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 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.
