Calling Australia home: Poetry the bridge to cultural acceptance

Arriving in Australia was hard for Zainab Syed until she found a role as a performance poet and writer.

Zainab Syed at Kings Park in Perth. Picture: Colin Murty

Zainab Syed brings an extraordinary range of experiences for a 28-year-old lover of poetry from Pakistan.

She was in Peshawar in 2015 when hundreds of children were gunned down by terrorists. She responded by setting up Pakistan’s first national poetry slam “as a way to go into schools and teach children how to respond constructively to the violence and insecurity around them”.

A job offer sent her parents and two brothers to Australia while she completed studies in Britain and the US. Arriving in Perth in 2016 was hard, she said, until she found a role as a performance poet and writer and a human rights observer with Red Cross in Perth’s detention centres.

Ms Syed had high hopes to take out citizenship this Australia Day but the backlog of people waiting for immigration to process their application has delayed her ceremony another few weeks.

The wait has increased almost eight times since 2013-14, when 27,037 people were in the citizenship queue. As at last June 30, 221,415 people were waiting to have their applications processed.

Applications were frozen for a period as the Department of Immigration awaited new eligibility criteria, including a tougher Eng­lish test, to come into effect.

When Ms Syed’s mother, ­father and two brothers applied in 2014, it took only a month to ­become Australian citizens, but her wait is nudging 18 months, and she admitted she was getting a ­little anxious.

“It wasn’t easy to make this place home but I’ve invested myself in it now,” she said.

“I love it and it would be good to have my passport in my hand, and to be able to exercise my right to vote.”

Gaining Australian citizenship would give her peace of mind when she had to leave her adopted home to visit elderly relatives in Pakistan — and to perform her poetry around the world.