This year has been a cascade of intensifying global conflicts, resulting in a shared sense of desensitisation among many. Interrupting this complacency was Omar Musa’s Fierceland, emphasising the weight of having privilege in sharp, unsettling poetic prose.

The novel’s interplay of identity, displacement, colonialism, and multiculturalism is communicated through its temporal and spatial restlessness, as it moves across Malaysian Borneo, Australia, Nigeria, and Venice across different time periods. What’s compelling is that the text does not resolve the tensions between the coloniser and the colonised, nor the impacts of their power dynamics on nature and community. Rather, it urges us to reflect on what it means to “[speak] back” against injustice.

My conversation with Omar delved further into these colonial, multicultural tensions, exploring themes of Western influence, cultural friction, the fine line between translation and preservation, and storytelling as a means of reclamation.

I recently read your book. 

I have it here, actually, Fierceland. And what a powerful and very needed story, considering the geopolitical climate these days! Also, I felt that I could relate to the multicultural experience. I left the story thinking about how we need to change and stand up to the oppression that keeps happening over time.

Thank you so much! I really appreciate that you took the time to read it and to think about it so deeply. I worked on it for a really long time, so it's very gratifying to hear when people engage with it in that way, and it resonates.

No problem! Throughout the story, we see a lot of Westernisation, especially through the media. And I wonder what your thoughts are on Western influence on cultures outside of it, and when it goes too far?

I think we live in a world where many hegemonic forces are at play, whether through political or military influence or pop culture. Obviously, I'm fairly interested in places where cultures clash, with friction or cross-pollination. So, in the past, I've definitely been interested in cultural friction. But I'm also interested in places like Southeast Asia and Malaysian Borneo, where there's such a swirl of cultures, whether Malay, Indian, Chinese, or Indigenous. But then, of course, living in a world where people do not exist in a vacuum, in a place like Borneo, I think it's very easy for people from the outside to essentialise a place like that. 

For instance, in British myths about Borneo, it was portrayed as a place of pirates and headhunters. But it's a place like any other in the world where people have access to Western pop culture, the kids grow up on video games, Western TV shows, and stuff like that. So, I guess that was the point of depicting it in that way, to sort of subvert and counteract some of those types of mythologies around a place like Borneo. I'm also interested in the deeper tectonics of things like production and, obviously, colonisation, and capitalism. So, for instance, something like the palm oil trade, seeing where those linkages lie between Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe. And the influence of, for example, the British North Borneo Company and British colonisation on a place like Borneo. And so those kinds of ghosts, and how they echo in the modern day, and, yeah, interested in that kind of broader, global context of these types of influences.

Southeast Asia or Borneo is spoken to by the colonisers or by the West. I would say that, hopefully, a book like this speaks back.

Translation is a huge part of this text, as is integrating local language and phrases into the dialogue. Many native languages have been lost or are nearly lost due to colonialisation. I wonder what you think the line is between preservation and translation?

I'm not a linguist, I'm a fiction writer, I'm a poet. So, I think I naively kind of went into this exercise. For example, the section translated into many local languages in Sabah, I [went into it] naively and with the best intentions, but not realising what a complex endeavour it is. But I would say, in this book, that translation is tantamount to some small form of preservation because it's a recording, and it's now there. People have to contend with it, whether they're Australian, English, in Kuala Lumpur, or Sabahan. 

I found, when I launched the book in Kota Kinabalu, that a lot of the people in my community were just so excited by that section, because it's something that plays [in] a lot of people's minds - that these languages and a lot of the wisdom that goes with it are disappearing. I had actually just, in light of all this, [had] a quite interesting conversation the other day with Dr Caroline Hughes, who's a Ngunnawal elder from where I grew up in the Queanbeyan Canberra region. She's been at the forefront of trying to revive the Ngunnawal language, and she said,

“We don't talk about dying or dead languages. We talk about sleeping languages”

And so that effort has to be put in. And it can be incredibly enlightening, but it can also be a difficult endeavour. But I like that idea, that you're sort of just reawakening something that's maybe lying dormant or sleeping. 

So, in light of Borneo, talking about hegemonic languages like English or the Malay language, and as they get bigger and bigger, the fear is that some of these smaller languages might disappear. So, I was just trying to play my own very small part in recordings. Also, Malaysian Borneo is a place where people often try to identify differences between ethnic groups and delineate boundaries. I know that's common, and it's not only in Malaysia where that happens, but I noticed it a lot there. So I think what I was trying to do, through the motif of the wood, and ‘The Song of the Wood’, and the voice of the wood, was [to] find this commonality, and a common material, that is shared by all of the different ethnic groups in Borneo, whether it's people of the coastline, of the interior, of the mountains, and so that these translations, and ‘The Song of the Wood’, was in some ways, [celebrating] the difference, because it shows the different sort of variations of language, but it's also to show the commonality, and something that unites all these disparate groups.

Adding to that, in the text I noticed this stylistic choice of altering how quotes are presented on the page, going against typical conventions, and I was wondering why this decision was made?

It's probably a product of my overthinking. It's really cool that you picked up on it, actually, because I was fairly convinced that no one would pick up on that. You know what it was? It’s that it's very hard in a book like this to get characters who are related to each other, and grow up in the same community, to have voices that are different enough from each other. And so I was trying to stylistically reflect the characters' differences. Rozanna is a bit of a rebel; she's a free spirit. She often has these kinds of stream-of-consciousness thoughts. I adopted the dialogue style of someone like James Joyce, who uses a lot of stream-of-consciousness. The long em-dashes, I believe, kind of guide the eye through that arrangement of words. Whereas I wanted Harun, as someone who's a bit more precise and business-minded, to use short, sharp, declarative sentences and more common quotation marks. I hoped that in doing so, it would maybe, subconsciously, delineate the voices for a reader. I actually thought no one would really pick up on this. I'm really stoked that you have. But I thought that, at the very least, on a subconscious level, a regular would know that they were in a different type of passage.

Yeah, I definitely felt that. With the murrina, the Borneo ironwood, and even the palm oil, we see a consistent theme in our world of possessions belonging to natives being taken away by colonisers. And I'm wondering what your opinion is on when precious materials being returned isn't an option, what reclamation looks like?

I can only speak from the point of view of being a storyteller, you know, and a poet. And

I think that reclaiming our stories, and the way we write our stories, is a way of reclaiming some of that narrative, selfhood, dignity and identity

So, for example, I sort of prestigiously write back to Joseph Conrad, who was a brilliant writer but wrote in certain ways that, I would say, backgrounded the local characters. Or, for example, used nature and its wildness as a metaphor for the dark side of man. Whereas, say in a place like Borneo, the forest is an abundant, generous place that is also the repository of a lot of wisdom and stories. I think part of the reason I actually wrote the book was reclaiming a story like this, because when I go into the bookshops in Kota Kinabalu, I'll see a lot of books about natural history, about World War II, and all those things are fascinating, but I don't find any fiction. So I wanted to sort of plant my own little flag in the literary landscape. And I realised that when Borneo was depicted, it was so often depicted by outsiders, like Joseph Conrad. 

Having said that, I also have to be aware of my own identity and where I sit in that whole matrix, because I was born and raised in Australia. My bloodline and heritage are deeply intertwined with Borneo and its different groups, like my grandmother's ethnic group, the Kedayan, and my father still lives there. All my family lives there, besides my mother, but I am Aussie, you know? I also have to be aware and not pretend like I've got some special lens on the place. I'm only a small fragment in a much bigger mosaic, hopefully. Also, having lived an extremely privileged life. I was born into an educated family. I went to a private school. I am university educated, you know? But, like some of the characters, I've questioned a lot during my life about what to do with that privilege. 

I've come to the point of view that you can either use that privilege to uphold the status quo or to challenge it.

And I'd like to think that in my own small way, what i'm doing with my privilege and with this book is to reclaim stories, challenge essentialising narratives, and also open the door for others. Hopefully, there are a lot of storytellers who grew up in Sabah and Sarawak who can now tell their stories, because hopefully I've opened the door a tiny little bit.

We see Roz doing a joint exhibition about her culture, yet her culture seems to be interpreted through white privilege. And I was wondering what you think are effective strategies for resisting the art space's continued domination by a Western canon while maintaining an inclusive image?

That's an interesting question. Resistant strategies. I think I can give you what I think is hopefully a good example, because I've seen it in practice. It's about creating safe spaces for dangerous ideas and places where people feel welcome and safe to express themselves. The best example I can think of is the Bankstown Poetry Slam in Western Sydney. I don't know if you've ever been there. 

I know some people who are part of it. 

Yeah, it's amazing, and it's not a space only for Muslim people. But, I would say a large percentage of the people who perform the poetry there and who attend [are] Muslim people. Or even something like the Sydney Muslim Writers Festival, which was two weeks ago. Both of these things would have been inconceivable 20 years ago when I started my practice. I was often one of the only, well, I'll be real, like, I was often the only Muslim person, or only brown person, at a lot of events that I would go to, particularly poetry events. And because of the hard work and community support out in the Western suburbs of Bankstown Poetry Slam, now there's this place in the midst of a really racist and Islamophobic society, where Muslim people are so often talked about in very febrile terms, in the media or in Parliament, but never actually spoken to, or even sometimes seen as human beings. Now we have this space where Muslim people feel safe and free to express their stories, until their stories with complexity and nuance and tragedy and humour [are accepted] like any other Australian citizen. But oftentimes, especially since 2001, I grew up in this era where we have been dehumanised and demonised. And so I think this is a roundabout way of saying that, it’s on a really small, local, and community level, that we can make these spaces, and hopefully, with the help also of allies, because we do live in a community, these spaces then become sites of resistance and community strengthening. 

I'm really thinking now. The other week of being at the Sydney Muslim Writers Festival, I mean, I'll be real with you. When I started in the early 2000s, I probably couldn't have named five other Muslim writers in Australia. And now there's a whole writer's festival in one city. That's amazing. But you could also feel how necessary that space was at this current moment in world and Australian history. For people to show this huge array of Muslim voices and thinkers, some very radical, some a bit closer to the centre. Some stand-up comedians, other people, you know, rabble rousers, maybe like, I don't know if that's what I am. But maybe people speaking with a bit more anger, and other people speaking from an academic point of view. And it's just so necessary. 

Yeah, that's amazing! My last question for you is: if those with privilege read this novel, what do you want their perception to be of the multicultural experience and their effect on it?

People with privilege. I mean, personally, I hope that people of all different walks of life, that's what I'm always aiming for, is that this book can be read on a number of levels, and by people of different backgrounds. But, you also have to be real, right? When people read literary fiction, they're usually people with a fair degree of privilege. For the most part. Or, say, in Malaysia, English-speaking people, you're probably gonna be a little bit more privileged. 

A friend of mine once said, “If privilege is a resource, where do we choose to spend it, and how do we choose to spend it?” I think, hopefully, people would read this book, look at themselves and how they are in the world with new eyes, and question how they choose to uphold or challenge the status quo. I think that's what it is. It's not something that can be done perfectly. It's messy. You have to have difficult conversations with yourself. And that's what I try to do, because I'd like to think, I hope, that I'm not just creating polemic, didactic art. I don't try to answer all of the questions that I pose in the book, because it's tricky stuff. I've had to look hard at myself and my own privilege, and my own blind spots, and where I have re-perpetuated systems of power or oppression. Or been complicit. 

That's actually one of the major things of the book, complicity. That was one of the things I was thinking about - when have I been too complicit in a sexist, racist, homophobic system, a capitalist system? And have I been complicit, by choice or by coercion? You know, where do we, as individuals, have choice within our systems, or are we sort of at the whim of these larger forces? I think it's obviously a combination of both, but I do think that we have agency. The characters in the book have agency. They might be products of their era, place, and generation. But they do have a choice. And if we, as citizens, can be part of the problem, which we have been and are, say, in terms of ecological collapse, then logic tells me that we can also be part of the solution. But it's not gonna be easy. 

Before Omar and I’s conversation ended, we revisited the idea of preservation and translation within and extending outside of the book, bringing a unique insight into the book-writing process for Fierceland which has not been discussed before.

I was reading something, I think it was from the Runway Journal, which focused on their current theme of translation. I thought it was interesting how there's such a fine line between translating something to make it more readable and accessible, and also preserving it to keep the language alive.

Well, that's the thing, languages are dynamic. And so, sometimes, they seem to grow by actually having mistranslations or things that aren't exactly precise. What I found is that it seems to be much more of an art than a mathematical science. 

I'll give you a cool example just to finish off because it was just funny and kind of interesting. So, one of the languages I got a translation for is Iban. It's an ethnic group in Sarawak, the other state in North Borneo. It was a friend's friend's dad who translated it. And when I got the translation back, I looked at it, and the formatting was totally different from the way I'd written it, and I didn't know whether that was just because it had been sent through WhatsApp or what. And I said, “Oh, is it, you know, like a word-for-word translation, or what, you know, what's going on? Did you put the words on different lines?” And I got the response, “No, your poem reminded me of an epic style of Iban poetry, that's sort of like a dedication to a hero that we have in our language. And so I basically (not in these words), took it on myself to rewrite your poem in that style.” And so, it's not a direct translation. It's a representation of the spirit of my poem in a style they use in their language. Is that a translation? Is that a mistranslation? Is that a conversion? I don't know. But what it is, is that it's dynamic, and I think, well, who the hell am I to tell this uncle, who's representing this in his language? And so to me,

A poem is a living thing. And so, it breathes new life into the poem.

Maybe someone else might come along and say, “Oh, that poem doesn't represent the original words. I want to translate it again.” And I'd be stoked for that to happen. 

Omar Musa will be a part of three events for the Sydney Writers’ Festival. On Thursday, the 21st of May, he will be part of the ‘Rhythm of Truth Poetry Gala’ where he will be conducting a performance alongside his wife, cellist Mariel Robert Musa, in dedication to Fierceland. You can also find him on Saturday, 23rd May, where he will be in conversation with writer and poet Sara M. Saleh about Fierceland. On Sunday, 24th of May, you can also find him as a part of the panel ‘Family Secrets’ alongside authors S. Shakthidharan, Susan Choi and Sisonke Msimang. Hope to see you there!

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Anagha Abhi (full: Anagha Abhilash Kumar) is a Bachelor of Arts student, majoring in Creative Writing. When she is not writing for Blitz, she edits for UNSWeetened. You will likely find her drenched in pink.

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