SOUP AND SOUL FOOD:

Hana Assafiri bowls ’em over

Hana Assafiri tosses her wild, dark mane and smiles. Her green eyes flash jubilantly as she pours coffee in shiny, dark ribbons from pot, held aloft, to cup. Just shy of her 54th birthday, the proprietor of Melbourne’s iconic Moroccan Soup Bar is happy. A self-made woman whose uncompromisingly idealistic business model has also made – and sometimes saved – the lives of other women, she can be justifiably satisfied with where her stamina, resilience and courage have brought her.

Half a century ago, this was not the future anyone would have predicted for Hana, who was born in Australia but whose mother, desperately homesick, moved the family back to Tripoli, on the northern coast of Lebanon, when Hana was four. To her horror, a man connected to the extended family by marriage moved with them. He had begun sexually abusing the tiny girl back in Australia but, in Tripoli, while her father travelled to find work, this man exploited the power vacuum and the abuse escalated. His threat was that, if she told anyone, she would be forced to marry him and live with him forever.

“It is unfathomable,” Hana says, settled now with her coffee, leaning back against the soup bar’s rich ochre wall, “that a man would think this was okay – that he would maintain the secret and continue his perverse entitlement to my body. As an adult, I find it extraordinary. It’s monstrous. It’s cruel.

“My very early years were shaped largely by adversity but, those years don’t define me,” she adds resolutely. “Yes, it shapes you, absolutely, but there is that little space, that little light inside you, that just never goes out, and that is where compassion comes from, and forgiveness and letting go and understanding and seeking to better your circumstances and move on. With stubbornness, that place inside me has remained intact. Because if the abuse defines you, they win.”

Hana’s father, whom she adored, was Moroccan. She has been told that her maternal great-grandmother was German and Jewish, married a Muslim man and moved with him to Turkey, then Syria and Lebanon.

“According to the Muslim faith, your religion follows your father’s line,” Hana notes. “According to the Jewish faith, it follows your maternal line. I identify as a woman with a rich heritage that’s enabled me to be the person I am today.” She now feels comfortable in her Muslim faith but that hasn’t always been so, and she acknowledges “how ridiculous and futile these divisions are that we find placed upon us.

This divisive talk about identity and borders and who belongs where is a test of our humanity.”

When her family moved to Lebanon, the country was well into its descent from the cultural capital of the Middle East to a land torn asunder by war. The Israel-Palestine conflict consumed the south, and a bloody civil war engulfed much of the rest of the country.

“We were there during very difficult times,” Hana recalls. “War was the norm. Basic things like bread were not readily available. Safety wasn’t guaranteed. Kids would leave home to go to school in the morning and may not come back. You took nothing for granted. Maybe Mum found a sense of solace being at home but there was also a sense of very real danger. Dad was the provider and was constantly leaving us, in very dire circumstances, to find work. Dad’s absence shaped my life a lot in my early years.”

Towards the end of their time in Lebanon, Hana remembers air raids. “The warning siren would go off and Mum’s way of coping was to pass out. She would be overcome by emotion and faint. The planes were flying so low, you could see the guys inside them, and there were snipers on the rooftops. We had water reservoirs on our roofs and I remember once a neighbour was picking her clothes off the line and jumped inside an empty reservoir when she heard gunfire. She was shot, hiding there, across the road from us.”

By the time Hana was 12, the civil war was in full swing and even her mother conceded the family must return to Australia. Here, for the first time, Hana was expected to regularly attend school, but as she spoke no English was an easy target for bullies, and all the while the abuse continued. She retreated into silence, and did not utter a word for a full year.

When Hana was 15, her abuser attacked her for the last time. He took her out of school to do it and when he dropped her back, she could no longer keep his secret. Somehow she summoned the courage and the rage to tell a teacher. This teacher, whom Hana liked and trusted, was a critical influence. “Her parents had survived the holocaust, so she had intuitively a different sense of what was fair and right. And she mirrored back to me a sense of self that felt more worthy and more important.”

Now, however, the teacher insisted that they tell Hana’s mother about the abuse. The prospect terrified Hana so much that she tried to overdose, making herself very ill but not ill enough to avoid the confrontation.

Hana’s father was not told of the abuse. Her mother decided that some way must be found to end it without exposing the family to criticism or humiliation. In her mind, there was only one solution. At just 15 years old, Hana was to be married.

A husband was found – a man 11 years her senior. “He was assessed by family and friends, including,” says Hana, still incredulous, “the perpetrator of the abuse, who thought he was a good man.”

“The first time I tried to leave was on our wedding night,” she recalls stoically. “I rang my mum and said, ‘I don’t want to be here.’ She said, ‘What are people going to say?

What are people going to think?’” So Hana stayed.

“Then, three days into the marriage, there was a conversation about my virginity. The family came together with the husband to discuss it. He said, ‘She’s not a virgin.’ There was a whole roomful of people having a conversation about whether or not I was a virgin, and I just left. In the end, though, they took me to a doctor to check and the doctor gave a report. That happened in this country. The doctor said that yes, I was a virgin, but he also said, ‘You need to take it easy on her. She’s young, she’s a kid. You can’t be aggressive and forceful with her, so just back off.’”

Ten months later, still a child herself, Hana gave birth to her first son. “The whole dynamic of the marriage was, ‘I’m right, you’re wrong; men make

decisions, women have babies.’” Before she turned 19, Hana had two sons, and had run away and been brought back to her husband six times.

“Every time I pushed, he would lash out violently, in every way: physically, sexually,” she explains. “But I was never somebody who was going to be broken. So I kept leaving. I went back home, I went to a refuge. I always took the kids with me. The last time I was brought back, he said: ‘Your dad doesn’t want you, your family doesn’t want you. No matter what I do to you – even if

I have to beat you up seven times a day – you will learn to obey.’ I said, ‘Actually, not.’

“When an environment is so unfair, it suffocates me, I can’t deal with it. I wrote a suicide note and I tried to take my own life. It was stupid but it was an act of defiance. The next thing I remember, I was in hospital. Then Mum had to make a decision between her reputation and her daughter’s life. So they accepted that this was enough.”

There was a dispute over the boys. “I was deemed unfit to look after them because I had tried to kill myself,” Hana explains, painfully. “There was no taking into account why I’d done that. There was no taking into account the violence.”

And their father moved with them interstate. “So I had to learn to be without the boys, and they were so young – two-and-a-half and one-and-a-half. It was gut-wrenching. The longing, the grief and also the worry for them.”

Hana locked herself in her room for months on end, consumed by sorrow. “I still recall vividly,” she says, “the day, such a long time later, when I thought, ‘get up – you being in here is not going to change the situation. You need to get up and learn to live.’”

Hana was barely 20, a slight girl with a shy, gap-toothed smile, when she set out to rebuild her life. She had some support. Her schoolteacher had remained in contact and had visited her at home while she was married. From her father, she says, she always felt a sense of acceptance.

“Dad was a wise man. He studied, he read widely, he learnt about psychology, alternative medicine and therapies, he understood the Koran and could quote it. Dad never judged me. So that place within, the little light inside me, was protected by my dad and by my teacher.

When there was a gust of wind, they protected it enough to keep that light on.”

Hana found a job working on the trams, where she agitated for female conductors to be allowed to wear shorts in summer. But eventually she gravitated towards domestic violence services. “I went to an interview at a refuge in my tram uniform and told them the story about my shorts campaign, and they kind of secretly loved it, and also recognised that perhaps I would bring to the table an understanding and an insight that was more experientially relevant. I applied for two positions and got both.

“This was still pre-internet and

I had to learn very quickly. So I read a lot of books, particularly about women in civil rights movements, and I identified a lot with their stories and their profound sense of what is right. You do not sit at the back of the bus – that spoke to me. From there, I learnt about a philosophy that was defined by and centred on women. I thought, ‘this is what I’ve been looking for my whole life.’”

Hana spent 15 years in the women’s services sector, eventually moving into policy work. But as hard as she tried, she felt that the services didn’t equitably address “the needs of women who were marginalised: Indigenous women, women from non-English-speaking backgrounds, women who were less fortunate.” Hana wanted to undertake a project that would do that, but she wasn’t sure just what it should be, until one afternoon, in 1998, when she was driving along St Georges Road, North Fitzroy, and saw a “For Lease” sign propped against a dusty old leadlight storefront window.

“I was never somebody who was going to be broken.”

“Women’s intuition has its own intelligence,” Hana says with the irrepressibly mischievous smile that springs straight from that light she speaks of. “Society teaches us to ignore it but I think I’ve learnt to be directed by it. I listen to it, I trust it.”

Hana’s intuition had her haggling with the real estate agent before she even knew what she would open there. “It’s part of our upbringing. Even at Myers, I haggle. So I brokered a deal with him there and then and thought, ‘Holy shit. What do I do now?’”

Gradually an idea took shape. Hana remembered the time spent with her mother and her sisters in the kitchen at home. “I thought, we’ve been socialised into cooking, we’ve been subjugated in kitchens, but even so, that little light inside, it lights up when women are around one another in kitchens ... We were shaped in kitchens. We learnt to cook like you learn to speak a language. It becomes an innate part of how you express yourself. If we can use the very tool that has subjugated us, turn it around and change the environment, we can be empowered.”

So the Moroccan Soup Bar was born and from the outset it was unapologetically a women-centred space. Only women were, and still are, employed here; often they are Muslim women and most often they are women in need.

“The foundations of this place were about circuit-breaking the cycle of disadvantage in a practical way. We give women employment, we take them on a journey and we bear witness to their transformation. Some might stay for a month, a year, 10 years. Some have been with me for 15 years. They hear about us by word of mouth. Women tell women. It’s become known that if you want a job, you can come here. I’ve never said no. Part of it is about putting them around one another, so they can connect with one another’s experience and feel less isolated. I believe that when you lift women, you progress the entire society. Absolutely.”

It’s a little before 6pm and the queue for a table at the Moroccan Soup Bar snakes along the footpath and around the corner. There are young men with woolly beards and woolly Afghan sweaters; girls in op-shop chic chatting earnestly about student politics and social media; families of all styles, many of them regulars, back for the soup bar’s popular vegetarian fare – mezze, tagines, salads, sweets, of course soups, and a near legendary chickpea bake – all delivered via a verbal menu which melts barriers between customers and staff.

The soup bar has expanded its paradigm in recent years. Hana initiated a series of “Speed Date a Muslim” events at which nonMuslims could ask a team of very patient Muslim volunteers absolutely anything about their religion. “We brought people together, connected back up with our common humanity, confronted the stigma and showed that there was no basis for it,” Hana says. Recently, she has opened a take-away and lunch spot up the road, and a women’s reading room, housing books by and about inspiring women, as well as salons and conversation nights. An early guest was former Human Rights Commissioner, Gillian Triggs.

As the Moroccan Soup Bar celebrates its 20th birthday, Hana feels she has become “the surrogate aunt of this community, whether they like it or not. I’ve seen generations born.” Sometimes now, during dinner, she rings a bell and briefly holds forth on whatever topic has caught her attention that day – climate change, asylum seekers, same-sex marriage have all had a go.

Outside, darkness has fallen. The chatter of prospective diners drifts in from the street, lights are dimmed and the restaurant glows like a Bedouin fire. Hana rises from the bench where we’ve been sitting now for hours and stretches her wiry, smartly-suited form.

“I’m somebody who genuinely believes – and I’m paraphrasing

[the poet and activist] Audre Lorde – that it’s not our differences that are the problem, it’s our inability to accept and celebrate them. I try to be the occasion that enables us to accept and celebrate our differences. I believe people are decent, no matter how much they try to disprove it. At the moment, it’s more challenging than ever to maintain that belief, but it’s also much more rewarding when it’s reaffirmed – and for me, it’s reaffirmed daily. It’s reaffirmed every time I open these doors.” AWW

‘Moroccan Soup Bar: recipes of a spoken menu and a little bit of spice’ is published by Melbourne Books. You can find the Moroccan Soup Bar at 183 (and Soup Bar Two Go at 316) St Georges Road, Fitzroy North.

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“When you lift women, you progress ... society.”