I met Julia, an Australian, in my local café in Montmatre. She was taking some pictures, and we got to chatting. On our first date, she was 2 hours late because she had got off at the wrong station. But I waited for her. Her plan was to travel on to Barcelona, but she...
My father was executed when I was 9. I remember visiting him in jail, walking down this dark corridor and he was at the end of it. He had made me and my brothers necklaces from date seeds. After he was executed, they didn’t give us a gravestone or anything. I remember...
(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...
Our whole family came to Australia by boat. Sometimes in Iran, the government ‘disappears’ people and nobody knows where they have gone. Our father had already been harassed a few times, and we were very worried about what might happen next, so we made the decision to...
