i would like to agknowledge that i’m residing and working on stolen darug and dharawal land. while we are currently witnessing the genocide in palestine, it is important to remember colonisation still continues here and we are beneficiaries of that violence. the colonial atrocities committed against Palestinians and Indigenous australians are written in blood and great injustice. our fight for freedom is one and the same. sovereignty was never ceded. always is and always will be indigenous land.

Written by:

Ayah darwich

I’m about five years old, I don’t know the name of this place because when you’re a kid you don’t know the name of any place. I know now, it’s Picnic Point along the Georges River. My cousins and I are watching our uncles play soccer. There’s kifteh on the charcoal barbecue, and the smoke stings our eyes. Sucking sugar from ice blocks, we use our laps to collect the drops, swaying our legs back and forth off the green benches. I can still feel the sweat between the back of my legs and the plastic. These are the earliest memories I have with my uncles, although these men have been in my life since I was born. They all grew up together in the same neighbourhood, they’ve known each other so long they can’t remember not knowing each other. As I have grown up, I get to see them change and become more open and affectionate, changing from the young men I watched back then, into the older men I now know. Whenever they talk about their memories together I see the happy, carefree children they once were. I wanted to create a space for them to show that side of themselves so I planned a photo series titled ‘Wahid Majnun’ to capture who they were as teenagers, and who they are now.

This idea came to me when I was at home with my dad. He asked me to watch a movie with him because he had just found it on YouTube. My dad’s normally into action movies but I’m not, and he almost never asks me to do things with him - so I said yes. That's when we started watching ‘Blood in, Blood out’. The film focuses on step-brothers Paco and Cruz, and their bi-racial cousin Miklo, who are all members of the gang known as ‘Vatos Locos’. The story follows how a violent crime and the influence of narcotics alters their lives. When he was a teenager, my dad and his friends would watch it weekly, gathering around the television set in boyish awe. When I asked them why they loved the movie so much, they spoke about being the only Arabs in a predominantly bogan Campbelltown during the 80s and 90s. The importance of brotherhood and the need to stick together for survival resonated with them. They shared how their lives could have easily ended up with them in jail, abusing substances, or dead, like the characters in the movie. I wanted to find a way to document their experiences of identity as both Arab and Australian men while exploring friendship and community.

I told them my idea - nervous that they would think it was lame and turn me down - but they seemed genuinely excited to have an excuse to see each other and to relive their memories with me. They didn’t exactly know what I wanted to do, but they were up for it. Before the actual shoot, I planned for all of us to come together at my house to ask them questions and talk to them more. From that conversation, I realised how important it is for their opinions to be heard. In photos, it is easy for the people within them to become subjects. Their image is ultimately controlled and curated by the photographer, but these words are their own. Some of them have been changed because they were recorded while my uncles were speaking over the top of each other and constantly interrupting one another, but I try to stay true to their essence.

What was it like living in Campbelltown, a majority white place in the 80s and 90s?

“It was hard, the whites wanted to bash us all the time, they hated us,” Khalil admits with a sigh. Hatem’s low gravelly voice tunes in, “We would get picked on every day.”

“We used to go up to the hill, they’d all be drinking, getting smashed and then someone would yell out every night without fail ‘Let’s get the fucking Lebs”

Ali recalls casually and then continues, “Growing up there, one of my favourite stories, was walking through the park near Ambarvale High. This was typical of that time, all you could see was high beams shining on us. Turns out it was coppers. She yells out ‘Hey Mohammed, Omar!’ and we just kept walking because there was no Omar, there was no Mohammed. In the end, she gave up, she goes, ‘You know what I fucking mean’.” Arrogance drips from his tone so that I can tell he’s picturing it in his mind. There's a weight that hangs in the air after he finishes speaking; we sit in it together, briefly stunned. I break the tension

It’s interesting because you guys are very Arab but you’re also very Australian

My Mum who went to school with Ali adds, “When I met you I wasn’t like Oh my god he’s so Arab but then when you go inside your home it’s like super wog.” “That’s a good point” Ali considers thoughtfully. “We were very Aussie-fied. We, more than most. If you met Arabs down at Lakemba, Punchbowl, Bankstown, they were totally different. “In our homes we were very Arab, you had to speak Arabic.” Ayoub speaks matter of factly, with a loud and commanding tone. “We’re living with Aussies, we had to become less woggy,” Hatem concedes to my Mum. He then turns to me and confides, “So basically we were trying to figure it out, how to fit in right?” Ayoub contradicts passionately, “No we weren’t trying to figure it out, we didn’t know what was going on. Because when you’re a baby you don’t know what’s going on”.

Ayoub then started to speak about the culture shock he experienced as a kid, moving from Lebanese Catholic school, St Charbel College in Punchbowl, to the majority white Ambarvale public. “We would get out of school and Keith would be waiting down the bottom and chase us on the bike.” To give you guys a picture of Keith in your head, my uncles described him as a Westie. (For those of us who weren’t born before the 2000s, Westies are housos with flannos, they’re rough, tattooed, long-haired bogans, basically bikees without bikes.). Ayoub describes how he warned his brother, “I’d be like ‘fucken Mark run!’ Imagine the shock of culture. We were in primary school, so that makes me twelve, and these grown men chasing us. And I swear once somebody called me a nigga and I said ‘Fucking nigga? Where’d you get nigga from? and I was confused and it was like a lot of that. That kind of shaped our mindset.”

My uncles then start to chime in with their own stories of fights from when they were growing up, as they're trying to navigate their place in Australian culture. Hatem recounts, “When I got my first black eye, my dad went over to his house. He knocked on his door and said to his dad ‘Your son!’ cause that’s the culture. Then his dad goes, ‘Why are you telling me for? I didn’t punch him.’” Ali laughs heartily and I can hear my Mum’s soft laughter beside me. “My dad’s trying to blend in, the best he knows how, so he takes me down to the police station and tells the police, ‘Someone hit my son’ and they said ‘Yeah, so go put him in karate or something.’” Khalil chuckles and joins in excitedly, “I remember when I got beaten up, we were still living in Claymore. I’m 5 years old or something, right. I come home, I’m crying. My mum goes, ‘Who beat you up?’ ‘This kid over there.’ My mum took me, dragged me back over there to his house ‘Fight him again.’” “What?!” My Mum exclaims in disbelief. “Had to fight him again, got flogged again, came home and got flogged again by my mum for losing.” The whole table erupts in a cacophony of chaos. “That sums up our life actually.” Ayoub’s smile carries through his words. “We wear it like a badge of honour; in the end, it’s probably not.” Ali contemplates.

Hatem, who’s a very spiritual guy, starts speaking about an experience he had when he was older, where he started to understand how the violence they were experiencing was completely unfounded.“One time a big group of guys came to our house. Me and Ali are upstairs shitting ourselves - twenty rednecks. I was sixteen maybe. ‘Come out you dogs, We’re gonna kill ya’s!’ And then my dad walks out in his underwear. Now my dad is a thousand times more wog than us. He doesn’t know the first thing about being Aussie, but turns out he does. Turns out he knows more than me. So he goes out there and we can hear, they’re surrounding him and they’re chatting. First thing he says is ‘What? You want to fight?!’ they start laughing and then they leave. So then a couple days later, Aussies are mostly drunk at the time and the next day they won’t remember you, you know what I mean, I went down to the Catholic Club and I seen one of them. He was a bartender, he was with ‘em. He was ignoring me and I went up to him and said ‘Look man I hope there’s no hard feelings, this and that, wallah.’ And he goes, ‘Nah it’s all good man, we just don’t like pretenders.’” Hatem says.

There’s a confused pause. “What does that mean though?” Ayoub says. “That’s right, what the hell does that mean mate?” Hatem says. “Wogs have a habit of pretending, it’s true, but Aussie’s can’t. Aussie’s can't pretend. You’re a grub? Yeah I’m a grub. But the Arabic culture is a feministic culture and the Aussie culture is very masculine. That's why we were suffering.” Hatem exclaims. “You know we were like, very feministic, very courteous. There’s no nosing anyone's business here like Arabs do. Being an Aussie is not pretending. You say what you think. You live in the moment.” Hatem says this so admiringly that I understand what he means. “But it’s better, because you don’t have to remember anything. You just say it as it is.” Ali points out.

“You’re making it out like we’re liars. I don’t think we’re pretenders. We’re not liars, we’re not any of that, but we want peace,” Ayoub reflects and observes, “whereas Aussies are more direct, we’re probably less direct.” This is where I chime in,

They can be more direct, it’s their country. They grew up with this entitlement that ‘I can say what I want. Who’s gonna hurt me? We’re the majority.’

“True,” Ayoub admits. Then the group starts talking about how things changed more as they grew up. “As we got a little bit older, that’s when everyone started to respect us as who we are,” Khalil mentions proudly, “Because we never started any trouble. We stuck together, but we never backed down.” “We all learned how to fight, we’d all teach each other how to box. By then we were strong, we didn’t feel threatened. So when you came into the area we didn’t care who you were. As long as you were nice to us, we were nice to you but if you came and threatened us, we would fight.” Ayoub asserted, turning to me as he acknowledged, “this is where fights started. Macarthur was ours, as long as you’re from our area. We had all different cultures, we had Islanders, Asians, Aussies, didn’t matter, but they knew who we were.”

Everyone knew who you guys were?

I repeated, finding it hard to believe the world was that small. “Everyone knew who we were,” Khalil reaffirmed. Ali jumps in agreeing with him,

“They did because that one time we had a punch up with the islanders, all the other islanders straight away said ‘We’re on your side’ because they knew we wouldn’t start trouble.”

Is that the one with the chairs?

“Yeah,” they reply simultaneously. For context, there’s a very famous story my uncles tell where they got into a brawl at Macarthur Square because some kids were picking on a cleaner in the food court; I distinctly remember chairs being thrown. I'm not going to get into too much detail because I'm not incriminating them. Not that anything criminal happened…moving on. Ali reveals, “One of their cousins lived in our street and his uncle beat him up, because he found out that he had a fight with us and his uncle goes, ‘I know those boys, they’re good boys.’” Ali said. Excited to finally get to the topic of the movie, the thing that connects this whole thing together. I move on to the next question.

What was it about Blood in, Blood out that you guys liked so much?

At the end of the movie, I think it sums it up really, it was just trying to survive man. So all those extra things, all those luxuries that you have in life, we didn’t have ‘cause we were just trying to survive everyday,” Hatem surmises.

“How serious was the movie right, and then right at the end of the movie, they’re having a conversation and he says to him ‘He just wants to be like you.’ In the end Miklo just wanted to be like Paco and it’s so simple,” Ali remarks appreciatively. In the scene we’re talking about, Paco stares up at a mural of him, Cruz and Miklo. He tells his brother that he hates Miklo and Cruz makes an inspiring speech about how their bond can never be broken, that they’re all brothers in the end. When I watched the scene I was surprised because the action movie that I expected to be shit was actually deeply profound, and I started to understand why my uncles loved it so much. (You can watch the scene here for reference)

“That’s the whole point. The point is, as complicated as it was, where we grew up and what we went through - in the end, we just want to live. We don’t want our kids to go through that,”

Ali shares with the group. Ayoub resumes the conversation, telling me how the movie represented their experiences, “As we grew up, we came together out of protection of one another. In the movie it says that exactly. One hundred percent, once we started to get to know each other, we reinforced each other, we taught each other how to fight. We backed each other. We didn’t have Muslim/Christian in Campbelltown because we couldn’t.”

Ali deliberates “We don’t have the luxury that our Arab community has to live in Bankstown and be protected by numbers. That’s why we’re different from them. We go down there and they know they’re different.” Khalil soberly observes “We could’ve ended up just like Blood in, Blood out,”

Why do you think you didn’t?

I inquire, wanting to know why these men in front of me had somehow turned out different from the people they grew up around. I wanted to know if it was pure luck or they had made a deliberate decision. “We all had ambitions, to be something different and our parents were on our ass,” Abdul reminds everyone. “The way we grew up, you had Abu Moussa, you had your dad and his dad,” Khalil gestures to Ali and Ayoub, “If I was doing something wrong, his dad could flog me, Abu Moussa could flog me, his dad could flog me and you know what? It was allowed.” He explains intensely and solely for my benefit, already knowing the table has a mutual understanding. “We had a village based community,” Ayoub points out, “You couldn’t get away with anything in the village.” Abdul asserts happily “And you know what, we were lucky too because we met some good women.” “One hundred percent, that’s another one,” Ayoub concludes in agreement, “In the end it all comes down to a good woman.”

By this point in our conversation, I feel pleasantly surprised and extremely grateful that my dad and my uncles are so easy to talk to - that they’re more knowledgeable and open than I expected. I feel like even though I'm asking the questions, these are things they think about often. It urges me on and allows me to ask the next question.

How has your friendship changed since you were teenagers and how has it stayed the same?

“We sort of went our separate ways for a little bit, but in the end, for me I’ve come to realise, I need my friends man,” Hatem admits sincerely. Ali adds on to his sentiment, “And that’s where the movie associates with us, because everyone does their own thing. They all do your own thing. I had a conversation years ago with Ayoub where he said to me, ‘I haven't spoken to you for four, five months but it’s like I spoke to you guys yesterday.’ The table nods in affirmation. “For us we don’t chase each other but we’re always there,” Ali says confidently. “It’s like family, you could fight with your family but you’ll always come back to them. It’s not a cliche, it’s an absolute fact,” Ayoub tells me, with so much assurance, that I feel the love between these men without them saying it explicitly.

“There's no judgement between us, you’ve grown up with each other, we know pretty much everything about each other growing up. We’re not ashamed. Whatever is going on, we can talk to each other. Like I don’t talk to these guys as much as I probably should,” Abdul admits sheepishly. ”Yeah, you’re a scumbag,” Ayoub retorts and Khalil’s loud contagious laughter resounds. “Yeah go on call me a scumbag, I'll cop it,” Abdul concedes. “But it’s out of love that I call him a scumbag. The

How do you feel about Campbelltown?

“We loved growing up there,” Ali responds. “I love growing up there, because every time I go back there people say hi to me. It’s not because they feared us, it’s because they liked us and we didn’t do anything wrong.” Khalil adds tenderly. Ayoub expresses,

“Towards the end, we were all mates. It's like this process of evolution, where you gotta get to know people. You gotta fight, you gotta go through the process of hating and fighting and getting to know and eating their food. Then over time, you can’t avoid each other. We’re one melting pot.”

Ali considers earnestly, “We know a lot of people that went down the wrong path. I think we loved growing up because of each other, not because of the area.” my uncles started talking about how living in Campbelltown has changed the way they look at the world, noting how their childhood has made them hyper vigilant and cautious. “I’m fifty but I can't get it out of my system. I’ve got it in me. Wherever I go, like yesterday I went to a restaurant, I can’t sit by myself and expose my back to anybody. I don’t know if you guys think like that, I gotta be in control,” Ayoub recognises.

“I can't sit at the back either,” Khalil reveals, and then recounts, “‘Me and you done the same thing, remember we went and we had to face the window to see who’s coming in, and our backs can’t be turned to the window.” My Mum points out “But I mean you haven’t been to high school for like thirty years,” “It’s ingrained in your brain,” Hatem reaffirms. “I remember going to a Serbian dance party, and I remember walking in, there’s a fire extinguisher I can grab, there’s a fire exit, there’s another fire extinguisher. There’s a few chairs I can grab,’ Ali describes, with no lack of detail. “So this is like a trauma response,” My Mum suggests. “It is a trauma response,” Hatem answers and Khalil deliberates, “But it’s normal for us to think like that.” Shifting the conversation towards a close, I carefully ask a loaded question, wanting to explore the intersection of diaspora and identity further.

Aussie, that's it. There’s no way I’ll call myself Lebanese, it’s a piece of shit over there. There’s no way I’ll call myself Lebanese. Ever.” Ayoub contributes his opinion calmly “I’ve thought about this very deeply. Our history is over there,” Ayoub pauses calmly and Hatem laughs with recognition, “Yeah true,” he concedes, “but our current state and future is here. We’re invested in our food, the practices, the culture, but equally I’m proud of living here because of the standard of living. It's a proud nation, we’re achievers, we got a future, our kids can survive, they can get jobs. Over there there’s no hope and they’re full of corruption so I’m very proud of being here.” Ayoub clarifies,

“I do call myself an Aussie, but to tell the full story, I’m an Aussie with a Syrian background. That explains my story, my journey. That’s who I am.”

We all hum in subtle agreement and admiration at his interpretation. I think that’s a good note to end on, one that I feel acknowledges the complexity of being Arab in a white place. The undeniable fact that we are changed by our environment but nothing can change our blood, and the land that was home to our ancestors.

Growing up as an Australian Lebanese person, living in Western Sydney, art was something that I felt failed to accurately represent me and my community. I felt like artistic spaces were made to keep us out, rather than let us in. Although Arab people have a long and beautiful history of art making, most of the Arab people I knew avoided creative spaces. We have been historically excluded in the very making of these Western structures and naturally begin to feel uncomfortable within their walls, inevitably avoiding them completely. If we look for our own reflection when we look at art, but the mirrors are always dirty, we begin to stop. This is the first time I got to creatively mix both of my worlds, and realise they actually compliment each other. Community without art is impossible, painful even, because art is a natural expression of our humanity. However for racialised people, vulnerability is a double edged sword; something that can always be misconstrued or manipulated to use against us. I wanted to challenge the idea of Arab masculinity and offer up another perspective. I’m extremely grateful to my dad and my uncles for being open and generous with their time and their hearts, knowing the courage it takes to do so. I hope their experiences and this photo series can offer up a more holistic view of diaspora, from a group that rarely ever sees themself in art.