'let's Get Pauline Hanson Over'
The Age
Monday August 17, 1998
Although smoke spirals from a tandoor instead of a barbecue, it's still a typical family gathering overflowing with chatter, friends, a grandmother, parents, excitable children and an abundance of food.
Yet this is more than a family get-together at Cennet Bagdas' Brunswick home. It is the scene of a monthly ritual: the baking of precious Middle-Eastern flat bread, called chorek in Turkish; bread imbued with cultural and historical meaning.
For Bagdas and her family, baking and eating chorek and other special breads satiates a yearning for, and preserves, their Kurdish culture; for Sevgi Kilic and her mother, Sultan, it does the same for their Turkish heritage. "Baking this bread is about identity and keeping the cultural spirit alive, but it's also about wanting to share it with others," says Sevgi Kilic.
"These women prepare one of the oldest foods in the world, flat bread, and there's a whole culture involved in its making; it's more than flour and water, there's a history in it and it's about women's knowledge."
Kilic's fascination with Middle- Eastern bread stemmed from her fieldwork for a PhD on the cultural construction of female identity in a shantytown in Turkey. Noticing how chorek from different regions varied slightly, she learned that women from the Black Sea, for example, could identify women from Ankara by a unique imprint in the bread.
Chorek is not just a means of identification though, it also signifies that the women belong to their community. When the smoke from the tandoor is smelt or seen, the villagers gather around to share stories, goodwill and, of course, the delicious bread.
When she returned home, Kilic's curiosity burgeoned because Middle-Eastern migrants in Melbourne were continuing the bread-making tradition and gathering around makeshift tandoors in suburban backyards, to the chagrin of local councils.
"It's just amazing that this flat bread has been made for thousands of years and, despite the migration process, it hasn't altered."
Migration is about being uprooted, and those who dismiss migrants for preserving their culture and not assimilating have never experienced the pain of alienation. And Kilic says baking allows these women to feel more connected to Australia by easing their
alienation and displacement.
"I think for women coming from these cultures, the bread gives them a sense of identity, a sense of belonging to a particular region and continuing that tradition here empowers them."
Many migrant women are inscribed with a negative identity because of their experience as non-skilled workers: "Baking bread is a means of resistance against
that negative identity."
She says bread also has a symbolic association with fertility, the way the dough swells and rises, and when Middle-Eastern women give birth in Australian hospitals, they crave chorek, not the ubiquitous white sliced loaf. Women in the extended family will bake chorek to satisfy the mother's hunger and to celebrate the birth.
In cultural terms, food is dismissed as trivial, as merely the thing one eats, but it's much more than that.
Kilic makes you think about bread in a more subtle way: you want to know more about her mother and the Bagdas women, and others in the same situation.
When Cennet Bagdas and her husband arrived in Australia in 1969, enticed here by the Federal Government, their introduction to "this paradise" was a confined hostel. Her young family became sick because they couldn't eat the food and they knew no-one.
Bagdas was grief-stricken because she was forced to leave her one-year-old son in Turkey after being incorrectly told only four of her six children could come here.
A month later they moved into their home and the bread making began, and the healing process. Four years later her son arrived.
When Sultan Kilic arrived in 1970, she cried for her homeland and ached for chorek, her identity. So strong was her desire that she began dreaming about the bread but always woke up before tasting it.
Now, within the Turkish community, Bagdas is respected and valued because of her skills and knowledge, and so, too, Sultan Kilic; for both there is a sense of worth.
Everyone at the baking feast is in awe of Bagdas's deftness at making mountain bread, called yufka in Turkish. The small, plump ball of dough is rolled then swirled around and around a long thin wooden rod and quickly transformed into an enormous paper-thin circle, then placed on to the sagg, the metal hotplate, in anticipation.
Bagdas says: "We're familiar with the bread, we long for it because we love it so much and no one makes it to sell; it's made to the needs of the family."
While Bagdas often chides her three daughters, all of whom are mothers, for not preparing the dough properly or rolling it correctly, there is much laughter, too. Each is proud of their heritage.
Her daughters also help prepare delicious bread parcels, called bukme in Turkish, which are stuffed with spinach and cheese or spicy mince and potato. And as soon as the aromas begin to waft, people start to arrive as if by clockwork.
Then one of the daughter's quips: "Let's get Pauline Hanson over!"
While they laugh at the idea, Kilic says: "There's a lot of sadness among migrants because of the views being expressed, not just by Pauline Hanson, but everyone. Everyone has something to say, but they don't really know migrants; that they are not living off the system that they are part of the economy, and much more than that, too."
The women say one way to break down barriers is by coming together into each other's homes to share and learn. And judging by the smell of the bread, the queue will be long.
© 1998 The Age