Singing songs of freedom

Larry Schwartz
Taqi Khan learned of the latest asylum seeker boat tragedy on Facebook. “People shared the news from the TV channels,” he says. “I watched the videos and I am very sad.”
News that 55 people were feared dead after the sinking off Christmas Island on the weekend brought back memories of his own journey, which culminated in a seven-day voyage from Makassar on the coast of Sulawesi Island in November 2009 and a boat trip he says was just as long, from near Darwin to Christmas Island, after he was intercepted by Australian authorities.
Khan, a controversial pop star in his homeland of Afghanistan, now lives in Melbourne’s south-east. He was born in central Afghanistan but his family fled to Quetta, Pakistan, when he was just two. He fled Pakistan after receiving death threats following a duet with a female singer.
“When I started my journey from my home, everyone told me there is a 99 per cent risk that you will die,” says Khan, who was held in migrant detention in Australia.
“I said, there is no choice for me. If there is only 1 per cent chance of success, I [may be able to] do something for myself and for my people, my family.
“The same with those people coming from Pakistan and Afghanistan, especially the Hazara people. They just want to do something for their families . . . There is no other choice for them.”
He flew from Pakistan to Singapore, crossed the border to Malaysia illegally and spent a month in Kuala Lumpur, from where he was taken by boat one night to Medan in North Sumatra. Khan says he spent seven months in Jakarta “waiting my turn” to go to Australia.
A close friend was on a boat carrying 105 Hazara asylum seekers that went missing in October 2009. He knew that a similar fate might await him. “Still, there was no choice because I had borrowed the money. My life was in danger and my family was in danger and I didn’t have any future in Pakistan. So there was only one way: I should die or I should go to Australia.”
Khan endured months of uncertainty on Christmas Island. Since his release from detention, he has twice performed for detainees in Australia. In early 2011, security company Serco gave him permission to perform to about 100 young people in a detention facility near Melbourne Airport as they celebrated Eid.
Serco also allowed him to perform for detainees at Curtin Detention Centre in Western Australia.
“They were happy when they saw me there. I said, ‘I can’t do anything for you. I can just pray for you and I can sing a song for you and just for a moment I can make you happy’.”
That night, they had danced as he sang. “But when I went to the rooms, they were requesting me one by one, please when you go outside the detention centre, tell our story . . . I said, if I can I will deliver your message for you there.”
More in Arts, page 30

Refugee plucks Hazaras’ heart strings with his songs

Larry Schwartz
Taqi Khan plucks a lute-like, two-stringed instrument that Melbourne’s Hazara community gave him when he settled here after three months in detention on Christmas Island.
“It has a very sad history with my people,” the Hazara singer says. “Religious people in Afghanistan said if someone touched the dambura they would go directly to hell. Because of this no one was allowed to touch this instrument.”
But such is the instrument’s appeal he says he found detainees using plastic safety helmets and sticks as makeshift versions when he visited Curtin Detention Centre about two years ago.
Khan says he was invited to perform at the WA centre by authorities after a request by detainees from the persecuted minority group from central Afghanistan.
“They were happy that they had their singer here in Australia,” says the 32-year-old, who will sing with a keyboard player and drummer this weekend at Multicultural Arts Victoria’s 10th annual Emerge Festival.
Khan says he received praise from compatriots from “London, Germany, Canada, many countries” after he put video clips he had recorded in Quetta in 2004 on YouTube and released a CD on which he sings the first pop songs in his people’s Hazaragi dialect.
But a song called Tashki Tashki, which he says means, “when you are going to hide something from someone”, had prompted death threats in Pakistan and condemnation in Australia because he dared film it as a duet with a female singer known to him as Farkhonda. They had collaborated despite the fear of repercussions from “religious people like the Taliban”.
“I was doing the editing by myself on my computer,” he says, “and when someone was coming I tried to hide the video from them. Many times I completed the video and destroyed it.”
He says he has been told that hundreds of thousands of pirate copies of his CD have been sold illegally and Tashki Tashki has been screened on Afghan TV.
He had tried to minimise the likely offence by insisting Farkhonda wear a scarf. “From the beginning, it was my idea that we can change our people, we can change the mind, slowly, slowly,” he says, “not in one time, directly.”
Khan, who studied music in Quetta with Afghan musicians, Abdul Haq and Mukhtar Naz Papo, was jailed for 14 days for organising a protest after the kidnap of a Hazara child.
The singer’s farming family had fled Oruzgan province for Ghazni and crossed the border to Pakistan during the Soviet occupation. His mother, two brothers and two sisters are still in Quetta. He learnt after his release from Christmas Island in March 2010 that his father had died.
Khan came to Australia via Singapore and Malaysia among 50 men, a woman and her two children on a boat that sailed for seven days from Makassar on Sulawesi Island before being picked up by the authorities near Darwin.
Khan and a friend – also Taqi – serve tea and nuts. “La-la-de-la-de-la,” his mellifluous voice fills his living room in Melbourne’s south-east as he performs an unaccompanied song favoured by his people because they were too afraid to keep instruments in the years of persecution since the rule of the late 19th century Afghan emir, Abdur Rahman Khan.
“They destroyed everything,” he says, “the culture, language, the education and everything. And because of that, the Hazara people are a little bit far from music.”
The Age, 11-Jun-2013