I was reminded the other day of the assumptions (or should I say misassumptions), people tend to make when they associate someone in Australia with a linguistically diverse background. As you may know, through reading recent posts on this platform my parents have recently moved back to Sri Lanka after 28 years of being away. The swiftness of this process meant that they left with some logistics still up in the air. One of these, on my Mum’s part was forgetting to cancel an ongoing direct debit payment. Which inevitably meant that this then fell to me. What I have felt after this process is something that I had hoped had eased over time, but instead still seems to reign true in this country. The assumption that just because I have a somewhat ‘exotic’ surname and my parents live overseas, that their English language skills must be lacking.
To give this a bit more context, I’ll explain the scenario which I found myself in. I called up this said company and conveyed the issue at hand. I was actually asking for an international number for my Mum to be able to access in order to absolve me from the responsibility of following this through, sorry Mum.. #baddaughter. In any case, after a long spiel the person speaking to me proclaimed, in such a forthright manner “it’s probably best for your Mum to give you authority and for you to speak to us if she has English language difficulties”.
The immediate response I had was a flash of red hot anger. Basically, this person had drawn on an assumption that just because my parents were now living overseas, and my mother’s name ‘Ramona Zulika Gomes’ was somewhat ethnic sounding, that she could not speak English. My response, as best controlled as possible was “well, I think you’ll find that my mother’s proficiency in English is fluent”. I so desperately wanted to add… “it’s most probably better than yours” but miraculously managed to hold back this comment.
The assumption that those of us who have emigrated from other countries are hapless brown faced illiterates with an ability to speak a word of English is as maddening as it is dangerous. My parents grew up in Sri Lanka and attended school at the time when English was the median language. They studied in English and Sinhala and spoke both of these languages at home and within their everyday lives. Prior to migrating to Australia they went through rigorous testing and had to prove their proficiency in a language they had spoken their whole lives, English.
To this day the language I speak at home with them is English tinged with some Sinhala, but it is predominantly the former. The connotation that they are unable to communicate in English just because of their skin colour, background and decision to leave this country highlights the lack of understanding relating to those of us who identify as both Australian and another nationality; particularly one from the Global South.
I mean yes this is ultimately because of colonialisation, which is a whole another issue to tackle at another time. But my point is, don’t assume. We are a country made up of a fantastic mix of ethnically and linguistically diverse people. The ‘immigrant’ story is not the same from one person to the next. My skin colour and ethnic surname does not mean that you are allowed to pigeon hole me and assume lesser things of myself or my family.
Sx
*Images courtesy of the incredible NorBlackNorWhite enterprise. Their philosophy on the multi-faceted nation of identity and subsequent ‘mash ups’ truly represent the idea of intersectionality.
I blog for Change. 