When I was a child, I knew I had superpowers.
That's right.
I thought I was absolutely amazing because I could understand
and relate to the feelings of brown people, like my grandfather,
a conservative Muslim guy.
And also, I could understand my Afghan mother, my Pakistani father,
not so religious but laid-back, fairly liberal.
And of course, I could understand and relate to the feelings of white people.
The white Norwegians of my country. You know, white, brown, whatever,
I loved them all. I understood them all,
even if they didn't always understand each other,
they were all my people.
My father, though, was always really worried.
He kept saying that even with the best education,
I was not going to get a fair shake.
I would still face discrimination, according to him, and that they only way
to be accepted by white people would be to become famous.
Now mind you, he had this conversation with me when I was seven-years-old.
So while I'm seven-years-old, he said, look,
so its either got to be sports, or its got to be music.
He didn't know anything about sports -- bless him -- so it was music.
So when I was seven-years-old, he gathered all my toys, all my dolls,
and he threw them all away.
In exchange, he gave me a crappy little Casio keyboard and singing lessons.
He forced me, basically, to practice for hours and hours every single day.
Very quickly, he also had me performing for larger and larger audiences,
and bizarrely, I became almost a kind of poster child
for Norwegian multi-culturalism.
I felt very proud, of course.
Even the newspapers were starting to write nice things about brown people,
so I could feel that my superpower was growing.
So when I was 12-years-old, walking home from school,
I took a little detour because I wanted to buy
my favorite sweets called Salty Feets.
I know they sound kind of awful, but I absolutely love them.
They're basically these little salty licorice bits in the shape of feet.
And now that I say it out loud, I realize how terrible that sounds,
but be that as it may, I absolutely love them.
So on my way into the store, there was this grown white guy
in the doorway blocking my way.
So I tried to walk around him, and as I did that, he stopped me
and he was staring at me, and he spit in my face,
and he said, get out of my way you little black bitch,
you little Paki bitch, go back home where you came from.
I was absolutely horrified. I was staring at him.
I was too afraid to wipe the spit off my face,
even as it was mixing with my tears.
I remember looking around, hoping that any minute now,
a grown-up is going to come and make this guy stop.
But instead, people kept hurrying past me and pretended not to see me.
I was very confused because I was thinking,
well, my white people, come on! Where are they? What's going on?
How come they're not coming and rescuing me?
So, needless to say, I didn't buy the sweets.
I just ran home as fast as I could.
Things were still okay, though, I thought.
As time went on, the more successful I became, I eventually started attracting
harassment from brown people.
Some men in my parent's community felt that it was unacceptable
and dishonorable for a woman to be involved in music
and to be so present in the media.
So very quickly, I was starting to become attacked at my own concerts.
I remember one of the concerts, I was onstage, I lean into the audience
and the last thing I see is a young brown face
and the next thing I know some sort of chemical is thrown in my eyes
and I remember I couldn't really see and my eyes were watering
but I kept singing anyway.
I was spit in the face in the streets of Oslo, this time by brown men.
They even tried to kidnap me at one point.
The death threats were endless.
I remember one older bearded guy stopped me in the street one time,
and he said, the reason I hate you so much
is because you make our daughters think
they can do whatever they want.
A younger guy warned me to watch my back.
He said music is un-Islamic and the job of whores,
and if you keep this up, you are going to be raped
and your stomach will be cut out so that another whore like you will not be born.
Again, I was so confused.
I couldn't understand what was going on.
My brown people now starting to treat me like this -- how come?
Instead of bridging the worlds, the two worlds, I felt like I was
falling between my two worlds. I suppose for me, spit was kryptonite.
So by the time I was 17-years-old, the death threats were endless
and the harassment was constant. It got so bad, at one point my mother
sat me down and said, look, we can no longer protect you,
we can no longer keep you safe, so you're going to have to go.
So I bought a one-way ticket to London. I packed my suitcase, and I left.
My biggest heartbreak at that point was that nobody said anything.
I had a very public exit from Norway.
My brown people, my white people, nobody said anything.
Nobody said, hold on, this is wrong.
Support this girl, protect this girl because she is one of us.
Nope. Nobody said that.
Instead, I felt like, you know at the airport, on the baggage
carousel you have these different suitcases going around and around
and there's always that one suitcase left at the end, the one that nobody wants,
the one that nobody comes to claim.
I felt like that. I'd never felt so alone. I'd never felt so lost.
So, after coming to London, I did eventually resume my music career.
Different place but unfortunately the same old story.
I remember a message sent to me saying that I was going to be killed
and that rivers of blood were going to flow and that I was going to be raped
many times before I died.
By this point, I have to say,
I was actually getting used to messages like this,
but what became different was that now they started threatening my family.
So once again, I packed my suitcase, I left music and I moved to the US.
I'd had enough. I didn't want to have anything to do with this anymore.
And I was certainly not going to be killed for something
that wasn't even my dream -- it was my father's choice.
So I kind of got lost. I kind of fell apart.
But I decided that what I wanted to do is spend the next however many years
of my life supporting young people and to try to be there in some small way,
whatever way that I could.
I started volunteering for various organizations that were working
with young Muslims inside of Europe.
And, to my surprise, what I found was so many of these young people
were suffering and struggling.
They were facing so many problems with their families and their communities
who seemed to care more about their honor and their reputation than the
happiness and the lives of their own kids.
I started feeling like maybe I wasn't so alone, maybe I wasn't so weird.
Maybe there are more of my people out there.
The thing is, what most people don't understand is that there are so many
of us growing up in Europe who are not free to be ourselves.
We're not allowed to be who we are.
We are not free to marry or to be in relationships with people that we choose.
We can't even pick our own career.
This is the norm in the Muslim heartlands of Europe,
even in the freest societies in the world, we're not free.
Our lives, our dreams, our future does not belong to us, it belongs to our parents and their community. I found endless stories of young people who are lost to all of us, who are invisible to all of us but who are suffering and they are suffering alone. Kids that we are losing to forced marriages, honor-based violence and abuse. So, eventually, I realized, after several years of working with these young people that I will not be able to keep running. I can't spend the rest of my life being scared and hiding and that I'm actually going to have to do something. And I also realized that my silence, our silence, allows abuse like this to continue. So I decided that I wanted to put my childhood superpower to some use by trying to make people on the different sides of these issues understand what its like to be a young person stuck between your family and your country. So I started making films and I started telling stories. I also wanted people to understand the deadly consequences of us not taking these problems seriously. So the first film I made was about Denaz.