Hyphenational poetics in Omar Musa’s Parang and Millefiori

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Poetry
• Omar Musa
• Malaysia
• Australia
• transnational
• diaspora

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Sheela Jane Menon and Nazry Bahrawi for their advice and assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Weihsin Gui

Weihsin Gui is associate professor of English and director of the Southeast Asian Studies programme at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of National Consciousness and Literary Cosmopolitics: Postcolonial Literature in a Global Moment (2013), and an essay collection on Singaporean poet Arthur Yap titled Common Lines and City Spaces (2014). He co-edited a 2016 special issue of Interventions on Singaporean literature and culture and a 2019 special issue of Antipodes on literary and cultural connections between Southeast Asia and the Antipodes.