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 and 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 face discrimination,
according to him, and the 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 al my toys, all my dolls,
and he threw them all away.
In exchange he gave me a crappy little Casio keyboard, and singing lessons,
and forced me to practice for hours and hours every single day.
Very quickly he also had me performing for larger and larger audiences,
bizarrely I became almost a poster child for Norwegian multiculturalism.
I felt very proud of course because even the newspapers at this point
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 favourite sweets called 'salty feet'.
I know they sound kind of awful, but I absolutely loved them.
They are basically these little salty licorice bits, in the shape of feet.
And now that I say it out loud I realise how terrible that sounds,
but be that as it may, I absolutely loved them.
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, get out of my -
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 any minute now a grownup is going to come and make this guy stop.
But instead people kept hurrying past me and pretending 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 ok though, I thought.
As time went on, the more successful I became,
I eventually started attracting harassment from brown people.
Some men in my parents 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 on stage, I lean in to the audience,
and the last thing I see is a young brown face,
and the next thing I know is 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 said
‘The reason I hate you so much is that 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 two worlds,
I felt like I was falling between the 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.’
Nobody said that. Instead I felt like,
you know at the airport, on the baggage carousel,
you have these different suitcases going round and round,
and there’s always that one suitcase left at the end.
The one that nobody wants. 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 time I has 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 wasn’t 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
to 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.
So I started volunteering for various organisations 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 honour 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 are not allowed to be who we are.
We are not free to marry, or to be in relationships with, people 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 are 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 they are suffering and they are suffering alone.
Kids that we are losing to forced marriages, to honour based violence and abuse.
So eventually I realised, 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 realised 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 it's like to be a young person stuck
between your family and your country.
So I started making films, and I started telling these stories.
And I also wanted people to understand
the deadly consequences of us not taking these problems seriously.
So the first film I made was about Banaz.
She was a 17 year old Kurdish girl in London.
She was obedient, she did whatever her parents wanted.
She tried to do everything right.
She married some guy that her parent’s chose for her,
even though he beat and raped her constantly.
And when she tried to go to her family for help they said
‘Well, you’ve got to go back and be a better wife.’