Amani Haydar should have been tucked up in bed that Monday night in March 2015, her arms wrapped protectively around her pregnant belly, her first baby. Instead, she found herself sitting in a dingy interview room at Kogarah police station, preparing to give a statement about why, just a few hours earlier, her father had killed his wife of 28 years and Haydar's mother, Salwa.
Haydar was in shock, racking her brain for answers. Her dad had not long been arrested after turning himself in that evening. Before that, he'd fled Salwa's townhouse in Bexley, covered in blood, after stabbing her more than 30 times in a frenzied attack in which he also injured their youngest daughter, Ola, who tried to stop him.
But nothing about the incident made sense. Haydar's parents had recently separated after a strained and unhappy marriage. They fought a lot, and of course they had problems — but didn't every couple? "My father had never bashed my mum," she writes in her new memoir, The Mother Wound. "How had he killed her?"
In the weeks and months after her mother's death, Haydar began the confronting process of re-evaluating what she thought she knew about her parents' relationship, slowly coming to grips with the insidiousness of domestic abuse and dismantling some of its most pervasive myths and stereotypes, many of which she'd absorbed herself.
Now, six years later, she's sharing her discoveries in The Mother Wound, a heart-wrenching story of loss and grief, her distressing journey through the justice system and her quest for truth, accountability and healing. In it Haydar carefully unravels her family's intergenerational trauma, making painful links between the death of her maternal grandmother, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon in 2006, and that of her mother, less than a decade later.
She writes of a complex, heavy grief that coloured every aspect of her life, including Haydar's own experience of motherhood, the first two years of which she spent "in a daze", hating her father for what he'd stolen from her. Her pain might have been unbearable in book form had she not clung to a hopeful question: If trauma can be inherited, then why not strength, resilience and joy?
'Victims are allowed to be angry'
"I wanted to paint a picture of what domestic violence looks like, what it does on multiple levels — how it affected my inner world, my practical life, my day-to-day dealings with people, my finances," Haydar, 32, tells ABC News. "And I wanted to be honest about how all those layers compounded to create such a suffocating experience and made my recovery so difficult."
She also reveals the pressure she felt during her father's murder trial to behave in a particular way — meek, weak, merciful — giving stunning insight into a side of female victimhood we've only recently begun to grapple with: rage. "I wanted this book to be about reclaiming the right to be angry," she says. "Victims are allowed to be angry, I am still angry. I don't have to forgive, and that's okay, that can be an empowering thing."
But first, she had to unjumble a puzzle. Haydar was surprised when Salwa's death was reported in the media as an act of domestic violence; she'd always thought her parents were simply "incompatible". Their constant fighting, her dad's dismissal of her mum's requests for a divorce as "nonsense" and his "subtle but persistent" coercion and control was all she knew growing up, and seemed insignificant at the time.
"Had I known the prevalence of homicides by men without a history of physical violence," she writes, "I might have made the connections sooner."
She did make the connections, though, gradually recovering memories of red flags she'd shrugged off, clues her mother had left her. A couple of times Haydar had seen her father lash out: he'd threatened to kill Salwa, choke her, and once he pushed her against a wall by her neck. When Salwa finally worked up the courage to leave him, she became scared he might do something to her, and told her daughter about the danger she sensed.
One memory kept resurfacing more than any other — a flashback to a disturbing discovery her mum told Haydar about when she was 15, that made her nauseous and nervous at the time. "It felt like a smoking gun ... something I felt was such an important part of mum's experience and why I believed my dad was guilty of murder," Haydar says. "I felt like it was really relevant to the trial, that it could be crucial evidence."
Silenced by stereotypes
But Haydar's determination to uncover and tell her mother's truth made her a target, and exposed her to the toxic world of victim blaming. She was shocked by the behaviour of some of her dad's family, who seemed to be more upset that he was in prison than the fact he'd killed his wife. They rallied around him, repeating his false claims Salwa had been having an affair, and slandered Haydar for giving evidence against him.
The expectation that she should forgive her father, their refusal to acknowledge her need for accountability, she says, felt like its own kind of abuse — a painful lesson in how to be a "good" victim.
"If you're forgiving and lovely and helpless, then you can be this ideal victim that people can feel sorry for, but who never demands anything," she says. "And that way, no one has to interrogate the way they've contributed to your experience, that this could happen to them, too."
Complicating things was the "double bind" Haydar found herself in as a Lebanese Muslim woman: speaking publicly about the cultural factors that shaped her father's abuse felt impossible.
Her dad wasn't religious and didn't encourage his wife to wear a hijab. He was "traditional" about marriage and divorce, though, and often spoke about divorced women with contempt. Salwa had also been reluctant to leave because of the fear her community would judge her, that she'd be labelled a "bad wife".
How could Haydar name those problems without contributing to harmful stereotypes, exposing her community to public vitriol, Islamophobia?
"When viewed through one particular framing, this story feeds into so many Islamophobic tropes," she says. "But I realised if I told it in my own voice, with the complexity and nuance it deserves ... then maybe I could challenge some of that and create a space for other Muslim women to feel comfortable speaking about similar experiences."
But she still cops it. Earlier this year, she appeared on The Drum, in a panel discussing coercive control. She spoke about how difficult it had been for her mum to articulate what she was experiencing as abuse because it didn't fit the language or legal definition of domestic violence.
As the program aired, a commenter on Facebook suggested Haydar was "deleting from her personhood" by wearing a hijab, that she was unqualified to speak about "women's rights". Her "religious uniform", he said, was "tacit support for a religion that has created more victims than any other".
Haydar tries to shrug off that kind of nonsense because "strange white men" like him are not her target audience (and, to the contrary, her faith has helped her cope with the challenges she has faced). It does make her work "heavier", though.
"I was like, I'm not deleting from my personhood, he had deleted some of my personhood ... because he didn't like the way I practise my faith," she says. "I wanted to explore the effects of it, how silencing it can be. It really makes me think twice before engaging with the media."
The trial became a trauma itself
To Haydar's horror, the victim blaming and domestic abuse myths also followed her into the courtroom. She was furious when her father argued he unintentionally killed Salwa because he was depressed, claiming it caused him to lose self-control as they fought about his false accusations.
Similar arguments had been made often enough by men who killed their wives that Haydar grew nervous: If his lawyers argued the case successfully, her dad could be found guilty of manslaughter, and receive a shorter sentence.
A commercial lawyer herself, Haydar understood the legal mechanics of it, but was insulted by the premise. "Depression doesn't cause people to commit murder," she told prosecutors. "He just didn't accept that mum was leaving him."
Still, her lack of control over the process was distressing, and the trial became a trauma itself. In the end, she didn't believe her mother's perspective had been properly represented. The coercive control, jealousy and threats — well-known risk factors for domestic homicide that often can't be admitted as evidence — seemed to become footnotes as the lawyers clawed for accounts of physical violence.
"Probably the hardest thing was my experience of giving evidence in court with my father present — that was the first time I'd seen him since before the murder," Haydar says. "And my biggest disappointment was the failure of that forum to properly capture the full extent of my mum's experiences ... feeling like, have I done enough, have I let her down, maybe I should have answered this question differently."
The emotional weight of that day, she adds, "was so immense that it set back my recovery completely, right back to as though the murder had just happened."
It's a common refrain among victims who engage with the criminal justice system — particularly women who've suffered domestic or sexual violence who already feel stripped of their sense of control — that it feels disempowering, retraumatising, unjust. Many begin the process hoping an institution or authority figure will validate their experience, that a guilty verdict can restore their sense of control.
But Haydar decided to find other ways of reclaiming power, resolving ahead of the trial that no matter the verdict, she wouldn't let the legal system define her or her mother's story. She knew in her heart what she believed, and that would have to be enough.
"I would never say we don't need these processes, we just need them to be better, more empowering for victims," she says. "The system we currently have really is the state versus the [accused], and as a victim of crime, you feel powerless ... it's all about your life and yet it doesn't really involve you, you're just a witness. You feel invisible, silenced."
In the darkest places, there is light
Along the way she also lost her passion for her career and, at the end of her dad's trial, told her boss she wouldn't be returning to her job. She hasn't been back in a courtroom since.
"I just don't feel that's the space I want to be in anymore," she says. "For me, it's opened up the opportunity to explore how we can tell stories about justice and law through the creative arts. How do we tell these stories through writing and literature, and how do we create a sense of justice that goes beyond the courtroom?"
In that way, The Mother Wound at its heart is about Haydar's determination to wrest back control, to find her voice, speak her truth and fight for change, even when some would prefer her to shrink away. And, it turns out, those things have also played a significant role in her recovery — together with professional counselling, advocacy work and serving on the board of her local women's health centre.
"I try to think of healing as an ongoing process, and for me it looks like being able to empower myself by telling my story," she says. "That was probably the most crucial aspect after losing so much agency. To reclaim it has been incredibly healing."
That includes storytelling in the form of painting, a passion she rediscovered in the months after she lost her mum. In 2018, Haydar was a finalist in the Archibald Prize, having entered a self-portrait in which she's depicted holding a photo of Salwa holding a photo of her mother, Haydar's grandmother.
"I'd like people to look at this painting and see three women whose stories are interconnected, three generations of women who weren't just victims but were also strong and resilient in their own way," Haydar said at the time.
That same sentiment has been carefully woven through the pages of her book, a reminder that even in the darkest places, there is light and hope. And that while resilience is a process, a discipline, perhaps like trauma, it's passed down through generations, too. From her mother and her grandmother, Haydar explains, she inherited the qualities and tools to heal her aching wound, to turn her fury into a force for change, to survive.
"My grandmother taught me how to use my palms and fingers to shape my world, to turn them upwards and pray, to make something beautiful out of nothing, stitch things back together when they need mending," she writes. "From my mum, I inherited the courage to speak. The desire to follow things through. I learned to assert myself and take up space, even in a world that is hostile towards women who do these things."
The Mother Wound by Amani Haydar, published by Pan Macmillan, is out June 29.
