I truly hate that I have to write this, because to respond to pettiness is to become embroiled in it, but as it is still having a negative impact on my life, I must. On Tuesday, I received an email by Esther Anatolitis, editor of Meanjin, saying there was an essay by Lur Alghurabi in their new issue, released on Thursday, which was critical of my work. Lur cheerled a slanderous attack on me last year, which was edited by her good friend Eda Gunaydin, so I knew this would be a continuation of that ugliness. I’ll come back to this new essay later, for now I’ll need to back track to the original injury and its ongoing effects.
Last year, the arts organisation Liminal published an essay called “I’m Not Hungry Anymore: Hasib Hourani On Omar Sakr,” which was nominally about my debut novel Son of Sin (Affirm Press, 2022) but as the subtitle indicates, specifically took aim at me. He falsely claimed that I personally had travelled to Turkey during Ramadan and internalised that experience unnaturally as ‘spectacle’; that it was okay to treat the fictional novel as autobiography, and so render his analysis onto me personally; that my intention was to “codify” my culture, and that I had done it incorrectly, specifically with regards to the transliterated Arabic dialogue, which should act as a warning to diasporic Anglophone writers “that they can’t do it alone”, the implication being that I am disconnected not just from my culture but also my community, unlike Hourani, who includes a random list of authenticators at the end. (Or at least, five friends whose first names are supposed to act in this fashion).
None of these things are true.
It is one thing to express your opinion, however negative, on a book; it is altogether another to tell specific lies about the writer of the book. I pointed out these lies and malicious claims on Twitter, which Liminal and its publisher Leah Jing McIntosh did not address, putting forward instead and subsequently amplifying the claims of others that I just didn’t like a bad review, and was being “aggressive”, a “bully”, “shutting down conversation”; various people earnestly claimed how important it was to have non-white reviewers of non-white books, a reductive and silly claim that homogenises all of us at once, and puts forward the utterly asinine idea that people who share a similar cultural background to you must be correct, as if they’re magically unable to hold and put forward bullshit ideas, or enact violences on the people they claim to be “in community” with. Unluckily for me, I’m a queer Arab Muslim and I have been subject to violences within my family and “community” all my life and as such the phrase and knowledge that “skinfolk aren’t kinfolk” is burned into my soul.
These generic, earnest defences of Hourani’s piece never dealt with my specific problems with it, instead gesturing to an imagined space where no harm was done or is indeed possible, which had the neat effect of doubling down on the narrative that I am the problem, and as the problem-subject, cannot speak to or back, without further problematising myself. Here are some direct quotes from Hourani’s piece now, in case you don’t believe my summation of these claims:
“Between 2011 and 2018, Ramadan spanned the months of July and August—the northern hemisphere summer holidays… So, between the years 2011 and 2018, Arab and Muslim writers in the diaspora were going back to blood-home over the holidays and seeing festival.
I have been thinking a lot about what that overlap of ‘holiday’ and ‘Ramadan’ did to my generation of the diaspora, specifically the writers, many of whom came of age in that eight-year window. We who were experiencing homeland in its exceptional state and, because we were at an impressionable age, internalised it…
It is reasonable to look at the work as an echo of Sakr’s own lived experience as a queer man himself, also born to Turkish and Lebanese migrant parents and raised in Western Sydney… In 2019, Sakr published an article with the ABC, a panorama of Mersin, Turkey, wherein he connects with his estranged father; in Son of Sin Jamal does the same.”
Again: I was never in Turkey during Ramadan, and for that matter, the protagonist of my novel does not visit Turkey during Ramadan either. The experience related here by Hourani, whether drawn from his life or others, is not mine, and has nothing to do with me; it is a lie. The “article” he quotes is a radio appearance wherein I tell a story about going to Turkey, which is true, but it was not during Ramadan and if it had been, the experience would have been radically different. I don’t know where he got this notion from nor do I care, what I do know is that once I publicly clarified that hey, you have told a lie about me here, the essay should have been edited to reflect that, with a public correction. That’s what anyone with integrity would have done, at any rate, and instead I was subjected to further nonsense.
Why does this lie matter? It matters to me, first of all, as the lie is about my life, and the lie is on the public record, which is enough; aside from that, it matters because it is the basis of Hourani’s claims about my supposed inauthenticity. It’s not a point that is made with subtlety either, as he compares my work directly to white supremacist exploitation and even Orientalism. (Edward Said famously wrote about Orientalism as the static, unchanging field of knowledge produced by non-Arabs about the East; this word is now used by Arabs and non-Arabs alike, who clearly haven’t read his work, or if they did, failed to understand it.)
So, to go back to the lights, and the banners, and the festive shop-fronts, this superimposition of spectacle over an ordinary landscape has become an overworked mechanism for contemporary SWANA (South West Asian and North African) writers. Reading Son of Sin, it is everywhere…
Jamal wakes up as the ‘adhan [sinks] into [his] skull’ and I think of every Western-made documentary or war film that opens a scene with dawn and the call to prayer. I think of exoticisation, orientalism, and White celebrity writers adding a clip of the adhan to their Holiday-in-Morocco Instagram highlight, followed by a screenshot of Wikipedia’s ‘Fajr prayer’ webpage.
Here’s the thing. It is inappropriate and offensive to treat my fiction as strictly autobiographical, but if you do so, you ought to stick to the actual biography. (An aside: it boggles the mind that this writer not only claimed to assess my work on the basis of my life, but then also felt comfortable literally “correcting” how my migrant family members speak Arabic, in essence saying your life is wrong, and it’s even more mind-boggling that anyone could see this as not only justifiable, but as a net good, a praiseworthy practice.) The facts are these: my parents are Arab and Turkish Muslim migrants, respectively, and I was born and raised in Western Sydney by my impoverished Lebanese family. I have observed Ramadan every year of my life. Even if it were true that I visited Turkey, once, as a 24-year-old man, and happened to experienced Ramadan there, it’s farcical to suggest that it could or would override the entirety of my life experiences to date. It would be stupid if it were true, it is in another category of ridiculous given it’s based on a lie.
I don’t know much about Hourani, but I do know they are not from Western Sydney, they are not from or within my community. The false claim about my imagined Ramadan odyssey and the internalised spectacle of it is essential for Hourani’s premise that I am an “outsider” looking in with a “white gaze” on my own life. Having been subject to white supremacist violences throughout my life, alongside my family, to be maliciously equated with such—for the crime of being a Muslim writer describing a Muslim character waking to the adhan—was extraordinarily cruel. At this point I need to say that some people, including Lur Alghurabi, called this writing “generous” and “gentle”, even loving in its attentiveness. I can only suppose based on this that they have never known a moment of care, generosity, or love, and for that, my heart goes out to them. (Lur, at least, deleted her tweets saying as much, perhaps anticipating this moment.)
Hourani, and Liminal, are welcome to be cruel, but where we differ in the extreme is that I cannot and will not accept that this is standard or decent practice in the literary field; nor will I be gaslit into silently tolerating personal abuse under the guise of ‘criticism’. Hourani’s errors were numerous, from absurdly claiming that there is a standard transliteration for colloquial spoken Arabic (there isn’t), through to misunderstanding basic English grammar while trying to correct mine, and here again, despite this being pointed out, there has been no correction to the work. I genuinely feel sorry for them, that they have been so comprehensively failed by Liminal, and by their editor(s).
I could go on, but I’m nauseated already, and I have yet to get to Alghurabi’s new addition to this interminable episode.
I keep coming back to the fact that someone publicly lied about my life, that I alerted people in the industry to this fact, including the publisher, and not only did nothing happen, I was painted as the villain for not meekly taking it. By and large, the people who saw this as absurd, as obvious bad practice, communicated this to me in private. The White writers and editors who did so were afraid of being perceived as racist if they commented, or of being on the bad-side of a “radical”-coded “POC” arts org, and the Arabs who did so shared how afraid they were of this happening to them, of being smeared on the basis of “failing” to perform culture—that living force, that permeable accumulation of histories and fabrications—according to the arbitrary standard of a stranger to whom they owe nothing. I don’t mind telling you that any faith I had in the industry, any notion of there being standards or merit, died in the aftermath of this nonsense. It’s all just so pathetic. Particularly because I know where this malignancy begins, I know the people behind it, former friends in the tiny Arab-Australian arts scene who have never forgiven me for the audacity of winning a single book award a couple of years ago. Tfeh alaikun.
Let’s fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when a new essay on my novel, by Prithvi Varatharajan, was published in the Sydney Review of Books. Incidentally, he was the first person I saw praising Hourani’s essay online—a non-Arabic speaking person who was thrilled to see my work critiqued on its imagined linguistic faults, which is to say, somebody who received Hourani’s essay in the way it was intended: as an authoritative voice, one able to declare what is and is not correctly Arab, never mind the divergent universes contained within that word, an act of cultural/racial hegemony and gatekeeping no literary publisher ought to be involved in. Anyway, Varatharajan followed up with his own essay that takes its cue from Hourani’s, reviewing all the other reviews of my book, specifically singling out the endorsements, and taking issue with the word ‘poetic’ being applied to it. As if that weirdness was not enough, Varatharajan has gone over my published poetry and commented on superficial similarities between descriptions therein, and my fiction, with the implication that my poetry is biography and therefore I have been caught using my life, that wretched resource, in my fiction:
I read this near 5000-word essay with mounting disbelief, that anyone could think it worthwhile to say that I described a queer park sex scene in a poem and that also in my novel, there is a queer sex act on grass. Oh, and I have a cousin named Jamal in some poems and my protagonist is named Jamal (as if this is not one of the most common names in the Arabic-speaking world). Scintillating stuff. All this because I had the temerity to state what is obviously true, which is that all my literature comes from my life, and as I have said a dozen times before: my life is full of fantasies, of nightmares, of humdrum inventions. To note that it comes from life is not to say it is factual.
I can’t believe I have to say this, in addition to everything else: just because it’s in a poem does not mean it is true. The speaker, the sometimes named and sometimes nameless “I” can be as close as my shadow, can in fact be me directly, and also not. For the record, the sex act in Fridays in the Park… takes place in Roxburgh Park, in Melbourne, and the sex act in Son of Sin, takes place in Casula, NSW—I’ve sucked dick across state lines, but never in those specific places, neither of those are true. What happens to these people if I declare all my writing is fiction? What use is this blather? I can’t help thinking that to have conjured a landscape, a distinct voice, a vernacular, that is legible across poetry and prose; to have subject matter, distinct themes and figures, returned to in delirious spirals, in any other writer would be—and has been—cause for praise, or at least a considered examination of style instead of this suspicious fixation on my personal life.
Look: part of me is flattered by this almost creepy attention, and Varatharajan doesn’t really belong in the conversation about dreadful writing, or failure to enact genuine criticism (as bizarre as I find the obsessive reaching, as disappointing the limp conclusions, there are valid points and it clears the low bar of not outright slandering me), I am including it here because a) he quotes Hourani, without criticism or reflection, further establishing it as legitimate and b) it illustrates how a weak, rotten foundation undermines all that comes after it.
Fast forward to now, three weeks after this, and we have Lur Alghurabi in Meanjin, with her own near-5000 word essay. I am pointing this out because, dear god, I’m halfway to that word-count and struggling to persevere against a horrified sense of intolerable indulgence. And I’m the subject of this shit! How is it possible multiple editors from Liminal to Sydney Review of Books to Meanjin failed to say, even once, pull ya head in! How did none of them reference the numerous times I have made public statements that either refute or contextualise the claims these people are making? The reason I am responding to this all with a blog, written while half-asleep as my sick baby sleeps, is because none of this material to date has been above the level of a blog, and I am so profoundly embarrassed to be in an industry with such low standards.
Like Hourani, Alghurabi is not from Western Sydney, she’s an Iraqi writer. Her essay, “An Elegant Revenge: Language At Play”, is one of the more confused works I’ve read, and achieves that rare effect of defeating itself with its own arguments. Like Varatharajan, she takes her cues from Hourani—if nothing else, Hasib can at least pat himself on the back for being influential, even if only in the manner of a senseless shock jock, shuddering through an audience who understand that a transgression has taken place, but against an undesirable, thus rendering it socially acceptable—both quoting his essay and also using his “I’m hungry only for myself” framing.
Lur writes at the start: “One of my worst biases as a reader is that I think all good work is actually nonfiction and that only nonfiction makes for good work…” and then, like Hourani, quotes my acknowledgement in the back of Son of Sin that the character of Jamal is a “distant avatar”, as basis for continuing to subject me, the author, to the precise dimensions of Jamal, the character. Apparently the word distant doesn’t register here, nor the fact I referred to his story as an unreal life.
What makes this especially interesting to me is that a week or two after claiming that Hourani’s essay was good and correct on the basis that he was invested as an Arab, and this made it a “close reading”, Alghurabi published an essay in the Sydney Review of Books, in defence of her friend Eda Gunaydin. What did Eda need defending from? The assumption from a critic that her personal essay collection was related to her life. Yes, even personal non-fiction is creative fiction according to Alghurabi. She worries that everything will be read as memoir, and that anything she publishes will be read as definitively hers, which is cruelly reductive for anyone, but specifically people of colour.
In sum, in her new essay “all good work is non-fiction”, but in her last essay about her friend and herself, all non-fiction is fiction. Kay. Let’s stick with that previous essay for a minute: the crime of mistaking Lur or Eda’s non-fiction as personal is serious, the sentence even more so: perhaps we need to ban all book sales and even writing until “readers can promise that they will never about an author so personally again, and they won’t use their last name in vain, and they don’t comment on how they might have lived their lives or coped with their abuse or adjusted to living situations unimaginable to many”. Obviously, this is heightened rhetoric in service of a provocation, but there’s no doubt the argument itself is serious.
It is astonishing to me that the person who wrote this could, in their next essay, perform everything she eloquently feared would occur to her, perform this exact kind of reductive agonising, and project it onto me, an author she calls an unsophisticated Arabic-speaker who should have given more to Jamal in order to speak to a wider audience (namely her and Hourani):
Jamal spends very little time thinking about whether his limited vocabulary or his localised dialect will engage the reader. As a people pleaser and a person perpetually in performance, I can’t relate. It almost makes me uncomfortable that he is speaking purely to himself and to the handful of people (they might be a family of 320 cousins if they’re anything like mine) who understand his language style. But I believe, if I can put Jamal aside for a moment and turn my attention towards the author, that a narrator’s ability to speak to a wide audience, to an audience with different localised dialects, to a homeland audience, can only stem from the author’s education in, or exposure to, these different dialects and worlds of language outside the local. If Sakr never offered himself this exposure, if Sakr never sought this wide vocabulary, then how could he have written this book any differently? And how much should we as writers be learning about wider uses of language, before we create the hyper-localised character
And:
Jamal might be doing as much as he can with the tools he has, but Walwicz, unlike Sakr, has chosen to create more sophisticated tools…
Jamal’s relationship with Arabic is that of a fleeting tourist, only visiting language (and at times in the novel, only visiting country) for a moment. But it is Sakr, not Jamal, who refrains from diving into language further
In addition to performing the same kind of critical failure her own previous essay railed against, there are many opposing claims within this piece itself. She acknowledges that spoken Arabic dialects are vastly different not only from country to country but village to village, that language’s conventions change “roughly every third door in the neighbourhood”, and what’s more, that each community in the diaspora essentially builds their own unfixable grammar, which is not written down, and can only be understood by listening—
—Reading this, I was like, Oh shit, maybe she gets it? How do you write down a hybrid tongue that has no rules, and what value would it have as such anyway? But no, instead she castigates me for doing it differently to how she, a master of classical and spoken Arabic, would have; this is apparently an enactment of “loneliness” on my part, a refusal to engage with other kinds of Arabic. She wonders what the diaspora writer’s obligation is to the reader, and is unhappy that I have created a “hyper-local” character whose Arabic “blocks” people like her and Hourani from engaging with the text. Generic language for literary fiction is the argument, because “If it isn’t communicable, how can it be impactful?”
Nevertheless, here she is demonstrating that she did in fact understand what I had written, that it was communicable. If you can understand it well enough to suggest a different spelling, then you are in fact engaging with it, but instead of meeting the character where he is, based on narrated experiences—and to be clear, Jamal’s very aware of his broken language and references this often, it’s a throughline in the book and all of my work, so none of this narcissistic bloviating is actually pointing out anything new or interesting—you have instead chosen to sneer and posture not only about how he should speak, but also about how I as the author should have recorded it. Of the two of us, who is enacting a refusal, who is performing a wilful loneliness? Habibi—forgive me this poor simple usage of a word, this fragment of Arabic that I, little Arab peasant that I am, choose to favour—while I literally wrote the book called The Lost Arabs, I can confidently say I’ve never come across anyone so lost as to be arguing with themselves, and still losing:
These dialects of Arabic, the ones we use at home, the ones we use to talk to each other, have not been contained by formal grammar because formal grammar simply never cared to acknowledge them. Their very existence is an ongoing protest to grammarian dictatorship: they say, My job is to speak, and I don’t care what yours is.
But that’s not all, naturally. Another claim here is that sure, bastardised language is great, but only if you know more than the bastardised language (a claim which is not measurable, by the way). None of this makes sense. Hundreds of Arabic dialects exist and cannot be contained by English grammar, except specifically for mine, because I’m an unsophisticated Arab who, in writing down his language in a novel, should have also telegraphed to the audience other registers and dialects of Arabic that his protagonist does not encounter.
There is a risk, otherwise, that the diaspora author, without the knowledge of how to dive deep into language, only gives their protagonist breadcrumbs of Arabic phrases to see them through their narrative, a means to no worthwhile end. These scattered Arabic phrases, a group of habibs and khiris and wulahs and ahwes and soyams and inshallahs and bismillahs and yallahs, become no more than superfluous punctuation serving only to remind the reader that a character carries an Arab identity, and nothing will be explored further
If you’ve made it this far, I’m so sorry, but also, we are nearly done here. I want to end on this above quote, because I think this is the crux of it. A lot of Lur’s essay is about performance, who she performs to, and her anxieties around it, how she’s constantly preoccupied with other people’s perceptions of her—this is where her anger comes from, my apparent lack, my unwillingness to extend to an imagined reader enough of a bridge for them to cross over to me. Ironically, despite extensively referencing Hourani’s review, this is an entirely opposing argument to his, which is that my writing catered explicitly to Whiteness; according to Alghurabi, I cater to no one.
There is a far better essay buried in this mess, but the whole has been warped by her admirable effort to launder Hourani’s terrible defamatory writing into something legitimate; the result is a confused meandering where she contradicts herself and asks such absurd questions as: How dare I allow this Arab character and his family to have their own broken Arabic? How dare I keep her and others away from him and his “handful” of diasporic Arabs—never mind that Western Sydney is home to the majority of the Arab and Arab-speaking population in Australia, accounting for hundreds of thousands. Never mind, too, that Arab writers like Zeyn Joukhadar and Ghassan Hage and Dr Cherine Fahd had no issue with this language use, the latter writing movingly about Son of Sin, and how she loved these “breadcrumbs” of Arabic throughout.
What if Jamal’s Arabic, and its usage, had no purpose other than being how he spoke? What if, in the context of a novel on his life, his preoccupations, his stutters and mannerisms, his failures and turns of phrase, took up every page and had nothing to do with you, or any other reader? Staggering, I know. But genuine critical engagement is not the point, the point is to try to render the Anglophone Arabic writing here as unnatural—something I’m not entitled to use in whatever manner I please, and here again Alghurabi cements via repetition the original, gross cultural and racial identity policing employed by Hourani and published by Liminal. It’s so miserable, so regressive, so nonsensical. Why have these two writers, from different backgrounds and completely different experiences to me, been given a free pass by these literary publications to act as cultural authorities? To assess my fictional work as biography, and to assert that biography is insufficiently Arab. It is breathtakingly arrogant, not to mention hurtful, and completely inappropriate in any respectable literary publication.
I suppose, given the nature of these essays, it’s pointless to wish for better, but I confess I am bemused at all of this and I not only wish for better, I insist on it. Why weren’t even basic editorial questions asked, like: if there’s no formal grammar to any number of dialects, how can you assess the Arabic in this novel, let alone specifically call out the author in a derogatory way? What is the value in this? Or, are you really sure you want to assert you have “no imagination” at the start of this? What kind of defence do you imagine that provides you? Is it useful or interesting to project your own anxieties about performance onto the author you’re reading? Does it really matter that this book does not reflect your equally experiences? Have you thought about this at all?
Personally, I’d ask, What if you chose to relate to this fictional character as a queer boy, and then man; as a son, or child of Arab parents, who had a difficult relationship with his father and mother and all the damaged adults who migrated to another country? What if you chose to relate to this fictional character on any number of other levels instead of one as reductive as “through the use of transliterated Anglophone Arabic and only that”? What if you didn’t make assumptions about the author, or tell lies about his life, or endlessly ruminate about how his poetry is not poetry and his fiction is not fiction and his personal life is not in fact personal because he has only written biography, and his biography is that of a bad Arab being Arab badly, a fact you can definitely not glean from his recent titles The Lost Arabs, and Ibn Haram.
More than 12,000 words of this in the past several months, ya. I’m exhausted.
Honestly, what a tremendous waste this has all been. I’m sure this will be skimmed over, or otherwise ignored by those determined to continue to malign me but I’ll say it anyway: you are free to dislike or even hate any of my books. You are even free to be mean about it. Go to town on the prose, scene construction, transitions, pacing, characterisation, story arcs, metaphors, etc. What is not okay is trying to judge me personally as an Arab or Muslim or Turk, in a retrograde pursuit of cultural purity. On that note, I will once more repeat myself and state the obvious: I have a mongrel heritage, and a mongrel tongue, and I am absolutely and resolutely uninterested in the reproduction of a “true” or “correct” Arabness, Muslimness, Turkishness, etcetera. My Lebanese family not only write transliterated words differently on a day-to-day basis—yes, the habibis and the wulahs and the Allah yehmiyes and the harams and haroms—they also very often say the words differently, humdullah one day, alhamdulilah the next, according to whim, to how the word falls out of a tired mouth, what they can be bothered to enunciate, and no matter the pronunciation I have never once witnessed somebody with the audacity or rudeness to try to correct their usage.
Since this happened on Twitter once already, I know some disingenuous people will say something to the effect of, “Ahh just another author doesn’t like a review!” or at best, “Well this is retrospectively good because it started this conversation, right?!” and I’m going to need you all to shut the fuck up in advance, because invariably, whenever that line is used, the cost is never discussed. The cost on me, psychologically, to have lies published about my life, to have aspersions cast on my Arabic-ness or supposed lack thereof, to be denigrated, to the point of having even those who dared to praise my work also insulted, and all this for whom? The English-reading audiences of Liminal, of Meanjin? The majority-White readership of the Anglophone world? All while claiming that their superior Arabness more adequately speaks to the Arab world, as if that has ever been an aim of mine, or as if the Arab world gives a shit about this performative garbage. What of the cost of having to read all this faffing about, to descend into the mediocre muck of it, and now to spend my day responding to it, because apparently there isn’t an editor at Liminal or Sydney Review of Books or Meanjin with the means or ability to edit a work so it is not only coherent in its arguments, but also has something substantive to say, that employs criticism against what a work is, not for what the critic super dooper wished it to be.
Khalas. I’m too tired, too dispirited to continue. For Lur and Hourani, I have one wish: success in the publication of their first books, and any subsequent books they may write. Unfortunately, I can’t imagine a more vicious wish. For myself, I wish a better class of enemy, and a better class of editors, someone I can actually learn from, as opposed to these dismal, sad letters—this profound waste of my time.
Salaam,
Omar
Wow this is mind boggling.... Big hugs albi