In 2021, when Randa Abdel-Fattah began working on her latest novel, Discipline, she questioned whether a story about state violence, the right to protest and the racialisation of Arab youth in Australia would resonate.
Suspicion of Arab communities – particularly young Muslim men – in media and political commentary had been potent in the years after 9/11 and had formed the subject of her academic research (and her 2022 nonfiction book Coming of Age in the War on Terror) – but, she says, the issue seemed to have “fallen off the radar”. She wondered whether people still thought it was a problem deserving of attention, and even emailed her publisher in September 2023 to ask if it believed there was a market for the novel.
“Then October happened and, honestly, fiction could not keep up with fact,” she says.
Watching the genocide unfold in Gaza after the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 left Abdel-Fattah creatively paralysed. As the relentless, live-streamed bombardment continued, the book was put on hold. But as the days and months rolled on, crackdowns on protests, freedom of speech and political expression gave her impetus to revive the work, and it morphed into a tale with profound new resonance in a nation where pro-Palestinian sentiment is being fought privately, and publicly, like never before.
“It just all poured out,” Abdel-Fattah says. “I deliberately decided that I would just focus on academia and media as the two most contested sites where this censorship was happening.”
Abdel-Fattah has personal experience in both contested sites. In February a $830,000 Australian Research Council Future Fellowship grant she was using to create a digital archive of Arab activism in Australia since the 1970s was suspended after sustained criticism from some Jewish groups, the Coalition and media outlets. An investigation into the use of the grant remains ongoing, with a decision due later this year.
And earlier this month she withdrew from Bendigo writers’ festival – where she had been invited to speak about Discipline – after a code of conduct was issued directing panellists to “avoid language or topics that could be considered inflammatory, divisive, or disrespectful”. Speakers appearing on panels presented by La Trobe University were also told they must adhere to La Trobe University’s anti-racism plan, which contains a contentious definition of antisemitism.
Abdel-Fattah was one of the first writers to withdraw from Bendigo, citing censorship concerns; within days, 53 participants had pulled out, resulting in a third of the program being cancelled.
Discipline is set in Sydney during Ramadan 2021, a period when Israeli strikes on Gaza killed close to 300 people. It follows the intersecting lives of Hannah, a young newspaper journalist, and Ashraf, an academic, after the arrest of a student from a local Islamic school who is charged with terrorism offences after protesting against an Israeli weapons manufacturer. Discipline charts the different ways the two navigate censorship and the toll it takes on them.
Abdel-Fattah wanted to “explore the idea of accountability – and that’s why I set it in May 2021, during Israel’s assault on Gaza”. If people had confronted the brutality of occupation and subjugation of Palestinians five years ago, she asks, “would we be in this moment now?”
The novel is sprinkled with references to recent and historical events, and real people and places. Characters discuss Muna and Mohammed el-Kurd’s fight against displacement from their family home in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem, Israel’s Dahiya doctrine, and conditions at the Ein El Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon, created in 1948. For those who have followed Israel’s decades-long illegal occupation of Palestine, the context – which many have pointed out has been lacking in media – is refreshing; for newcomers, it will be educational.
The story, however, is uniquely of western Sydney. It pokes fun at the haphazard and inconsistent responses from Muslim organisations responding to media crises, and gives voice to the conflicting emotions felt by Arab Australians encountering their lives through “a lenticular lens” when witnessing the destruction of their homelands – moments of levity and frivolity butted up against brutality, violence and injustice.
Abdel-Fattah does not hesitate when asked who the intended audience is. “I was writing it for my community,” she says. “I felt like this was my way to validate all the private messages and angst.” Unlike some of her previous young adult novels, which she concedes sought to appeal to white audiences, Abdel-Fattah says, “I have no interest in that white gaze any more.”
To build Hannah’s world, she drew on the real experiences of journalists who confided to her their stories about racism and prejudice in Australian newsrooms, and their own encounters with censorship and apathy towards Palestine. At one point Hannah pitches a story about the domestic impact of Israel’s bombings on the Muslim diaspora and colleagues respond with vacant stares and furrowed brows. “Ignore it all during the cold violence of occupation and siege. But during the hot violence of bombs, wasn’t this the time to check in, ask how she was doing?” Hannah thinks.
Abdel-Fattah also drew on her own experiences in academia and universities. “I wrote the book when I was myself being subjected to a lot of censorship and repression, and in a way, it was therapeutic,” she says.
While she considers herself a writer first and foremost – because of the joy and catharsis it brings – it’s her activism and criticism of Zionism that has earned her powerful enemies and kept her name in the headlines over the last two years.
Of the controversy at Bendigo, she says, “the irony is hilarious” – but the wave of support she experienced from fellow writers who also withdrew suggests there has been a shift, at least within the artistic community.
“Bendigo felt like a turning point in terms of solidarity,” she says. “I didn’t ask anybody to withdraw … There was this momentum of people withdrawing of their own volition.”
Abdel-Fattah wants all those who have not spoken up against the injustices inflicted on Palestine to confront the “violence of their silence”. The opening page of Discipline states: “I humbly dedicate this book to all the Palestinian academics and journalists killed in Gaza who would be alive now if academics and journalists in the West had spoken and acted when they had the chance.”
Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah is out on 2 September (UQP)
