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A programme looking at the lifestyles of immigrants to New Zealand, their lives in their country of birth, and their impressions of New Zealand.
Programme Number: 67
Subject: Nabila Jaber
Roots: Lebanon
Producer: Eileen Cook
Nabila was born to Lebanese parents living in the Ivory Coast where they have a business. Although her parents were Muslim, she was sent to Catholic boarding school in Lebanon to learn Arabic and then to an American high school in Lebanon to learn English.
She talks about being Shi'ite Muslim in terms of her identity, but says she was not raised religiously, although since the war identity has become more important in Lebanon. She talks about Lebanon as a relatively modern Arab country for women, but life could be difficult if you were an unmarried woman past her early 20s. Premarital sex was frowned on.
At home, her family speak Arabic and French and she reads a poem in Arabic by a Lebanese poet and translates it.
She says she didn't think Islam played much of a role in her life until she married a Muslim man in America. They returned to Lebanon with plans that she would go back and finish her PhD, but he was pressured to make her behave as a more traditional Muslim wife and give up her studies and independance.
She was not able to reconcile with this and they eventually separated with her husband getting custody of their daughter, while she returned to America. Nabila later married an English sociologist and they now live in New Zealand, with a son who was born here.
She talks about her grief at being apart from her family in Lebanon although she now considers herself half-New Zealand.
Her PhD was on the role of women and Islamic reform and she now works in the field of feminist studies. She ends by discssing the role of women in New Zealand society and contrasts it with other countries in which she has lived.