5 Questions with Randa Abdel-Fattah
Randa Abdel-Fattah is an ARC Future Fellow at Macquarie University. Her research areas cover Islamophobia, race, Palestine, the war on terror, youth identities and social movement activism.
Dr Abdel-Fattah is also a former lawyer and the award-winning author of twelve books for children and young adults, which have been translated into over thirteen languages. She has won and been shortlisted and longlisted for awards including the Australian Book Industry Award, the Australian Book of The Year Award, the Victorian and NSW premiers’ literary awards, the Stella Prize, the Children’s Book Council Award, Middle East Outreach Council USA and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.
Her bilingual English and Arabic picture story book 11 Words for Love, illustrated by Maxine Beneba Clarke, was shortlisted for the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award.
No.1
Randa, you have published 12 award-winning books for children and young adults, a memorable one being Coming of Age in the War on Terror (2021). Why a novel now?
Art gave me the freedom to say the unsayable in a time of censorship and repression of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices. While I started writing Discipline in 2021, it morphed into a cautionary tale after October 2023, about the cost of silence and cowardice especially in public institutions and amongst people who often see themselves as ‘progressive’ and ‘leftist’.
No.2
In a Q&A attached to Discipline’s media release, you say that you had been inspired by a call by artist and decolonial theorist Nitasha Dhillon for “art to be training in the practice of freedom”, which is also the title of her essay in a 2015 issue of The Brooklyn Rail. In a time where freedom of expression is openly under attack in so-called Australia, what does that mean for you?
I think Dhillon’s call beautifully captures the potential for art to tell the stories of our broken world but also imagine and inspire us to be in the world differently in the present, rather than delaying our ideals and hopes to an imagined future. I relished every word of Dhillon’s article. It pushed my thinking about protest writing and rebuked those who insist on distinguishing between art and activism. Dhillon argues that “the artist is an organiser” and never have I felt so seen. My writing practice is not separate from me asking questions of myself and my reader about the world we live in and how we want to go through it. In this sense I am inspired by Dhillon’s call to create art that “unleash[es] powers of direct action and radical imagination.”
No.3
Discipline follows two key characters, Ashraf and Hannah, an academic and journalist respectively, who find themselves reckoning with their choices as Israel’s attack on Gaza intensifies in May 2021. Lately I have been thinking of how jobs are also referred to as “occupations”, which feels resonant here. How did you come up with these two characters, and how do you think you brought them to life in the novel?
I love that observation. Occupations rely on control, surveillance, governmentality and indeed both Ashraf and Hannah are denied agency and freedom within the respective institutions in which they work and expected to internalise the repressive expectations of their workplaces, regulating their language, commitments, affinities, and self-censoring.
The book initially had a much larger ensemble cast of alternating characters, but after October 2023 I decided to narrow the focus down to two of the most repressive and contested institutional sites—academia and the media—and focus on Hannah, a young diaspora Palestinian, and Ashraf, a jaded, morally compromised academic, as the two key protagonists.
No.4
During this time of new McCarthyism, where traditional institutions and legacy media collude with state actors to suppress freedom of speech, feelings such as fear, paranoia and shame might affect the process of art-making—even unconsciously. What do you think we might lose collectively when our art is affected by fear and paranoia? Further, what would you say to artists and academics who are struggling with self-censorship?
At a time of intense censorship and repression, the duty of artists to resist, raise the ceiling, [and to] make defiant, subversive art is greater. Art that conforms to cultures of repression is not neutral. It becomes a tool for reinforcing the status quo, an instrument and extension of state power.
The first consequence of making such ‘art’ is that it diminishes the artist. Artists who surrender their creativity, rebellion and independence might enjoy commercial success, but they expose themselves as state agents. It’s true that self-respect isn’t everybody’s priority! But then they cannot be surprised if they are treated as objects of ridicule and derision. I have no sympathy for artists who allow their art to be a means to launder state power in a time of genocide. Art is inherently rebellious in demanding people liberate themselves from all kinds of chains. That call is never so important in this time of live-streamed genocide.
No.5
You are an activist as well. There is often talk of the personal being political, but to me it seems more apt that the political is personal, which I see throughout your work. Can you speak more to this?
I wanted to illuminate the violence of demanding that people demarcate global systems and structures from the banal, quotidian spaces of their everyday lives and workplaces. Gaza has exposed it all now. That what we eat, drink, play and work with, invest in, consume, etc—it’s all implicated in a military-industrial-surveillance-technology industry that is right now sponsoring genocide.
My book is set in May 2021, when Palestinians faced profound gaslighting at even using the words “apartheid” or “settler-colonialism”. Through Ashraf and Hannah’s stories, I wanted to show the entanglement between their personal lives and the political forces that work against us all.
Find Out More
Sydney, May 2021. Ashraf is an academic whose career and personal life are in freefall. Hannah is a young journalist struggling to honour the voices of her community. When a Year 12 student from a local Islamic college is arrested for protesting a university’s ties to an Israeli weapons manufacturer, Ashraf sees an opportunity to exploit his personal connection to the situation for professional redemption. Meanwhile Hannah, who is juggling the demands of new motherhood and family trauma, fights racism in the newsroom. As Israel’s bombardment of Gaza intensifies into the final weeks of Ramadan, Ashraf and Hannah must reckon with their choices, values and places in their communities. Will they be prepared to make sacrifices in the pursuit of what is right?
With a focus on two of today’s most contested fields, academia and the media, Discipline tallies the price we all pay when those with privilege choose to remain silent.
Get it from UQP here.