Randa Abdel-Fattah has acquired considerable name-recognition since being invited to appear at the 2026 Adelaide Writers’ Week only to be disinvited for fear, it is said, that her session would be too controversial. AWW’s director resigned, soon followed by most of the Adelaide Festival board. Writers Week was cancelled.
I don’t wish to participate in this dispute, express indignation at the censorship displayed by it, or give my opinion about the issues it raises. But I do wish to take the opportunity to mention what may seem a relatively insignificant matter, one I hope to show is germane.
This is the fact that literary events such as AWW give central importance to writers, in person, in sessions where they are interviewed and then answer audience questions. The point of the format is to provoke discussion, and these events are used by the publishers for marketing purposes. “The author” is well and truly alive in Australian literary culture.
When Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author he was not referring to the mass demise of real-life writers, but to The Author as the central organising principle of French academic literary history. This discipline, its curricula, its textbooks and its journals, produced a chronological account of the national literary tradition, the intentions and motivations of writers, and writers’ lives, literary influences and significance. Barthes’s concern was to refocus attention from the singularity of a text’s purported origin in the person onto the text itself and its dispersal in the ongoing cultural practices of its reading.
I do wish that the writers’ festivals held around this country were called “Festivals of (recent, interesting, significant…) writing” rather than “Writers festivals,” and their organisational protocols focused primarily on divergent ways of reading a well-curated selection of books. My small contribution to imagining such a change is to review Randa Abdel-Fattah’s recent novel rather than talk about the controversy surrounding its author.
Discipline is set in a community of Palestinian Australians in the early days of the current conflict in Gaza. All the characters are professionals whose careers are more or less precarious. As do many members of diaspora communities, they live between two worlds, each occupying a position on a rough spectrum from least to most problematic. The narrative consists of episodes illustrating these problems.
Ashraf’s wife has left him in order to live an exclusively Islamic life: she represents a refusal of the diasporic life. Ashraf, on the other hand, while having not entirely moved into the secular world, is the most accommodating of the characters to its demands. He is an academic, modestly successful on the usual criteria, but his career is threatened by the requirement that his work have greater impact in the society beyond academia. He gets a break, and undertakes to work on a government-funded project aimed at deflecting young people away from radicalisation and towards creative ways of expressing their identity and its conflicts.
Ashraf has a PhD student named Jamal with whom he has a trusting relationship. Jamal, however, is something of a hot-head, taking various kinds of “risks” — writing unwelcome open letters to the staff of the university, signing his online posts with his university affiliation, associating his with Ashraf’s signature, and posting apparent support for Hamas that implies condemnation of Zionism. He is instructed to take the posts down to avoid implicating his supervisor or the university at large in his opinions.
Ashraf takes a mentoring role with Jamal: “Your job is to bring people to your side,” he tells him, teaching him to “operate strategically” and encouraging him to “play the long game” so that no solitary individual has to carry the “burden of representation.”
Jamal is married to Hannah, a journalist on a mainstream newspaper. She is caught between the discursive norms of the paper and trying to write stories unshackled by these norms. Most of the book’s episodes that concern her recounting versions of this conflict, as an ever-angrier Hannah confronts senior editors who either “kill” her stories, rewrite them, or take over responsibility for the by-line.
Fayza, the sister of Ashraf’s estranged wife, is as disappointed as he is by her decision. She is the principal of an Islamic school, one of whose students has been arrested for brandishing a Hamas flag at a protest rally, bringing unwelcome media attention to the school. Though self-assured and confident in her role, she is worried about her pupils and unsettled by the potential for the attention to compromise the school’s reputation. In this, her situation echoes that of the senior management of the university.
This, then, is a very tight knit group of people, the more so as each is drawn into the others’ stories. But tight knit though it might be, the exchanges among its members are not private: they are relentlessly, publicly, conducted on social media. We read that they are “consumed by their phones.” This is the proximate cause of the problems they encounter, and it should be said that this is the source of the turmoil engulfing the author of this book. It is Abdel-Fattah’s posts, not her novel, that have disturbed the Adelaide Festival board and whoever lobbied it against her. The same was true for Antoinette Latouf and Jason Gillham.
Of course, there would be no point in arguing against the predominance of online communication in present circumstances. Its reach is such that the writers cannot calculate their discourse for specific audiences. So pace Stan Grant, who writes that we have lost the art of language, it is more pointed to say that what we have lost is the arts of rhetoric. Rhetoric taught us to do just that — calculate the relation of our communications with their recipients.
This is what the authority figures in this novel require of their juniors, Ashraf, Jamal and Hannah, yet their only way of imposing this requirement establishes a binary opposition between anger and self-restraint, the latter being characterised variously as “liberal bullshit,” “the politics of respectability,” “impartiality and neutrality,” the policing of “tone,” the language of “equivocation and obfuscation” and “point zero language.” Whereas Ashraf is advised by his dean to produce work with greater social impact, he and the others are rebuked precisely for the social impact of their posts.
This suggests Abdel-Fattah’s reasons for choosing the novel form: I assume she hoped it would reach a different audience from that of her posts. But it is a novel whose energy is devoted to purveying a message: Palestinian Australians are having an awful time. They are suffering from the fear and grief occasioned by the conflict in Gaza, and they are also, the fiction tells us, suffering from the oppression of discursive norms that cannot accommodate the intensity of those emotions. This tells us that “having a voice” is not enough: getting people to listen to it is the real issue. And this is what is dramatised in most of the episodes of the narrative.
This is an interesting and important issue, and I for one — being someone who has long taken for granted those very discursive norms — find it salutary to attend to. But I sought, and failed to find, the qualities of an effective or engaging novel. I have no doubt its message is true; what I want to know is what purpose the fiction plays. This is fiction that merely disguises its referent by inventing names for its characters and institutions; it is not an imaginative exploration of the depth of the experiences it depicts. The characters are two dimensional, having little emotional, let alone psychological, complexity — they simply have emotions. Susan Sontag said of great novels that they extend the emotional range of the reader, but the mere naming of emotions cannot achieve this.
Furthermore, Discipline has no plot: good plotting relies on a structure in which an initial situation is disturbed by a complicating event, this complication or disturbance being thereafter resolved by the intervention of some action or other factor. The complication is a knot, its resolution a dénouement (this French term means an “unknotting”). This novel consists of a string of episodes that demonstrate a repeating situation.
There is, however, a candidate for an ending: Jamal and Hannah decide to “fight” in less direct, more creative ways. We don’t see this in action, so it remains programmatic. An alternative reading would be that this ending represents the author’s own decision to write a novel. I would like to be able to conclude that as a novel it is a successful intervention into the situation she describes, or indeed into the literary field; but I cannot. I need it to engage me, to leave me with emotions and understandings that I didn’t have before reading it; I need to care what happens to the characters and to think about how I would respond to the difficulties they face. I want to admire its writing — to be surprised by its insights — I want to be carried by its rhythms. But I was not.
I can only speculate about what impelled the decision to invite Randa Abdel-Fattah to AWW, but I suspect that it was to perform the (kind of) controversy she depicts. The fact that she was cancelled made it all come true. Unfortunately, there is no sense of an ending. Next week in Adelaide is to be held a rebel gathering of writers. We can expect it to stage a further episode of the same sorry drama. •
Discipline
By Randa Abdel-Fattah | University of Queensland Press | $34.99 | 256 pages
