Sydney Life

I have just returned from an amazing two-week trip overseas. As a stowaway performer on a French/Italian Mediterranean cruise, I visited Nice, St Tropez, Capri, Sorrento, Amalfi, Pompeii and Roma. Before all that I managed to do a stop over in Bangkok and on the way back I had a stop-over in Amman (Jordan) to see family.

This left me thinking about the concept of home. What is home?

My honours thesis for sociology this year is all about the concept of home and feeling at home – the freedom to bring all parts of your identity together in a safe and validated way. Travelling really brings to the fore what it means to be “at home”. Surprisingly, the places where you are most at home are not always where you expected...

Travelling alone through Roma I was forced to completely fend for myself. With little language and a small phrase-book to help me through, I managed to navigate my way through Roma’s metro and bus networks, see all the sights and even make a few friends along the way. On my last night in Rome, I met a Spanish guy in a pub. He spoke no English, I spoke no Spanish. We both spoke poco Italiano (little Italian). We used body language and my little Italian-English phrase book to have a conversation which lasted into the night. As I was walking back to my hostel, that connection with the Spanish guy had me thinking how easily some places allow you to feel at home. Other places however don’t feel as welcoming.

One place was France’s Charles de Gaulle Airport. An architectural monstrosity, I was completely lost! And yet despite knowing more French than I did Italian, and most of the signs having English translation, I still did not feel as grounded as I did with the Spanish guy in the little bar back dropped by a night-lit Colosseum. Beer is a universal truth it seems.

Above: Capri

I also took a trip to Jordan to see my family on the way back to Sydney. I was born in Amman and lived there for six years before coming to Australia in 1990. I have been brought up in an Arabic family with a significant Arabic cultural background influencing my everyday life. The minute you step into Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport you notice something significant. Your arrival cards ask you to state how many wives and children accompany you. The idea that a woman’s identity is tied to her marital status – in fact that she is ‘one body’ with her husband (or frankly, her husband’s property) is a concept that left Australian law decades ago. This is a daily legal reality in an Arabic country which is more progressive than most.

I spoke with my cousin and my Grandmother’s sister on women’s liberation in the Middle East. Two educated women from very different generations. They told me about some of the daily realities for them as women. The feminist movement is not as strong as they would hope, partly because, according to them, some women have accepted the conditions they have lived in since birth. In many ways, the same tensions that exist in Western feminist movements exist in Jordan, even though they might be fighting for slightly different things. (Sexual liberation, for example, is not a concept some would want to be associated with.)

Above: Cruising by Monaco

In many ways I come from a more progressive family than most people I know – Arabic or otherwise. My grandfather has always insisted that the girls in the family would be as educated and have the exact same opportunities open to them as all the boys. In other ways however, there is little room to move. The number of times I sat through the “marriage conversation” (Where? When? To Whom?) in that short day I was there was slightly embarrassing. The word “gay” is not something that one can freely raise in polite Arabic societies. Well that’s not exactly true. I’m sure you could raise it but it would require a long process of re-education and I wasn’t going to be around to ride out the familial ripples. Sometimes it’s easier to just fly under the radar.

So I left Amman slightly suffocated and wanting to leave that cultural baggage behind for somewhere a little easier to just be. 21 hours later I arrived in Sydney. 21 hours away, everything is just a little freer!

Above: Pompeii

The places closest to our hearts – our birthplaces, our families – are not always the most comfortable. We fight for the right to stand our ground in those places because, well – really it’s a matter of luck. You can’t help where you were born or which culture you were born into. You make the best of what you’ve got. You push buttons where appropriate but fly under the radar to avoid unnecessary confrontation. As an Arab exile, you quickly learn to pick which fights are the most important to you to win. You leave the rest for another day.

Some places come with no baggage. Roma. Amalfi. A cruise on the Mediterranean. You’re free to write your own stories there, to make your adventures, to have conversations with Spanish guys over a beer and phrase book. In those places, you make your own home.

I met many special people on my trip. Each of those people we connect with takes a little piece of our sense of home with them. They are the ones that you could meet in Sydney or in Seoul, in Sorrento or in San Francisco, and still find yourself a little cocoon of home in this big, wide, wonderful world.

Above: Sorrento Sunset