Is it a compliment or an insult to describe someone as “private”?

Online, in literature, on podcasts, we love dissecting the minutia of our tastes, morals, orientation, diagnoses, upbringing, genetics and all other aspects of what was once called our “private lives”. We turn these dimensions, especially how they’ve disadvantaged us, into an identity. The otherwise privileged increasingly make a brand of confessing a struggle, as though performing a civic duty or a quasi-religious expiation.

My reaction to this may be a matter of theological difference. For all our similarities, Christianity holds confession sacred where Islam shuns it. God already knows, Islam says, the best of your deeds, the worst … Keep it to yourself.

We all know our privacy has been sold. Influencers who choose to share in the profit may have more sense than me who fancies myself slick for clicking “prefer not to say” on surveys asking me to select gender – as if I’m not getting internet ads personalised to my hormonal cycle anyway.

Still, I maintain that my hijab acts as a firewall by restricting access to the part of me that capitalist patriarchy feels most entitled to – my body. This shield is often perceived as a threat, such that is sends entire governments into a panic.

Did I compromise that shield by deciding to publish a book, potentially allowing strangers a glimpse into my psyche in exchange for money?

In her 1998 essay, The Privacy of the Novel, Patricia Meyers Spacks describes the ideal novel as a private place where one can “exercise, experience and discover [one’s] uniqueness”. In the lead-up to the launch of my own debut novel, a wise friend advised me to start writing my second book before internalising public perception. But it was too late. From my first draft I had been anxiously trying to preempt readers’ judgments. I envied Emily Dickinson, who was to me a symbol of ultimate artistic privacy.

History has pitied Dickinson for dying in the very obscurity that allowed her to “discover [her] uniqueness”. She left behind an awesome monument to the fruits of privacy. While familial pressures certainly discouraged her from seeking publication, she also painted fame as an end to creativity: “Men eat of it and die.”

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Privacy is especially challenging for non-white authors. Particularly in Australia, the expectation is that non-white authors must draw on their personal histories for inspiration – especially their traumas, the traumas of their ancestors. As I was on the cusp of my literary career, I felt industry pressure to livestream my own disembowelment.

Was that all I could do? Hold a brown mass up to the audience, saying, “And this is my left kidney … ” It would be excruciating and debilitating but at least it would prove – once and for all – that I am a human being.

But I already know that, so I decided to keep my guts to myself.

In retrospect, this was a privileged decision. For one thing, writers of colour before me had paved the way and so I felt less need to proclaim my humanity. For another, my humanity was not directly under threat.

In 2021, when I was drafting my novel, social media was flooded with videos of Palestinian kids crying as Israeli police fired stun grenades into al-Aqsa Mosque, as though only a traumatised child could earn western pity. The year before that, I had seen Black and Blak families forced to broadcast their griefs to prove that Black lives matter.

None of that would prepare me for the videos that have been emerging out of Gaza since October last year. Desperate to plea their humanity, Palestinian doctors and journalists film incomprehensible levels of human suffering, forfeiting their right to grieve in private.

But even before these events, when I set out to write a novel with a central character, a Palestinian farmhand, so private I wouldn’t even divulge his first name, I was fantasising a way for oppressed peoples to demand compassion without having to bleed.

I wanted to afford my characters the dignity of ambiguity, to prove ambiguity was possible despite the demands for explanation that have infiltrated identity politics.

Decorated Vietnamese Australian writer Nam Le does this beautifully. His stories pose as migrant trauma tell-alls, only to subvert the trope with metafictional sleights of hand. In one essay, he concedes there is value in identity politics – to centre marginalised voices, bear witness and create community – but he is conflicted . “As … a comrade I get it,” he says. “As a writer, I find it profane.”

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Solitude makes privacy easier, but it is not a prerequisite. Intimacy is only extending the borders of your privacy to include another person.

Creating intimacy between my characters without violating their privacy from readers was a challenge. I had to draw the curtain at moments that would have amplified readers’ understanding and create meaningful ellipses, gaps readers might fill with something more alive than I could have instructed them to imagine.

The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman understands Virginia Woolf’s notion of privacy in fiction as a gift box containing a precious metal: “Opening it would dispel the atmosphere, ruin the radiance [that] makes [life] worth living.”

Privacy can sanctify feelings and memories that might be tarnished by the miscomprehension of strangers or the exploitation of profiteers. I have striven to spare my characters the humiliation of explanation, leaving them free to say to each other, I love you. You don’t need to do that with me.

In The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest preserved poems in human history, a stranger questions the profound love Gilgamesh holds for his deceased companion. Gilgamesh calls out, “Enkidu, Enkidu … Help me. They do not know you as I know you.”

That’s all he says. And we have no right to know more, even 4,000 years later. His love is too precious to share.

• Translations by Jumaana Abdu is out now ($34.99, Vintage Australia).