Close to the Edge (15 page)

Like some white rappers, Asian American rappers could also rework hip hop as a vehicle to express their experiences of marginality and discrimination. But whether they could come together with blacks and Latinos in a broader hip hop culture depended on the existence of some shared ground. A minority of whites and Asian Americans who grew up alongside African Americans were able to gain entry into worlds like early underground hip hop. One example was the South Asian DJ Rekha, who grew up around mostly African Americans and second-generation Caribbean immigrants in Flushing and on Long Island in New York City.
¹⁶
But without those common lived experiences—or at least parallels in experience—the rhetoric of multiracial alliances and postures of Afro-Asian unity didn't have much resonance beyond small circles. And without shared social spaces and experiences, there was very little ground for multiracial political struggles. Underground rap couldn't bring people together across racial and ethnic lines unless there were existing alliances—and perhaps even a political movement— that had already brought them together.

The global Hip Hop Nation was fractured. As I traveled the globe, I saw more differences than similarities. And location mattered greatly in defining who you were. In Cuba I was a gringa, in Chicago I was an Australian, yet in Australia I was Indian. Growing up, people would ask me, “Where are you really from?” My exposure to the identity-saturated world of Asian Americans had taught me one thing. Much about who I was, the way I viewed the world, and my concerns as an artist came from my location in Australia. As I looked back, I realized that my experiences in the US were a world apart from my own initiation into hip hop in Australia and its cross-racial appeal at the time of a deepening antiracist political movement.

CHAPTER 3

Blackfulla Blackfulla

M
y odyssey around the globe had begun on Sydney's West Side in August 1995, when I saw the ad from Death Defying Theatre that announced a multimedia project with workshops in rapping, graffiti, and b-boying. Three months of workshops were to culminate in a large-scale performance known as Hip Hopera. After several years of full-time political activism in Sydney, I was starting to wonder why left-wing radicals and progressives were so confined to the downtown vegetarian-hippie-café-latte-drinking set while never reaching the vast working classes in the west of the city. The problem was that the left was culturally isolated. Its idea of a radical cultural night was lentil curries and folk songs on the guitar. Meanwhile, Aboriginal, Arabic, Pacific Islander, and white working-class youth out in western Sydney were embracing hip hop culture and becoming angry and inspired. I saw the Hip Hopera workshops as a way to connect with this nascent hip hop movement and to understand how hip hop might be the key to political expression and voice for a new generation of excluded youth.

Just as hip hop reached urban American minority populations in places like Chicago at a point of desperation after years of deindustrialization and urban decay, so the culture hit home for Aboriginal and immigrant youth in Australia at a time of intensifying poverty, unemployment, and despair. It was a generation that had grown up seeing marches in the streets, sit-ins, and community organizing. But now this generation faced a vacuum—of leadership, of politics, of direction. Could hip hop fill that void?

Aboriginal people in particular had a history of connecting to a Pan-African diaspora through music. When Bob Marley performed in Adelaide in 1979, his claim that “All Black men are brothers” was taken up as an anthem by indigenous people.
¹
But could a black American form like hip hop still galvanize protest at a time when there was a dearth of political engagement? And could Marley's black men expand into Bambaataa's “Planet Rock” to incorporate the poor whites and immigrants who, along with Aboriginals, populated the fringes of the city? Despite Chicago's being a multiracial city, the segregation there made it harder to forge broader cross-racial alliances. In Sydney an unexpected turn of political events would bring us together across racial and ethnic lines, if briefly, in ways we hadn't thought possible before.

I
kicked around the idea of going to the Hip Hopera workshops with my friend Waiata Telfer, a young Aboriginal woman who hailed from Adelaide. Could we be Australia's new Queen Latifah and MC Lyte? We had our doubts. With our braids and lack of vocal training, we felt more like Milli Vanilli.

I had met Waiata at a community theater workshop in the inner-city neighborhood of Newtown the year before. She was a slender woman with copper-colored skin and closely cropped hair. Although she had been pictured with loose wavy hair falling about her bare shoulders, I recognized her from the oversized billboard with the caption, “They say I'm too pretty to be an Aboriginal.” The billboard, mounted above the main thoroughfare of Parramatta Road in inner-city Leichardt, was sponsored by the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council's “Racism Sux” campaign.

As we strolled across to the park during a lunch break, Waiata explained, “The agent took that statement out of context when he used it for the ad. What I was saying was that I hated it when people said I was too pretty to be an Aboriginal. He took away the power of my words.” When she went back to Adelaide, Waiata's family was offended. “Think yer too pretty to be a blackfulla? Think yer too pretty to be one of us?” It prompted her to cut off all her hair.

Waiata grew up in public housing in a semirural town called Old Noarlunga, on the outskirts of Adelaide, with her mother and three brothers. Her mother came from Point Pearce Mission to the city to work as a domestic and later found work in a government program known as Aboriginal Hostels Ltd., which provided housing for Nungas—the term for Aboriginal people from the Southeast of South Australia who came to the city.
²

When she was playing in the shallow streams and wide green paddocks of Old Noarlunga as a child, the people Waiata encountered were mostly Aboriginal. It was only when she went to primary school and started seeing predominantly white faces that she began to wonder, who am I?
“Yeah, you're an
Abo.” She had to go home and ask her mother what that meant. “My first year at primary school, I had a really clear memory that's when all the doors were closed, and that's when I started to get really angry,” she related.

The rise of the Aboriginal land rights movement in the early 1970s forced Adelaide, like many other Australian cities at that time, to confront its troubled racist history. Hundreds of Aboriginal people were taking to the streets with megaphones and placards, occupying the main streets of the downtown area. As a child, Waiata accompanied her mother to packed community meetings where people were talking about native title, sovereignty, and the Gove Land Rights Case in which a Northern Territory judge upheld the legal doctrine of pre-British Australia as
terra nullius
, or “vacant land,” that justified British settlement and the dispossession of Aboriginal people.

At school Waiata found that Aboriginal history was absent from textbooks about exploration and settlement of Australia. “They were telling me that Aboriginal people had died out. So it made me feel really angry and I said, ‘Hey, hang on, this isn't true. What kind of history are you telling? It's bullshit!!! I'm Aboriginal and I'm alive, and this history book is saying that I'm not.' And the teacher said to me, ‘You're the student, I'm the teacher, and this is the true history because it's written.'”

So one day Waiata came to her history class dressed as a bushranger, complete with stocky black boots, a fake beard drawn on with a pen, and a wide-brimmed outback hat. Aboriginal bushrangers were outlaws and rebels during the late nineteenth century; Musquito, for example, was an escaped Aboriginal prisoner who ran raids against the white settlers from his vantage point in the bush and was sentenced to death by hanging. Waiata pointed two fingers at her teacher in mock imitation of a gun, and she told him that the history he was teaching wasn't true.

“I was really enraged that to me he was telling lies,” she said. “I wanted to let him know, ‘You don't know shit, all you're doing is reading out of a history book, and there's a lot of history here that you have missed.' I told him he should get books in there that told the truth. But at that time there were no books. The history books were written by the conquerors, and they said that Aboriginal people all died out with colds and smallpox.” Waiata found herself sitting outside the principal's office and then suspended from all classes. She started cutting school; she had nothing to learn there anyway.

Every Sunday night in her preteen years, Waiata watched Molly Meldrum's
Countdown
, a sampling of local and international music hits. Waiata lip-synched to Tina Turner and imitated Michael Jackson's dance steps. It was on
Countdown
that she first saw Bob Marley, and she begged her mother to take her to see him on his Survival Tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1979. Like many other young indigenous Australians, Waiata was drawn to Marley's Pan-Africanist invocations of black brotherhood.

Just a few years later it was rap that caught her attention on the same show. “When I saw Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel with “The Message,” I was in grade six or seven, and I was really blown away,” recalls Waiata. “I just went
‘Shit!'
One was for the rhyming, I'd never seen that or heard that before. And, two, for what he was saying. It hit home, really political stuff coming from another person who was black.” Aboriginal people in South Australia didn't live in ghettos as such; they were dispersed into white society. But the song resonated.

Along with the music, Waiata was captivated by b-boy culture. She and her little brother would watch
Breakdance, Beat Street
, and
Electric Boogaloo
on an old Betamax machine, and they'd try to copy the moves. When she was thirteen, Waiata had a dance crew with her little brother and another boy, and they carried their cardboard strip everywhere they went.

“I used to spin on my back and do ‘the worm,'” she remembered. “As usual, the boys used to do all the power moves. My brother would do the windmills, and I'd be there doing the moonwalk and the robot. I remember I wanted to be just like Baby Love from the Rock Steady Crew,
‘b-b-boys and b-b-girls, all around the world.'
It was about sharing a message and also having some fun, dancing and having a good time. I'd grown up in a household where there was just a lot of violence and exposure to criminal activity because of poverty,” she said. “So for me music was a way to escape, really, and have a sense of happiness. ‘Cause the life I was growing up in had some pretty hard elements.”

Waiata left school at sixteen and went to Sydney to perform with the Aboriginal Dance Theatre, but she sustained a neck injury during a rehearsal. At the time I met her, she was wearing a neck brace, taking painkillers to stave off the frequent headaches, and working as a commercial model to make ends meet until her workers' compensation came through. After we met at the Newtown workshop, Waiata and I began to work as facilitators, doing theater workshops with young Aboriginal and migrant kids.

A
week after I saw the ad from Death Defying Theatre, Waiata and I made the trek out to Sydney's west, a sprawling area on the periphery of the city populated by Lebanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Pacific Islander immigrants and whites. Worlds away from the tourist brochure images of golden sand beaches and the silhouette of the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge, the west is the massive underbelly of the city. Nestled in the basin of the Cumberland Plain, prefabricated fibro houses— made of asbestos and cement board—and low-income public housing estates stretch sixty miles west to the Blue Mountains range. In the postwar period significant numbers of European immigrants were drawn to the southwestern region to work as unskilled laborers in industrial areas such as the Minto industrial estate or in construction.

Up until the 1970s, there was a “White Australia” policy in place that restricted non-white immigrants from entering the country. After this policy was officially repealed with the passage of the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975, there was a significant rise in nonwhite immigration. Whole villages and small towns from Lebanon were transplanted to areas like Lakemba and Bankstown after 1975, during the Lebanese civil war. Asian immigration also increased dramatically, with places like Cabramatta, a southwestern suburb of Sydney, becoming a hub for Vietnamese settlement. Many of these immigrants filled the growing need for unskilled labor on assembly lines. But as in other Western capitalist countries around the globe, manufacturing went into decline during the 1980s as factories relocated overseas and cheap imports replaced local production. Unemployment among Lebanese youth rose to 43 percent by the early 1990s.
³
Many parts of the west began to experience high rates of unemployment, poverty, and crime, as they were increasingly cut off from the prosperity of the gentrifying inner city and the mostly white north of the city. Immigrant communities in western Sydney were demonized with talk of “Asian crime waves,” “Asian invasion,” and “ethnic gangs.”

With internal and external migration the racial makeup of Sydney's west had changed dramatically. The earlier denigrating stereotype of the “westie” referred to white working-class youth with mullet haircuts, Ugg boots, and checked flannel shirts who lived in western Sydney. In contrast, the post-White Australia westie rocked the latest fly gear—Adidas track pants, Nikes, and Fila hoodies. And in true hip hop style, b-boys, graffiti writers, and emcees reclaimed the term
westie
and redefined it as “West Side.”

The Death Defying Theatre workshops were being held in the recreation facility of the Bankstown Multicultural Youth Center. Waiata and I took the Strathfield-Bankstown train out to Bankstown station and got off at the Old Town Plaza. Side by side were a Lebanese beauty salon; a Chinese herb center; a travel agent advertising cheap fares to Beirut, Jordan, Damascus, and Amman; and a Vietnamese butcher selling pig feet, cow feet, and pork neck. Two burka-clad Muslim girls were talking animatedly on the corner. On the opposite corner was a Maori man in a tank top with traditional tattoos on his face, arms, and legs. A group of elderly Vietnamese men played mahjong on a table in the plaza. They were all oblivious to the white guy on a megaphone outside the Bag-A-Bargain who belted out the discounts to be found in the store in a broad Aussie accent. We walked down a few streets to the youth center.

Khaled Sabsabi, aka Peacefender, was a serious young Lebanese-Australian man whose brown eyes peered out from behind dark locks of curly hair. Standing in his Nikes, hooded sweatshirt, and blue jeans, he shuffled papers on a desk in front of a rowdy roomful of adolescent Lebanese boys in the youth center. The boys, fourteen and fifteen years old, sat with growing limbs squeezed into small wooden desks. They wore Adidas trackies, Pumas, and Nikes; some sported bandannas and baseball caps; and others had their hair gelled back. As Waiata and I entered the room, a sea of eyes turned toward us.

“Um, we're looking for the rap workshops by Death Defying Theatre?” I mumbled to nobody in particular.

There was silence. I studied my fingernail. Khaled didn't look up from his papers. After what seemed like a very long time, the boys turned their attention back to their noisy conversations. One pair started to wrestle in the corner.

I looked over at Waiata, and we exchanged desperate glances that said, “
What are we doing here?”
I turned and walked quickly out of the room, followed closely by Waiata. Outside, in the warm spring air of early September, we shook our heads and sighed. We were too old for this—I was twenty-one and Waiata was twenty-four. Khaled trudged out soon after, his shoulders hunched over and his hands dug deep into his pockets. “Hey, listen,” he said, encouragingly, “this here is more of an after-school activity for some kids of the community. But next week we're starting to work with young people out at Casula Powerhouse, if you wanna come out there instead.”