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Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to conversations. My guest today is an amazing lady, Dakhane Aubi and her family immigrated to Australia from Afghanistan when Aubi was just too settled in Melbourne, but then came to Adelaide a couple of years later and very famous in Adelaide because I open this rest Afghani restaurant called Pawana, and Dakandi wrote a book about the recipes of Parawana. She has a new book which is really interesting from the perspective of Afghanistan and her heritage, because Afghanistan is always in the news, probably for the wrong reasons. Her book is called She Who Tastes and Nose Dakane, Welcome to the program.
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Speaker 2: How are you Hellocan did? It's so lovely to be here with you.
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Speaker 1: I'm well, what do you know she who tastes those?
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Speaker 2: Well, I can't give away the ending right at the front? Can I? I think I know that there's so much unknown and that we can get to much more truthful places if we start with the idea that you know, there is just so much we need to learn.
00:01:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like it seems to me you're obsessed with your homeland and the perception of it is generally pretty negative. Yeah, is that a fair observation?
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Speaker 2: Well, I think you know, I understood throughout my life in much more kind of as I became an adult with much more awareness that we don't have our own stories. For me, as an Afghan born girl and now woman, I can see that the source of so much of the suffering and injustice and the way it's explained away is because our stories have been taken from us. And so for me, I knew that for the contribution that I want to make in my lifetime, I didn't want to just treat the symptoms, right, which is raising money, and you know, no matter how much you raise, it's never enough because of the extent of the dysfunction in the country at the moment. So I decided that my main effort would be, you know, how do we understand the root causes differently beyond the dominant narratives which are very one dimensional and very asymmetrical and from the perspective of I guess the Western conqueror, right, So I knew that if I wanted to live in the world with truth and with a sense of who I was, I really needed to understand my ancestry, my four mothers, my forefathers, my parents, our journey in such a different way.
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Speaker 1: So you're only two. Yes, your parents, can I use the word escape? Did they escape?
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Speaker 2: Yeah? We flattered, We fled Afghanistan.
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Speaker 1: So so take us back to your mother and father's decision to have to leave. I mean, how traumatic was it. Have they spoken to you about it?
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Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, Well it's really interesting because as a writer you've become very nosy, and that's a really good thing, right, because the trauma of leaving a homeland during war is really tough.
00:03:04
Speaker 1: On that mat of the Russian War, right, Russian Afghanistan.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, so my family left in the mid eighties and it was the height of the Cold War in Afghanistan. The Russians were had troops in the country. It was a really I guess, the period of devastation that we've never recovered from since almost fifty years later. Right. So it was a time when half of the population of Afghanistan became refugees. Yeah. So it was a population of about sixteen million and about eight million became refugees, and it was internal and external displacement.
00:03:39
Speaker 1: So was a diaspora of Afghani.
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Speaker 2: That's right. So now that's right. So now we have just become a highly diasporic people. People live all over the world at that time, So everything changed really dramatically in those ten years of the like the Russian invasion in Afghanistan. So life before and after was it was kind of a lightning rod moment for the population. So my parents grew up with the concept of Afghanistan that they were going to live their whole lives there. They had prospects, They traveled, a lot of Afghanis went and studied overseas and came back to improve the country. It was really globally connected. My dad is a lawyer and he worked as a customs official. My mum was a teacher and she taught English to high school students and you know English, yeah, learning, well, she would have learned in of Dalistan. So, I mean, people might have this perception of Afghanistan as being very peripheral, but it wasn't, you know, it was really integrated. It was part of the Eurasian continent, right. People traveled around and a lot of Europeans came and Westerners came to Afghanistan on the Heaby Trail. In the seventies as well, Right, I didn't. You're not giving you that.
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Speaker 1: I would have liked to have done it, to be quite honest. There was always a mystery about those exotic places, h but it disappeared pretty quickly.
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Speaker 2: It's true. And so that was the period where mum and Dad decided that, you know, they needed to leave. And my mum really felt like, you know, she could see a lot disintegrating. People were sort of you know, all the horrors of war. Really, if you didn't agree with the political line at the time, people weld just disappeared. You would never see them again. Yeah, People lost their jobs, people lost their livelihoods, and there was a lot of violence as well. So yeah, absolutely, I mean they had family members that were taken that we never heard from again. There was bombings and just like all through the villages and that kind of thing.
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Speaker 1: You're one of the youngest sides I am. I am I elder sisters remembering.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, So by the time we left, my elder sister was about ten nine or ten, and then my other sisters were five and four, and then I was a baby. Yeah, she does remember, you know, of just the because there was a political coup at the time, so there was a lot of like you just had to be indoors. There was a lot of suspicion, people were starting to
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people were being turned against each other, you know, the manipulations that happens when you've got outsiders in charge. So Mum and Dad realized it was time to go.
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Speaker 1: So was there a sitting down moment? I'm sorry, but it was there a moment that they sat down and made this decision. And if they did, who was involved? Because you had a grandfather, yeah, and you.
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Speaker 2: Probably obviously lots of extended family. You know. The thing is you would try to keep it as quiet as possible and do it as quickly as possible because it was an offense to leave the country at the time. The movement was being monitored. It was a highly like a lot of security by the officials that were in charge, and so to leave was punishable, right, So we had to do it in secret. So I would think that what would have happened was, you know, they just decided quietly, as an immediate family, Mum and dad, there's probably nothing left here for us, and make that step into the unknown. In the book, I tell the story of you know, the final goodbye at my grandfather's house and how you know that I asked you, and you know, I asked these same questions of my mom and dad, you know, like what was it, like, what were the emotions? Like how afraid were you? And you know it's this mix of fear right because you're walking into the unknown, grief because you're leaving behind everything you know, but no choice in a way.
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Speaker 1: No.
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Speaker 2: So this is my father, my paternal grandfather's and my father's father and we just we stopped on the way and had this well just to say goodbye. My grandfather insisted sit for one more meal, and I thought that was really poignant, you know, as an adult, imagine knowing that to your last meal in this home that you know, we'd all sort of been raised and everything's quite extended. Family is very involved in you know, it's not these isolated Yeah, I've interrogated grandfather. My mother's father had passed away by that time, and you know that's the sad thing. A lot of the elders and people died early, right from the grief of losing their homeland. My grandfather from my mom's side died of a heart attack. My and young and he had been widowed. That's right. So my mother, her mom passed away when she was just four, right, and my grandmother as well. She's this incredible poet and a feminist writer in the forties and fifties in Afghanistan, and she died of heart issues too. And so when you think about it, like there is a lot of kind of grief that becomes internalized in people's lives when you don't have autonomy as a people and you can see the future of the country becoming something you hadn't dreamed for.
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Speaker 1: It scholaristic intent within or bent within your your family digressing. I know that when you said she was was intrigued. Well, we'll take a break. Kari are Ub is my guest, folks. Her book is She Who Tastes Nose, and it's it's really a journey through Afghanistan, its history and its current status based on food, Afghani food. Back after the break, folks, welcome back, everybody. My guest today is Khari are Ubi, known here in Adelaide for her book Pawana, but she has a new book called She Who Tastes Nose and it's you know, that's the journey of the family from Afghanistan to settling and Adelaide via Melbourne. So I'm really intrigued about you having to flee Afghanistan, giving the political situation there when you're just a baby. So you've said, you've said good bye toy of grandparents, and you've questioned mom and dad. So I wonder, how do you how do they get how do they get out? And had they get away with it?
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Speaker 2: Yeah, So once they decided it was we had to leave you literally take nothing with you, right.
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Speaker 1: Because you have any money.
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Speaker 2: So they sold the house that they had and half of it had to go to the state, right because it was a communist state. So they were pretty much left with very little. And because we couldn't leave freely and because we needed papers to cross, but you know, we weren't. We didn't have like a reason that would be accepted by the government. So what you would do is you would get docted papers, like illegitimate papers to pay somebody. And the papers said that we were crossing over into Pakistan, which is just on the border for a wedding. Is that through the Kaiber Pass through the Kaiper Pass exactly right?
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Speaker 1: So romantic, but obviously.
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Speaker 2: I know because then it became this exit point for a lot of our campaign. Actually, so what they did is they dressed us as Quichies, which were the country's nomad communities. And these Coutchies have passed through these mountains and through these valleys like gypsies exactly right, uh, And so they like have a long history in that area, and.
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Speaker 1: They were they have a certain dialect.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I imagine that they would have their own sort of dialect of far Sea or Diary which is what we speak there, or pushed or even which is the other main language. And I've to understand. And so we were all dressed.
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Speaker 1: I guess as.
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Speaker 2: Nomads, so it didn't look like we were part of the country's established population trying.
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Speaker 1: To like seot we were on camels or no.
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Speaker 2: So what happened was Dad had to go separately to us, and we got to a certain point in cars. And the reason that Dad had to go separately is because they would stop and detain men much more than women and children, right because obviously they just you know, wanted to keep contry of the population, especially all the men in the country. And so to make it safer for us a mum and us girls Dad went separately for most of the way, and so from Cobble to Jelalabad is I think about two or three hours, right, and then from Jelalabad to the hyber Pass is another couple of hours. And so he did the journey from Cobble to Jelalabod
separately and we did too. We met in Jelalabard, but Dad had been stopped on the way, so there's lots of security checkpoints along the way, and he was late. So our journey then onto the hyperpass with the papers was a day late. So when we get to the crossing, so then a part of it you do on foot. And I tell a sort of funny story in the book about how so if you were a kookchie a gypsy goats and you know, all the animals, the cattle, that kind of would be really normal. But my sisters see these goats and they get so excited because they've never really seen anything like it, and Mum and Dad are like shushing them, like, you know, you're going to blow our cover. Essentially, I don't know how convincing it would been anyway, the cover, but so I thought that was quite sweet, you know, just these kids so excited, just oblivious to what's happening. So we make it to the hyperpass and there's a border guard and Dad goes over and gives him the papers and the border guard looks at the papers and he says, so you're going over for a wedding, are you? But you're late, like the wedding was yesterday exactly. And I said to my dad, how did you feel in that moment? And he said, my heart just sunk into the pit of my stomach. And he was like, I thought, this is it. It's over. They're going to detain me. Terrible things will happen. The border guard looked at him and he said, I know there's no wedding. I know you're not crossing over and then coming back. And don't know should you take your family go leave, like rebuild your future?
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Speaker 1: This is what the border guard Russian.
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Speaker 2: It might have been like an Afghan official, right because at the time in the country it was Afghan people in charge, but they were part of the Communist Party and were very closely aligned with the Soviets, right, so they were sort of put in place by the Soviets. So it was just this stroke of luck, and I thought That story was really quite an important one to tell in the book because that's what refugees lives depend on.
00:14:17
Speaker 3: Right.
00:14:17
Speaker 2: Once you cross over and you become stateless, you are at the whim and mercy of luck. You've lost your agency, and you know there are good people that you know will turn a blind eye and will you know, and in our case, let us step into that next part about.
00:14:34
Speaker 1: You wonder what happened to that guy.
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Speaker 2: I really, you know, I would love to know. I would love to know.
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Speaker 1: How many people he let through.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I hope maybe many, you know, because the thing is this, you know, for me, I really wanted to understand the story, but unfortunately, like it's a very common story for a lot of Afghan people. That's how a lot of people got out right.
00:14:55
Speaker 1: Anyway, So you're in Pakistan, so that's not a comfortable.
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Speaker 2: Country, No it's not, and it was very politically fractured, and there was a lot of danger for refugees, like in the camps. So my family stayed in a un camp there in the border, which is where a lot of Afghans were as they sort of waited to either move on or to go back. You know, the hope was maybe we can go back when things settle down. And I asked my mum what she felt like in the camps, like what it was like for her, and she said something that really surprised me. She said she could smell the scent of heaven there. Those were her.
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Speaker 1: Words, the scent of heaven. Yeah.
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Speaker 2: And I said, what do you mean, mum, And she said it was safety, like we were out of that direct danger that was there in Afghanistan.
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Speaker 1: I can't imagine you feel safe in a refugee camp though.
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Speaker 2: Well it's relative, isn't it. You know, so it wasn't like obviously comfortable, and it wasn't ideal and you've just lost everything. But I think that's how the human spirit works, right, it's hope past literally past that border.
00:16:05
Speaker 1: Memorism.
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Speaker 2: My older sister certainly does, and we've got lots of like photos. Well actually not that many, but we do have like photos from that time. I certainly don't remember any of it.
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Speaker 1: Actually, there's a line in your book where you talk about leaving Afghanistan. He said, we have the price you pay. We have very few photos of our grandparents, or of our many arts and uncles or extended family, even of our baby selves. There's no This is the part that got me. There's no heirlooms or trinkets, no inherited linens or doilies that might carry the familiar of an interlinked past to range around the house, or that we've all got those little things going around our house. But you did. But you had some photos from.
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Speaker 2: The well, you know what would happen is you would get them sent over a bit later if you could. And in the camps, it was kind of like it was kind of like a mini village, right, because there were a lot of Afghans that were displaced and they're waiting to move.
00:17:07
Speaker 1: So how did you get to Australia?
00:17:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, you know that was another stroke of luck. So I have this incredible aunt and we call everybody older aunts, and you know, our families knew each other in Afghanistan. And she lived in Australia already. She was a physicist and she was working at the Melbourne Hospital. An incredible woman and she really physicist. Yes, I think she's incredible. She'd studied in France and traveled the world and eventually settled in Melbourne and she helped a lot of people that were still in Afghanistan, and so my father ran into her father in the camp and he said, I'm leaving to Australia tomorrow. My Aunti's name is Nauria. Nouria has done our paperwork and like we've been accepted into Australia on humanitarian grounds. Quickly write down the names of everybody in the family, yourself, your wife, your children, and I'll pass it on to Nuria when I get to Australia. So another
just stroke of luck. And my aunt, you know, she was gracious enough to fill out the paperwork and we were accepted on humanitarian ground. That took a really long time. My dad would have to go to the office of the immigration office, like he would go every day, and he said, every day the guy the cloak at the desk would just look at him and shake his head. In the camp, yeah, so you would probably travel into the nearest city a shower or somewhere, and the book the cloak would just be like, like, no news, shake his head, nothing for you. And then he said, one day, finally, after months and months, he looked at him and it wasn't a shake of the head. And my dad that said that he kind of realized at that moment that there might be good news. So yeah, and then we booked our tickets and flew over.
00:18:51
Speaker 1: We need to take a break, but we want to explore that thread when we come back. Can I keep saying, I hope that No, no, you're saying, Dekandi Ubi. Her book is called She Who Tastes Nos. She's already had a best selling book called Parawana. But this is it's more than in depth, almost a nostalgic look at your country, immersing it in the food of the country. So but I want to get you to Australia. We nearly have the back after the break, folks, welcome back to conversations everybody. If you've just tuned in, we're speaking with the Khan Aubian. A lot of you would know who Her family had the restaurant Parwana, and Kandi wrote the book called Parwana. And she has a new book, so She Who Tastes Nos. And I said before, it's I think it's a nostalgic look at her homeland, Afghanistan, and associated woven into the is, the is the foods, the unique foods that were prepared and she eats and she remembers fondly, but they've just fled Afghanistan. They've got through the Kaiba Pass into Pakistan, into a un A refugee camp and after nearly a year they're accepted to immigrate to Australia. They say, you have to go by your air fed. Yes, what sort of means did your dad there?
00:20:03
Speaker 3: We had the sale of the house, sat the house and probably borrowed money from born money family or my aunt or somebody in Australia just to get over.
00:20:15
Speaker 1: And how expensive those tickets were?
00:20:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't I don't think it was as expensive as they are now. I don't know, maybe maybe more. That's actually a good question.
00:20:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, your worldly possessions that you have got to be learned into a plan and you're but you're too, you can't.
00:20:31
Speaker 2: I am too. I can't remember. And the thing is we have no worldly possessions. It is literally just us, right, And that's part of that story of.
00:20:41
Speaker 1: Happened to start with nothing? And your land in Melbourne? We land in Who to help you? Yeah?
00:20:48
Speaker 2: So the lovely thing is there wasn't a big Afghan community already in Australia. Certainly by the time we got to Adelaide. We were one of the first families living in Adelaide from the Afghan
community.
00:20:59
Speaker 1: But you were we got.
00:21:01
Speaker 2: To Adelaide by about here. There's no secrets here. We got to Adelaide by about eighty eight. Yeah, eighty eight eighty nine is both when.
00:21:14
Speaker 1: We've gone from whide a decision to move from Melbourne to Adelaide.
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Speaker 2: That's a good question. I think Melbourne was a big place for mum and dad with four young girls and we just my dad and mum thought they had a friend, a family friend who was relocating to Adelaide and he had been a couple of times, and he said, you know, why don't you try Adelaide. It's a bit smaller. It might be like easier to get yourselves like a like a little apartment and all that sort of thing, and get around a bit easier, be easy to get the kids to school and that kind of thing. So we left Melbourne and we came to Adelaide. And yes, that's sort of where my memories start.
00:21:54
Speaker 1: And you end up in you have a housing trust.
00:21:56
Speaker 2: How we do we do?
00:21:58
Speaker 1: You know, we take a while to get that.
00:21:59
Speaker 2: You know, back then it wasn't really the same as like very I guess very long waiting lists and stretched resources and that kind of thing. So we did. You know, we were very reliant on assistance when we first moved to Australia because we literally had nothing and it took a long time to rebuild.
00:22:19
Speaker 1: Did your dad get a job?
00:22:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Dad worked various like odd jobs, so he was he trained as a nurse, so he was working in nursing homes. He worked as a cleaner.
00:22:31
Speaker 1: He couldn't work as a lawyer.
00:22:33
Speaker 2: Well, he didn't reskill himself as a lawyer, and I think a lot of that story of moving and losing things, there's a lot of psychological sort of loss and pressure and trauma that happens in that starting again as well. So he didn't. And you know, we grew up with mum at home and dad just sort of working.
00:23:00
Speaker 1: Were your childhood like you're old enough now to remember your child and you're little five at left Ganny kids and there.
00:23:07
Speaker 2: My old my younger sister was born ten years later than me, So yes, they were like I think they were trying for a boy and it didn't happen, which, you know, things.
00:23:20
Speaker 1: The four oldest ones. You say you're going to school, what was the school like for you give your face with prejudice.
00:23:28
Speaker 2: You know, my memories are quite fond, like I look back and yeah, you know, I think your brain is so plastic when you're a kid. So I grew up speaking Farsi at home, but I went straight into the school system here from KINDI or you know, all the way to perception and then you know, school and high school. And so I didn't have issues with the language, did your sister? My oldest sisters did. And it's interesting because I think things were a little tougher for them because my older sisters, who had bit of an accent, she didn't speak English as well as all her peers. And same with my my middle sisters. But for me, you know, I just sort of like fresh, went into the schooling system and English.
00:24:12
Speaker 1: So I'm interrupting, that's the father of girls. Those teenage years are really tough.
00:24:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this.
00:24:20
Speaker 1: Is your your older sister as a teenager with limited English.
00:24:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know it is. It was tough. It was tough, and you know, you don't really realize that when you're when you're a child. But then looking back, you know, like we were different, we were from a completely different culture. Might as well have been.
00:24:39
Speaker 1: Like and there's suspicion too around Afghana.
00:24:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. People. Well in those days, people really didn't know anything about Afghanistan and very few people did, you know, and the reference was rambo A supposedly Satin Afghanistan, but it's not even Afghanistan where they shoot and and you know the people that done the Heape track. And then eventually by two thousand and one, of course, when nine to eleven happened and America went to war in Afghanistan. By that time, I was fifteen or sixteen, and yeah, everybody knew about Afghanistan.
00:25:14
Speaker 1: Was a suspicion of.
00:25:16
Speaker 2: Yep, yeah, it really did. And it's with time that you can look back and process things. And I do remember just feeling really visible all of a sudden and really kind of like had to be, I guess, mindful of what you said, because back in those days it was really taboo to be anti the war, which you know, with time we know there was so much injustice in the way those wars were waged and the reasons for going to war in Afghanistan and just how quickly it all happened. But at the time it was people were really vilified for being able to say anything about it, and I was only fifteen or sixteen. All I felt was, you know, I remember my teachers pulling me up at school saying like, are you okay? Because everything all right there? Yeah, they were, you know, and there was racism at the time, and I do remember that it didn't there were times that didn't feel very safe, but that was the political climate at the.
00:26:14
Speaker 1: Time, you know. And so what ambitions does a young Dacani going through this period of adolescents? What ambitions do you have?
00:26:26
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, I think I've always been quite sensitive to surroundings and emotions, and you know, maybe that's something I developed because I left, you know, and experienced my mother's emotions as she was carrying me through this fear and across these borders literally, And I think I've always been somebody that has wanted to understand more. And I didn't necessarily think in high school or UNI, I'm going to be a writer or anything like that. I just really want.
00:26:56
Speaker 1: To go to school.
00:26:57
Speaker 2: I was actually I love and I was such a nerd. You Oh no, okay, well I just remember,
you know, Okay, this will give it away. My favorite place as a kid was the library, Like I read every book, and I just I loved learning. I was so hungry to learn. And my sisters and I were, We were all pretty similar. I went to Mary McKellop College in Norwood. That was my high school, and then I went to a public primary school. It was called Newton, but I think they've merged now, so it's something else, just in new And so I didn't actually have any problems at school because I was just a bit of a nerd and I loved science and I loved English, and you know, and I loved drama.
00:27:43
Speaker 1: I like, so you're this star student. Thanks go, So what ambitions? What are you going to what are you going to be? Because it would be ambitions.
00:27:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, they kind of quietly was because I knew I just wanted to keep learning. And I actually went to UNI and I studied chemistry and I majored in organic chemistry and drug design, and I did my honors in drug design. And then I was like, I don't ever want to work as a chemist. So I found out the long way that I actually just loved the humanities and literature. And I was really lucky because my degree was fantastic because I could research, and I learned how to like critically analyze, and I could use my scientific and mathematical brain. But then I was always acing English as well, like even at UNI. And then it was quite funny because when I was living in Camber and Melbourne, so I got a job with my degree, but it was sort of vaguely related. And I was working as a graduate for the Communications and Media Authority in Melbourne and camera and writing policy papers and all sorts of things. And then I was also writing opinion pieces on the side and they would always get published.
00:28:50
Speaker 1: Is your name?
00:28:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, like Cricke and New Material and like ABC and that kind of thing. Just every time something would happen, I'd be like, you know, I can see that we're not looking at full picture here, like things to do with Afghanistan women's lives and that kind of thing, and I would just pen something and I felt so at home when I was writing right like that's where it felt great.
00:29:09
Speaker 1: We need to take a break because so many threads that emerge from that. But Dakane Areub is my guest, folks. A new book is called She Who Tastes Nose. We'll get to it. The Journey is interesting. Back after the break. Dakane areu b is my guest in the studio, Folks. It's an amazing story of her family's flight from Afghanistan by Melbourne, landing in Adelaide. And Aubi is well educated here in Adelaide, does really well at school, studying chemistry, but loves writing. You working with the Australian.
00:29:42
Speaker 4: Broad communication to the media, Okay, that sort of monitors us, does it does?
00:29:47
Speaker 2: So watch out what you say. I'm just kidding.
00:29:50
Speaker 1: No, no, we've been ad boonished by them.
00:29:52
Speaker 2: Okay, yes, occasionally over.
00:29:54
Speaker 1: The years, not that often, but just occasionally. We had a announcer called Bob Francis who.
00:30:00
Speaker 4: Was always enjoy Remember, so you're working in Melbourne in that role, but you decide to become a full time writer or do you come back and help?
00:30:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, you come back and help in the restaurant.
00:30:12
Speaker 2: I do, I do. I think what happened was I got to this point where it was like I can stay and become a career public servant and you know, do this with my life. But I think I always knew there was something more I needed to do, and I wasn't one hundred percent clear on what it was, but I knew my heartlines. I needed to get closer, back to the family, back to food, back to my own story.
00:30:36
Speaker 1: So your family opens a restaurant and af Gharia and now your mother who was a teacher, your dad who was a how on earth does and that seems such hard work? Yes, you know there's one of them you talk about one of the recipes. It takes a week to make things.
00:30:54
Speaker 2: Like well, yeah, yes, yes, so you know, I don't think I think a restaurant opening a restaurant, people probably wouldn't do it if they knew just how hard it was. But that's kind of the nice thing about. We came to Australia with not much, right, but what we had, what mum had was this love for food. And she always said to us, Afghan food is a treasure, and it really is. It's this incredible mix of every taste. I would have brought you a dish, but you could come to the restaurant sometimes now that I will, yeah, but I'm very taste Alian. We will boil you something. I'm just kidding. So, but the thing is you might be surprised, right because it's very palatable. It's not very potent with any particular spice. It's just this really fragrant blend. We're at the center of the Silk roads. So we've got all these countries and places history where the restaurant. The restaurant is in Torrenceville, Afghanistan. Is that the center of the silk where all the food comes from, right, So it's this very long history of incredibly diverse ingredients and flavors.
00:32:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, your book touches on that, and I can't help but think it's influenced by nostalgia. But you do talk about the Russian botanist Kolov, This Russian goes through and he just rightes so glowingly about the food that's available in Afghanistan. But it's a different era those, is it not. You're talking the nineteen twenties or so.
00:32:30
Speaker 2: That was a while ago, one hundred years ago or so.
00:32:33
Speaker 1: You know.
00:32:34
Speaker 2: I wouldn't say that my book is primarily nostalgic, right, I would say that it's grounded in scientific and historical fact that has been overright.
00:32:43
Speaker 1: I understand that, But I mean it's it's influenced by your love and you're nostalgia for a country that you had to leave. I mean you've been back, you had to leave it. Are you seeing it through rose colored glasses?
00:32:58
Speaker 2: I'm not, because well, I don't think I am. And it's because I deal with the loss, I deal with the suffering and the grief, and I don't undermine the trauma and the layers of war and violence that Afghan people have gone through, and it really primarily has affected our lives and even as refugees. Just because you leave a place, it doesn't mean that you don't carry on trying to work your way through the losses and the suffering that has happened. And so for me, I thought everything about Afghanistani is always seen through this lens of violence, patriarchal extremism and masculinity, and is a very Western narrative about who we are, right and it needs to be a narrative about us having nothing, being arid, scarce and needing to be saved. Because if you didn't have that narrative right, then you can't justify war, and you can't justify bombing in the name of civilization, democracy, freedom and feminism.
00:33:58
Speaker 1: How do you free it up? And the Taliban rules now that must be terribly oppressive.
00:34:04
Speaker 2: It is awful. You know, and especially for it's awful for every Afghan person living there, but especially for the women and the girls. Right. And I look at it and I say, well, how did the Taliban and extremism come to be? It was very heavily funded and weaponized during that Cold War era and during the War on Terror, Right. And so for me, the solution and the way forward is not a silver bullet, and it's not quick and it's not ever going to be perfect. But what it starts with is Afghan people being able to look at the intricacies, the complexities, the suffering, the losses, but also the joys, the prosperity, the abundance that we hold, which for me is very maternal and which is why I can access it and tell this completely shifted story through food and the nurturing of food. Right. If we don't have those stories to compensate for everything that's been pasted over us about us, then we're always going to be walking a crooked road that takes us further and further from ourselves. So I think it starts with being able to reclaim the expanse of the story, not denying everything terrible that has happened to us, that now our own people are perpetrating against our own people, right because of all the psychological trauma and the waves of violence that have happened, and the realities that have been made for us, right, not denying any of that, actually being the ones to use our voices and tell our truths and our vulnerabilities and our hopes. And if you don't have that, what's the next generation going to hold on to It's all going to seem like more.
00:35:43
Speaker 1: So it seems I'm not invested, but just observing me. That seems so difficult to reclaim when like a movement move in Taliban has total control of people are so violently suppressed. You've been back.
00:36:00
Speaker 2: I have been back.
00:36:01
Speaker 1: What year was that?
00:36:02
Speaker 2: And what was two years ago? Yes? I went in with my mom and we it
was just an impromptu visit. We were over the border in charge for a book fair, and we said, we're two hours from Cobuble, let's see what happens. And I wasn't sure what would happen, because I've written thinks Pakistan. I know. We went through Dubai to Cobble. We fluent. I was a bit nervous because I didn't know what was going to happen, but they let us straight in My passport says born in Cobble, and my mom does too, and so it's this interesting thing to my passport's Australian, but your passport always says where you're born, and mine says born in Cobble. Yeah. We became citizens maybe two or three years after we had moved to Australia. Yeah. But the Teliban is weird and complex. Right, people think they will be totally anti the West, but they're towing a line and they're playing a game because they need to be politically legitimized, so they let people in. Right, And I want to say nothing to see here. Everything's great, you can come and go. And when I was on that plane, it was filled with foreigners, people from all around the world, from Europe, from America, from Asia. Right, they're doing business deals. They're doing business deals basically. And also still like all the NGO work and that kind of thing that they allowed it to happen, it's all sort of still going. So it's not a straightforward place. It's complex. But what I would say about the Tulliban is, I mean, nobody knows what's going to happen, and nobody knows how long it will take, but tyranny is tyranny, right, and people don't put up with it forever. It might take years and years.
00:37:38
Speaker 1: In Iran where they started a pro and they just mowed down.
00:37:42
Speaker 2: I mean, it's yes, I know it is. It is horrific, and I am not saying it's without sacrifice or that it's easy. But we're also a very diasporic community, and there are lots of Afghans all around the world organizing, politically, organizing, connecting with each other to try and actually start to imagine you're there.
00:38:04
Speaker 1: You can, I guess you're connecting with the extended family that yep.
00:38:09
Speaker 2: So the first thing we do is we go to the very house that was where we had our last meal, where my grandfather shook down the walnuts from the walnut tree as like one final good luck. My grandfather's passed away now, but you know, we go to that house in couple and you know, for my mum, it's all very familiar and for me, you know, that's sort of where I spent some of my early months, and it's just this reunion, right like there is so much yes, you know, yes and no, Okay, So what's happened now with the tild One in Afghanistan is people are It's very bittersweet because when the US and allies like nature were there, there was constant unexpected suicide bombings and random violence and that kind of thing. But now that the taild One have control, there's not as many random bombings or anything like that. But there's just so people have devastated in another way, right, like it's a police state. Women and girls can't go to work, go to school. People have lost their jobs, so there's economics girls do. They are literally going out of their minds. It's really terrible. Yeah, they just sort of like have to sit at home. A lot of them. See, they're very they're very clever, and they have so much to give. So they will go online and they will learn that, they will do online schooling. They are sort of figuring out how to do their lives in these terriblems.
00:39:32
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, just earnest. What's the tattoo on your hand? It looks like.
00:39:38
Speaker 2: So they're called nocta and they are Afghan women tattoos. And I got them sort of to celebrate after I'd finished writing this book because the book was such a cathartic process for me, and it brought me so close to my fore mothers and a lot of those lost stories, and it's really where I find my strength from.
00:39:59
Speaker 1: What do you hope for the book?
00:40:01
Speaker 2: Ah? For the book, I sort of leave it to its journey, and I hope that it finds anybody who wants to reimagine not just Afghanistan and not just the look to the past, but who wants to understand the world.
00:40:17
Speaker 1: But it is nostalgic. They when you talk about how oppressed the women are now a minutes, I think, I think you're hoping for a better Afghanistan or an Afghanistan of yours.
00:40:31
Speaker 2: I'm hoping for more complexity and depth in people, not just Afghanistan. I'm hoping that people understand how Afghanistan is not just this thing far away over there, how it's really intimately connected with our lives, right, and how power works in the world. And to be able to say the beautiful and abundant things about a place is part of resistance and it's part of politics, right, It's not just this ephemeral head in clouds kind of thing. Because if you don't hold onto the joy and the possibility that is actually very real, and you just allow that toxicity to become your mindset, then you never ever had a hope.
00:41:14
Speaker 1: Well, good luck for the book. It's been a great chat. I hope it's a happy ending.
00:41:18
Speaker 2: Really well, it's an unknown, isn't it.
00:41:21
Speaker 1: That's what I know, is my guest. Folks, we all have to get down to Pawuana restaurant down at Torrenceville. Obviously that the sample is Afghan food, which you speak so or write so glowingly in the book. The book is called She Who Tastes Knows to carne auv. Thank you so much for your time.
00:41:39
Speaker 2: It was so nice to chat. Thank you so much for having me, and thanks
00:41:41
Speaker 1: Folks for joining us.