Life in Australia

In 1987, when we arrived in Australia, life was bathed in a warm glow and with the ethereal scent of safety. We were among the few who had left Afghanistan with their family still intact. We had escaped with our lives, and with the opportunity to live in a setting free from the spectre of war and the scrambling of the human spirit that it creates. But attached to this opportunity were the shadows of all that had been lost.

The disconnection from the ancestral lands upon which generations of my family’s history had unfolded, and which were firmly imprinted on our auras, would come to define the trajectory of our lives. Stripped bare of all that was known and familiar, those lives would now unfold in a setting that was, in some ways, disorientating. As displaced people, the quest we now faced was to find a way of reconciling back to its rightful ‘oneness’, the seeming binary of joy and sorrow, or risk being lost in the void in between.