Finding voice and perspective when events leave us adrift
Working my way through what happened to Adelaide Writers Week
It’s been a couple of weeks now since the Adelaide Writers Festival, one of the most celebrated literary events in Australia, collapsed into chaos (and ultimately cancelled itself) after the board made a controversial call to drop Palestinian author and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah. Most of the board resigned, as did the festival director, Louise Adler, who made her thoughts clear in a passionate opinion piece for The Guardian. This led to an intense and continuing discussion around free speech, the definitions of hate speech, the role of the agitator, and the immense responsibilities of deciding who gets a voice in our culture.
I can’t go past such an important topic, so today I want to talk about the effect on us, as individual working writers, and how this incident has shaped my own thinking over the last few weeks. When events shock us as much as this one did, and hit so close to home, I believe it’s really important to get to a place of some kind of self-reconciliation in order to continue to be an effective contributor to any kind of cultural dialogue - and in regards to the trauma we’re witnessing right now, this seems almost impossible. And therefore, it’s extremely important that we talk about it.
In the early days of my substack, I wrote a piece about why I wasn’t speaking out about Gaza, which still reflects much of what I feel today. However, it’s been two years since I wrote that post. Two years of endless horror and suffering piped to us through screens (and if we’re behind the screen, we know we’re the lucky ones). I belong in the outer circle of witnesses to this genocide - i.e. those of us who can still carry on with our lives - and I feel an intense mixture of pain, anger, fear, helplessness, numbness and despair whenever I engage with what I see. It’s unimaginable to think how all those closer to the centre of the suffering endure their days.
But there are those trying to tell us, if we will listen.
When I heard that Abdel-Fattah had been disinvited from the Adelaide Writers Festival, I was appalled. I put my thoughts online, because if her fellow writers won’t defend another writer’s right to speak their truth and tell their story, who will? I felt it shouldn’t be left to only established voices to object to this, and that each of us who spoke about it contributed with value to the groundswell. Defending Randa’s right to speak - defending anyone who wishes to partake in civilised debate - is not the same as condoning everything she might say. It’s also not saying she shouldn’t be challenged or held responsible for what she does say. I hope that she would do the same for others - and it subsequently concerned me to hear that she hasn’t always done so.
But then…
I read Randa’s book Discipline, and I liked it a lot - and I learned a lot. I also saw the point she makes in there through one of the characters about the frustration around the passive position of ‘seeing all sides’ - that the oppressed and the oppressor are not two ‘sides’ but a monstrous villain and a powerless victim. I saw then why she might feel that her objections were different.
And yet…
I also read the stories in Ruptured - written by Australian Jewish women in the aftermath of October 7th - about how their lives have changed in the last two years. Many of them are directly descended from people who were taken to death camps and survived. In a few short generations these people have gone from descendants of Holocaust victims to becoming a group also asked to bear collective responsibility for a terrible genocide that many of them find abhorrent.
I felt that…
Both books have a commonality of human pain and suffering caused by circumstances far out of their control. Both detail the terrible repercussions on individual lives because of actions taken by others, often far away, or in the highest reaches of power, who somehow escape the direct censure that all the powerful seem to evade these days, while those so much further away from these circles of power and responsibility end up turning on one another.
Which made me think about …
A friend of mine, the author Holden Sheppard. Holden has spoken (in a different context) about the sage advice given to him to write from a scar and not a wound - advice that seems excellent and also essential for our own mental health as writers. But what happens when there is no time for these scars to form? When your people are dying or under constant grave threat of annihilation, and you write to try to stop it, to spread the word, to make society understand, to urge people to help? These writers are forced to write from their wounds because there is no other choice - they are in an ongoing nightmare. To wait is not an option.
Reading and listening and learning around all this is so important. But it also means confusion and the need to constantly decipher questionable conflation put forward by passionate speakers - such as the AWW board’s assertion that cancelling Abdel-Fattah was necessary because of the Bondi terrorism event.
In addition, trying to sum up groups of people or thinkers under broad labels appears to be part of the problem. When I tried to research Zionism and the call to ‘globalise the intifada’, it seems these phrases can mean different things to speaker and the listener. Whenever meaning and context is lost or muddied, assumptions take over. Misunderstanding begins. Manipulation too.
This is where we are now.
And if this is where we land, of course it feels confusing to speak. Pointless. Wrong. Outrageous. Egotistical. Who do we think we are to even attempt to have an opinion on these complex issues? Exhaustion and overwhelm can switch us off, as trying to find our voices often leads us into complex, endless debates that we’re not equipped for.
But when we see carnage and despair to the extent we witness today, we must surely speak or act in some form? Particularly when those of us who can continue our lives are often benefitting from our coloniser ancestry and a lopsided justice system. To carry on as though nothing is wrong feels abhorrent, when elsewhere there is only fire and ash and a never-ending toll of human suffering. And yet we must also find a way to live and love through our days too, despite what we’re witnessing.
Throughout history, disparate groups of humans have shown that we are most successful when we organise and work together for common goals. And yet the lack of trust and disarray in modern society has disorganised the global, decent citizenry to the extent that humanity is not winning right now - greed and power is. And yet, if those who believe that peace is possible could find a way to truly organise, they might be unstoppable.
My friend Tess Woods, the bestselling Australian author who is the granddaughter of two Palestinian grandfathers, is a wonderful advocate for peace. A couple of weeks ago, Tess shared some words with me from Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah, two peacemakers from Israel and Palestine. Abu Sarah was 10 years old when his 19-year-old brother Tayseer died from injuries sustained under torture shortly after his release from an Israeli military prison. Inon lost his parents Yakovi and Bilha on October 7, 2023 when their house was burned down with his parents inside. They have written a book together, which will be published in April 2026.
I share their words with you not to comfort us into inaction or apathy, but to galvanise us to keep on looking for the peacemakers and the strongest advocates for dialogue, in war zones and writers’ festivals and everywhere between. To seek out the voices who are finding a way to cut through the noise and truly leading the charge for peace. Whatever else we can or cannot do, we can become their champions, and these two seem like a mighty fine place to start.
Peacebuilders have been marginalized, both at home and abroad, for far too long. We are not invited to sit at negotiation tables or included in international summits with those making decisions on behalf of our peoples. We are used to being dismissed as dreamers and mocked as being naïve. Yet we are realists. We know that bombs will not bring quiet, walls will not protect us, and war will not bring security to either side. What is truly naïve is imagining that fear and multigenerational trauma will lead to security, or that any strategy to end the horror of this conflict can succeed without dreamers and visionaries at the vanguard.
If you take nothing else from our story and this journey, let it be these words: The future is peace. We know this because between us we have visited and worked in former war zones—from Vietnam and Northern Ireland to Rwanda and South Africa—where we have witnessed people’s capacity to rise out of the wreckage of their trauma and the destruction of war, and we have seen former enemies come together to forge a path of healing and reconciliation. We know that the future of humanity is peace; the only uncertainty is how many more innocent people will suffer before we get there.
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Today (Thursday 22 January) is a national day of mourning in Australia for those lost in the Bondi terror attack. My heart goes out to all the victims and their loved ones.
Some more articles that might be of interest to you, which all discuss the fallout from Adelaide Writers Week:
As authors abandon Adelaide Writers’ Week after cancelling of Randa Abdel-Fattah, is free speech in tatters? (The Conversation)
Who is Randa Abdel-Fattah, the author and activist at the centre of the Adelaide Writers’ Week crisis (Sydney Morning Herald - possibly paywalled)
How Adelaide Writers’ Week went from peak excitement to disaster (Sydney Morning Herald - possibly paywalled)
‘Masterclass in poor governance’: what was the board’s role in the end of Adelaide Writers’ Week? (The Conversation)
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A deeply thoughtful and articulate post that really resonated with me - thank you Sara ❤️
Thanks for commenting and sharing your thoughts. I would like to read both books but Ruptured can only be found on Amazon and I am not spending money with any American company. I tried Abebooks but can only get it from the USA. And my library doesn't have it. Any suggestions? I would like to read both books.