WEBVTT

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
When I was a child,
I knew I had superpowers.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
That’s right.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I thought I was absolutely amazing because
I could understand and relate to

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
the feelings of brown people like
my grandfather, a conservative Muslim guy,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and also I could understand
my Afghan mother and Pakistani father,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
not so religious but
laid back, fairly liberal.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And of course I could understand and
relate to the feelings of white people,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
the white Norwegians of my country.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
You know white, brown,
whatever, I loved them all.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I understood them all even if they
didn’t always understand each other

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They were all my people.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
My father though was
always really worried.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
He kept saying that,
even with the best education

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I was not going to get a fair shake,
I would face discrimination,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
according to him, and the only way
to be accepted by white people

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
would be to become famous.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Now mind you, he had this conversation
with me when I was seven years old.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So, while I’m seven years old he said

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
'Look, so its either got to be sports
or its got to be music.'

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
He didn’t know anything about sports,
bless him, so it was music.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So when I was seven years old
he gathered al my toys, all my dolls,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and he threw them all away.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
In exchange he gave me a crappy little
Casio keyboard, and singing lessons,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and forced me to practice for hours
and hours every single day.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Very quickly he also had me performing
for larger and larger audiences,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
bizarrely I became almost a poster child
for Norwegian multiculturalism.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I felt very proud of course because
even the newspapers at this point

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
were starting to write
nice things about brown people,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
so I could feel that
my superpower was growing.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So when I was 12 years old walking home
from school I took a little detour

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because I wanted to buy
my favourite sweets called 'salty feet'.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I know they sound kind of awful,
but I absolutely loved them.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They are basically these little
salty licorice bits, in the shape of feet.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And now that I say it out loud I realise
how terrible that sounds,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but be that as it may,
I absolutely loved them.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
On my way into the store, there was this
grown white guy in the doorway

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
blocking my way, so I tried to walk around
him, and as I did that he stopped me,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and he was staring at me,
and he spit in my face and he said

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
‘Get out of my way you little black bitch,
you little Paki bitch, get out of my -

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
go back home where you came from.’
I was absolutely horrified.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I was staring at him, I was too afraid
to wipe the spit off my face,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
even as it was mixing with my tears.
I remember looking around,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
hoping any minute now a grownup
is going to come and make this guy stop.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
But instead people kept hurrying past me
and pretending not to see me.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I was very confused because I was thinking

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
‘Well, my white people come on,
where are they? What’s going on?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
How come they’re not
coming and rescuing me?’

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So needless to say I didn’t buy the sweets
I just ran home as fast as I could.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Things were still ok though, I thought.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
As time went on, the more
successful I became,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I eventually started attracting
harassment from brown people.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Some men in my parents community felt that
it was unacceptable and dishonorable

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
for a woman to be involved in music,
and to be so present in the media.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So very quickly I was starting to
become attacked at my own concerts.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I remember one of the concerts, I was
on stage, I lean in to the audience,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and the last thing I see is 
a young brown face,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and the next thing I know is some sort
of chemical is thrown in my eyes.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And I remember I couldn’t really see,
and my eyes were watering,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but I kept singing anyway.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I was spit in the face in the streets
of Oslo, this time by brown men.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They even tried to kidnap me at one point.
The death threats were endless.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I remember one older bearded guy
stopped me in the street one time and said

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
‘The reason I hate you so much is that
you make our daughters think

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
they can do whatever they want.’

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
A younger guy warned me
to watch my back, he said

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
‘Music is un-Islamic
and the job of whores,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and if you keep this up you are going to
be raped and your stomach will be cut out,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
so that another whore
like you will not be born.’

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Again I was so confused.
I couldn’t understand what was going on,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
my brown people now
starting to treat me like this.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
How come?
Instead of bridging the two worlds,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I felt like I was falling
between the two worlds.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I suppose for me,
spit was kryptonite.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So by the time I was 17 years old
the death threats were endless,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and the harassment was constant.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It got so bad at one point
my mother sat me down and said

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
‘Look, we can no longer protect you,
we can no longer keep you safe,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
so you’re going to have to go.’

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So I bought a one-way ticket to London.
I packed my suitcase, and I left.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
My biggest heartbreak at that point
was that nobody said anything.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I had a very public exit from Norway.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
My brown people, my white people,
nobody said anything.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Nobody said ‘Hold on, this is wrong.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Support this girl, protect this girl
because she is one of us.’

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Nobody said that. Instead I felt like,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you know at the airport,
on the baggage carousel,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you have these different suitcases
going round and round,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and there’s always
that one suitcase left at the end.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The one that nobody wants.
That nobody comes to claim.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I felt like that. I’d never felt so alone.
I’d never felt so lost.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So, after coming to London,
I did eventually resume my music career.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Different place, but unfortunately
the same old story.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I remember a message sent to me saying
that I was going to be killed,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and that rivers of blood
were going to flow,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and that I was going to be raped
many times before I died.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
By this time I has to say I was actually
getting used to messages like this.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
But what became different was that now
they started threatening my family.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So once again, I packed my suitcase,
I left music, and I moved to the US.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I’d had enough. I didn’t want to have
anything to do with this anymore.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And I wasn’t going to be killed for
something that wasn’t even my dream,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it was my father’s choice.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So I kind of got lost, 
I kind of fell apart,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but I decided that what I wanted to do is

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to spend the next however many years
of my life supporting young people,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and to try to be there in some small way,
whatever way that I could.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So I started volunteering for various
organisations that were working

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
with young Muslims inside of Europe.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And, to my surprise what I found,
was so many of these young people

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
were suffering and struggling.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They were facing so many problems
with their families and their communities,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
who seemed to care more about
their honour and their reputation

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
than the happiness and
the lives of their own kids.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I started feeling like maybe I wasn’t
so alone, maybe I wasn’t so weird.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Maybe there are more
of my people out there.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The thing is what most people
don’t understand,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is that there are so many
of us growing up in Europe

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
who are not free to be ourselves.
We are not allowed to be who we are.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
We are not free to marry, or to be
in relationships with, people we choose,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
we can’t even pick our own career.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
This is the norm in
the Muslim heartlands of Europe.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Even in the freest societies
in the world, we are not free.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Our lives, our dreams, our future,
does not belong to us,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it belongs to our parents,
and their community.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I found endless stories of young people,
who are lost to all of us,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Who are invisible to all of us,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but they are suffering and 
they are suffering alone.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Kids that we are losing to forced marriages,
to honour based violence and abuse.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So eventually I realised, after several
years of working with these young people,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that I will not be able to keep running,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I can’t spend the rest of my life
being scared and hiding,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and that I’m actually going
to have to do something.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And I also realised that
my silence, our silence,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
allows abuse like this to continue.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So I decided that I wanted to put
my childhood superpower to some use,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
by trying to make people on
the different sides of these issues

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
understand what it's like to be
a young person stuck

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
between your family and your country.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So I started making films,
and I started telling these stories.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And I also wanted people to understand

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
the deadly consequences of us
not taking these problems seriously.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So the first film I made was about Banaz.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
She was a 17 year old
Kurdish girl in London.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
She was obedient, she did
whatever her parents wanted.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
She tried to do everything right.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
She married some guy
that her parent’s chose for her,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
even though he beat
and raped her constantly.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And when she tried to go
to her family for help they said

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
‘Well, you’ve got to go back
and be a better wife.’