Asma “I don’t see myself as stateless because I know where I belong. I know where I am from—but I’m not accepted there.” I arrived in Australia in 2013, when I was 10. I arrived by boat with my siblings and parents. Unfortunately, I remember it all very well, especially the detention centre in Darwin where we were held. It all felt very foreign—I felt like an alien. We weren’t referred to by name. We were referred to by numbers. The guards would check up on us in the middle of the night by shining a torch in our eyes. I felt like we were in a prison, and we were, basically. But I just couldn’t understand why we were in a prison. People kept saying, “Detention is a prison for people who did bad things.” As a 10-year-old, I was confused. I would ask, “But what did we do?” I was the eldest, so I felt the duty to care for my siblings. A lot of the experience of detention didn’t hit me until after I left. Back then, it was just a bunch of cloudy questions I pushed to the back of my head to get through it. It was all just happening, happening, happening, but I really wasn’t processing it, intellectualising it. It didn’t make sense to me. It was when we left detention in Darwin and came to Sydney that things really hit me. Once I started school and got to know the local community. High school is when it hit me the most. Back in 2013, 2014, there were a lot of negative stereotypes and stigma around refugees—and as a kid, I didn’t know anything about it. Everything I learnt about ‘refugees’ came about after I arrived in Australia. Before then, it was just my family and me trying to go somewhere safe. Then coming here, a lot of things hit me in the face at the same time, which shouldn’t happen to a kid. After coming to Australia, the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘asylum seeker’ were thrown at us a lot. But I never really considered the term ‘stateless.’ It wasn’t until much later, when my mum and I started advocating for refugees, attending protests and community events, that I first heard about it. A few years ago, I travelled to Malaysia for a conference on statelessness, which was probably the first time I found out exactly what it means. It’s not specific to one type of group. It could happen to anyone. Before I went to that conference, I felt very alone. I thought it was just something my community experienced. But I now know that anyone could be stateless at any point in their life. I don’t see myself as stateless because I know where I belong. I know where I am from—but I’m not accepted there. Back there, everybody says, “You’re not from here. You’re an illegal immigrant from another country. Your ancestors are from elsewhere—go back there.” But I know where I am from. I feel very frustrated being called “stateless” because I’m like, “I am Rohingya from Burma.” And my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, everyone’s always been there. That’s the only thing they know. They don’t know anything else. When people tell us we don’t belong there—that we actually come from Bangladesh, I wonder, ‘What do you mean?’ I know nothing of this other country. Even the Burmese military uses the word ‘Bengali’ as a slur when speaking to us. I have many Bengali friends, and I love and respect them. It makes me frustrated, because not only am I not Bengali, but the military is disrespecting both my community and the Bengali people when they do this. They look down on us because the majority of us have dark skin. And a lot of us are Muslim. So there’s a lot of Islamophobia and racism. There are a lot of things I didn’t know before that, after coming here and being educated and learning about the effects of colonialism and history, made me realise this runs deeper than we thought. There’s the intergenerational trauma our ancestors faced, this long persecution. The fact that it has been happening for so many years, but people barely know about it. That’s why I don’t understand it when people call me “stateless”. I’m not stateless. I was forced to become stateless because of the military. Ethnic cleansing, genocide. Some people still don’t accept that it’s happening. People call it ‘fake news.’ There’s so much propaganda saying the Rohingya people are bad, they’re like animals. I’m kind of exhausted of explaining who I am. I am Rohingya. Everywhere I go—University, work, meeting new friends, trying a sport—people ask me “Where are you from?” Assuming I’m from here, assuming I’m from there. Or having a strong opinion of me the first time they see me. I struggle so much with my identity as a Rohingya. I advocate for it, but, to be honest, I struggle with it a lot. Out of anything else I could’ve been, why am I part of a group that’s persecuted so heavily in the world? I could’ve been somebody else and lived a normal life, never had to worry about all this legal stuff, all this racism. It’s very complicated, and I wish I wasn’t so deeply traumatised by everything, because now I—I barely live. I’m alive. I’m existing, but I’m not really living, because of all the trauma that’s happened over the years. People like to categorise other people. “You look like this, so that means you are this.” People don’t understand how diverse humans are. Just because you look a certain way, speak a certain language, it doesn’t mean that is what you are. Anyone can learn a language. Understanding Statelessness in Australia | Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness 89