Alissar Gazal is a Lebanese-Australian actress and activist who has challenged the customs and traditions that, since childhood, she feels robbed her freedom and demolished her existence as a woman in her family home.
Since the age of eight, she remembers extensively what her parents told her when she asked why she is wasn’t allowed to go out to play.
"You are the only girl in this family, and you have to help your mother. Your siblings can go out to play, but you have to do the household chores.”
أليسار غزال في لبنان Source: Alissar Gazal
Childhood
Alissar lived a simple life in a small village in the western Bekaa of Lebanon. She recalls beginning to face her challenges with her identity as a free woman when she began to feel oppressed when carrying out orders and tasks that she could not comprehend as a child. More importantly, these orders were imposed only on her, and not on her younger brothers.
"I have to clean the bedrooms, help my mother wash and hang the clothes to dry. Then my mum sweeps the floor and I mop it,” she recalls one her routine tasks.
"I had to kneel on the floor and wipe it with a piece of cloth, squeezing the mop with my little hands. Imagine, how strong is this eight-year-old's hand, to be able to squeeze the mop to dry, so she can wet it again and complete the task?”
If she refused, she got punished.
"Of course, they would beat me! I am from that generation, if your parents don't like what you say or do, they slap you or hit you with shoes."
Puberty
Her tasks at home increasingly became more difficult, and when she reached puberty, restrictions of another kind were imposed on her.
"I was a very active girl, I liked to run around and climbing trees and mountains. When I got my period, my parents started restricting my movement,” she says.
“My father used to say, ‘sit still,’ and if I was sitting with my legs open and wearing jeans, he would say, ‘close your legs together,’ and my mother would force me to wear dresses.”
The year that Alissar turned 13 was a turning point.
Life in Lebanon was no longer tolerable. Between war conditions and the lack of work opportunities, her father decided to emigrate to Australia, where they had some relatives, in search of a better future for the family.
"The problems there have existed since the creation of Lebanon from 1921 when they decided that they wanted to build a country. My father was imprisoned and tortured to the point that he was unable to walk when he returned to us.
“There were so many people like him too. In Lebanon, you were not able to raise your head or your voice, and there was no future - if you don't like it the way it is, leave the country."
Alissar Gazal - teenage years Source: Alissar Gazal
Migrating to Australia
The family arrived at Sydney International Airport in March 1973. From a cold spring in Lebanon to a warm autumn in Australia.
Alissar and her family initially lived in Sydney before moving to regional New South Wales where they opened a business to manufacture and sell fabrics.
However, like many migrants to Australia, the language barrier was a big problem at first, as the family did not speak a single word of English.
"I was the only one able to speak English. I was their eyes, ears and tongue for translation everywhere, they were relying on me a lot."
Teenage years
Between the ages of 14 and 16 Alissar says she felt like she was suffocating. Restrictions rained down on her from every direction; she did not know which of them she should refuse, and which of them she should accept.
Her social life was limited to going to school and to the market with her mother. But during this period, she was trying to claim a different social life from the one she was living - a life, which many girls in her age had, especially in Australia.
"In high school they would take us on excursions, and I had some friends. But after school hours and on the weekends, I was not allowed to see my friends, it was for staying at home or helping my family with work. If I wanted to go to the cinema I had to beg for a week or more. But they were letting my brothers go wherever they wanted."
After she turned 16, Alissar underwent a major transformation in her life. She learned to drive – the first and only thing during this time she says helped her to breathe some freedom that she dreamed of having.
"I became my father's private driver. I’dI take him everywhere, travel to Sydney and back. I loved it so much just to get away from the house where I felt like a servant, even for my brothers who were younger than me."
"’Alissar, bring me a glass of water, Alissar, make me a sandwich,’ and if I went with my mother shopping for the house, my mother and I would carry everything on our own, including boxes and bags, while they were sitting on their bums."
Aside from the shopping and car rides, she had some simple hobbies.
“If I wanted to run away from home psychologically, when they didn't need me, I would put my headphones on and listen to music. I loved reading, going to the movies and photography. I don't know if my love for these things stemmed from the fact that these activities I could do on my own, and I didn't need anybody or friends by my side to enjoy it. ''
أليسار غزال ممثلة ومنتجة لبنانية أسترالية، اشتهرت بفيلم On the Ropes (2018) ، Fighting Season (2018) و I Luv U But (2012). Source: Alissar Gazal
‘Choking’
With every year she grew, Alissar says she felt angrier about the restrictions on her freedom, her ideas, and her ambition.
“I was seeing with my own eyes what was happening in the early seventies in Australia, I was seeing demonstrations of the Australian women's movement on television, reading news about them in newspapers, and their history in books,” she says.
"But how would I have been able to explain this to my father?
“They were watching this on TV and asking, ‘What do these women want, take them to prison, they were raised with no manners at all?’
She decided to look for a different path than the one her family had drawn for her.
"I decided to leave school after I finished Year 11. I did not enjoy school or school life, and I felt that I wanted to study something that can make me happy."
She wanted to study photography and acting.
“Every time I suggested I want to do this and that with my life, the answer was, ‘No, you can't do this’.”
Her parents did allow her to study photography for one year. But they did not allow her to practice it.
"Every decision I wanted to make they put it down, I didn't get their support. If I were one of my brothers who wanted to become a professional photographer, they would have supported me to become one. They would support them in whatever decision they wanted to make."
Independence
She had no choice but to work with them in their business.
"When I turned 21, I felt that I had no future inside or outside the home. All the dreams I had when I was 14 years old when we migrated to Australia were completely gone."
Alissar reached the decisive year in her life, after a long struggle to obtain freedom, and begging for the pursuit of some of her ambitions and dreams that were available to everyone but her.
She decided to leave home.
"I told them that I will leave the house next Friday to live with a group of friends in a shared house."
Her father became agitated and did not believe her words, and began to ask her: "Why?”
“You are living a luxurious life that no one else can get easily - you don't pay your rent, have a car, money and do whatever you want,"
"I have money because I work,” she answered. “And I have a second-hand car that you bought for me thank you very much. But I never do what I want. I need more than a week to convince you, negotiate with you, and answer dozens of questions to think about letting me out of the house.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
"What will people say about us?” he replied.
"Do we live for ourselves or for the people?” she answered. “You migrated from Lebanon and from the degrading social and political life, people’s mentality of interference and hurtful behaviours to tell me now what people will say about us?
“Why did you come here then?"
Alissar Gazal Source: Alissar Gazal/ Heidrun Lohr
Freedom
Alissar left home to live with a group of friends in a shared house, and although her bed in her family’s house was more comfortable than her bed in this house, she felt another kind. Of comfort
"Imagine, you get to wake up and prepare a cup of coffee or tea. Choose what you will have for breakfast or decide that you don’t want to eat. You wear what you want to wear, and if you do not have work on this day, decide what you do on this day, without four people in the house deciding how your day will go.”
Her family refused to visit her. Her mother became sick and her father was upset. They did not cut her off, though, and were meeting her at the family business.
For many months after she left the house, they lost hope of her returning to their home. Fearing her loss forever, her father decided to accept the decision she had made.
For the first time, she felt that he thought about her and respected her opinion.
"If you don't want to live with us anymore, I understand that, but why you live in rental property, buy a house," she recalls him saying.
Alissar reflected on those words.
"At that time, I took advantage of the opportunity, and I told myself that if I bought a house, my father would feel that I live in my house and be proud that his daughter was able to buy a house. I understood what he wanted to accept the situation, and I decided to do this, and he was very happy."
She knew that what she had done was not easy for them or for her, especially coming from a strict culture, that doesn’t believe that a woman should live on her own or should not leave the family house before getting married; but for her this decision was necessary.
” I still feel until now that my parents did not encourage me to do something big in my life, but encouraged the boys to do whatever they wanted to do. This is because their ambitions and hopes for me as a girl were small.
"Their dream for me was to grow up to be a clean, kind and beautiful girl until someone comes to marry me and become the wife of so-and-so or the mother of so-and-so."
في هذه الحلقة من بودكاست "الهوية" تتحدث أليسار غزال عن الأسباب التي دفعتها كفتاة عربية، تعيش في كنف عائلتها في أستراليا، من انتظار الفرصة الأولى لتترك منزلهم. و Source: Alissar Gazal
Demand for equality
Today, Alissar may be able to find justification for a fraction of her mother and father’s harsh parenthood while she was growing up, a cruelty she says that for many years, where she could not help but to explain it with hate.
"I never felt that their treatment was stemming out of love. But when I look back, of course they loved me and wanted to protect me."
But she did not find a convincing justification for the unequal treatment used between male and female in the family.
"If the girl cannot be independent in this country and live the life she wants, this means that she either belongs to her father, or her brothers or her husband.
“God did not create us to be slaves. God created us and gave us a brain to think and make decisions in our life. Even if we make mistakes, we must make mistakes because we learn from doing them. "
"It drives me crazy, that until now, there are families that raise their girls with set limits and give their boys whatever it takes to be who they want to be."
Alissar Gazal is known for On the Ropes (2018), Fighting Season (2018) and I Luv U But (2012). She came to Australia from Lebanon in the early 70s. After graduating from the Australian National University in Canberra, she moved back to Sydney and began her acting career when she joined Australia’s first bilingual Arab-Australian company TAQA Theatre in 1991. Alissar is on the management committee of the Arab Film Festival and the selection committee for the Sydney Film Festival. She is also a founding member of Sydney Arabic Choir. In addition, she has been known to facilitate thought-provoking diversity casting seminars for the Information and Cultural Exchange in Parramatta. While she has enthusiastically assisted on the set for other filmmakers and casting directors, her first love will always be acting.
