AustLit

'Friday is always the best day at Adam's house. It's doughnut day!

'But this week, his family is fasting for Ramadan. They aren't going to eat or drink until the sun sets.

'Adam wants to fast too, but it's so hard. Can he wait that long for his very special doughnut?' (Publication summary)

'The act of writing from lived experience as a trauma survivor involves making choices beyond the literary and political decisions a writer ordinarily makes. It carries added risks and can have emotional, psychological and practical consequences for the writer. This is particularly so for survivors from racialised communities. In writing my memoir The Mother Wound, which is about losing my mum in an act of domestic violence perpetrated by my father in 2015, it felt important that I tell my story in a nuanced way, resisting self-tokenisation, stereotypes, and sensationalism. There were considerations around mitigating harm without compromising truth, contextualising personal struggles within political realities, and understanding where my work sat within broader conversations about gender-based violence, #metoo and domestic abuse in Australia. Understanding the effects of trauma and building a trauma-informed approach into my writing practice has allowed me to navigate some of these risks and foster a writing practice that facilitates personal healing despite the risk of re-traumatisation.' (Introduction)

''I am from a family of strong women.'

'Amani Haydar 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 mothered) was shaped by this devastating murder.

'After her mother's death, Amani began reassessing everything she knew of her parents' relationship. They had been so unhappy for so long - should she have known that it would end like this? A lawyer by profession, she also saw the holes in the justice system for addressing and combating emotional abuse and coercive control.

'Amani also had to reckon with the weight of familial and cultural context. Her parents were brought together in an arranged marriage, her mother thirteen years her father's junior. Her grandmother was brutally killed in the 2006 war in Lebanon, adding complex layers of intergenerational trauma.

'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.' (Publication summary)