"There is no shame in wanting someone to be held accountable, or even punished, for hurting you or someone else. That the only repercussions available are punitive is a failure of society, not of survivors. What do we do with people who do things they can never fix? We do not individually have the tools – yet – to keep ourselves safe from abuse, especially when the perpetrators are seldom sorry. However, this all still gives rise to a tension for me, in that the same system I am depending on to feel heard and validated after my trauma, remains a source of grief for countless families and communities – including my own. It gives rise to a tension in that I recognise the disproportionate rate of incarceration and deaths in custody for Aboriginal people within this structure. It gives rise to a tension because I feel like I have no choice but to settle for and pursue a form of accountability that does not represent the type of world I want to live in. These tensions lead me to resent Dad’s violence even more."

There is an exquisite intellectual and emotional honesty in Haydar's memoir that makes it a really important contribution to public discussion. Haydar has survived horrors - not only the highly publicised killing of her mother by her father but also the death of her grandmother in Lebanon in an Israeli airstrike. Her grandmother was part of a convey flying white flags and was hit by the second missile as she fled the already hit car to the fruit orchid they were travelling through. Haydar writes both of her attempts to make sense of her family's experiences, of the strangeness of a society that has one narrative around domestic violence but tends to silence the anger of those bereaved by war. If all this sounds too abstract, the book is, of course, deeply personal.
Reading this alongside the Abolition For The People anthology inevitably meant I particularly appreciated Haydar's take on abolition, the law and the police. Abolition writings tend not to focus on interpersonal violence, largely because this is such a small part of the system, but it can become frustrating as a victim of such violence to not see a more open discussion about the impact of such trauma here and now and the paucity of options for both safety and accountability. While I don't agree with Haydar's support for coercive control laws, I can understand her view that perhaps with them, her mother might still be alive. When combined with Larissa Behrendt's excellent After Story, which also explores the impact of violence, both police-led and other, this feels like a richer approach to a world without incarceration.
Yet, at the time of her mother's murder, Haydar's brother was incarcerated. Despite numerous calls and pleas, her brother found out about the murder from the news in the prison. Haydar explores the various dimensions of their situation - as well as the hopelessness of services available for victims of domestic violence, with forensic fury. There is nothing here that is easy or good. One memorable scene involves her navigating Centrelink days after the murder with her 17-year-old sister, who was not in a position to sit her exams. The mundanity of the evil of our systems lays starkly clear.
There is a lot in this book that I will be thinking about for some time, and I suspect a re-read is in order.