From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Fri Nov 20 2009 - 15:18:20 EST
Best new artist not giving up this day job
Chris Johnston
November 21, 2009
HE WEARS a little council badge - ''Khaled Abdulwahab, outreach worker,
African community, City of Yarra'' - which gives the outline but is far from
the whole story.
Abdulwahab's job - his day job on the badge, at least - is to move between
the council's three sets of housing commission towers in Richmond, Fitzroy
and Collingwood to help new African migrants and refugees. He was one
himself; he can feel what they feel.
He's got to sort out confusions, bewilderment and displacement, and all
kinds of issues to do with Centrelink, the courts, police and education -
and language. It could be as simple as answering: ''What does that mean?''
When Abdulwahab fled Eritrea solo at 18, his parents and brother staying
behind in the capital city of Asmara, he could speak 10 words of English. He
skirted between safety and strife, around Footscray and Flemington. Then he
settled into an asylum seeker's netherworld for five years, doing cash jobs
and chasing dreams in music.
It's the same for the people he now counsels. They have dreams but also
troubles in their new homeland. Right now, more Sudanese and Liberian people
are coming into Melbourne. Eritrean, Ethiopian and Somali migration has
slowed.
"Refugees get out here," Abdulwahab says. "Fitzroy flats maybe. Then blam!
What next? Where to? The story goes on and on and on."
That's his days: trouble and trying to help.
Then at night, Abdulwahab fronts a hip-hop band called Diafrix, which has a
record deal with Mushroom. The band goes on big tours and this year made
debut album Concrete Jungle. "Work hard in the week and party at the
weekend," he says.
Last night, Diafrix won a reader-voted EG Award for Melbourne's best new
artist, beating the highly fancied rock band the Temper Trap. "I looked them
up," says Abdulwahab. "They're huge."
He says his two jobs are not as different as they seem. He's a rapper (one
of a duo in Diafrix - with Momo, who is also African), which means his role
is to tell stories and narrate the goings-on of the people he meets and
things he sees.
A lot of Diafrix's songs are political, so he can rap about public housing,
detention centres and racism. His day job filters into the night.
Working with Africans and being black, he says he sees Melbourne's racist
underbelly daily: cold shoulders and assumptions, people not looking others
in the eye and - this is the common one - people locking the doors of their
car when he pulls up beside them at a red light (even though, he says, a lot
of the time "my car is better than theirs").
He's also big on being a role model through music as well as youth work. The
kids he knows look up to him more, he says, because he is a rapper and in
magazines and on television, so he avoids the rap stereotypes: the gangster
poses and conspicuous wealth.
"There's so much wrong with that. It's hard to find real hip hop," he says.
"So many rappers talk bullshit and so few talk about real things, you feel
me?" He says he learnt about this way of thinking from fellow Melbourne
rapper Joel Ma, from the band TZU, who held hip-hop workshops in Footscray
where Abdulwahab and Momo first met.
And he says one reason he wanted to do community work - after doing VCE here
at 19, then tertiary study - was because when he first arrived with just
$200 to his name, he was helped by workers from places such as the Asylum
Seeker Resource Centre - and he realised the one-on-one stuff makes a
difference.
"My day job is to be a friend, that's all it really is," he says.
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