Pattin Miller Identity

Every person spends their life searching for an identity. Sometimes that identity is straightforward, other times it is obscured by problems and attitudes and cultural perspectives that are beyond the individual’s control. Race, religion, skin colour, geopolitical and socio-political constraints that make the journey tortured and hazardous.

The school I attended in Australia can be described as extremely multicultural. Every one in my class (including the teacher) is a migrant or refugee from somewhere else. Everyone has had to negotiate a pathway to a new identity which has been confused/troubled/complicated by issues of race, religion or language. As an EAL class we have had to learn to deal with learning expectations in another language, …show more content…
Yes. Is my path difficult? Yes? But when I compare myself to others my life is not so difficult and my transitional identity not so fractured. I may be away from my homeland, but I have some of my people here. As a Muslim migrant, part of the large Hazara diaspora I have many others who share my story. This is the personal journey. That has taken many paths. My journey is harder than that of Patti Miller but not as hard as Sandra Laing. How can I say this so easily? Patti Miller explores the problems of mixed race aborigines in Australia, but she also asks questions about where she belongs in the scheme of things. Our class reflected long and hard on The Mind of a Thief and came to the conclusion that Miller herself is the thief. This is not to say that other Aborigines in Australia have not had devastating lives, full of anguish and problems and lost identity. But Miller is not one of them. Sure she can be conflicted by her own family’s place in the Australian journey, but we cannot retrospectively fit an identity crisis onto an identity we are not aware of. The mere accident of her discovering an aboriginal ancestor may make her question her place in the bitter story of race relations in