Amal Awad hears from Arab women in their own words

Author Amal Awad is out “disrupt the Western image of the Arab woman”.

Amal Awad, to speak at next week’s Sydney Writers Festival, hopes her book will change perceptions of Arab women. Picture: James Croucher

Amal Awad is the fifth child and only daughter in a Sydney Palestinian family. Her parents mig­rated to Australia almost 50 years ago. She is a Muslim. Her husband is not an Arab. She is a lawyer, journalist and author.

These shifting aspects of her life combine to create the identity she thinks matters most: that of a human being.

She believes this is how we should first think of all people, including the women she interviewed for her book, ­Beyond Veiled Cliches: The Real Lives of Arab Women.

“I come packaged with this culture,’’ she says. “I have to work harder to be just me. Imagine how hard it is for a woman in a veil.’’

Awad will talk about her book at the Sydney Writers Festival, which starts on Monday. She travelled to the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Jordan, the Palestinian territories and Qatar to interview women, some Muslim, some not, about their lives.

She hopes their stories will change the Western perception of Arab women, which she sees as cartoonish, but not in a funny way. “It is a depressing cartoon,’’ she says. “It is an Arab Woman, capital A, capital W, veiled, repressed, frightened, silent.

“What I most hope for from this book is that readers will be surprised. I want to disrupt this image of the Arab woman. I ask that ­people not just read this book but listen to the women, connect with them. That is where you will find humanity, that is where you will find normality.’’

Awad describes Australian Arab women as “snow in the desert”. She recalls her own childhood and teen years in 1980s Sydney.

“We are just so at odds with our environment. There is pressure from all sides. We want to be part of Anglo-Australian life and we want to be the ‘best Arab girl in the world’ to make our family happy.

“You straddle both cultures and, above all of that, you have to work out who you are.”

Awad, 38, hopes the women’s accounts of living in the Arab world will liberate the minds of non-Arab readers.

Beyond Veiled Cliches, by Amal Awad, is published later this month by Penguin Random House