International Women's Day 2023: Sarah Malik keynote

A copy of Sarah Malik's 2023 International Women's Day keynote at UTS. Published with permission.

I would like to acknowledge Gadigal people of the Eora nation – the traditional custodians of the land of which we are gathered and pay my respects to all elders past and present. I extend this respect to all First Nations listeners here today. I recognise we are on stolen land, with no treaty and sovereignty has never been ceded.  

It was just over twenty years I walked through those front doors to do an arts and law degree.  

I was 18 years old, a bookish and shy young Muslim woman from a Western Sydney public school. I was exhilarated and so excited by the life I wanted to open up for me at a big city university like UTS. One I had worked so hard to be at. It felt like my love for words was a portal that had transported me with a magic Dorothy kick of the heels into a better space - the promise of an education opening doors that had not been available to anyone in my family.   

I dreamed of being a journalist, a writer, of making a mark in the world.  

Words made sense of the world for me. They helped give shape to a nebulous cloud of half-formed questions and desires. They paved a road to self-determination from the limitations of a working-class adolescence and the wider world that circumscribed it. 

Every feeling, from loneliness to anger to curiosity, I could find a salve for in books. I knew what I couldn’t find a mirror for would be in the books of the future, written by my generation, existing in the hyphenated margins of western society. 

It is why I felt attracted to a career in journalism and writing. I was fascinated by how contested competing truth claims were, the way information was strictly guarded, words carefully crafted to create ideas and stories that impact the way we think. Words full of power, both weapons and shields, they could illuminate or obscure, create sympathy or antipathy. 

Much of the rhetoric of the media growing up was directed at people like me. I stress ‘at’ rather than ‘to’. We were the problem - the non-integrating Muslims, migrants, misfits. This racism was sometimes mirrored what it felt like being a girl in a traditional community - being indirectly addressed and talked over, your life analysed and dissected and directed by others, your own feelings and emotions ignored. 

This fusion outsider was so many of us - children of migrants in the west. I remember reading Dickens and Austen while eating biryani. My morning fasting meal was Vegemite on toast. I watched Beverley Hills 90201 and Bollywood movies. I listened to qawwali and Bob Dylan. I read Germaine Greer and Kamala Das. How could I reconcile myself without imploding? 

I read. I read and was comforted and discomfited. I was intoxicated by the Idea. In my early 20s, I devoured the news, words, and the internet, finding solace in other hybrids blogging to make sense of the world.  We were the in-between generation, Salafis and Sufis and seekers, who derived inspiration from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Rumi, Amina Wadud and Naomi Woolf, Alama Iqbal and Hafez.  

At the time I registered that universities where the place to solve problems - connect with great minds whose own biographies provided the puzzles to the problems they solved in their work - who felt the sting of being lonely, of feeling like an outsider. I read Edward Said and Derrida and Judith Butler. I read people who I felt had the words for the wordless and searching parts of me who could not even dare to ask the questions out loud. 

I poured myself into courses and work that spoke to me - why am I here? What am I supposed to do? Is there a God? Why do I experience the world the way I do? What are the social reasons for the struggles I was facing? Being a woman in the world constantly policed and surveillance and forced to conform. Understandings of religion that circumscribed and stifled me where I wasn’t allowed to ask questions. A wider society I was treated with suspicion. A post September 11 world where my identity was constantly foisted upon me as a challenge and a test. Where in order to show how Australian, how liberal, and progressive I was, I had to erase myself, my culture and identity; to assimilate into a whiter or supposedly more superior way of being.,  

I read not as a luxury; but as if my life depended on it. To open up my life from the vice grips of other people’s projections of me - of messages that bombarded from everywhere that told me who I was and what I should be; from invasive gazes that felt like they sliced into me, leaving me no room to breathe.  

The gaze of the Imam who told me a woman’s place was to be obedient, the gaze of the white feminist who told me my people were backward, the papers that blared that Muslims dangerous and anti-democratic. Reading was the lifeline that opened my horizons. Literature and higher education was the hand that came out of the page and took mine, the hand that understood, and eventually the hand that empowered me to speak back to those projections, to contest the way narratives had defined what I learned was historically ‘the other’, people like me who did not have the platforms and power to speak back. 

In the library a few streets down I developed a feminist consciousness with Simone de Beauvoir and later transformed that consciousness with the works of feminists of colour like bell hooks. Reading shaped a way of looking at the world as filled with nuance and endless possibility, full of histories and meaning that impacted the present day. Instead of being accidents, I learned our current social realities and relationships had patterns and threads. They were deliberate creations that benefited some at the expense of others. These knowledges were like x ray glasses, revealing and opening the world to me as a myriad of ways of living and seeing and being.  

So much of my memoir Desi Girl: on feminism, race, faith, and belonging is about that period of life; the UTS years when I moved out of home, when I struggled financially, when I became an independent person. And most importantly it’s where I began to have a consciousness and an idea of how I wanted to live my life; what mattered to me, what I wanted to be guided by; and a spirituality that spoke to me.  

It’s where I found housing and scholarships and part-time jobs. It’s where I connected with teachers like the late great Islamic studies + feminist academic Jamila Hussain, jurisprudence teacher Penny Crofts, head of journalism feminist Wendy Bacon and immigration law scholar Jennifer Burn; people who were formulating paradigms to QUESTION the frameworks we lived by.  

The university was a precious space for me; an incubation, a reprieve, a place where instead of a traditional thesis I create an online feminist website predicting that digital journalism would transform society.  

Increasingly our universities are under threat with casualisation of staff and ruled by corporate metrics. 

That time reminds me of what a great trust they have in nurturing the aspirations and social mobility of young people like me from under-represented backgrounds to give them the confidence to become leaders of their own lives as handrails to understand the ropes that bind us and become free of them and as authoritative voices for social progress.   

That happens by creating work conditions and psychological safety to thrive; through collaborative relationships and intellectual fellowship to create breathing room for new ideas; and by continuing to engage deeply in the political and social currents of the world we live in. Most importantly by ensuring our student loan systems are as accessible and affordable as possible.  

Buy a copy of Desi Girl, On Feminism, Race, Faith and Belonging by Sarah Malik.

More importantly than books, university gave the opportunity to fail, to make mistakes, to get my heartbroken, to join political groups and leave them, and to do a million ill-advised things that are the privileges of youth. UTS was my safe space; a place where I was like experimental Petri dish, cultivating and becoming something new.  

This is the meaning of any true education, and what I found in the radical books I read. They gave me the courage and impetus to find my own voice, to build autonomy for myself, one small step at a time. They gave me the courage to believe I too could maybe be the journalist and writer I dreamed of despite not seeing anyone like me.  

I connected to an imaginary. I dreamed the possibility because the books I read; ones that felt as real as my hand and heart, were also acts of imaginations that becomes tangible things in the world; and maybe I could too.  

Years later, now in my 30s, I still don’t pretend to have the answers. But I know that empowerment begins with the question. It begins by becoming comfortable with not having a place, but being in the in-between place where things don’t always fit.  

It is these secret worlds they opened up for me that has sustained and shaped me. 

The words of late great writer Audre Lorde still hit me powerfully: “What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own until you sicken and die of them, still in silence? Of course, I am afraid because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger.  

Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent because there’s always that one little piece inside of you that wants to be spoken out. And if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and hotter and hotter and if you don’t speak it out one day; it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.” 

Today I am the writer I dreamed of being and that happened by refusing to be silent. Today I write and my words and feelings matter, they are read and considered by others. They are a maybe a tiny drop of colour in a river of social narrative that changes the constitution of the whole, just by existing. 

I wrote my memoir because I am the first in my family to have the privilege of writing a new story for myself, of literacy, of going to university, of choosing a life for myself that I wanted. I think about so many women and girls who are denied that opportunity, people in my own extended family. I think about how history loops around and repeats itself. 

I think of Palestinian women trying to protect their children surviving every day under occupation. I think of women in Iran tear-gassed in the street for fighting against police brutality and to dress how they please. I think of women in the US stripped of their right to bodily autonomy where books are now routinely banned. I think of Afghanistan; a new regime that begins its old assault on women and denies them the power that access to knowledge brings. I think of trans women who face continued discrimination for just existing. I think First Nations women who daily navigate a society that has systemically taken so much from them. I think about so many women whose lives are circumscribed by those who want to deny them autonomy, voice, and the power that knowledge and education brings. 

This is why authoritarian regimes ban books. It is why extremists target female schools. Art and knowledge create questions, sows doubts and wonder, lights a path to an unknown place. A girl who reads is a girl with ideas. And a girl with ideas is a powerful girl. In a world where control over women can be either subtly or violently enforced; from conformity to social ideals to rigid laws circumscribing physical control, it is the rebellious mind, that has the potential to be the biggest threat. 

I think about my mother who grew up a world always from here who wasn’t allowed to go to school, and me who grew up here and how connected we are.  

It makes me realise how urgent our fight is, and how deeply connected we all are. The threads that bind us are more intimate than we think.  

As Audre Lorde said, “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” 

It also made me realise how despite it all women rise. We create art, we create music, we create families, we run businesses, we lead companies, we work at factories, we are professors and students, we volunteer at schools, mosques and churches and synagogues. We lend our time, energy, and care to power our communities, this society, and the world we live in; often unpaid without the recognition and credit we deserve.  

For me rising and finding my voice has always happened through words. Education helped me know another world was possible and writing helped me feel like I existed.  

Writing helped me name my experiences; to trace the contours of my emotions and saying yes this hurt, and yes this mattered or yes this is the way I see it and I matter. you matter. We matter.  

Outside of the safe haven of university and faced with the real world - writing taught me we can have difficult conversations with ourselves and others and this is how we progress by being truthful.   

By allowing ourselves to take off the masks we’ve had to wear to survive and refusing to contort ourselves to be pleasant and to be good, to shapeshift yourself to fit environments that were never designed for you. But to create new worlds that do. 

This is not easy. I think about at how each step the temptation and the deep seduction to take the easier route.  

To conform, to not speak, to play nice, to repress our voices, and healthy anger and how this leads us; at least me; to the therapist office, personalising the collective problems I had internalised. The glass ceilings, the devaluing of my work and labour in environments that wanted a model minority or diversity to showcase; but did not embody the transformative representation and equality that true diversity calls for.  

For me it represented itself in burnout, in pain my body could not ignore even if my mind did. I was registered that my body, my personal life, and my being was intimately linked to society, culture, and the wider political structure. So, my personal story was political because it was the instrument on which these structures imprinted itself.  

I know the fight is never over but has new manifestations. I don’t experience the challenges my mother did; but different ones - but these still matter. The pay gap, the structural racism in our politics, arts, media, and powerful institutions that still in 2023 are largely led by men and people of Anglo-Saxon background. The tokenism, microaggressions, indignities and lack of respect we can experience as we try to make our ascent in a country that often tells us we don’t belong; that we’re not good enough; of feeling always secondary even in spaces that propose to be for us. The white feminist voices who dominate and don’t make space for us; whose words can often by loaded by unconscious white privilege. The progressive who is there to help only as long as you remain servile or one down and don’t eclipse them.  

As Audre Lorde said: “The visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greater strength; because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway whether or not we speak.  

We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted, while our earth is poisoned. We can sit our safe corners mute as bottles; and we will be no less afraid.  

The decision is to define ourselves and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by others.” 

The mazes and binds I sometimes felt trapped by - I remembered that great escape route. Words. Naming the nameless feeling, the shameful thing, the tricky relationship. I think about how words can illuminate and reveal, and they could dazzle and obscure too. They could empower and disempower. I thought about how I wanted to use my words; and how they were the escape tunnel in those early days. By telling my story in my own words, I reclaimed myself. The right to our own stories, our own ways of seeing the world; is something no one can ever take away.  

I think about every woman here, who got up today, who showed up, despite a million private griefs, of sorrows privately internalised. You, who fought for that pay rise, who escaped the psychological abusive relationship; who decided to study as a mature age student, who recovered from that miscarriage, who maintained a relationship to a spirituality that uplifted her and didn’t put her down, who raised that child on her own while juggling two jobs, who chose herself, who said, say yes I too matter. I too deserve happiness, love, prosperity and self-expression. I too deserve to honour myself, to treat myself as something precious. I too am worthy.  Every day we do this, we rise; we win against the forces that want to chip away at us.  

It is you I salute today, and I am in awe of. I hope today is a celebration of your strength and your joy. And the power of our words - to protest, to speak, to keep fighting for the world we want to live in and the capacity always that we have to use our words to write new futures for ourselves.  

Copyright: Sarah Malik.