Trials Of Dishonour

Gabrielle Lord has written 15 books as well as a 12-volume thriller series for young adults. She started writing seriously at the age of 30 and resigned from her position as Employment Officer in the Public Service after her third book Fortress. It was picked up internationally and made into a feature film starring Rachel Ward.
Her fifth novel Whipping Boy was made into a telemovie starring Sigrid Thornton. Her latest book is Dishonour and takes us into a contemporary crisis facing Western society – a clash of cultures. Addressing The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 11 November 2014, Gabrielle Lord took up the issue of crimes against women in Islamic communities – and in particular the clash of values this has meant in modern Western societies.

TRIALS OF DISHONOUR

GABRIELLE LORD

The process of the making of a novel is a mysterious business. In one way, it’s a technical matter, a bit like making an industrial sized fruit cake. Massive amounts of ingredients pour into a huge cauldron – the writer’s imagination – where they’re sifted and sorted, stirred and finally cooked. It is also an intensely personal business, in which the writer reveals aspects of the self, sometimes unwittingly so.

Yet there is always something else at work. Although in part it is an intensely conscious process, with highly contrived plot lines and character development creating the structure, this “something else” is what the novel sits in – the invisible container of the author’s own spirit, her preoccupations, her interpretation of the society in which she lives, her morality, her psychological states, her yearnings and fears, the depth – or lack of it – of her development as a human being.

Outside this lies the wider world, and its sometimes unacknowledged influences. It has been said that once Islam arrives in a country, that country is changed forever. Australian writers and artists are now working in a changed culture. Often dressed up as “cultural sensitivity”, the fear of offending Muslims which is really a completely understandable fear of violence, silences legitimate discussion and debate. By not writing a novel, play or movie mentioning the glaringly obvious effects of Islam, or by censoring such references, such creators are a priori meekly accepting for themselves the status of the dhimmi, the subjugated people under Islamic rule who must not speak critically of their overlords if they value their heads. If such “cultural sensitivity” had had been allowed to silence the British in India, or the missionaries in China, there might still be widows in India being thrown into the flames of the funeral pyre, and the foot bones of little girls might still be crushed for footbinding in China.

The influences of family and education also create the writer’s crucible; the fact that as a child, I was raised or “razed” as I like to joke, in pre-Vatican II convents, which were run along totalitarian lines, demanding unquestioning obedience, self-imposed silence, no questioning or criticising of “the faith”, where “answering back” was a crime, effectively forbidding self-defence, where beatings were common, where Kafkaesque interrogations without being told what the charges were (this sometimes resulted in the added bonus of the interrogator hearing about a misdemeanour they hadn’t known about), a surveillance system that read all incoming and outgoing mail, made lightning raids on desks and cupboards in order to find incriminating evidence of insurrection, and punished even facial expression, objecting to something called “dumb insolence”. (The Dominicans) This environment, imprinted on my childhood soul, later delivered a great benefit – the ability to recognise totalitarianism in any of its forms, no matter how it might present.

A novel can only go as far as the author has been. Of course, a writer can write of imagined states of action. But beneath these imagined states, must lie a sensibility that understands the psychological nature of what one has written because it has been experienced in real life. All these largely inchoate and shifting energies, somehow, combine in a writer to call in the elements that will quicken the conscious aspects of the writing.

Dishonour began as a very practical and conscious choice. Last year, I attended a meeting with my publisher and my agent during which I was acquainted with a very sad story. My latest crime novel, Death by Beauty, the fifth book in the Gemma Lincoln PI series, published in 2012, had not done well. In the four years since the success of its predecessor Shattered, the fourth Gemma Lincoln novel, and while I’d been away having health issues and also writing the (now) seventeen books of the “Conspiracy 365” Young Adult series, the world had changed. Bookshops had folded; both Borders and Angus & Robertson had gone, buyers had been replaced and to the new young ones on the scene, the name “Gabrielle Lord” meant little. Large orders for Death By Beauty were cancelled. I hadn’t noticed any of this, because the Conspiracy 365 series had been sold into dozens of overseas markets, and the television series, based on the books, is even now still playing on ABC 3.

In short, the publisher didn’t want another Gemma Lincoln PI novel. For a moment, I thought I was being sacked – I knew that publishers were dropping authors from their lists – and I recall feeling relieved that I had another publisher who was keen for my work. However, I was told that adult crime was still selling well. Could I do a new “stand alone” crime novel? With a fresh, new character? “I can do that,” I said. We all love “fresh and new”.

I went home and thought about it. Making a novel from scratch is a very big job. Yet a completely new novel would free me up from the constraints of PI Gemma Lincoln’s series world – where the main characters are already cast and the action revolves around a previously established fictional world with any new character usually being part of a disposable plot. With the liberty that comes from conjuring a completely new character and a new world, I would be free to do anything I liked.

I already had one storyline worked out for use in the now unwanted and unwritten sixth Gemma Lincoln. This, together with a surprising anecdote about two police greatcoats, had been given to me by a now retired senior detective who’d been approached by a young woman of Middle Eastern background more than 20 years ago. Her brothers had been ill-treating her, bashing her, and when my friend the detective went round to the house to follow up the situation and discover whether she wanted to lodge an official complaint, the girl was no longer there. The brothers said they didn’t know where she was. She had vanished. Had she been sent back to the Old Country to be married off to a cousin? Was she buried in the back yard? Had she successfully run away and made a new life for herself, away from the tight-knit community from which she came? No one was saying.

Although that was many years ago, that girl stayed in my memory and I knew one day I’d write something based on her bruises and her disappearance. As well, those two police greatcoats still hung side by side in my memory. Another story that had never left me involved the events surrounding the coldly premeditated murder of a police officer many years ago in Queensland. These disparate stories waited somewhere in my mental files, standing out in the archives of my imagination. Already, as I was riding home on the bus from the meeting with my publisher, these storylines swirled around in my mind.

But what I really needed, was a way to combine them with a major new character and a major new storyline; a strong character living in a contemporary, credible world who would be the central spindle around which the other plots would spin.

All my “crime writing” is based in Australia and Australian crimes. Over nearly 40 years of writing, I’ve used the scaffolding of real crimes, craftily reworked to suit the various plot and sub plots of 16 adult novels, as obstacles which my fictitious investigators must navigate in order to resolve the situations in which they – and the plot – present. The Faraday school kidnapping, the Macleod-Lindsay attempted murder, the infamous Mutilator murders, the well-protected pedophile groups, the brutal physical abuses of young children in often church-run institutions as well as many other Australian crimes have all gone into my fictional brew, to be swapped around, rearranged, developed and threaded through a crime novel in a new way.

Once a commitment is made to a work, it does seem that a helpful synchronicity comes into play. Around the time of my meeting with publisher and agent, I read an account in the newspaper of a detective superintendent who was working to disrupt the violent Middle Eastern gangs, including the notorious Brothers For Life group. The accompanying photograph of Deborah Wallace of the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad revealed a tall, elegant woman in an aqua blue suit, hair swirled up in a French roll, strappy stilettos and flashing earrings, who now headed up MEOCS. There’s the inspiration for my main character, I thought, as I studied her photograph and read some of her sensible comments. I could create a fictitious senior police officer, a graceful woman, instead of a broad shouldered male boss and give her what she needed – a life, a family and a personal mission based in the events of her past.

I’ve come to believe that the real story, the emotional story, similar to the way it is in us humans, is always lodged in the back story, in what has gone before the action of the novel, what has brought the character to this exact place in time and space, albeit in the fictional world that she inhabits. My fictitious police officer, Debra Hawkins, would be in charge of a new police unit. All I needed was to decide what kind of work her unit should undertake and what it was that was haunting her from her past.

At the time I was building up the structure and storylines of the new novel, it seemed that drive-by shootings, many of them fatal, were occurring almost daily and that the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad was fully occupied trying to stop this. Over the last few decades there had been a shift in the nature of Sydney crime. Violent motorcycle gangs had replaced “Mr Sin” individuals like Neddy Smith and Abe Saffron as the manufacturers, distributors and dealers of criminal enterprises. Some experienced investigators suggested that the bikie gangs, now with global links, could become as bad or even worse – as the Mafia. Together with the drug lords who dealt with them, and their rivals, Sydney was witnessing gang warfare on a scale unseen before as the rival gangs, often born enemies because of imported tribal loyalties and vendettas from Middle Eastern countries, fought for supremacy. This involved shoot outs in suburban streets.

People living in some of the south western Sydney suburbs found their streets on occasions turning into war zones. They feared for the safety of their families. Policing methods changed to meet the increasingly violent situations. Officers in full helmeted riot gear and the 9 tonne Ballistic Engineered Armoured Response Counter Attack Truck more readily known by its acronym Bearcat, started to appear during raids or even in the course of making arrests. A defiant arrestee, with just a phone call, could swiftly mobilise a “flash gang” – an aggressive, confrontational mob of potentially violent young men, demanding that the police release their friend immediately. Australians had never seen mounted machine guns on police vehicles before; military-style weapons and vehicles in our streets. Policing in Australia, although still engaged as always in the disruption and prevention of crime, became militarised.

The newspapers ran stories of Middle Eastern criminals running their crime empires from their maximum security prison cells, organising contract killings, with law enforcement seemingly one step behind. There were stories of the conversion of prisoners to Islam, of violent men embracing a belief system that would allow them to vent their rage on the unbelievers, and even sacralise it, dedicating their violence to a warlike god. From the huge amounts of money generated by drug and weapons sales; it was discovered that in several cases, a percentage of this money was being sent overseas to help fund the jihad.

Some years back, the mother of a young girl, and then finally the girl herself, had contacted me from her Witness Protection hideout asking me if I would write her story – she’d been briefly married to one such man, who had organised for her to be murdered to prevent her from giving evidence against him in his upcoming trial for murder. I’d urged her to write her own story, telling her I’d do what I could to be helpful but that my own writing commitments at the time precluded anything more. This incident provided yet another strand to the gathering threads of the new novel.

Last year, Pru Goward, a State Government minister, had gone public with some of the findings of her department, and she’d mentioned the over one thousand forced/underage marriages that had been brought to her attention. Australians were shocked to hear about girls, some as young as fourteen, who’d disappeared from their classrooms in Australia in order to be married overseas, often to a stranger or a first cousin, selected for them for the benefit of the family, the collective, not the individual. Newspapers carried stories about the mutilation of little girls’ genitals, on religious or cultural grounds. That this should be happening in migrant communities in our liberal democracy was outrageous. This sort of mutilation went far beyond the horror of the original crime, directly causing difficulties in childbirth and other painful complications throughout the rest of the women’s lives.

As well, I heard through a clergyman I knew, about Australian citizens who had left Islam and were now living in hiding from their communities and too often their families. They’d been subject to death threats and harassment – cars vandalised, garbage and dead animals thrown into their yards. They’d been forced to move over again. I heard anecdotes about community health workers being told not to file reports they’d made about bruised and beaten migrant women who were daily locked up in their own homes, because public knowledge of this would mean that all doors to that particular community would slam shut and those women would become even more isolated from the outer society – the largely tolerant and liberal atmosphere of daily life in Australia and bereft of even the fleeting contact of a health worker.

One of the energies that informs a book comes from the writer, the passion and spirit of its conception and gestation. I found myself feeling angry that this could be happening in my Australia, the country that has been so good to me and my migrant forebears. Fortunate to be colonised by the British, rather than the Portuguese or the French, Australia has inherited the best form of government compared with all the other methods, as Winston Churchill wryly remarked. To know that there were women in my country living in fear of religiously sanctioned violence from their husbands or relatives, or religiously mandated death sentences from their communities, was completely unacceptable and affronted me as a fellow citizen of a democracy. As the detective inspector says in Dishonour , “People are constantly talking about human rights – surely the most basic human right is the right to live one’s own life, make one’s own choices without fear of being threatened or violently attacked by other people because of these choices.”

All of this information swirled around and finally settled into the kind of police unit that my fictitious detective inspector would head up – she would investigate crimes of violence against women from non-English-speaking backgrounds – NESBies as the acronym would have it – who were too fearful to come forward. Detective Debra would use police intelligence from other operations as well as acting on information received by her own lines of enquiry and find ways to contact and assist these hidden women.

It would be called RED-V – an acronym derived from “Religio-Ethnic-Domestic Violence” unit. Due to its sensitive nature, and the initial need to protect the anonymity of the women utilising it, the unit would have to be discreet – no press release fanfare, just notices out to the very many different government and NGOs who work in this area.

It was now time for some serious research. I needed to talk to at least some of these women-in-hiding. Finally, after a lot of vetting and promises that I would protect their anonymity, I was able to interview two women, one a young woman from Kuwait, and the other, an older woman from Iraq. Their stories were chilling. The mother of the Kuwaiti had attempted to poison her when she suspected her daughter was “losing her religion” and refused to take her to hospital as she lapsed into unconsciousness after the poisoning. It was only the good heartedness of an imported servant (the household had seven of these) who drove her to hospital that saved her life. She was on a drip for three days and the doctors pronounced an unknown toxin had almost killed her. As this plan had failed, there was another plot hatched by her uncles to take her out to their farm and incinerate her in what would look like an accident. A young sibling had heard this discussed and warned her. This led the Kuwaiti girl to make hasty, secret arrangements with a pastor in the underground church she had been secretly attending, to get her out of the country.

She is now living in Australia and is engaged to a young Copt from Egypt. She has gone from living in a mansion and being served by seven servants to living in a room and washing dishes in a restaurant, but as she said, “I’m happy. I’m free.”

The second woman, an Iraqi (whose name isn’t Rana) told me of her family story and her gradual journey to Christianity. A devout Muslim and highly educated teacher in one of the sciences, she’d followed her husband, and who had later come to Australia under the skilled migration program, and only removed her veil because her husband ordered her to do so now that they were living in secular Australia. She was fortunate, she said, that her arranged marriage was to “a good man” who would not betray her growing desire to convert. An atheist himself, he doesn’t care what other people believe. But her religious instruction and baptism had to be kept secret from the close-knit and inquisitive – intrusive – community in which she moves. So far, although her brothers and family in Iraq suspect her, (one of her brothers came out for a visit and noticed that she was behaving “un-Islamically” and reported this back to their parents) she has managed to live life over the last few years as a closet Christian, thanks to the support of other MBBs – Muslim Background Believers and other parishioners at her church. She fears for herself and her children in the future, worried that as they get older, they might say something that will betray her. She is currently pursuing post-graduate qualifications in one of the sciences.

I took pages of notes from the interviews with these two women and, using these plus news stories from other parts of the Western world, was then able to build up a credible story for Rana al-Sheikly, the fearful Iraqi girl who is seeking self-determination in Dishonour. I became educated in the “honour” system – of how Middle Eastern women carry the whole burden of the honour of the family, the tribe and the clan, and that if one of them should dishonour these in any way, by “misbehaviour” such as wearing the wrong clothes, having the wrong friends, loving the wrong man, or failing to obey the patriarchal rule, they must be “disciplined” sometimes murdered, to expunge the stain on family honour. If they’re not removed, this dishonour spreads, tainting siblings, uncles and aunts. No one will marry the girls from the family, the men will find it difficult to get wives and employment. Honour killings are happening with alarming frequency in Europe and in the Anglophone democracies. There have been tragic stories, one of which I partly drew on, of girls being murdered by their fathers or brothers, very often with the complicity of their own mothers. Family honour and its restoration trumps everything – humanity, compassion, reason – everything. Only last week a video from somewhere in Syria appeared online, of the stoning of a young woman for adultery. Not only did her father refuse to “forgive” her, despite her heartbreaking begging, he enthusiastically accepted the “honour” of throwing a large stone at her head.

I needed to get a clear picture of what such a fictitious police unit might look like, and so I asked Chief Superintendent Wallace for assistance. She helped me with the set up – a likely building, the staffing arrangements, the allocations of cars and computers, the rank of those selected and the administration and supervision by superiors. The rest I conjectured. I knew there’d be jealousies and frictions because all work places comprise people with varying degrees of egotism and emotional maturity. The battle for promotion, the competitiveness, the workplace psychopaths – all of this is part of the human experience and well known to everyone.

I started structuring the story. Detective Debra is a country girl whose father was murdered when she was twelve, as he blundered into a scene of domestic violence, leaving a psychic wound in her character, and giving her the determination to succeed where it seems her father has failed. She has a prickly relationship with her mother, who has never got over the loss of her husband, and who is harrowed by a devastating secret. Her brother is a drug addict, who is quite happy to use his sister as well as drugs. Slowly, with lots of thinking, walking, staring out at the ocean, the novel took shape.

The awful plight of the young Iraqi girl, Rana al-Sheikly, who must make one of two equally devastating choices, seemed to me to present the impossible dilemma that makes for a really dramatic situation. High stakes, life or death. Either choice will bring her heartbreak, she can accept the offer of escape, with Debra’s assistance, and escape to a new life offered by the man she loves, thereby completely cutting herself off from everyone she knows and loves – or please her family and go through a forced marriage to a man she already loathes – Coleridge’s “nightmare Life-in-Death…. That thicks man’s blood” – in this case woman’s – “blood with cold”. Such a marriage, beginning with rape, could only go further downhill from that, flattening out into the death of the spirit and the unlived life of mechanical domestic and sexual slavery.

All this provided probably the most sought-after structural device possible in dramatic writing, the classic dilemma – the agonising choice between two impossible situations, a contemporary Romeo and Juliet and no one else was writing about it! To my mind, it was the hottest story in town – slavery in Australia in the twenty-first century!

My research among the Copts had led me to Dr Eman Sharobeem, who is, among other things, CEO of Immigrant Women’s Health Services. When I gave her the synopsis of Rana’s story, she exclaimed, “But Gabrielle, this is not fiction. This is happening now, in Australia!” Taeko Yamada, the service co-ordinator of Shakti Migration and Refugee Women’s Support Group Melbourne, works to help vulnerable girls and women to break free from forced marriages and other abuses. These girls can be as young as twelve and it is very hard for them to come forward because “the prospect of ostracism and honour killing are very real”. The Victorian police are currently investigating 20 such cases and 18 of them involve girls under the age of eighteen.

Once I had all my notes and structural plans, I wrote a first draft, doing a thousand words a day, my self-appointed quota. Sometimes it’s more, but it must never be less. I redrafted it several times. Finally, I submitted my work to a wide range of editorial refining. The structural edit was fine, and I made the moderate changes necessary for improved logic and flow.

It wasn’t until the copy edit that I encountered suggestions that I self-censor some dialogue, change other parts and remove an Arab proverb (“Even the doorstep weeps for 40 days when a daughter is born”) and replace it with another. It was also suggested that I include more attractive Muslim characters (I already had one of those – the Multicultural Liaison Officer, Maryam) and that I write more about the rich positives of Islam. The fear of offending Muslims was evident in my advisors. I contacted my internationally renowned scholar of Islam and fluent Arabic speaker and asked him what to do about this – what the rich positives of Islam were? He suggested strong community cohesion – surely a double-edged sword as Dishonour shows – and warm hospitality. I obliged with a scene in which Debra attends a luncheon put on by some of the migrant women and enjoys delicious dishes in the course of explaining her role.

I understood the fears that people have about saying anything that Muslims might take offence at: bricks thrown through windows, rioting, fire-bombing and murdering people connected with a book or film or play deemed to “insult” their religion. I understood the reason to get something in writing from experts in Islam that there was nothing factually wrong in what I’d written. However, I didn’t see it as my job to act as an apologist for any religion, let alone deliberately obscure the truth about a woman’s position in Islam. When I wrote Bones, which gives a highly critical serve to the cruelties of some of the Catholic brothers who ran schools and other institutions, no one had suggested that I should write about “good Catholic brothers” to balance the book, nor to describe the rich positives of Catholicism. I discussed this problem with the go-to Islam expert, and he helped me find a way through my text which honoured my integrity as an observant human being and writer, while he and a highly literate Iranian woman provided the desired clearances that what I’d written was factually correct and defendable.

The writing of a novel comprises only about ten per cent of the labour – the creation of the story and its structure is the hard work. For me to devote all this time and soul energy to a project, I have to feel that what I’m doing is worthwhile, and not just another story about a serial killer doing awful things to (mostly) women and then coming after the investigator. I believe that in Dishonour I’ve written something that not only entertains as an exciting work of fiction, but that also has the human spirit’s desire for freedom close to its heart.

“Holding a mirror up to reality” is a phrase sometimes used to describe how novels and films work. I didn’t want to hold my mirror up and find that some things, like vampires, had failed to make it into the reflection. I hoped that Australian Muslims would be mature enough to cope with a story that described some of the effects of their values colliding with our secular democracy.

David Hume warned that liberty is never lost in one fell swoop, rather it is eroded away, quietly and gradually until we find ourselves with something like 18C still on our lawbooks. It’s not possible to know the level of self-censorship in Australia today, but unless writers and other artists, journalists and commentators reflect honestly what they see and hear, they are not acting as speakers of the truth, but instead as agents of repression.

While ever Muslim clerics and others continue to tell us that Islam is a religion of peace and while ever we and our politicians pretend to believe this, while all the time discounting the evidence of our “lying” eyes and ears, the nightly horror show on the television news, the inevitable day of honest debate is pushed further away. I’m no expert in Islam, but I am expert in being an infidel and, as such, I value our hard won infidel civilisation built over bloody centuries, deriving from Jerusalem, Athens and Rome, where humans are not divided into superior and inferior, where church and state are quite separate, where the individual is protected from the power of the state, where reason, rather than non-rational attachment to a god’s diktat informs the laws, where freedom of conscience and belief may be expressed in reasoned debate without fear of violence or imprisonment, and where doubt and questioning, the basis of the scientific method, are cherished as the means by which we discover more of the truth.

I’m only a storyteller, not a philosopher, but I believe that genuine art can only freely exist in a free society – that Dishonour could only be written in such a society. For all their human failings, and the growing attempts to shut down freedom of speech, the liberal democracies, with their immense treasuries of music, art and literature, provide a way of life for people infinitely superior to all other forms of governance, and we should never be afraid to say so.