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Omar Musa is a rapper, poet and novelist from Queanbeyan, Australia. He calls himself a “scallywag” but I’ve seen this man in action and he could charm the Queen of England. In an email conversation interrupted by literary festivals, workshops and heartache (not a breakup but Muhammad Ali’s passing), he tells me what he thinks about Beyoncé’s Lemonade , how his attitudes to maleness have changed, and why he wants to tell stories about people who don’t fit into stale mythologies.
His first novel, Here Come the Dogs (Penguin-Random House), is part prose, part poetry — rugged, jagged and blisteringly good.
I don't know if you've been following this whole >bell hooks vs. Beyoncé debate . It has to do with power and representation but it's also about feminism — how we define it and what we expect of it. I wondered what your take on this was?
I have only vaguely followed the whole bell hooks/Beyoncé debate. Firstly, I must say that I am a big fan of Lemonade — I thought the movie was stunning (accented by Warsan Shire’s wrenching, vivid poetry) and that the album itself is the blockbuster collection of bangers you would expect from the Queen B. I enjoyed seeing the outpouring of fandom for a piece of art that celebrated black, female badassery and the black, female body. It seemed like a cool moment to see one of the world’s biggest stars trying to artistically express her interpretation of feminism and her complicated position as a woman within the world and within her relationship. Having said that, it’s a pop album, one mostly constructed to get us moving and feeling, and making a tonne of money.
This might be a cop-out by a simple mind, but even though you could argue that the very nature of a pop album makes it a worthy object of analysis, as a manifestation of a capitalist system, or that songs like these can be potent emblems of racial/sexual identity, I always roll my eyes a bit when a tome of academic analysis is dedicated to an album like this. Yes, everything is up for intellectual dissection, but when you come to the conclusion (as hooks seemed to), that Lemonade is in fact not revolutionary or new, and that it doesn’t shatter the patriarchy or redefine womanhood or allow black women to move beyond pain, I end up wondering, even as a true believer in the arts — “but do you really expect all of that from a Beyoncé album?” Maybe some people do, and that is what bell hooks is reacting against. Or maybe she did, and was let down. All I can say is that I might start wearing high heels, just so I can enter a party to “6 Inch Heels”.
You're a musician — you talk about violence, race, gender in your work — I'm interested to know how your attitudes have changed over the years with regard to maleness, particularly in the Australian context you grew up in.
I think my attitudes to maleness have changed a lot over the years. It has become somewhat of a clichéd term, but I do think that a lot of the maleness I encountered and participated in, growing up, amounts to “toxic masculinity”. I have come to realise that I live in a world that regularly enacts verbal, physical and economic violence against women. And, as a man, either with conscious or unconscious bias, I play or have played a part in that. I try to stay open to criticism and am willing to interrogate myself in the hope that I can play a positive role in this system, as an ally to feminists/women. I say “ally” because I’m starting to get a bit sick of middle-class (often white) men, labelling themselves “feminists” as if it protects them from criticism. I also reckon this often stops them from looking at their own prejudices. I know that at a base level, a feminist is a person who believes in justice and equality for women, but part of me wonders whether I can truly say I am a feminist if I have not experienced oppression in a woman’s body? I’m still figuring all of this out, and I’m sure I will die trying to figure it out. For now, I am an ally.
Muhammad Ali died June 3, 2016. Can you tell me why he was so important to you?
Muhammad Ali meant so much to me. I wept uncontrollably when he passed away, even though he had been in ill-health for a long time. When I was a child, I got teased by another kid for having brown skin. He said it was the same colour as shit. I went home crying and told my parents for the only time in my life that I wished my skin wasn’t brown. My parents sat me down and told me that I should always be proud of my skin and being Muslim, even if other people put you down for it. Soon afterwards, my dad started showing me tapes of the handsome, charismatic Louisville Lip, a man who wove rhymes, cracked jokes and conquered all comers in the boxing ring, who proclaimed that he was The Greatest and The Prettiest.
The latter statements were not mere braggadocio, it seemed obvious to me even then — what he was really saying was that black was beautiful and even though he was living in a country where racism against people like him was rife, he could proudly own his selfhood, his religion, his skin. His attitude inspired me no end at a time when I could have internalised racist attitudes towards people of colour in Australia. I could never be a champion sportsman, but I could take on some of his audacious, brave attitude. He taught me to be proud, to be fearless, to stand up for my convictions, that even if society was against you, your conviction for what was right and just would be vindicated by history. It taught me that my brown skin was not the colour of shit — it shone like gold. His legacy also led me onto finding out about Malcolm X and the Civil Rights Movement and, in turn, to find out about hip-hop music. So much of my personality and even my profession, I owe in part to Ali. RIP.
Tell us about Queanbeyan — the town in Australia you grew up in and how it has figured into making you a poet/rapper/scallywag.
Queanbeyan has shaped me in a lot of ways. It is a town of about 30,000 people in New South Wales, just outside of the capital of Australia, Canberra, and is a very multicultural, working-class place. Its nickname is “Struggletown,” even though it is changing rapidly. Its motto is “City Living, Country Benefits,” so it’s a bit of an in-between place. I grew up in a big flatblock/apartment block where my neighbours were from Korea, the Balkans, India, the Pacific Islands — all trying to make a life for themselves in Australia. So, I was surrounded by a multitude of stories and interesting people from a young age. Because none of us had much money (although I was certainly privileged because my mother was in the arts), we were often forced to use our imaginations to come up with games, tell each other stories, create adventures to go on.
We also saw a lot of car thefts, drug abuse (especially heroin in the ‘90s), domestic violence, and just violence in general. Some of my friends were also involved in these nefarious activities. I was always a sensitive kid, so I would take a lot of it in and try to process it and figure out why humans acted so badly to each other. When I was 11, I won a short-story prize with a story about heroin-addicts in Malaysia, and if you look at my work, I am still interested in dark themes. The corollary to all of this is that I am also interested in how people who reach low points can redeem themselves, how people in places that are ignored or ridiculed are often actually full of bravery and dignity and pride. Being from a place like Queanbeyan has given me a chip on my shoulder, an urge to tell the story untold and an interest in people who do not fit into stale mythologies of what Australia is.
You’ve travelled far and wide from Queanbeyan, performing on stages all over the world… and one of those places has been India. What was your experience in India like? The highlights and lowlights, please.
Weirdly, my highlights and lowlights were different sides of the very same coin. I love meeting young people on my travels and was continuously impressed with the level of urgency and the hunger for knowledge I encountered amongst high-school and university students from Jaipur to Delhi to Guwahati to Mumbai. I could be being naïve and I have no doubt that apathy exists in India, but I didn’t feel it as strongly as I do here in Australia, where years of prosperity seem to have led to large-scale apathy and a sense of entitlement amongst many. My highlights were mostly in Mumbai, actually. I loved the Kala Ghoda Festival, the seafood, getting to perform alongside passionate poets at the open mic event Words Tell Stories and meeting young rappers from Dharavi. But what I loved most of all was getting the chance to spend time with a breakdancing crew called The Culture Squad, in Govandi. Govandi is a largely Muslim area that is built on one of the largest rubbish dumps in India, and it was inspiring to see these young people expressing themselves so wonderfully and creatively while up against some of the harshest conditions I have seen in the world. That’s what I call resilience.
Of course, the flipside (and lowlight) of that was seeing such entrenched poverty on such a large scale — it can’t help but depress you. As I was driving past Dharavi, I actually started tearing up in the cab; not out of some sense of voyeuristic pity, I hope, but because I suddenly felt a sensation that I have had in Malaysia, in Bangladesh — a sense of the monumental heartbreak of Asia, of nations whose post-independence optimism has now crumbled into widening inequality and scarily narrow nationalism.
