Patriarchy has taken so much from women … it chips away at our confidence and muffles our voices … Those of us who rely on religion or spirituality to navigate these challenges do not want to be told that we should also let patriarchy take our faith. It is underscored by her position as a devout Muslim woman, who embraced the hijab after her mother’s murder and found comfort in the esoteric Shi’ite Muslim tradition: This right to fury or talking back through the page is a mainstay of feminist and post-colonial literature and it informs Haydar’s feminist consciousness. Haydar links her personal tragedy to the myriad ways in which misogyny, patriarchy and racism hurt and harm, creating power dynamics within families that allow abuse to flourish. She is reclaiming a world that has stripped her of everything: her mother, her right to be angry, her voice, her complexity. Haydar dispatches each in turn, with an elegance that proves the most powerful a woman can be is when she is writing with cold fury. And so are Islamophobia, patriarchy, the lack of interest shown by extended family and community, and the prurient fetishisation of a ravenous media. It underwrites domestic abuse, a gender inequality crisis that sees, on average, one woman killed at the hands of her partner in Australia every nine days.Ĭlass, race, the politics of migration, and the intergenerational trauma of Salwa losing her own mother, who was killed in an Israeli drone attack in Lebanon in 2006, are exacerbating factors that Haydar unpicks with precision. According to experts, a history of coercive control is an even more important predictor of intimate partner homicide than a past history of physical violence. It can include verbal, economic and psychological abuse, not just sexual and physical violence. A term gaining traction in the public sphere, ‘coercive control’ describes a repeated pattern of control and domination in a domestic relationship. The beauty of her writing is in contrast to the coercive control she explores. This fury and power also animates The Mother Wound by Amani Haydar, an incandescent memoir of growing up in a home marked by coercive control, and of dealing with the psychological aftermath of losing her mother Salwa Haydar, who was stabbed to death by her father in their Bexley home in 2015.ĭespite the horrific subject matter, Haydar, a visual artist who was an Archibald Prize finalist, writes poetically, furiously, illuminating her world as vividly as she does in her art practice. It is the fury in the author’s biography that finds a salve in words and helps us feel her characters’ realities coming up against the brute force of a society that discriminates against them. It was this raw and unleashed quality I found most thrilling: the breaks in consciousness where the narrator addresses the reader and reminds her that there is politics even in fiction. It is precisely the fury that animates Brontë’s work that lights a spark with readers. But on the fury aspect, I would respectfully disagree. Woolf’s thesis – that the architecture of arts favoured the wealthy, monied, leisure class, chiefly men, leaving women the subjects rather than the writers of the stories that dominated culture – can be extended to writers of colour today, who exist in similar disadvantage to the status quo. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely … She is at war with her lot. She will write in rage where she should write calmly. If one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Woolf remarks that Brontë had more genius than Jane Austen, but her works, Women feel just as men feel they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation precisely as men would suffer. I could not help it the restlessness was in my nature it agitated me to pain sometimes… In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf argues that fury deforms fiction, referring to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and the rageful monologues that interrupt the novel:
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