This piece was written and performed for the Melbourne Writers Festival 2018 Women of Letters event, where the theme was ‘A Goodbye Letter’.

Before I begin, I want to mention that we’re gathered here on stolen Aboriginal land, specifically the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. This land has always been and always will be Aboriginal land, and their sovereign relations with this place have never been and will never be severed.

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This was actually supposed to be a goodbye letter to political correctness, a satire. I had it all planned out in my head. It was going to be sarcastic and scathing—you would laugh, you would roll your eyes and comically groan, and you would leave thinking huh, I’ve never really thought of it that way before. Political correctness really is just some stupid made-up bullshit people use when they want to complain about the fact they can’t slap a bitch’s ass or call an Arab a dirty fucking terrorist without being called “sexist” or “racist” anymore.

So for the last few weeks, I’ve sat down with my laptop, opened a new Word document, and I’ve tried to find the humour about the situation we find ourselves in here in Australia.

A couple of weeks ago Fraser Anning delivered his first Senate speech. “I remember Queensland as it was in the sixties, seventies and early eighties, when you could say what you thought without being charged with a crime,” he said. “Free speech could be eliminated by appeal to not ‘offending’ or ‘saying things that were hurtful’.”

Because that’s what this is about, right. My offense, as opposed to your bigotry. But I digress.

He goes on: “We as a nation are entitled to insist that those who are allowed to come here predominantly reflect the historic European Christian composition of Australian society. Historically the one immigrant group here that has consistently shown itself to be the least able to assimilate and integrate is Muslims. The first terrorist act on Australian soil was in 1915, when two Muslim immigrants opened fire on a picnic train, and Muslim immigrants have been a problem ever since.”

Because apparently, it’s terrorism when a Muslim does it, but when a land is overwhelmed by the arrival of masses of boat people who immediately set about violently murdering the land’s inhabitants and trying their utmost to wipe the oldest living culture off the face of the earth, that’s not a problem, that’s creating the great Australian nation.

According to Anning, “While all Muslims are not terrorists, certainly all terrorists these days are Muslims. So why would anyone want to bring more of them here?”

Why indeed.

There’s probably a lot to find funny about this, right? We can laugh at the sheer irony of Pauline Hanson calling this speech ‘appalling’—Hanson, whose maiden speech to the Senate two years earlier included the line: “Now we are in danger of being swamped by Muslims, who bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own.”

(It’s funny because it’s one bigot calling another bigot a bigot. Like, hello pot, meet kettle.)

Similarly, there’s probably a lot to find funny about the leadership spills we’ve been having. The morning of the latest #libspill I’m at work and the office is abuzz. Turnbull or Dutton? Dutton or Bishop? Turnbull or Morrison? It’s rich comedy grounds: Remember, Australia: Change of prime minister means change your smoke alarm battery!

As the day progresses our choices get narrower: will our next glorious leader be Peter ‘African Gangs’ Dutton, or are we vibing more with Scott ‘You will never be settled in Australia’ Morrison? Some people in the office are discussing it with the same glee they use for discussions about The Bachelor. Julie Bishop has an such angry stare, ha ha ha; Turnbull just wants to leave the crap offices of Canberra already and return to his lush mansion, ha ha ha; something about a potato, LOL. This whole thing’s a joke—politics is just something ethereal that goes on in the background while they get on with their lives.

But I’m not laughing.

While all of this is going on my phone won’t stop buzzing. Messages are coming through thick and fast across the various WhatsApp groups I’m in. I get sent links to a rally happening on the weekend: Morrison out! Refugees in! I send my apologies: I’m not going to be in the state for it, otherwise I’d totally be there, I text. In a message thread made up entirely of Muslim women, someone says: “Either Dutton or Morrison will be PM in the next few hours. Either way we’ll have an unapologetic racist in the top job. I’m fearful of how much more hate and bigotry we’ll have to face.” Someone else replies: “Just gotta rally together guys. Gotta strengthen our networks.” Despite trying really hard to be optimistic, I can’t help but text back: “Honestly though, what good does protesting do? They don’t listen. Nothing changes.”

The thing is, I’ve been going to protests and rallies for as long as I can remember. Rallies for Palestine. For Syria. For Iraq. For Manus and Nauru. For refugees. For Indigenous rights. For worker’s rights. For women’s rights. For queer rights. To end racism, to end bigotry, to end occupation, to end deaths in custody. I have marched and I have waved banners and I have screamed No Justice, No Peace until my voice is hoarse and my back is aching. For 20 years, I have been resisting.

Last July I sat at the Flinders Street intersection and screamed for justice for Elijah Doughty. Last November I knelt on the steps of Fed Square for the SOS Manus – Evacuate Now rally where hundreds of us clasped our arms in the air in peaceful protest, mimicking the actions of the men on Manus in solidarity. In January this year I marched and screamed alongside thousands of people in the #AbolishAustraliaDay Invasion Day 2018 rally. In February I stood outside the State Library for the No Racism: Stop Criminalising African Communities rally. In May I marched for Palestine in remembrance of the Nakba. In June I found myself spending my lunch break outside Richard Wynne’s office for a snap action to protest the removal of sacred 800-year-old Djap Wurrung trees. I have called offices. I have written emails. I have donated money. And for what?

For what?

Elijah Doughty’s still dead, and his murderer roams free after serving a year and a half of his 3-year sentence. Three years for murdering a child, because the life of an Indigenous child in this country is a fucking joke. Every single child incarcerated in the Northern Territory is Aboriginal. Gaza’s still under siege. Refugees are still setting themselves on fire and left to rot. African communities are still being demonised in a bid to win elections.

In defence of Anning’s comments and among a host of other outrageously ignorant and bigoted comments, Federal MP Bob Katter said, “Are we racist?”

Are we racist?

Well. We are Australian.

Every day for the last three weeks I have sat down with my laptop, opened a new Word document, and I’ve tried to find the humour in this. Because as people of colour, we’re expected to have a sense of humour about our oppression. God forbid we get angry—we need to smile and speak nicely lest we alienate our allies or come across as too emotional.

So I have tried to find the humour, but I haven’t been able to. What about any of this is funny?

I am a Muslim. I am a North African Arab. I am the child of migrants. I exist at the intersection of these and other marginalised identities. When you talk about these things, when you make jokes, you aren’t talking about some vague ethereal spectre happening in the background, you are talking about my life. You are talking about my friends. You are talking about my family. You are talking about my mother, who before every rally I go to calls me and says Hella, please, be careful. Don’t do anything stupid. She’s been hearing about the increasing police presence, heavily militarised police presence, at these actions. She’s heard about the racist fuck who grabbed the mic and screamed “They’re all rapists, don’t let them in” at the Emergency Rally for Manus I was at last November. She’s heard about riot police storming the Kensington flats and pepper-spraying residents who were trying to keep their community safe from the onslaught of Nazis and fascists brought to the area by a Milo Yiannopoulos event. I want to tell her that this is Australia, we don’t live in a police state; this isn’t like Egypt, where protesting against government authority leads to rapes and imprisonment and people vanishing mysteriously but honestly, I’m really starting to wonder. My mother calls me and says Hella, ma fiyash si7a, we can’t afford lawyers if you get in trouble.

She ends these conversations with la ilaha illa’llah, the first phrase of the Islamic shahada. It’s an affirmation of faith, but she says it to me as a protection prayer; when a child is born, the shahada is whispered into their ear to make sure God watches over them, and when a person is dying, they recite it in preparation to meet with their Maker. My mother ends conversations with la ilaha illa’llah when she thinks I’m about to go into a dangerous situation—when I’m driving in torrential rain, when I’m travelling overseas, when I’m going to a protest where fascists might be present. It tells me she’s afraid for me. I’m afraid for me, too. I’m afraid that these police tactics and the Nazi presence are starting to work; after the November rally, I make a Facebook post:

Friends, I’m a little shaken by what happened at yesterday’s Manus rally. Since when do we not have the right to demonstrate in this country? I’ve been to plenty of protests and never seen anything like the police actions and presence there. I walked past blood on the street and watched as dozens of police blocked us from marching. And I still can’t work out why. Again: since when do we not have the right to demonstrate in this country?

I have been trying to find the humour here. But the more I look around me, the more scared I get. I am full of fear. I am full of despair. I honestly don’t know how I drag myself out of bed most days. My mother tells me she’s scared for my safety, but the truth is I’m more scared for hers. I’m not visibly Muslim. I’m not visibly anything. But she is. And I am terrified that one day I’m going to get a phone call telling me something terrible’s happened to her because she decided to hop on public transport and some fascist decided he didn’t like the look of her.

A friend of mine keeps burn books, cataloguing every microagression and instance of racism she’s experienced as a First Nations person living on colonised land. Two years’ worth of notes, filling several volumes. She sends me pictures of them one day and I scroll through some of the entries—none of them are anything too ‘serious’. Nobody’s punched her in the face. It’s just little bits of settler cluelessness she experiences on a day-to-day basis. She’s laughing at the whiteness of it all. I’m supposed to laugh too, and I do, kind of, in that I send her a ‘lolwut?’ and a smiley emoji.

But I’m not laughing.

I’m staring at my phone screen wondering how many times she can take these little daily hits before she breaks. I want to tell her that I admire her fortitude. Instead I text her: How you do this? Serious question. How do you keep a sense of humour about this? She texts me back: A lifetime of being blak in a colonised country. And a lot of therapy.

I tell her that for the last two years I’ve walked away from every rally and protest with an overwhelming sense of hopelessness, and that I read a tweet once where the author said she’d heard a nun say ‘hope is a discipline’ and for the author it meant hope is a practice. Not an emotion or something fluffy, but something we have to commit to every day, and that she wakes up and chooses every morning to be hopeful. But I wake up every morning exhausted and despairing at the current state of the world.

My friend texts me back: Look, it doesn’t come naturally. It takes practice. The world is a dark, bleak place, but it doesn’t have to be. And seeing and knowing that there are people around me fighting that same fight is what pushes me forward. I’m not going to let them win.

So.

Dear despair, dear helplessness, dear fear. When my mother ends conversations with the first part of the shahada, la ilaha illa’llah, I reply with the second part: Muhammad rasoolul’llah. It’s a way of saying Don’t worry, I got this.

Dear fear, I’m so ready to say goodbye to you, because I can’t go on feeling defeated and despairing all the time. I’ve thought about it a lot and I’ve decided to take ‘hope is a discipline’ to mean ‘to have hope is to take action’. To continue to take action, even when I don’t know exactly what actions to take that will make things better, but to keep trying anyway. To go on even when I can’t muster the energy to laugh, even on days I can’t get out of bed, even when I’m at my most afraid.

Because, and to borrow a phrase from Michael Mohammed Ahmad, if you’re a bigot, you should be afraid of us.

We’re not going to let you win.