AustLit

'Sand nigger. I was 15 years old the first time I heard this racial slur. An Aussie with long brown hair and pasty white skin, who was drunk, screamed at me from across the road while I was walking to the local manoush shop for breakfast. It was December 2001 and I was studying at Punchbowl Boys High School-a scrawny second-gen Leb growing up in the ethnoslums of Sydney. Three months earlier, two airplanes hijacked by Muslim terrorists had crashed into the World Trade Centre. Twelve months earlier, Australian news media had been dominated by reports of 'Lebanese-Muslim' gang rapists plaguing Sydney's streets. And three years earlier, I had seen the first reports in Australian newspapers and on TV news networks about local 'Middle Eastern' and 'Muslim' thugs involved in drugs, murders, theft and drive-by shootings. However, despite what the news headlines were saying about people like me at the time, I wasn't interested in terrorism, sexual assault and organised crime. I was interested in reading. I spent my evenings and weekends consuming the great works of Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, Hemingway, Joyce, Flaubert, Shakespeare, Austen, Charlotte Bronte and Mary Shelley. My teachers assured me that I would find myself within the pages.'  (Publication abstract)