WEBVTT

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When I was a child,
I knew I had superpowers.

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That's right.

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I thought I was absolutely amazing
because I could understand

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and relate to the feelings
of brown people, like my grandfather,

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a conservative Muslim guy.

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And also, I could understand
my Afghan mother, my Pakistani father,

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not so religious but
laid-back, fairly liberal.

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And of course, I could understand
and relate to the feelings of white people.

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The white Norwegians of my country.
You know, white, brown, whatever,

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I loved them all. I understood them all,

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even if they didn't always
understand each other,

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they were all my people.

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My father, though,
was always really worried.

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He kept saying that
even with the best education,

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I was not going to get a fair shake.

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I would still face discrimination,
according to him, and that they only way

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to be accepted by white people
would be to become famous.

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Now mind you, he had this conversation
with me when I was seven-years-old.

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So while I'm seven-years-old,
he said, look,

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so its either got to be sports,
or its got to be music.

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He didn't know anything about sports --
bless him -- so it was music.

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So when I was seven-years-old,
he gathered all my toys, all my dolls,

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and he threw them all away.

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In exchange, he gave me a crappy little
Casio keyboard and singing lessons.

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He forced me, basically, to practice
for hours and hours every single day.

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Very quickly, he also had me performing
for larger and larger audiences,

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and bizarrely, I became almost
a kind of poster child

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for Norwegian multi-culturalism.

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I felt very proud, of course.

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Even the newspapers were starting
to write nice things about brown people,

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so I could feel that
my superpower was growing.

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So when I was 12-years-old,
walking home from school,

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I took a little detour
because I wanted to buy

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my favorite sweets called Salty Feets.

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I know they sound kind of awful,
but I absolutely love them.

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They're basically these little salty
licorice bits in the shape of feet.

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And now that I say it out loud,
I realize how terrible that sounds,

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but be that as it may,
I absolutely love them.

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So on my way into the store,
there was this grown white guy

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in the doorway blocking my way.

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So I tried to walk around him,
and as I did that, he stopped me

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and he was staring at me,
and he spit in my face,

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and he said, get out of my way
you little black bitch,

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you little Paki bitch,
go back home where you came from.

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I was absolutely horrified.
I was staring at him.

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I was too afraid to wipe
the spit off my face,

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even as it was mixing with my tears.

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I remember looking around,
hoping that any minute now,

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a grown-up is going to come 
and make this guy stop.

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But instead, people kept hurrying past me
and pretended not to see me.

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I was very confused
because I was thinking,

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well, my white people, come on!
Where are they? What's going on?

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How come they're not
coming and rescuing me?

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So, needless to say,
I didn't buy the sweets.

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I just ran home as fast as I could.

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Things were still okay, though, I thought.

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As time went on, the more successful
I became, I eventually started attracting

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harassment from brown people.

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Some men in my parent's community
felt that it was unacceptable

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and dishonorable for a woman
to be involved in music

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and to be so present in the media.

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So very quickly, I was starting to become
attacked at my own concerts.

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I remember one of the concerts,
I was onstage, I lean into the audience

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and the last thing I see is
a young brown face

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and the next thing I know
some sort of chemical is thrown in my eyes

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and I remember I couldn't really see
and my eyes were watering

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but I kept singing anyway.

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I was spit in the face in the streets
of Oslo, this time by brown men.

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They even tried to
kidnap me at one point.

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The death threats were endless.

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I remember one older bearded guy
stopped me in the street one time,

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and he said, the reason
I hate you so much

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is because you make
our daughters think

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they can do whatever they want.

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A younger guy warned me
to watch my back.

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He said music is un-Islamic
and the job of whores,

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and if you keep this up,
you are going to be raped

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and your stomach will be cut out so that
another whore like you will not be born.

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Again, I was so confused.

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I couldn't understand
what was going on.

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My brown people now starting
to treat me like this -- how come?

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Instead of bridging the worlds, 
the two worlds, I felt like I was

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falling between my two worlds.
I suppose for me, spit was kryptonite.

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So by the time I was 17-years-old,
the death threats were endless

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and the harassment was constant.
It got so bad, at one point my mother

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sat me down and said, look,
we can no longer protect you,

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we can no longer keep you safe,
so you're going to have to go.

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So I bought a one-way ticket to London.
I packed my suitcase, and I left.

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My biggest heartbreak at that point
was that nobody said anything.

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I had a very public exit from Norway.

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My brown people, my white people,
nobody said anything.

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Nobody said, hold on, this is wrong.

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Support this girl, protect this girl
because she is one of us.

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Nope. Nobody said that.

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Instead, I felt like,
you know at the airport, on the baggage

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carousel you have these different
suitcases going around and around

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and there's always that one suitcase left
at the end, the one that nobody wants,

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the one that nobody comes to claim.

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I felt like that. I'd never felt so alone.
I'd never felt so lost.

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So, after coming to London,
I did eventually resume my music career.

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Different place but unfortunately
the same old story.

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I remember a message sent to me
saying that I was going to be killed

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and that rivers of blood were going
to flow and that I was going to be raped

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many times before I died.

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By this point, I have to say,

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I was actually getting used
to messages like this,

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but what became different was that
now they started threatening my family.

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So once again, I packed my suitcase,
I left music and I moved to the US.

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I'd had enough. I didn't want to have
anything to do with this anymore.

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And I was certainly not
going to be killed for something

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that wasn't even my dream --
it was my father's choice.

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So I kind of got lost.
I kind of fell apart.

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But I decided that what I wanted to do
is spend the next however many years

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of my life supporting young people
and to try to be there in some small way,

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whatever way that I could.

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I started volunteering for various
organizations that were working

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with young Muslims inside of Europe.


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And, to my surprise, what I found
was so many of these young people

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were suffering and struggling.

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They were facing so many problems
with their families and their communities

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who seemed to care more about
their honor and their reputation than the

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happiness and the lives of their own kids.

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I started feeling like maybe I wasn't
so alone, maybe I wasn't so weird.

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Maybe there are more of
my people out there.

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The thing is, what most people
don't understand is that there are so many

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of us growing up in Europe who
are not free to be ourselves.

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We're not allowed to be who we are.

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We are not free to marry or to be in
relationships with people that we choose.

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We can't even pick our own career.

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This is the norm in the
Muslim heartlands of Europe,

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even in the freest societies in the world,
we're not free.

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Our lives, our dreams, our future
does not belong to us,

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it belongs to our parents
and their community.

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I found endless stories of young people
who are lost to all of us,

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who are invisible to all of us but
who are suffering

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and they are suffering alone.

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Kids we are losing to forced marriages,
honor-based violence and abuse.

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So, eventually, I realized,
after several years of working

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with these young people that
I will not be able to keep running.

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I can't spend the rest of my life
being scared and hiding and

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that I'm actually going
to have to do something.

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And I also realized that my silence,
our silence, allows abuse

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like this to continue.

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So I decided that I wanted to put
my childhood superpower to some use

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by trying to make people on the different
sides of these issues understand

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what its like to be a young person stuck
between your family and your country.

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So I started making films
and I started telling stories.

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I also wanted people to understand
the deadly consequences of us

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not taking these problems seriously.

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So the first film I made was about Benaz.

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She was a 17-year-old
Kurdish girl in London.

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She was obedient, she did
whatever her parents wanted.

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She tried to do everything right.

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She married some guy that
her parents chose for her, even though

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he beat and raped her constantly.

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And when she tried to go
to her family for help, they said,

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well you got to go back,
and be a better wife.

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Because they didn't want
a divorced daughter on their hands

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because, of course, that would bring
dishonor on the family.

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She was beaten so badly
her ears would bleed,

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and when she finally left and she found
a young man that she chose

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and she fell in love with,
the community and the family found out

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and she disappeared.

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She was found three months later.

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She'd been stuffed into a suitcase
and buried underneath the house.

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She had been strangled,
she had been beaten to death by three men,

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three cousins on the orders
of her father and uncle.

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The added tragedy of Benaz's story
is that she had gone to the police

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in England five times, asking for help,
telling them that she was

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going to be killed by her family.

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The police didn't believe her
so they didn't do anything.

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And the problem with this is that
not only are so many of our kids

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facing this problem within their families
and within their families' communities,

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but they're also meeting misunderstandings
and apathy in the countries

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that they grow up in.

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When their own families betray them,
they look to the rest of us, and when

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we don't understand, we lose them.

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So while I was making this film,
several people said to me, well Deeyah,

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you know, this is just their culture,
this is just what those people do

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to their kids and
we can't really interfere.

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I can assure you being murdered
is not my culture -- you know?

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And surely people who look like me,
young women who come

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from backgrounds like me,
should be subject to the same rights,

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the same protections as anybody else
in our country, why not?

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So, for my next film, I wanted to try
and understand why some of our

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young Muslim kids in Europe are drawn
to extremism and violence.

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But with that topic,
I also recognized that

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I was going to have to face my worst fear:
the brown men with beards.

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The same men, or similar men, to the ones
that have hounded me for most of my life.

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Men that I've been afraid of
most of my life.

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Men that I've also deeply disliked.