Sharing the stage with authors Jeet Thayil and Iffat Nawaz on the Literature Stay! The Mumbai LitFest not too long ago, Bornean-Australian author and poet Omar Musa had the viewers hooked as he learn from his genre-defying new novel, Fierceland (revealed by Penguin). Musa, who can also be an artist and musician, shared that his “polyglot, polyphonic” e-book is in regards to the “faultiness of reminiscence and truths that stay on unstable floor”.
Fierceland is Musa’s second novel and was not too long ago awarded the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Fiction. A scathing portrait of the ecological crises dealing with humanity within the period of the Anthropocene, the novel is instructed by means of the lives of Rozana and Harun, heirs to the blood cash of patriarchal palm oil baron Yusuf. In an electronic mail dialog, Musa elaborates on how his e-book is a direct critique of Joseph Conrad’s Coronary heart of Darkness. Edited excerpts:
Additionally Learn | Coronary heart of darkness
Q: Fierceland foregrounds many essential debates, from colonial origins of capitalist greed to widespread ecological crises. What was the fast driving drive behind the novel?
A: The fast driving drive was a mixture of affection, longing and fury. It was private reflections in regards to the dynamics of households, in addition to privilege and complicity (my very own included) in methods of oppression and environmental destruction. I describe Fierceland as a love letter to Borneo and an elegy for the issues we’ve misplaced. I turned fascinated by the darkish, fraught world of logging and palm oil in Borneo. I knew that if I needed to inform this story honestly, I needed to dive deep into the tectonics of capitalism and corruption; to grapple with the ghosts of imperialism and language. As people, how will we interface with momentous forces far larger than ourselves? Can we have interaction with them out of selection or coercion? Is it even potential to heal the injuries we’ve got brought about or regenerate the issues we’ve got destroyed?
Q: There’s a deliberate try to not clarify for an Anglophone Western readership, with regards to the Malay phrases and references within the novel. What was the thought course of behind this aesthetic selection?
A: Accent and circulate of speech are so carefully tied in with identification, and representing the souls and dynamic lived experiences of my characters meant capturing them within the novel. Sabahan slang and Manglish have their very own rhythm and texture, and the e-book wouldn’t have felt as genuine if I had made it rigidly conform to “correct English” (no matter that’s), and if I had italicised phrases rupturing the web page each few sentences. I look again on a few of my early work, the place I did that, and even had a glossary of Malay phrases, and it simply appears so unusual and othering now.
Deforestation in Borneo
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Wiki Commons
I actually need individuals to interact with Fierceland by itself linguistic phrases. As a reader, I discover it enjoyable to try this — I’m pondering of how revelatory it was to learn Sandra Cisneros’s mix of Spanish and English for the primary time, and even Irvine Welsh writing in Scots English. We stay in a polyglot, interconnected world — if individuals don’t know what a phrase means, they will google it. I do it on a regular basis with arcane English phrases, and tutorial writing or legalese, for that matter, that are additionally their very own languages.
Q: Whereas studying the novel, one is reminded of Joseph Conrad’s Coronary heart of Darkness, to which there’s additionally a direct reference. How would you say your work speaks to that colonial literary custom of depicting indigenous landscapes and wilderness?
A: Properly, Fierceland is certainly a deliberate subversion/ critique of Coronary heart of Darkness. Within the passage you’re referring to, a personality responds to Conrad himself, saying that in the event you observe a river in Borneo, you’ll find that the land/ wilderness in reality has a coronary heart of sunshine, not darkness. The forest in my e-book additionally has its personal voice and company and spirit — it’s not only a backdrop or to be exploited; not only a metaphor for the hearts of males. Likewise, I’ve tried to foreground the native characters, make them flesh and blood, when in a e-book like Coronary heart of Darkness, they could solely present an impressionistic backdrop for the lives of the European characters.
Q: Have any of your private experiences made it to the fictional panorama of Fierceland?
A: Oh, sure. There’s a darkish undercurrent beneath the shiny veneer of The Australian Dream. I’ve many instances skilled the vile kind of hatred that Harun and Loopy Auntie undergo within the e-book, at a avenue degree and naturally on the Web. Xenophobes and Islamophobes (and apologists for the genocide in Gaza) are operating riot in Australia and the U.S. for the time being. However I’ve additionally skilled the extra pervasive, center class types of racism and Islamophobia that Roz experiences (although in all probability not fairly as excruciating).
I bear in mind an ungainly second, when, like Roz, I used to be requested to provide a speech at college about Islam and was “caught out” for not realizing each tiny element about Islamic jurisprudence, as if by merely being Muslim, I used to be all of a sudden some kind of spokesperson for the group. That kind of factor has adopted me round my entire life since 9/11. However whereas a few of these issues within the e-book are undoubtedly knowledgeable by actual life experiences, keep in mind that it’s fiction — most of it got here from my creativeness.
The interviewer is a Delhi-based literary critic and analysis scholar.
Printed – March 09, 2026 02:30 pm IST
