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In the last year, I’ve taken back the rights to my non-fiction books. I decided that I would release them all again – updated and connected by cover art. While each work has a particular focus, they are interconnected. Each book has my own story, experiences and explorations as the central thread. And each book has Palestine in it – a living, breathing world and its people.
In this episode, writer Amal Awad talks about the importance of understanding when a project or pathway is no longer sustainable, discussing when you might decide to call it quits on something you once thought was a good idea. Also discussed is the importance of knowing when to take a break, as opposed to walking away altogether.
Powerful thighs. Golden eyes. Black robes. Swords. And fury. In romance fiction, it is not enough to have a set of muscle-toned thighs. They must also be powerful. Eyes cannot be brown, they must glow with the fire of a thousand suns. This is the world of desert dreaming. Of thinly disguised oil-rich kingdoms. Of exotic romance with the bad boys of the Arab world—ridiculously good-looking men with more money than sense.
In 2019, I was invited to present a love letter to a book at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Nawal El Saadawi’s seminal creative non-fiction book, Woman at Point Zero, edged out any competition. No other book I have read, which centres a flawed but authentic heroine, has affected me as deeply, a fact that played into my own understanding of how we talk about women, their issues and the cultural differences that influence how these manifest. I cannot dilute the significance of the book’s exploration of an Arab woman’s life. This is a book that did not just point out injustice, it ripped it apart, exposing the bones of our broken humanity.
It was a random post on social media, but it unexpectedly moved me: a woman asking, for research purposes, what is something your mother can do that you cannot? There are many in my case, but my instant response was: I can’t cook like my mother. Soon followed a deeper realisation: I wish I could cook like my mother. I am a Third Culture Kid, belonging everywhere and nowhere, proficient in Arab- lish (that odd combination of Arabic and English that forms a new word). As an adult, I take some strange pleasure in this lack of belonging, and yet the moment I return to my parents’ house and smell the aroma of Arabic food, I feel like I am home.
Popular culture —particularly film and TV—struggle to portray fictional worlds that reflect the diversity of the real one. In the push for more diverse storytelling, however, the task is not simply to tick boxes and represent minorities, but to normalise. More minority storytellers delivers a diversity of rich storytelling that goes beyond stereotypes and trauma tales.
It was a couple of years after September 11. But the Australian media had its Muslim spokespeople, and I had no desire to be a mouthpiece in this excruciating moment. So in my debut mainstream piece, I didn’t write about being Muslim in an increasingly Islamophobic world. I wrote of my struggles to transform the high of graduating with a challenging degree into a meaningful career, one where the pile of rejection letters grew so thick I went from paper clip to bulldog.
Ordinary life for minorities is a constant stream of, ‘Yeah, but …’ We are question marks, worries to be flagged. I have tried for many years to focus on a way forward. I loathe the idea of Muslims, or anyone from a minority, feeling that their worth is tied solely to whether or not they are a threat, to how they can peacefully present themselves to a society that doesn’t go to any pains to disguise its hatred. But sometimes this feels like an impossible task.
Growing up as part of an ethnic minority group in any society has its challenges. But it’s difficult to imagine the backlash those in Muslim communities have endured and continue to face in the wake of terror attacks carried out by Islamic groups. In her book, Beyond Veiled Clichés, Muslim Australian author Amal Awad focuses on the lives of Arab women, revealing the similarities and differences of their daily experiences.
