AustLit

'Omar Musa has, it seems, put aside the voice of protest, anger and challenge so present in his powerful 2017 poetry collection, Millefiori, in favour of a journey to his roots in the culture and history of Borneo.'

'This article examines two poetry collections by Omar Musa (b. 1984) and his hyphenated identity as a Malaysian Australian. Extending Jahan Ramazani’s concept of transnational poetics, it draws on Omar’s comments about the importance of the hyphen in his personal and artistic self-fashioning to argue for the presence of a “hyphenational poetics” in his work. This poetics functions as both hyphen and parang (machete), enabling transnational connections and sociopolitical critique. It is evident in the mixture of Malay language and Malaysian cultural details, African American hip-hop rhythms and aesthetics of spoken-word or slam poetry in Musa’s anglophone poems. His poetry performs a simultaneous critique of the sociopolitical status quo of both his ancestral homeland of Malaysia and his country of birth and citizenship, Australia. His hyphenational poetics offers one way of thinking beyond the national–sectional division in Malaysian literature, focusing instead on in-betweenness and cross-cultural borrowings and exchanges.' (Publication abstract)

'A young woman of 23, Dorothea MacKellar (1885-1968), had a poem published in the London Spectator in 1908, titled 'Core of My Heart'. She was the daughter of a wealthy pastoral family, educated privately, a graduate of the University of Sydney. She is said to have written the first draft of the poem in 1905 in response to the breaking of a prolonged drought on the family cattle and tobacco farming property, Torryburn, near Maitland in NSW. The poem was also written in protest against the anti-Australianism of many Australians at that time, excoriating them for their nostalgic love of English “grey-blue” landscapes and English weather.' (Introduction)

'Being a migrant in Australia, according to the author, rapper and poet Omar Musa, is a lot like constantly applying for a visa to somewhere you already grew up. In twin releases due at the end of this month – a book of poetry, Millefiori, and a hip-hop album, Since Ali Died – Musa speaks of seeing too many non-white Australians caught out in the trap of the model minority: where you can spend your whole life trying to fit in, only to discover that some people never thought you belonged.' (Introduction)