Editor’s Note: This conversation includes discussion of family violence.

‘We’ve got an ongoing conversation happening about violence against women in Australia, and I felt that it was important to contribute what I had learnt from my perspective as a Muslim woman, as an Arab woman, as a daughter of someone who was murdered, and as someone who had a legal background, to that conversation.’

Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings First Book Club. For July that debut is The Mother Wound by Amani Haydar, out now from Pan Macmillan.

Amani suffered the unimaginable when she lost her mother in a brutal act of domestic violence perpetrated by her father. Five months pregnant at the time, her own perception of how she wanted to mother (and how she had been mothered) was shaped by this devastating murder.

Writing with grace and beauty, Amani has drawn from this a story of female resilience and the role of motherhood in the home and in the world. In The Mother Wound, she uses her own strength to help other survivors find their voices.

First Book Club host Ellen Cregan spoke with Amani about the book and the experience of writing it.

Our theme song is Broke for Free’s ‘Something Elated’. Sound production by Lloyd Pratt.

1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) offers confidential information, counselling and support services and is open 24 hours to support people impacted by sexual assault, domestic or family violence and abuse.

Further reading:

Read Ellen Cregan’s review of The Mother Wound in our July Books Roundup.

Read about Amani’s favourite books and reading habits in this month’s Shelf Reflection.

The Mother Wound is available now from your local independent bookseller.

Stream or subscribe: Apple Podcasts / Soundcloud / Google Podcasts / Spotify / Other (RSS)

Let us know what you think by rating and reviewing in your app of choice!

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TRANSCRIPT

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Alice Cottrell: Welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings Podcast. I’m KYD publisher Alice Cottrell, and today I’ll be bringing you our July First Book Club interview. Our pick this month is The Mother Wound by Amani Haydar, out now from Pan Macmillan. Amani suffered the unimaginable when she lost her mother in a brutal act of domestic violence perpetrated by her father. Five months pregnant at the time, her own perception of how she wanted to mother and how she had been mothered was shaped by this devastating murder. This memoir is a story of domestic violence, female resilience and the role of motherhood in the home and in the world. First Book Club host Ellen Cregan spoke with Amani to ask her about the book. Please note that this interview contains discussions of family violence, and may not be suitable for all listeners.

Ellen Cregan: Hi Amani, thanks very much for joining me today.

Amani Haydar: Thank you Ellen, I’m excited to be speaking with you.

Ellen Cregan: All right. We’re going to get started with a reading from the book. So if you want to go ahead, that would be lovely.

Amani Haydar: Okay.

*

A clock hung on the wall in the birthing suite at Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital. I heard it pulse above my head, above the beeps, above the gurgle of the gas, above the cooing midwives.

I had opted for morphine instead of an epidural. I felt the sting of a needle sinking into my bare thigh. It surprised me that I could detect this among the other pains; the rising rumble and thrust of each contraction, the tug of a canula here, catheter there. There were waves of nausea, hot skin stretching and the dull force of baby grinding against bone.

Another pain, the unspeakable one, was present too. But the grief had to be held tightly, quietly. At least until my child was born.

I was falling asleep or passing out between contractions. Sweating and heaving through them. In my mind I began listing all the things that expand and contract; muscles, wombs, pregnant bodies, fruit when it grows and rots, concrete slabs, glass, metal, every molecule, and all the stars in the sky. Then silently called upon Al-Qabid, Al-Basit. The One who contracts, the One who expands.

An obstetrician in a white jacket appeared at the foot of my bed. I watched her mouth open and shut as she explained that she needed to take a blood sample from my baby’s scalp. It would indicate whether the baby was in distress.

I glanced up at the time and then down at my belly, which was swollen, almost translucent under the fluorescent lights. I had been in labour for eleven hours. Midwives in navy-blue scrubs shuffled around the room. Their shapes moved and voices spoke in short, quick strokes, as though there was an emergency.

The obstetrician asked me to hold still through a contraction while she found the baby’s head with a piece of equipment I couldn’t name or see.

‘You mustn’t push, no matter how strong the contraction is,’ she said.

I nodded.

A kind senior midwife with a pixie cut sat beside me and chanted, ‘Breathe in—hold—breathe out—good girl.’

My husband peered over her shoulder with furrowed brows.

Within minutes the obstetrician announced, ‘Baby is not happy. You’ve got to start pushing. If you don’t deliver soon, we’ll have to perform a caesarean.’

‘Okay, yep.’ I huffed as another contraction surged.

‘Push!’ the senior midwife instructed.

I knew what I had to do but my arms were numb from gripping the metal bars of the bedhead. Grief mingled with physical pain at the crest of each contraction. I wanted to take it all back. I wanted to tell them I wasn’t ready. That I was too sad to push.

Al-Qabid, Al-Basit, Al-Qabid, Al-Basit.

With every contraction, the room melted away and I was in a rectangular grave, at first only large enough to hold a person. Earth had been scraped away to reveal four walls, striped layers of sediment.

‘Breathe in.’

I breathed in and the grave swelled into a cave, expanding, like a lung made of brown soil, like a uterus, its walls wet with mud.

I was in it and it was in me.

‘Breathe out.’

I breathed out and the walls collapsed inwards, pulling me back into my sticky skin. My pillow and tee-shirt were damp with sweat.

‘Okay, now again.’

Pain burned through every muscle, but it felt like someone else’s. Like my ruh had exited my body and was lying down beside it.

‘Push, push, push! Almost there!’ sang a second midwife in a navy-blue hijab, her face drifting in and out of focus.

Al-Qabid, Al-Basit, Al-Qabid, Al-Basit.

Relief arrived in three abrupt stages; the head, then the shoulders, then the warm gush of placenta. The midwife in the blue hijab placed a slippery baby on my chest.

‘Oh my God, oh my God!’ I laugh-cried out loud.

A dark-eyed child stared up at me, blinking, gulping, already trying to nibble at my skin. I didn’t think to ask if it a was a boy or girl until someone said, ‘Don’t you want to know? It’s a girl!’

She was bigger and heavier and more purple than I expected, puffy from the vacuum suction that had helped her out. The hair on her head was thick and black but her eyebrows were faint and sparse. She stretched out her spindly fingers then rolled them into little fists before letting out a cry. My husband leaned in and whispered adhan in her ear, bearing witness, ‘Ash-hadu an la illaha illaAllah’, as I searched her face for traces of my mother.

‘You did so well!’ Moey beamed, rubbing my shoulder.

‘Everything hurts.’ I smiled back.

The obstetrician in the white coat was still at the foot of my bed. ‘We’ll let Daddy hold her now. You’ll need some stitches,’ she said.

I sipped laughing gas and watched Moey rock our wailing baby back and forth on the other side of the room while my wounds were stitched shut. I counted nine needle-pricks. There was a little pain, the kind that didn’t matter at all.

As I lay there exhausted but relieved and a little high, the senior midwife returned to the edge of my bed and asked, ‘So, where is your mother?’

My neck I stiffened and I felt myself returning to my body. She had not read my file.

‘She was murdered in March by my father,’ I answered.

The midwife’s smile flattened, and her eyes widened. She patted my thigh and said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, darling.’

‘Thank you,’ I replied, grateful for the acknowledgement. ‘I am so happy to have a daughter. I am from a family of strong women.’

*

Ellen Cregan: Thank you so much, Amani, that was beautiful.

Amani Haydar: Oh, thank you.

Ellen Cregan: I think this is just such a powerful and perfect opening to this book, and it really captures the sort of interplay between the pain and the grief and also a lot of beauty that is throughout the whole book. So, yeah, I just loved that. Thank you.

Amani Haydar: Thank you so much.

Ellen Cregan: So, for those who haven’t read your book yet, can you give a bit of a summary?

Amani Haydar: Yeah. So The Mother Wound is the story of losing my mum to domestic violence in 2015. But it’s also the story of losing my grandmother in war in 2006. And she was killed by an Israeli drone in south Lebanon during the 30 day war that happened in 2006. And in experiencing the grief around my mum’s murder, I found myself revisiting the grief around the loss of my grandmother. And I was five months pregnant when my mum was murdered. And that got me thinking about the next generation too, and how do we block all this pain and this grief and this violence from being transmitted to the next generation. And how do we kind of heal not just on a personal level, but globally?

Ellen Cregan: So you have told your mum’s and your grandma’s story before, in, in media and through your visual art—why did you decide that now was the time to get it down in a book?

Amani Haydar: I actually decided a while back that I needed to write the whole story. When I was preparing to face my dad at his murder trial, I was contemplating what I would say in my victim impact statement. And a victim impact statement is quite short, and has certain rules that you have to follow. And although that was an empowering experience, reading it out in court, I felt like there was so much left to say, and there were so many nuances and details from my mum’s life that had been missed in the trial. So early on, before I was advocating publicly, before I was, you know, making art to share with the public about my stories, I was already thinking in terms of writing that story and capturing those things that hadn’t been part of the public conversation yet. So it kind of then evolved as I started to think about it more and more. And as I started to process more of my emotions, I could see it coming together as a book. And ultimately, when I had the opportunity to do that, I was like, yes, I think this needs to be done. And, you know, we’ve we’ve got an ongoing conversation happening about violence against women in Australia, and I felt that it was important to contribute what I had learnt from my perspective as a Muslim woman, as an Arab woman, as a daughter of someone who was murdered, and as someone who had a legal background, to that conversation and, you know, offer that knowledge to the public and to whoever was sort of interested in learning from it.

Ellen Cregan: And I think as, as you’re saying, a victim impact statement is a really short kind of chance to say your piece. But victim impact is something that goes so far beyond what you can fit in that sort of limited statement. And I think this book is a really, as a whole, is a really—it’s kind of a victim impact statement itself, but it looks into, as you say, the intergenerational nature of trauma and stress and violence. And then also you go in with sources and kind of get a chance to explain that more. So, yeah, it’s interesting to hear that it kind of, you know, began with that victim impact statement in the legal sense.

Amani Haydar: Yeah, it’s it’s almost—yeah, like you said, an extended version of that victim impact statement, and an extended version of all the previous work that I’ve done.

Ellen Cregan: So throughout the book, you use a lot of primary sources that are from your own life, you go back and look at the court documents from the, from the trial, and you also look back at articles about your grandmother’s death and interviews that your mother gave at the time. What was it like to sort of revisit these documents and media in terms of memory? Did, did the things that you found match up with your memory of those quite traumatic times?

Amani Haydar: Overall, yes. I had kept sources about my grandmother’s death for, you know, a reason that I couldn’t quite put my finger on at the time, but I was very grateful (Laughs) to my past self for being so good at documenting things, and for keeping a diary, for example, throughout my dad’s trial and for, you know, having…that sort of foresight that comes in handy when you’re writing and you’re trying to reconstruct things. But there are obviously gaps between what we remember on a day-to-day basis and what, you know, what we can find documenting things. And one of the most interesting ones for me was, giving evidence at my dad’s trial was such a traumatic experience, and a retraumatising experience. And it was confronting and I felt like a deer in headlights, and it felt like it went on for ages. And when I got the transcripts and I sat through and I looked at them, they have the timestamps for when I started and when I finished, and it turned out that I’d only been there as a witness for 25 minutes.

Ellen Cregan: Oh, wow.

Amani Haydar: And it had been such a overwhelming experience that that actually dominated my memory of the trial. It dominated my memory of that whole year, to be honest. And two years between the murder and the trial, it was as if nothing had happened. And it wasn’t until I went back and revisited the journal entries that I had done, the things that I’d made a note of in my diary that I was able to piece together that, you know, two years took place between this event and the eventual trial, and I have almost no recollection of them. But giving evidence really stood out in my memory. So it was a fascinating process, and actually helped me put into a chronology all of these things that had happened that had sort of become a little bit fragmented in my mind.

Ellen Cregan: It’s so interesting how trauma and events like this do tend to edit our memories, like cut things out, extend things much longer than they were. The human brain is very strange in that regard.

Amani Haydar: Yeah, definitely. And I think I mention in there that the two years had warped and stretched in between the murder and the trial. And that perception of time was something that I really felt I was constantly grappling with. And in my mind, things would, would kind of lose sense of order, time, space. And that can be so overwhelming when you’re trying to raise children, and get back into a sort of normal life after something so traumatic.

Ellen Cregan: And to come back to time, so this is quite a large story in terms of the time it takes place across. So it starts, you know, you tell really the story of your mother’s life and of your grandmother’s life, and then you go up through the trial. What was it like to manage such a big intergenerational story? Did you have Post-it notes everywhere or were you just kind of going from your own mind? How did you manage that?

Amani Haydar: I had Post-it notes. I had a file. (Both laugh) I had a binder where I had hole punched and put in all of the material that I felt would help me in the writing process. I was using Scrivener and I was also using a whiteboard (Laughs) to just mind map the things that I needed to talk about, work out the chronology, work out the themes that I needed to include and explore. And obviously, structurally, it was quite a big feat. And I was even I was a little bit, you know, naive going into it. And I was ended up being a bit surprised at how difficult it is to structure, to do that structural edit. But it kind of fell into place. And I think it was important to do that process because, like I said, a lot of it had seemed quite fragmented in my mind. And it wasn’t until I’d carefully put everything together and reworked it and worked through it again, that it fell into place in the way that I thought would be the best way to take the reader on that journey with me.

Ellen Cregan: There’s something that you talk about in the book, I think maybe a couple of times, where you’re talking about how a baby in the womb already has all of its eggs. So everything that your grandmother experienced while she was pregnant with your mother kind of went into, goes into your DNA. And I think that the structure of the book almost feels a little bit like that, like there’s always this shadow of what came before, and what came before that, that kind of layers up in the way that you do structure it, and the way that it kind of is chronological, but it does jump around a little bit. And I just thought about those two things next to each other while I was reading. I thought it was really, really well done.

Amani Haydar: Thank you so much. Yeah, it’s… That was such an important thing to get across. And when I first painted that self-portrait that was in the Archibald Prize in 2018, it was a similar message. And I wanted to echo that feeling in the book because it actually really dominated my experience of grief. When you’ve experienced violence on so many levels, and intergenerationally, it begins to feel inescapable. And I remember that feeling so clearly from the days after my mum’s death, and you know, reflecting on it after the funeral and thinking, oh my God, like there is—the odds are stacked against me, they’re stacked against my child. And, and that was terrifying. And I wanted to sort of reflect that in the work, but also create a sense of optimism that yes, perhaps we can go back to these little moments where harm was inflicted and and heal them gradually.

Ellen Cregan: And just to go back to—so you just mentioned then you are a painter and you’ve had painting, you, you had a painting in the Archibald Prize. Can you speak a bit about your practise as a visual artist and maybe what role the memory of your mum and your grandmother play in that work?

Amani Haydar: Yeah, I was—as I was writing, I read about how art plays a role in healing and reprocessing traumatic memory, and it’s interesting to me that I found it easier to communicate my experiences visually than I did to, at first, to communicate them in the written word—because the written word felt so black and white, it felt so literal, and I wasn’t in a place where I had processed everything that happened enough to be able to put it into words. So…my art has been a tool where I can start telling those stories in a safe way, where I can invite the public in and engage with people on that level, where things can be a little bit symbolic and where they can connect in a way that you can’t always put your finger on. And my mum and my grandmother are such a huge influence on that work, down to, you know, the aesthetic, the fact that I draw a lot of inspiration from old photos of my mum, the colours she used to wear, the songs we used to listen to as kids, the experience of visiting the village where my family originates, as someone who was born in Australia and a foreigner to that village, and finding so much connection there and how that influences the visual language that I use in my art. So they’re a sort of ever-present force in my creative work. And I don’t think I’ll ever sort of run out of inspiration because of that.

Ellen Cregan: And I think you’re…that sort of sentiment definitely comes through in your prose as well—like when you write about painting in the book, it’s just so beautiful and it jumps off the page, and as you say, like those elements from, from those parts of your life, like when you talk about the tiles in your grandmother’s kitchen in Lebanon, and how that kind of comes into your…into an artwork you’re working on. I really loved that, I thought that was really—it’s just so animated when you write about it in this book.

Amani Haydar: Thank you. I’m a very visual thinker, so—and it wasn’t until I started thinking of writing as something that is, that can also be quite visual, that I was able to sort of find my flow and my groove because I do like to think in pictures, and my favourite type of writing happens when I’m describing those pictures.

Ellen Cregan: Yeah, totally. So there’s a quote that I love in this book, towards the end. You say, ‘Between the screeches of Islamophobes and the booming voice of patriarchy within our own community, there’s little room left for Muslim women to share their truths freely.’ Can you speak about your experience of this quote, especially in relation to the how you were treated by the world around you after your mother’s murder?

Amani Haydar: Yeah. So after my mum’s murder, I lost a lot of sympathy from my dad’s side of the family, who were trying to piece back together the situation, who were trying to save face and save embarrassment and defend him, and all sorts of things that didn’t actually make any sense to me and still don’t. And at the same time, I saw little comments and remarks online from people who kind of turned my mum’s murder into a caricature and, you know, said things like, ‘oh, this was, this was a Muslim woman who didn’t pass the salt’, ‘this is the supposed religion of peace’, and all those tired stereotypes and tropes sort of emerged. And I immediately sensed a huge pressure, because I wanted to talk about what was happening and how it was affecting me, and I felt that the white gaze wasn’t giving me the space to do that in a way that was sensitive, in a way that was nuanced, and in a way that wouldn’t harm my community at the same time. So what I’m really getting at when I talk about the double-bind in the book that Muslim women face, is this lack of a space, and lack of a language and a lack of, you know, representation that allows us to confidently tell authentic stories. And I was at Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s book launch recently, for The Other Half of You, and he said something that I thought was really powerful. He said ‘true diversity is complexity’. And that really resonated with me, because we can’t have two-dimensional stories, we need to be able to explore, as storytellers and as writers, these really, really difficult, nuanced conversations. And only then will we be able to create space for more stories, and that would then, I think, flourish and allow other women, other Muslim women, and other women from marginalised experiences to be able to contribute their voice to ongoing conversations, and then to have that reflected at a higher level, not just in literature, but also in policy.

Ellen Cregan: Yeah, that, that’s so right. Like, when you have these issues in representation where there’s only one story that we’re seeing in a nuanced way in our media, then it also kind of falls on people from those marginalised communities to be almost a spokesperson for a whole world, when they are one person with their experiences and their specific life. And that is just not fair in any way.

Amani Haydar: Exactly. And also to reduce my mum’s experiences to ‘oh, that’s just another oppressed Muslim woman’, is so inaccurate because she navigated the complexity and barriers in her life in such a clever, strong and resourceful way. And I really want that to come across. And no two survivors have the exact same story, and that needs to be reflected in our storytelling.

Ellen Cregan: And your mum was an activist, too—she was working with women from non-English-speaking backgrounds to help them, like she was training to become a counsellor, wasn’t she?

Amani Haydar: Yeah. So my mum was a counsellor, she—after she had kids, she went to TAFE, she did a few courses, and at the time of the murder she was actually enrolled in university, in a social work degree at Western Sydney Uni. And she’d gone on to work both within the Arabic-speaking community and also on the Quitline at St Vincent’s Hospital, where she would provide drug and alcohol counselling to people. And that was sort of her passion. But she had advocated, after the loss of her mum, publicly about how that had affected her. She had been involved in radio interviews and things like that, about the work that she does in the—or that she did in harm minimisation and in community health. Yeah.

Ellen Cregan: Yeah, so, you know, those, I guess, quite extreme reactions after her murder, sort of trying to depict her as this two-dimensional person, they’re unfair but they’re also just incorrect.

Amani Haydar: Yeah, definitely. And they fell so short of providing a complete picture of her experience. And those, those stories are important because they’re informing the way that we advocate against DV. And it felt really important for me to also point out that she could name what was happening. She’d been trained to do that, and she could name gaslighting. And she’d describe my father as controlling, and other people couldn’t see it, but she could. And that’s such an important thing, because we’re starting to understand now the value of listening to women and believing their experiences of abuse.

Ellen Cregan: Absolutely. I have one more question for you, and it’s kind of a big one. (Both laugh) Um, so what impact do you hope your book is going to have on its readers?

Amani Haydar: I always think of this as a two-pronged question, because I imagine readers to be in sort of two groups. Firstly, for readers who are survivors of any kind of gender-based violence, I hope that they find some sort of empowerment, some sort of healing and some sort of hope in my writing, and a sense of solidarity. And for readers who haven’t had those experiences, but who are coming into the conversation wanting to know more and wanting to support change, then I hope that the book offers them a perspective that is new, one that they might not have considered previously, and one that inspires them to make those demands and to push for better safety for women.

Ellen Cregan: I think that is a brilliant answer. And actually, you’ve inspired me to ask one more question, so I lied.

Amani Haydar: (Laughs) Okay.

Ellen Cregan: Do you think you’re going to write another book? Do you have plans for your writing life? Is this it? Or can we look forward to seeing more writing from you?

Amani Haydar: I have plans to write another book. I would love to write fiction next.

Ellen Cregan: Yeah.

Amani Haydar: Telling your own story can sometimes feel like a burden and something that you’ve been carrying for a while. And once I was done, I was like, you know what? I think I can write about other things now, I’ve got so many stories to tell, and this is not just it.

Ellen Cregan: Well, that is a very exciting note to end on, I think.

Amani Haydar: Oh, thank you!

Ellen Cregan: Thank you so much for talking to me today, Amani. If you’re listening and you haven’t read this book, please go read it as soon as you possibly can. Borrow it from your library, buy it from your local bookshop, just read it. And yes, thank you again, Amani. It was lovely to talk to you.

Amani Haydar: Thank you so much, Ellen, it was a pleasure speaking with you.

Alice Cottrell: That was the July First Book Club edition of the Kill Your Darlings Podcast. We’ll be back soon, but while you’re waiting, you should drop in on the KYD website for new commentary, criticism, memoir, interviews and reviews. If you’re feeling inspired to write, then check out our wide range of online writing courses. Thanks for joining us, see you next time.

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