Jeanine Hourani
Interview with Jeanine Hourani
HH: You’re currently the director of Road to Refuge. So much of the organisation’s work is about autonomy. Giving back the license over our own narratives. How did you fight for license over your narrative? Or maybe fight isn’t the right word.
JH: I didn’t move back to Naarm/Melbourne until I was eighteen years old. Most of my upbringing was in the Arab world where there was a really different narrative around Arabs, Muslims, Refugees, Palestinians. It was so different that I hardly thought about my story or narrative or rhetoric. When I moved here at eighteen and people starting asking me all these questions and making all these assumptions about me, my beliefs, my background, my politics, I came to this sudden realisation people had bought into a really harmful narrative on race/racism and refugees and Islam and Palestine. I felt like something I had taken for granted my whole life was suddenly not mine anymore in this new environment. So, I started working to take it back.