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Thirty years ago, when I was a teacher of English as a Second Language at the Migrant Women’s Learning Centre, a student with an engaging smile and a steely determination to learn joined my class. Marie Younan was an Assyrian migrant who had been in Australia for twelve years. She had never been to school, was blind, and had only recently acquired spoken English and basic literacy through braille.
Marie quickly formed friendships as one of a delightful group of women who had come from many parts of world and met for three days a week in the Return to Learning class. Here they were studying language and literacy whilst sharing their lives and having fun together. Whenever a new or unfamiliar word came up, we would practise using it and I would write it on the white board, spelling out each letter so Marie could key it into her braille machine. With each new word captured, her face would light up with joy.
Marie told me about the day when as a small child, she discovered she was blind. Her story stayed with me over the years and is written, almost word for word, as the first chapter in this book.
We kept in touch after we went our separate ways. At a reunion in 2013, we teachers decided that we would partner with past students to record their memories of the MWLC and subsequent lives for a centenary publication of the TAFE college.
As soon as Marie began telling me her stories and I began to record them, I was hooked. She is a mesmeric storyteller; I was drawn into her world as she told me about her years in Syria, Lebanon, Greece, and Melbourne. We agreed almost immediately that we would continue to work together to write her life history into a book, as had been suggested to her by her braille teacher, Ben Hewitt.
Over eight years we met up in each other’s homes. Marie told the stories of her life while I took notes, in awe of the details she had stored in her non-visual memory and the way she could create pictures in my mind of things she herself had never seen. I wrote her stories into chapters which I would read to her at subsequent meetings. Each time Marie listened, she went more deeply into her previous life; new memories would come to the surface and she would relate new anecdotes, share new feelings
and discover new insights.
The book gradually took shape through many cycles of telling and writing, re-telling and re-writing.
Praise for ‘A Different Kind of Seeing’
A story, raw with reality, full of love and hope, where the stream of resilience runs clear. We share the life of someone for whom blindness is not the insurmountable barrier many believe it to be. What most holds Marie back is the soft bigotry of low expectations. It is hard to put this book down.
Graeme Innes, Former Australian Disability Discrimination Commissioner
A tale of dispossession, displacement and a remarkable resilience … chronicles one woman’s struggle to live a fulfilling life despite her blindness and lack of education.
Arnold Zable, author
Interview with Marie and Jill, by Jacinta Parsons on ABC Melbourne Radio Afternoons 19 October, 2020. Listen here.
Feel free to email me if you would like to get a copy of ‘A Different Kind of Seeing’.