Readers, take note: I’ll be at the Words on the Waves festival, on the Central Coast, this April 13th, reading from my brand new book of poems alongside Yumna Kassab.
“We are very excited to welcome two of Australia’s most searing new voices to the Central Coast for this instalment of Late Night Lit on Thursday April 13. Omar Sakr has been called “one of our essential poets,” by Kwame Dawes, and his unflinchingly honest latest collection Non-Essential Work dubbed, “a stunning achievement” by Driftpile Cree writer Billy Ray-Belcourt. We are so lucky to hear some of the poems from this release, fresh off the press. And, alongside Omar will be fellow Western Sydney artist, Yumna Kassab. Yumna has astounded with assured, singular myth-laden novels to date: The House of Youssef, Australiana, and most recently, the fable The Lovers.” Get your tickets now, fam.
I’ve decided that I’m going to showcase here odd bits and pieces that I wrote either for events, or that were only in print, or died with their website, and so on. Recently, I featured at the NSW State’s Library event Fresh Takes, which was a presentation of live readings from a number of authors. In addition to reading from our books, we’d also been asked to provide a short reflection on the writers and writing that “shaped” us. Below, I’ve included mine.
Authors are often asked to talk about the writers or art that shaped them; it is in the nature of these events, and the nature of our audiences, to seek from us the most clarity possible, to want the best handle on our shapes, to know where we begin and end, the better for you to grasp us and feel some measure of relief at seeing the wizard behind the curtain revealed as naked, human. It’s a question bound up in class, too, a revelation of the literatures we’ve consumed, a performance of erudition, because for all that you want the magic to be lessened to an achievable mundanity, you also want to be reassured that we are indeed excellent, worthy of the microphone, worthy of the moment, illustrious in our letters.
I’m not going to give you the usual answers.
The question at its heart is one of lineage—to whom do our words owe a debt—and so first I think of the wounds I cohered around, each incidence of harm that led to a word, however galling however artful, and as I travel back over each barbed knot, I pass over my mother and father who were born in Lebanon and Turkey respectively, I arrive at my grandmother, Yurdanur Celic Balicok, who was married as a child, unschooled, and who left behind her country to land here. She worked in factories by night, cooked and cleaned by day, first for her children, then her children’s children.
She died two weeks ago.
She spoke Turkish and some English, but like my Arab grandmother, she was illiterate in both. My mother and her sister, who raised me, both dropped out of high school in year 7 and 8, teenage brides, and they can read at that level, which means my primary function as a so-called man of letters is to read for them, to parse the officious jargon of council letters and medical reports, to write what they need written, to fill out the various forms required, and explain the system that governs them, and us.
This is my lineage; it is one of illiteracy, in mother tongue and father tongue and colonial tongue alike, but we still had what we spoke, the tart come on cunt of bogan lingo on Centrelink streets, then the ebb and flow of Arabic, colloquial and Quranic, as well as Turkish, and throughout them all a worship rooted in words, in the Holy Book we could not touch without purifying ourselves first. I keep picturing my grandmothers and aunties sitting on their couches, listening to the Quran, phrase book before them, sounding out the words, trying to know not just the rhythm and song of prayer, but the shape of every letter. To teach themselves their stolen birthright.
I am indebted to them, these extraordinary women, children of elsewhere, who even unlettered were, and are, far better and far more accomplished than I will ever be; they shaped us with their bodies and their hands, they mothered and fathered (in the absence of fathers), they left wounds the size of countries, they gave to me the gift of incomprehensibility, an unknowingness that drives me, always, to craft these little castles of air, tiny ephemeral weathervanes, making music that points the way toward meaning, and perhaps, further away, but still visible—love.
Fresh Takes
thank you for this. my anneanne is also illiterate - her father sent her brothers to school but made her drop out when she was young because her education was not a priority. I have a very vivid memory of one of the rare times we got to spend together when I was a child, about four years old, when she showed me how to write our shared name in turkish, which she did very slowly and painstakingly in all capital letters. she had a little more english back then than she does these days, but verbal communication between us has always been limited - still in that moment I could feel her love for me and her pride in me, the way I do every time we talk, even if neither of us have the words to say all the things we feel for each other in a language the other would understand.