Performance maker, intercultural producer and advocate for diversity in the arts
What are you enjoying doing at the moment?
Collaborating with an illustrator to adapt my previous performance work, Chinese Whispers, into a digital graphic novel.
What is the best thing that has happened to you today?
It’s possibly the best but also the most challenging – challenging a family member’s homophobic views as we shared lunch together.
If you were a super-heroine, what powers would you like to have?
To zap everyone, especially people in positions of power, privilege and money, into realising the value of the arts and investing in it accordingly.
What is your best quality or attribute?
I bring people together.
What is the best part of your day?
My daily morning walk.
What do you most value in your friends?
Kindness.
If you could give one piece of advice to someone new to Australia, what would it be?
Have your own definition of who you are. Be careful of falling into the ‘acceptable’ ways in which ‘people like you’ are seen, e.g. you can argue that it is more acceptable for people of refugee backgrounds to be seen always through the lens of ‘Victim’ or ‘Grateful Recipient of Help’. The dominant culture can get angry at you when you fall out of this narrow definition and show yourself as fully in charge of your own life.
What’s your favourite word and why?
Bahasa Indonesia: menjiwai, the root word being ‘jiwa’ or ‘soul’. It’s when you become so at one with something that your soul merges with it. It is the verb, ‘to soul’.
For you, what’s the best thing about being a woman from an immigrant or refugee background?
Connecting with other Women of Colour through our shared pains but also our shared strengths and resilience.
Name a book or a film that changed your life
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
What are you reading right now?
Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine
Confluence in Collaborations by Kei Murakami
Silence by Thich Nhat Hanh (re-reading for the third time…)
What is your favourite possession?
My grandparent’s letters to each other.
What could you never be without?
My breath.
If you could meet the Prime Minister tomorrow, what would you like to tell him?
Stop taking up so much time and space. Listening is a form of action. Know your privileges and act from a place of responsibility based on this awareness.
You can support Rani’s Pozible Campaign for THE CHINESE WHISPERS 2018: a bilingual, digital graphic novel inspired by the racial violence of May 1998 in Indonesia.