Guest post written by Blood Moon Bride author Demet Divaroren
Demet Divaroren is the award winning author of Living on Hope Street and the co-editor of CBCA shortlisted anthology Growing up Muslim in Australia. She was born in her mother’s childhood home in Adana, Turkey. Demet migrated to Australia with her family when she was six months old and grew up on the outskirts of Melbourne. Her language was a fusion of English and Turkish words, a phonetic, random mix of strong vowels and sneaky silent letters.
Today, Demet’s unique voice shapes her stories, which explore multiculturalism, cross cultural relationships, racism, injustice, gender based oppression, and what it means to be human.
About Blood Moon Bride: Forced into marriage for her valley’s survival, Rehya must decide: submit or rebel against a ruthless system? A brilliant, fierce and compelling YA fantasy perfect for fans of The Prison Healer and Children of Blood and Bone, from the acclaimed, award-winning author of Living on Hope Street.
Readers often ask how much of my life is in my fiction.
The answer is always the same.
Writing, regardless of genre, is personal.
Sometimes the personal bleeds into our work in detectable ways. Often, it’s subtle. Writing is, after all, cleaved from imagination that’s nourished by what we read, watch, observe, experience, feel and want.
My latest young adult novel, Blood Moon Bride, is set in a fantastical world yet it echoes the many forms of oppression and injustice that permeate our world today. My heroine, Rehya, and girls like her, inherit the patriarchal and corrupt world of Mennama Valley, ruled by a ruthless governor. A world where girls as young as fifteen are lined up on a stage, ‘washed, scented and wrapped in thread’, and paraded in front of old men who wait impatiently to make them their wives.
It features courageous women who dare to fight back against gender-based oppression in fictional circumstances – but their resilience is very real.
I come from a long line of resilient women.
Women who rebound.
Spring back.
Women whose strength is coiled in my marrow.
In the 1950s in Adana, Turkey, my maternal great-grandmother laboured alone on her loungeroom floor. An hour after giving birth, she returned to her shift on a leek field.
In a world that kneaded and compressed the term ‘girl’ like dough, her daughter, my quiet grandmother, set up a small sewing business in her marital home at eighteen and made her five daughters sleeveless dresses that defied the modest dress code.
One of her daughters, my mother, resorted to marriage two years after graduating primary school due to poverty and a lack of life choices, and continued her education by reading novels. Books stretched her mind and heart beyond her world and she found truth, empathy and resilience in fiction.
Through stories, my mother learned to resist.
***
When I was fifteen, a suitor came knocking on our door. My mum stood boulder-like between us. ‘I married young,’ she said. ‘My daughters will not.’ My mum broke free of a past intent on repeating cycles and honoured my right to an education and life choices.
She chose instead to regularly take me and my sisters to the library where we would fill plastic bags until they bulged with books.
I inherited my love of stories and storytelling, my superpower, from my mother.
And this power of story and storytelling, of documenting truth, is an important thread in Blood Moon Bride. As is Rehya’s fight for justice, equality and agency over her own mind and body. A fight not unlike the one raging across our world today led by women who demand equality, the right to an education, self-determination and control over their bodies.
Women who resist.
Rebound.
And fight back against patriarchal systems, echoing the many women who have come before.
