From Western Sudan to Western Sydney

By Gillian Cook

Fathia Adam sits on the living room floor of her Blacktown apartment thumbing through the pages of an Australia Citizenship workbook. Her feet, painted with henna to celebrate the end of Ramadan, rub against each other.

Her tongue falters over unfamiliar words like ‘democracy’ and ‘responsibility’. Not because the concepts are foreign to her. It is because her mouth, so used to forming Arabic sounds, struggles to make sense of the syllables.

She doesn’t mind the frequent distractions by her one-year-old daughter, Marlawa. Her frizzy hair, uneven steps, and tendency to try and eat objects of varying degrees of edibility keep Fathia busy.

It is 9:30am and Fathia serves garlicky beef stew with home-baked bread for breakfast. Marlawa eats the gooey food from her mother’s henna-tipped fingers.

Fathia has been in Australia for 10 months. She came from Sudan as a humanitarian refugee and spent two years in Egypt before being granted refugee status in Australia.

This morning Mahgoub, her husband, is at a job search agency. He will take almost any job offered to him.

“In Australia it’s too hard to get a job because English is not good,” says Fathia.

Fathia was born in a small village in Darfur, a region in the west of Sudan.

It is a place where mountains are the backdrop for cascading waterfalls and running rivers – a place where she says the orchards are full of mangos, guavas and oranges.

In 2003 Fathia and her family woke in the 4am darkness to screaming and the sound of horse hooves.

The Janjaweed had come.

Meaning ‘man with a gun on a horse,’ the Janjaweed are militia of nomadic, Arab-speaking African tribes.

Her Father ran out of their house to defend the village with the other men after urging his wife and children to run and hide.

The militia were firing guns indiscriminately into houses and at running families - women and children too, remembers Fathia. They set houses on fire and herded cattle away.

Fathia and her Mother, brothers and sisters ran to hide in the mountain. They stayed there for a day before her father found them. Although he was wounded, he led them by foot for hours to the next village.

Mahgoub also escaped to the next village, but his Father died of his wounds.

Fathia travelled on her own to Khartoum, before going to Egypt and reuniting with Mahgoub where they married.

Fathia’s cousin Sidig had already been granted refugee status in Australia and so he proposed that Fathia, Mahgoub and their daughter Marlawa come to Australia as refugees.

“My father had 300 cows. We lost them and our home."

“All gone,” remembers Fathia, speaking through another Darfur refugee, Haviz.
At other times she speaks for herself in broken English.

Her grandfather was killed by the Janjaweed in his house. Her aunty had children taken and killed in front of her before the soldiers told her to leave.

Thick grey smoke puffs and coils out of the small clay pot of burning sandalwood twigs placed on the dining room table.

Fathia did not know until she reached Egypt that her family was safe in Khartoum. Her first born daughter, who she lost in the confusion, is still in Sudan, living with Fathia’s mother.

Marlawa runs around the carpeted apartment pulling on fake flowers.

Sometimes, when Marlawa grabs one too many hand-fried, oily cardamom donuts, or picks up a fragile glass cup, she receives a sharp word from Fathia.

It is either in Arabic or her mother tongue, Fur.

But when Fathia says to her daughter “no no no no no” in English and Marlawa mimics her perfectly with a waving finger and creased eyebrows, she cannot help but smile and laugh with her baby.

Fathia puts on a Bollywood film and she and her daughter dance and sing along to the choreographed moves of the women and children who weave through the Indian tea plantations.
Fathia scoops Marlawa up and wraps her in a makeshift sling made out of a blanket that binds her daughter to her back.

In the kitchen she pours water into a pot of four cardamom pods, some cloves and two tea bags. She places it all on a silver tray with a little bowl of sugar.

Over a cup of tea she talks about Australia, frustrated by her own fractured English.

Fathia is happy in Australia. She misses her family but she says “Australia is good.”

She is part of a tight knit Darfur community in Sydney. On weekends the families invite the bachelors of their community to eat with them.

She is about to begin a TAFE course in English because she has finished the hours the government mandates and wants to learn more. She is studying for the Citizenship test and hopes to pass in December.

As Fathia goes to leave the apartment she darts into the bedroom and pulls out an azure-blue silk shawl that when wrapped around her body and over her head and arms becomes the traditional dress worn by Muslim women from Darfur.

When outside, she adjusts her veil which often slips off her plaited hair. She laughs and points at Marlawa, saying “look, we forgot her shoes.”

But Marlawa doesn’t seem to mind at all as she totters ever so lightly and always so closely alongside her mother.