn’t I be with someone else who was to all the world similarly awful? Related to that, in the same way we had glorified our war-torn homelands, I wanted to believe there was something interesting and attractive in being wrong and imperfect.
But in the end, I didn’t believe I could do any better. I didn’t think I deserved better. The world wasn’t built for me to participate in as an equal, so why would I try for what most people would expect in relationships?
Things got physical with shoving. I once went through the sliding door of my wardrobe, which broke off its hinges. Another time I fell backward hard onto some rocks right before we went into a party. I had to explain away the scrapes, the finger marks from being grabbed and squeezed so violently. It got worse when twice he threatened to kill me. That’s when he choked me, forcefully enough to leave thumb marks around my neck, so I wore a scarf for a week. The apologies came in the usual way: ‘I love you. I need you. I wish you wouldn’t make me angry.’
My university grades fell and I couldn’t concentrate well. I could only really leave him when my friend Kyla and I got together to form a flat. I found an address he didn’t know and changed my phone number. It was a good thing that I did keep up with university and fought hard to keep my friendships going. That isn’t always possible for women in controlling relationships, especially when children are involved and financial support doesn’t allow for independence from their abuser.
This is why Jan Logie’s bill is crucial. Jan knew the importance of this profound measure for survivors, because she has spent her life at the grassroots of that sector. She knows that the time immediately after leaving is the most dangerous for women. We need to change our routine. We also need income in order to leave. Survivors should never have to choose between financial independence and abuse. Even if she isn’t ready to leave, she needs time out to seek mental healthcare, to heal.
Passing the new law will always be the moment that we as a society accepted that abuse victims deserve real support. That came though representation. It came because women like Jan were in the House, carrying the voices of the women outside who had been silently bearing this burden alone.
For me, the move to a new flat meant I got to explore all the self-loathing and dysfunction that comes with being a survivor. Kyla had been an AGGS girl with me. We shared our complex relationships with race and abuse. She studied psychology and worked for a women’s refuge, devoting her life to helping other women. Now the young woman who helped me escape abuse is the director of Wellington Rape Crisis. She remains the only friend I talk openly to about that part of my life. I’ve never talked about it much because, to this day, even though I know it’s wrong, I feel a deep sense of failure and responsibility for the abuse.
The backdrop to my personal struggle with abuse, juxtaposed with the thrill of university life in those undergraduate years, was the global shift in perceptions of Middle Easterners. Even in remote, peaceful Aotearoa, 2001 saw a shift in the way we were seen as feared outsiders. I was lucky to have been here long enough to have lost my Iranian accent and clocked some social capital, but I could no longer retreat into being an ordinary Kiwi. War was waging in the Middle East. Iran was part of the ‘Axis of Evil’. The battle cry rang through the West: you are either with us or against us.
I remember being woken up at some ungodly hour on the morning of 12 September 2001 by the phone ringing. It was my friend Shirin. She said I had to turn on the TV, some huge disaster was happening in America. I grabbed a jumper, ran downstairs to see. Tears streamed down my face in those first minutes of realisation. I kept thinking maybe everyone would be okay. It was clear that at least some people were not. The first images I saw were of the billowing smoke where the planes had hit. The towers hadn’t fallen yet in those images; it was unimaginable that they would. Then came the harrowing collapse.
I barely moved for the rest of the day. I didn’t go to class. Those images were repeated over again. All of us who are old enough to have a living memory of that tragic day remember some of the victims vividly still. Their human stories, the children, the survivors who missed work that day for some reason, grappling with the gaping wound of guilt and sorrow for their lost friends.
In the background journalists speculated wildly about who did it. They were naming al Qaeda pretty fast. I tried to reserve judgement. How could they know? I kept begging the universe: please don’t let it be Middle Easterners. Please, not Iranians. It was clear to us that if the killers were foreigners, vengeance would be war and the human cost would be indiscriminate.
It was.
It’s so wretched to know that those innocent lives lost on the day, that sorrow, were used as tools to justify the killing of so many more.
We still live and breathe the toxic remnants of Bush Jr’s opportunistic war mongering. We are living with the reality of millions dead and displaced. The original fake news was the lie that ‘weapons of mass destruction’ sat in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. As a Kurd, I know that man was a mass murderer. But what came with the War on Terror was pop-culture Islamophobia, and an ‘us versus them’ rhetoric. It is what we, in New Zealand, are only now starting to reckon with. I remember that rhetoric starting just as I was first stepping out into adulthood as a ‘Kiwi’, and growing through most of my university years. Though I eventually learned to be proud of being a little different, it was clear in the wake of that renewed xenophobia that my kind of difference wasn’t going to be celebrated. That maybe some of us were never going to be quite Kiwi enough. I realised it meant working a little harder to dismantle the barriers. It meant I became aware of equality movements, the centuries of analysis and resistance born of the pain of entire populations degraded by similar power structures. It meant realising the beauty of joining forces across communities to affirm each other’s struggle, and our shared humanity.