Omar Musa finds wisdom in unlikely places. When the Malaysian-Australian poet and hip-hop artist was recently travelling in Indonesia, he had a chance conversation with a fisherman. If you listen closely, you can hear its echo through Musa’s latest poetry collection, Millefiori.
“I was in a remote part of Indonesia right after a break-up and I met this fisherman who was trying to hustle me and get me to pay extra for snorkeling to show me different types of coral and then he saw that I was really sad,” Musa, a generous, kinetic presence, tells SBS. “He said ‘I once had my heart broken and nearly killed myself but then I jumped on the first boat to Bali and became a labourer for five years. Now the only way I think about my ex is in the flowers of dreams. In our lives, there are people who have passed on, who we don’t speak to anymore for whatever reason. The only time we see them is in the flowers of dreams, in our memories. I thought that was beautiful.”
There are so many of us who grew up in Australia feeling overlooked but actually, our stories are beautiful and redemptive.
Millefiori, a slim volume that takes its name from a style of Italian glass paperweight, an object that reminds Musa of “ephemeral moments that are frozen forever” is strewn with flowers. Black Sallees witness the ghosts of colonial violence. Leaving a lover casts “lilac shadows.” And the power of telling your stories is like the “reddest of geraniums” that secretly bloom. Musa grew up in Queanbeyan, near Canberra and received international acclaim for his first novel Here Come the Dogs — a gritty incandescent dreamscape peopled by the kind of immigrants who are often absent from the Australian consciousness. Although Millefiori is an elegy to the losses we accrue over a lifetime, he says that it’s also a tribute to the beauty we can find in what’s ordinary or painful — if we take the time to seek it out.
“There’s a great Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who talks about how all true poetry is about the loss of the beloved — that in even the most beautiful poems, there is a sense of melancholy that seeks out a lost past,” says Musa, who also has a parallel practice as a rapper and launches his new album, Since Ali Died, next month. “This volume is full of this — there are goodbyes to childhoods, to friends who have passed away, to innocence. As second-generation migrants, it’s about saying goodbye to the place that’s been a mythical anchor in your life. It’s also about looking for beauty in war, in poverty, in the discarded. There are so many of us who grew up in Australia feeling overlooked but actually, our stories are beautiful and redemptive.”
Back in 2013, Musa gave an electric slam poetry performance at TED X Sydney. That poem, ‘Capital Letters’ is one of Millefiori’s highlights. It’s a kaleidoscopic portrait of an Australia that simmers with class and race tensions, where you can hear the “the hiss of talkback serpents,” where the “Opera House” and “coastline” exists alongside a world of suburban dreamers, the “oils and spices of many lands.” Musa, who’s currently at work on his second novel, believes that writers have a responsibility to grapple with these contradictions — especially during this cultural moment.
“If we look at public language in Australia, it’s trapped between two extremes — the hazy, bureaucratic language that hides the truth, that has a narcotic effect on our consciousness and lulls us into apathy and the jingoistic kind that hits you over the head,” he muses. “It’s our responsibility as poets, artists, writers and journalists to come up with new kinds of language. We shape the world through the words that we use. Two hundred years from now, you can pick up a book of poetry and it will tell you just as much about the human condition as the headlines. It will really tell you about what people are going through. And it will do it in a more interesting way.”
Millefiori by Omar Musa, published by Penguin Random House, is out now, RRP $24.00
