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What we don’t know about Europe’s Muslim kids and why we should care | Deeyah Khan | TEDxExeter

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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
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    ‘Well, you’ve got to go back
    and be a better wife.’
Title:
What we don’t know about Europe’s Muslim kids and why we should care | Deeyah Khan | TEDxExeter
Description:

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDxTalks
Duration:
19:58

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