I am Amani Haydar. My mother was murdered by my father. My grandmother was murdered by the Israelis: Même combat.(Some quick thoughts around Amani Haydar, The Mother Wound, Sydney: Macmillan, 2021.)

This book was distributed to bookshops yesterday. I already knew what it was about and I’ve been waiting for it. I think I was the first person to purchase a copy at my local bookshop, Gleebooks, yesterday. It was still in a box at the back and I had to wait for them to open the box for me. I started reading it in the afternoon and finished it at 3.00 am that night. I was going to start writing my comments there and then but thought I’d better sleep on it so I can write something just a little bit more coherent than an after midnight rave.

Like many in Sydney, I had followed the media’s coverage of the murder of Amani’s mother, Salwa, by her father. I was perhaps more interested than others because I had met Salwa in Sydney previously when organizing ways of commemorating the many victims of Israel’s failed, but destructive and murderous, attempt to subdue Hizbollah in 2006. Salwa’s mother, Amani’s grandmother, Layla was killed (indeed, obliterated) by an Israeli criminal bombing that targeted a car convoy of civilian escaping their village. But I didn’t know about the significance of the loss to Amani herself until I became aware of her activism, writing and artwork. Her portrait of herself holding a photo of her mum holding a photo of her mum was an Archibald Prize Finalist in 2018.

 

But what made me most eager to want to read it were two questions before all else. The first was: what kind of authorship and what kind of writing is needed to overcome the difficulty of writing a book about male domestic violence centred around your father murdering your mother? In my mind this could only be a kind of heroic writing that I was eager to read. The second question was: How do you write critically about patriarchy within an Arab Muslim setting, in a book destined for the general public, knowing that, no matter how you write, your words will be mauled and disfigured by the Islamophobic hyenas. I knew that Amani was up to the task. I have read some of her previous writing. So, I wasn’t asking myself whether she could or not. I just wanted to learn more about how she has done it. But already, by telling you that I was up well past midnight finishing the book, I guess I have already told you that I was far from being disappointed. This is indeed a heroically and subtly written book, full of insightful gems, that everyone must read.

 

First all, the book is very well crafted. One feels throughout that the writing, in the sense of the kind of words used and the modes of constructing sentences and paragraphs, is exactly the right kind required to express something as painful and psychologically demanding. It allows the author both the needed proximity and the equally needed distance. But the book is also well-crafted in the sense of it being a story that is exceptionally well-told. I am not sure if it is a suitable term to use when dealing with such serious, and seriously gutting and heart-wrenching, subject matters, but parts of the book do read like a thriller. It makes you eager to turn the next page to know what happens next even when you know what ultimately was going to happen next. Amani uses writing devices that also make the description of the court proceedings a page-turner. Perhaps the fact that she is a trained lawyer helped here. And she also introduces a testimony with a ‘secret’ referred to as ‘the thing’ that makes us eagerly await page after page to know what it is. I am not sure if Amani uses ‘the thing’ here with an awareness of the psychoanalytic genealogy of the term, but what is exceptional, and particularly powerful feat of writing, is how ‘the thing’ ends up being articulated around a critique of what is accepted as evidence of abuse in the court of law. And at the end of the book, when you think the story has been told and it is time to wrap up the text is augmented with exceptionally insightful commentary about storytelling that gives the book a certain raison d’être that is well beyond the individual and the therapeutic: ‘The best story telling is that which builds a community and it is, in turn, a communal responsibility to make the space – in courtrooms, media, schools, society – safer for stories. That way, victims know that they are welcome and supported to reclaim their narrative and thereby reclaim their world.’

 

As a tale concerned with male sexuality, patriarchy and migration, a topic I have dealt with in my academic work, I found the story of her father’s gradual loss of control speaking to two issues I have often encountered in my fieldwork. To what extent they help think the case of Amani’s father is not for me to decide but I can say that reading about what she described helped me to further think through the way I theorised the cases I am studying:

 

First, the loss of patriarchal control is experienced not merely as a loss of power but a disintegration of a primal patriarchal fantasy of being mothered, whereby the role of the mother (and later the wife also imagined within this fantasy as having the task of mothering her husband) is to create a space of absolute mothering: where everything and everyone around the male exists to service their needs. A particularly patriarchal mode of imagining ‘heaven on earth’. Because it is a fantasy space of absolute control it becomes so emotionally charged that any minor disruption, any minor moment when a woman looks the ‘wrong’ way or does the ‘wrong’ thing is experienced as disastrous and a threat to one’s primary well-being.

 

Second, in the cases I have examined, the patriarchal fear is not just a fear of losing control. What is most unbearable is seeing those whom you previously controlled flourish and leave you behind, socially stuck and unable to move along as successfully yourself: not only is my wife doing better than she was doing when she was under my thumb, but she is actually doing much better (getting better jobs, more education, networks, etc.) than I can ever do myself. It is a patriarchy-in-decline jealousy born out of comparative existential mobility. I thought I could see elements of this process in Amani’s story.

 

One of the most original aspects of the book is the way Amani articulates the killing of her grandmother by the Israeli army and her mother by her father (both with claims of being injured parties on the defensive). Amani explicitly shows herself to be aware of the importance of intersectional thinking to better understand the articulation of patriarchy, race and class in the way domestic violence among immigrants works. But in the way she articulates the killing of her grandmother by the Israelis and the killing of her mother and the working of the justice system in Australia, she seems to be pointing to another intersectionality, an intersectionality between different forms of patriarchy that operate at a family, social/national and international/colonial level. 

 

I thought that the book dealt exceptionally well with the question of the universality and cultural specificity of these patriarchal processes and particularly the question of patriarchal violence. For it is always easy to think that one has to choose here. Is this about Muslim patriarchy or is it about patriarchy, tout court? My anthropology tells me that any choice would be a false choice. The task is always to continually fluctuate between degrees of universality, or at least generality, and degrees of specificity. To say that the book is about Muslim patriarchy without making an effort to see in what way it is about patriarchy in general would be a mistake. But it would be equally a mistake if one deals with patriarchy as a general category and ignoring it culturally specific forms. This always has political consequences.

 

For if it is true that racists have used the patriarchy of the other as a way of getting away with their racism, it is also true that sexists have used the racism of the other as a way of getting away with their sexism. As Amani puts it: ‘Such is the double-bind Muslim women survivors and activists find ourselves in. Between the screeches of Islamophobes and the booming voice of patriarchy within our own community, there is little room left for Muslim women to share their truths.’ She does an excellent job at finding some room and working within it but she also more than amply shows how this ‘double-bind’ is constructed. Indeed, the way her father’s lawyers organise his defence offers a rather breathtaking exemplification of this mobilisation of cultural specificity in the defence of patriarchy. But Amani herself is quite aware how important cultural specificity is but she is also aware of the limits, and necessity to limit, the work of cultural specificity. As a male, I could easily say this book is not about me. It is about Muslim males from a rural background. I am an urban cosmopolitan Christian Lebanese. I would be right to a certain extent but there will be a point where I would be using cultural specificity as a defence mechanism to stop myself from reflecting on my own sexism. It would stop me from asking, for example, a question that I need to ask myself: in what way does my short temper and occasional explosions of anger in continuity with the kind of male violence analysed in the book. Where does my anger and my mode of expressing it position me on the patriarchal spectrum, as it were? and how do I work critically on myself to continue to minimise the anger itself, rather than minimise its importance?

 

Without essentialising (as she is clearly blessed with an exceptionally wonderful male partner), Amani clearly wants to address all men: ‘I’m cynical about men. That’s not my fault: it’s theirs’.

 

The least we males could do is read her. So go, and pick up your copy… now… and make your COVID lockdown useful to help you thrive, flourish and become a better person.