Randa Abdel-fattah: Advocate for equal opportunity storytelling

By: Nesima Aberra

It’s been six years since Australian author Randa Abdel-fattah published her groundbreaking young adult novel, Does My Head Look Big in This? introducing the world to Amal, a Muslim girl who wasn’t a child bride, oppressed daughter or suicide bomber, but instead, a cheeky, free-thinking, ordinary teenager. Since then, Abdel-fattah, also a practicing litigation lawyer in Sydney, has been furiously writing in different genres and reaching audiences around the world with her multicultural and multi-dimensional stories.

Growing up as an Egyptian-Palestinian-Muslim in Australia, Abdel-fattah wasn’t too conscious of the interfaith world she lived in. It wasn’t until her teenage and university years, where her hyphenated identity became a challenge and she was forced to deal with the crisis.

“I did it by embracing all my identities rather than running away from them,” Abdel-fattah says. “By gaining self-respect, I gained the respect of others.”

Her experiences with going to a Catholic primary school, teenage relationships, hijab, friends and stereotypes were all fodder for her first books, Does My Head Look Big in This and later Ten Things I Hate About Me. Abdel-fattah says originally she had ambitious plans to ‘change people’s minds’ through the first drafts of her writing and later toned it down and added more humor.

“Ultimately, I hoped that readers would pick up my book and laugh, cry and think as they engaged in a kind of active compassion- experience empathy for a character they might have otherwise been quick to judge,” she says.

Abdel-fattah had a passion for empathy and justice from a young age, which made her dream of a career as a lawyer as well. She studied Arts and Law at Melbourne University and got involved with human rights advocacy, specifically regarding Palestine and refugees. That background gave her the opportunity and courage to discuss controversial, political issues in op-eds, columns and in her novels that she hopes advocates “a great human rights message of equality of opportunity when it comes to storytelling.”

One of Abdel-fattah’s most celebrated books, Where the Streets Had a Name, tells the story of a young Palestinian girl during the 2004 West Bank Israel-Palestinian conflict. She said while touring schools around Australia and speaking to students, she is amazed by how open students are to the Palestinian narrative. The book has also been optioned for a TV series.

Though it might be easy to paint Abdel-fattah simply as a Muslim writer or a writer of “Muslim issues,” she is actually far from that. Her other novels include a young adult legal thriller called Noah’s Law, two “tween” books called The Friendship Matchmaker and Buzz Off, all of which have nothing to do with Islam or Muslims explicitly. Abdel-fattah says she enjoys the different challenges each novel presents her with from writing about a male protagonist, setting a story in a country she’s not physically in or seeing the world through the eyes of a fifth grade student.

“As long as people don’t box or label me, I’m happy to talk about writing, about my identity, about politics, about human rights,” Abdel-fattah says. “I make no apology for the fact that these are all things I am deeply interested in.”

That doesn’t mean she is satisfied with the state of narratives about Muslims globally. In fact, Abdel-fattah believes there is an “ongoing and systematic campaign of Islam and Muslims being demonized, otherized and stigmatized” through propaganda and stereotyping. During the uproar over France’s burqa policies, she and other Australian Muslims found themselves circling the media outlets to sound off, which motivated Abdel-fattah to write a poem about otherization called I Am Not Negotiable.

For those who do want to write a genuine, interesting story involving Muslims without being stereotypical, Abdel-fattah says the key is to avoid being preachy and “to find creative and subtle ways to challenge our definitions of mainstream fiction so that a book containing a Muslim character doesn’t necessarily have to be an ‘issues-based’ story.”

Abdel-fattah has toured around Australia and internationally connecting with readers, giving workshops and attending special engagements like a writer’s workshop in Ramallah and Jerusalem and at The Melbourne Writer’s Festival and a talk on human right and women in Brunei to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of International Women’s Day. She says the feedback she’s gotten from readers has been “overwhelmingly positive and humbling,” especially when people tell her that she’s changed their lives or perspectives.

Looking ahead, Abdel-fattah is finishing up her first adult novel, No Sex in the City, a satirical take on the chick-lit genre and a sequel to The Friendship Matchmaker called The Friendship Matchmaker Returns. Outside of her work responsibilities, she also has to juggle taking care of her family –a husband and two kids, her biggest passions, the renaissance woman- says that no matter how difficult the balancing act may get, those kinds of worries are in what she calls a “first-world problem basket.”

“When it gets tough, I remind myself of how blessed I am and get some good old-fashioned perspective (and caffeine),” she says.

And as she jokingly adds in her biography on her official website after a long list of accomplishments, “I will get a full night’s rest sometime after 2020.”