Brown Girl Magic.

It’s no secret that I have often spoken of my lived experience as a South Asian, 1^st generation immigrant and the curious ways that this has affected my identity over the years. Am I Sri Lankan or am I Australian? Am I both or one or the other? The more I have tended to think about this element, the further down the rabbit hole it’s driven me. Translating this across then to the fact that I also happen to be a woman has meant that nuanced segments of intersectionality have ‘othered’ me within society even further.

Gender equality and women’s rights have in a sense been in the spotlight more in recent times. This has tended to no longer focus as much on getting women into the workforce, but instead trying to push for equality of representation at the highest positions of power in corporates, multi laterals and government. As such, whenever I raise questions about a lack of women in CEO positions and the like I am usually met with the response of but what about Gail Kelly?! People then tend to lecture me about not accurately representing the strides that Australia has taken in the gender equality movement and sometimes even accuse me of distorting facts to push my ‘feminist agenda’.

My response, whilst it takes every part of me to not shade back with some serious side eye, is always, well yes this true and fantastic, but what about the representation of women of colour in these positions? What about the representation of anyone who isn’t a white, cis gendered, straight, middle to upper class woman filling one of these positions?

So when Macquarie Bank announced Shemara Wikramanayake as its incoming CEO, you can imagine the response this triggered in my brain… YASSSS!!!!!! Here you had a woman of a British-Sri Lankan background, a mother, someone born in another country taking one of the top jobs in this country. When attempting to explain how significant this moment was to me, I found myself becoming quite emotional, and I’ll tell you why..

I came to this country as a 2 year old with a set of parents in their 30’s who had left a conflict afflicted country. Sure, they didn’t’ come over as refugees, in fact they would technically have been classed as economic immigrants. At the time, in the early 1990’s, Colombo, the city of my birth was being more and more affected by the burgeoning civil war. Schools were frequently facing disruptions and being shut down due to security fears. For my parents, who had just brought another human being into the world they dreamed of more for me and also for themselves. So they left everything behind and immigrated to a foreign country in which they looked and sounded different and struggled to fit in after leaving behind the only country they had ever known.

For me, I grew up in this country sounding an Australian. Of course, I was and am Australian. I was naturalised and received citizenship in 1991 with my Mum and the first passport I ever owned was Australian. As I entered school I was given every opportunity alongside my peers and told constantly that I could achieve anything if I set my mind to it. But the thing was, the more I looked around, the more I failed to see people who looked like me being represented as succeeding.

Watching my favourite Australian TV shows I saw no one who was anywhere near honey coloured or darker or resembled any of those in my immediate community. I never saw any diversity on the screens or magazines. Plots on TV shows never paralleled the realities of my life or the expectations my parents had of me as a 1^st generation immigrant. No one spoke of the underlying and unconscious bias that took place when my parents spoke in our native tongue in public. There was no mention of the occurrences of people telling me that I ‘smelled’ different too, as my peers used to innocently ask me why all my belongings smelt like curry all the time when I was younger.

As I aged and began to aspire to greatness I remember thinking, why can’t I see anyone who likes like me leading big businesses or top corporations. Whilst this may sound somewhat sad but perhaps not so detrimental, in actuality it had an effect of crushing my dreams subconsciously. I, like many others am a visual learner and thinker and not having a visual of someone who looked like me succeeding in this way made me question if it was actually possible at all. It made me think that perhaps my skin colour was the basis of a barrier I could never overcome. Perhaps that then meant that I would never truly be embraced, acknowledged and rewarded for my toils despite my best efforts.

So I know this may be an achievement of just one human being, but her accomplishment in this sense has validated the dreams of so many others. It has allowed us to visualise success in our own skin. It’s given all of us brown girls, whose belongings always smell like curry, who have unpronounceable ethnic names, whose parents arrived on these shores from elsewhere the chance to dare to dream and believe that we can, in spite of the colour of our skin.

Sx

*Image courtesy of Brown Girl Mag: https://www.browngirlmagazine.com

Also check out NorBlack NorWhite. This brand is life:

https://norblacknorwhite.com/