I grew up in Lebanon, but we weren’t citizens there because my family were Palestinian refugees. As a result, we didn’t have many rights, and when the war between Israel and Lebanon started in 2006, my father decided we should migrate to Australia. I was 11 years old...
In 1986, my parents decided to escape from Poland. They didn’t tell my sister and I we were leaving forever, because they didn’t want to risk us saying something at the border, but I remember when we left – I saw my aunty and my grandmother standing there, and felt...
(Part 2 of 2) After university, I became a high school teacher, but I stayed involved with the UCM, publishing a booklet, which was very tame by today’s standards, mostly it was poetry about freedom! But still because we had links to the Black Consciousness movement,...
(Part 1 of 2) As a child, I lived in an almost exclusively Afrikaans speaking community, and English speaking people were bullied terribly at school – we even had rocks thrown at us. One day, the teacher just laid into me with a ruler, saying I was ‘a damned...