Arts
Finding liberation and relief in writing—Omar Musa
View(s):There was a time when Omar Musa seriously doubted the validity of his work. He had been told rather kindly by a producer that no one would want to hear an Australian rapper, and it did seem as if no one was listening.
Omar Musa
Musa wrote ‘Play On’ to deal with this-very much in the same way he has written poetry since he was young to deal with his loneliness and powerlessness as a boy of colour living in Australia.
The low point in his career, which he thought “would never end”, was followed by a victory at the 2008 Australian Poetry Slam.
It gave him the opportunity to travel, to perform to growing local and foreign audiences and to make his first album. More than anything, it gave him the confidence to pursue a career as a poet, rapper and author.
Musa has released two solo hip hop records (The Massive EP and World Goes to Pieces), two self-published books (The Clocks and Parang) and a self-titled album with international hip hop group MoneyKat.
Here Come the Dogs was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Award and Musa was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelists of the Year in 2015.
The son of Australian arts journalist Helen Musa and Malaysian poet Musa bin Masran, Musa was encouraged to write from his young days and found himself frequently turning to poetry to deal with feeling isolated from society due to his mixed heritage.
“Writing was something I found liberation and relief from,” he says “but I was looking for a more performance oriented form and that’s when I discovered hip hop. It was cool, it was political.
Then, of course, I started writing stories. I don’t think of them as different genres-they’re all branches of the same river. The important thing is telling a story.”
At the Galle Literary Festival, the spotlight will be on his poetry, upcoming album Gutter and Gold and first debut novel ‘Here Come the Dogs’ published by Penguin in 2014. It’s a story set in suburbia, centering around three young men.
Musa notes that the book explores toxic masculinity and the way young men are taught to express themselves at an early age. The writing of the book was a very brutal, raw process, he says.
“I had to put myself in a lot of dark places while writing it-took me three years to complete and I felt extremely lost for much of it.”
As a writer he felt the need to station himself with his protagonists, rough though they may be. “A criticism has been that it glorifies masculinity but I see it as telling their story as well.”
Demonising is not what he wants to do as a writer, he adds.
Musa’s access point to the prose was through the poetry, so one third of the book is in verse. It’s difficult subject matter to handle, because he’s writing about issues he feels are rarely tackled in Australian literature.
“There was an infamous statistic last year that revealed that one in three Australian women will experience violence in their lifetime.
There is obviously something deeply wrong in our society, and what might make people uncomfortable about my writing is that I’m picking at the scabs to look beneath the surface. “