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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 and relate to

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the feelings of brown people like
my grandfather, a conservative Muslim guy,

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and also I could understand
my Afghan mother and 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.

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You know white, brown,
whatever, I loved them all.

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I understood them all 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,
I would face discrimination,

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according to him, and the only way
to be accepted by white people

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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

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'Look, 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 al 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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and forced me 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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bizarrely I became almost a poster child
for Norwegian multiculturalism.

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I felt very proud of course because
even the newspapers at this point

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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 I took a little detour

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because I wanted to buy
my favourite sweets called 'salty feet'.

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

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They are basically these little
salty licorice bits, in the shape of feet.

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

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

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On my way into the store, there was this
grown white guy in the doorway

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blocking my way, 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 and he said

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‘Get out of my way you little black bitch,
you little Paki bitch, get out of my -

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go back home where you came from.’
I was absolutely horrified.

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

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even as it was mixing with my tears.
I remember looking around,

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hoping any minute now a grownup
is going to come and make this guy stop.

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But instead people kept hurrying past me
and pretending 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
I just ran home as fast as I could.

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Things were still ok though, I thought.

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As time went on, the more
successful I became,

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I eventually started attracting
harassment from brown people.

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Some men in my parents community felt that
it was unacceptable and dishonorable

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for a woman to be involved in music,
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
on stage, I lean in to 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 is 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.
The death threats were endless.

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

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‘The reason I hate you so much is that
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, he said

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‘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 and your stomach will be cut out,

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so that another whore
like you will not be born.’

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Again I was so confused.
I couldn’t understand what was going on,

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my brown people now
starting to treat me like this.

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How come?
Instead of bridging the two worlds,

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I felt like I was falling
between the two worlds.

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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.

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It got so bad at one point
my mother sat me down and said

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‘Look, we can no longer protect you,
we can no longer keep you safe,

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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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Nobody said that. Instead I felt like,

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you know at the airport,
on the baggage carousel,

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you have these different suitcases
going round and round,

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and there’s always
that one suitcase left at the end.

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The one that nobody wants.
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,

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and that I was going to be raped
many times before I died.

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By this time I has to say 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 wasn’t going to be killed for
something that wasn’t even my dream,

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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

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to spend the next however many years
of my life supporting young people,

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and to try to be there in some small way,
whatever way that I could.

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So I started volunteering for various
organisations 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 honour and their reputation

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than the 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,

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is that there are so many
of us growing up in Europe

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who are not free to be ourselves.
We are not allowed to be who we are.

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We are not free to marry, or to be
in relationships with, people 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 are 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,

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but they are suffering and 
they are suffering alone.

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Kids that we are losing to forced marriages,
to honour based violence and abuse.

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So eventually I realised, after several
years of working with these young people,

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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,

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and that I’m actually going
to have to do something.

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And I also realised that
my silence, our silence,

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allows abuse 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

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understand what it's like to be
a young person stuck

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between your family and your country.

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So I started making films,
and I started telling these stories.

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And I also wanted people to understand

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the deadly consequences of us
not taking these problems seriously.

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So the first film I made was about Banaz.

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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 parent’s chose for her,

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even though he beat
and raped her constantly.

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