Am I not pretty enough.
The crowd was barely paying any attention as she stepped up to the stage. She had to reach up to grab the mic from it's stand. The band picked up behind her. She start singing. For the next few minutes, hundreds of Kununurrians sitting on the dusty grounds of the drive-in picture theatre, would be confronted by the trembling voice of a young girl, as she sang a rendition of Casey Chamber’s “Am I not pretty enough”. For those few minutes, you would feel yourself swimming in a diluted mix of discomfort and peace. Resonating hope, illuminating despair. It would be in those few minutes, that you would listen to a child's voice sing a tune that collided two worlds. She stood alone between them.
First of all, you would need to know the lyrics of the song. So go look them up. "Am I not pretty enough". Secondly, you would need to know, what my colleague Michael was able to share with me:
“...it’s a big deal for indigenous girls, to be able to get on stage...to perform. They have incredibly low self esteem. They see themselves as black, poor, over weight, or too skinny, and going nowhere fast”.
You would also need to know that this girl, like many others in that group that were individually taking turns performing, they were classified as marginalised indigenous youth. Any youth worker will point to the obvious - indigenous youth were marginalised. So to be put into a category of “marginalised indigenous youth”, you would know that this is a group of kids who have got it, pretty tough. This particular lot were being supported by ‘Save the Children’.
Perhaps that also says a little more. Save the children works predominantly in third world countries, saving children. I know that 'development' folk have recently preferred to stop referring to ‘third world countries’ as 'third world', and instead refer to them as “developing”. Bugger that. In this context i’ll refer to it as third world. Come with me on this...
Third world, is more apt a phrase, when you’re walking down the main strip of the town yesterday morning at 10am, and there is a body lying semi conscious on the ground, and people are walking around it, getting on with their shopping. A dog gingerly pauses to sniff at it, before moving on.
Third world, makes sense to me, when you watch an indigenous man hurling abuse and being verbally violent towards an indigenous woman, thrashing out obscenities, and people stand around watching and waiting to see the outcome. Not necessarily because they are concerned for the woman's well being...but because it's Saturday morning and he's standing close enough to two points of interest: the entry to Coles, and the Commonwealth Bank ATM. One world, holding up the morning of the other world. ...So for this context, i’m going to stick with 3rd world. I hope you don’t mind.
...If you knew these things, and you have just listened to a girl who looks hardly much older than my fifteen year old niece, sing “am I not pretty enough”...you have watched her shift nervously on stage, her eyes closed perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of trying to create the space in her mind where she can be comfortable, her voice reverberating across the dusty outdoor theatre... If you knew these things, and you were quiet enough, you would know that you had a heart...you would be able to hear it breaking.
When you have walked into the picture gardens through a town that shuts early, and all the buildings are fenced with steel guards, caged basically, in order to protect itself from various elements of the town; when you walk past incredibly inebriated folk, lying in the grass outside the theatre of what has been promoted as a drug, alcohol, smoke free, family friendly environment; when you watch the local constabulary breaking up a few fisty fights, with the paramedics nearby at the ready... when you look at your mobile and realise it's only 6pm, you wonder about the rest of the night. There's a hint from Michael:
"We're going to have a lot of work to get to on Monday...a lot of the houses are going to be smashed up".
In this world, you hear this voice,of a 12 year old girl whose is clouded by so much uncertainty, except what is obviously very certain potential, all anyone really wants to do is wrap her up in cotton wool, and take her to a place where she will be safe from the violence around her, and place her in a setting where she will be able to reach her full potential. She was pretty enough. She was talented enough. With half the opportunities you and I have, her aspirations could be fulfilled, enough.
I watched the girl wander off stage to an applause that sounded more like a few pages blowing in the wind, and drift into a sea of indigenous faces. She was, after all, just another black face in Kununurra.
