Omar Musa - The Hat

 

Thank you very much. My mother moved from country New South Wales to Malaysia in the late 1970s to work in the theatre world. She got put in charge of directing the first Malay language version of Hamlet by an unknown up and coming writer. [audience chuckles] They were auditioning all these different guys for the main role of Hamlet, and no one was quite cutting the mustard, until this guy walked through the door and he had long black hair. He was a bit mysterious. He came from the land of Borneo, the land of headhunters and pirates, and orangutans and jungles. He auditioned for it, and he was perfect, and he went on to become the first Malay Hamlet. He also went on to become my father, which to me was a far more auspicious achievement. [audience laughter] 

 

He moved to Australia in around 1980, so I guess less than 10 years after the white Australia policy properly ended. As I was growing up, I was definitely in between worlds. I was wearing sarongs at home, and speaking Malay, and praying five times a day, and eating food with my hands, and everything. And my father always told me, “You will be an outsider in this country. If you want to get anywhere, you will have to work twice as hard as the white kids. You will have to be fearless, and ferocious, and fierce.” And he also told me that “You should be proud of your culture. You should be proud of being Malay, you should be proud of being Muslim, even if people tell you that you shouldn't be.” 

 

And so, I guess when I got into my teens and I was trying to find my feet in this world and in this country, I decided, yes, I'm going to own this. I'm going to own being Muslim. I want to display it in some kind of outward, physical way. And so, my father had told me that a Muslim man should always wear a hat. It's a very seemly thing for a Muslim man to do. So, I decided to go out in Queanbeyan and Canberra and find my great Muslim hat. [audience laughter] So, if any of you are from Canberra, you might remember the Community Aid Abroad shop. Got any Canberrans out there? [audience cheers] 

 

Oh yeah, most of Canberrans here. [audience laughter] So, I went to the Community Aid Abroad shop. It was in Civic Interchange, right next to that old takeaway that still there, probably still selling the same battered salves and chico rolls, like literally the same ones. [audience chuckles] I went in amongst all the incense, and the mats, and the wooden carvings, and the white do-gooders. And there, shining like a beacon, was the hat rack. And there I saw my great Muslim hat. It was a majestic thing made out of this black cloth. It had gold threads through it. Green, red, it was shining. And I decided I would wear this hat. 

 

I bought it for $22. I had saved up my ducats from working at Kingsley's Chicken in Queanbeyan, across from the Royal Hotel. Great place, by the way. Delicious fried chicken, completely unethical. [audience laughter] I would wear my great Muslim hat every day. And at school, if my teachers told me to take it off, I would say, “You are being very, very culturally insensitive.” [audience laughter] I would even wear it when I was running track. So, for a brief period in my life, I harbored this ambition to be an Olympic runner before genetics and laziness caught up with me. [audience laughter] 

 

And so, I was standing there about to run the 800 meters at the starting blocks-- I used to train with this really good friend of mine. I was wearing my great Muslim hat, and he took one look at it, and he gave me this withering look I'd never seen before, and he said, “Man, I can't stand it how you wear that hat all the time. Why are you always trying to be so ethnic? Why can't you just be like the rest of us? Why can't you just be like a normal Australian?” 

 

I remember I was running around the track and I was furious, I was also a bit sad, and I was trying to figure out why it was that me just repping my culture, repping my heritage, had offended him so much. But looking back on it now, I don't think I was exactly repping my heritage, because I think that my great Muslim hat had actually been woven by some indigenous Guatemalan tribe’s people. [audience chuckles] But I was 14 at the time, man. You know, I was trying my hardest. 

 

So, another way that I decided to connect with my Muslim heritage and my Malay identity was through poetry. My father and my mother had told me that there was a rich tradition of performing poetry in the archipelago, and that you perform it with full body, and that it's not just isolated to a dusty old ivory tower for academics. It's something that lives on the streets and in the villages. And so, I was looking for all these Muslim role models, and I didn't really see that many in Australia. So, I came across Malcolm X and the Black Muslims and Muhammad Ali, who was the coolest man in the world, and he was a Muslim and he was a poet. 

 

And so, I went. On SBS, they played this documentary about the Black Muslims and I taped it to VHS. I'm sure some of you remember what that was. [audience chuckles] I would watch it every few days, because I loved the speaking, I loved the oratory, I loved all the speeches. But there was this 30 second clip right at the end, where these two guys get on stage and they start speaking a very percussive type of poetry over a heavy drum beat. 

 

Now, one of them has a very deep, distinctive baritone voice, something like a preacher. The other one is a little bit more of a wild card. He's got a hat back, he's got sunglasses, gold teeth, and a massive clock around his neck. [audience laughter] So, of course, it was Public Enemy. And I was just-- [audience applause] - Yeah, yeah, round of applause for Public Enemy. Yeah. [audience applause] 

 

So, I was sitting there just astounded, and I thought to myself, this is the coolest shit that I've ever seen in my life. And I decided right then and there, this was the sort of poetry that my father was talking about. This was the sort of poetry that I would one day make. [audience laughter] So, the years passed, I quit Kingsley's, I left my great Muslim hat behind, and I went to university. I was working as a phone operator at the Department of Health in Canberra during the SARS crisis. Maybe a story for another Moth. [audience laughter] 

 

I decided that I needed to save up some ducats and go to Malaysia for the first time since I was nine years old. I'm ashamed to say that when I was there, when I was nine, the whole time I was just complaining that I want to eat some Western food, which stands at odds with me now, because I'm a great laksa and durian hunter these days. So, I went to Borneo, and I saw my grandparents for the first time. They were getting very old, and they insisted that we go to this small plot of land that was on the border of Brunei and Malaysian Borneo. 

 

These were my grandmother's ancestral lands. So, her people had come hundreds and hundreds of years ago from Java to teach the Sultan of Brunei to cultivate wet rice. So, we got dropped off in the middle of the highway. I always remember my grandfather, he was wielding this parang, which is the Malay word for a machete. And he was cutting his way through the undergrowth. And now, the machete in Borneo is seen as a very dangerous thing, part of headhunting culture or piracy. 

 

But at that moment, as I saw him cutting through the undergrowth, forging a lane from the road to this old dilapidated hut in the middle of the jungle, suddenly in my head, I realized that the parang can be a very constructive tool. It can be something that forges a path between places that don't usually connect, places that don't usually communicate. So, we get to this hut in the middle of the jungle. There's a family of orangutans living there, and we have to shoo them out of the house. 

 

My grandparents tell me that when my father spent time at this little piece of land, he would sit in front of the hut and he would read the Quran with this very deep, mellifluous, beautiful voice. And suddenly, dozens of orangutans and families of monkeys would start climbing down from the trees, and sit in front of him, like a rapt audience, like you guys, you beautiful orangutans out there. [audience laughter] They would sit in front of him and listen to him reading the Quran. 

 

It was then we only had an oil lamp and we were dragging water from the river. My grandparents were telling me about their lives of hardship, and about their family history, and about my family history. I decided at that moment I would start going back to Malaysia every year, because it anchored my soul in some way. And so, I guess all of this culminated a few years ago, when I went to my cousin's wedding in Kuala Lumpur in the outskirts. 

 

We all had to dress in this traditional Baju Melayu, which is kind of-- It's a traditional Malay Muslim outfit. I guess it's long pajama pants, very colorful, a long baju with fake diamonds at the chest. And then, you wear this thick type of sarong that is woven with gold, and you turn it into a thick band of fabric, and lift it up over your belly button. Now, I didn't know how to do it. Everyone could just do it so easily, and it came so naturally, and it suddenly exposed this rift between me and my family. But they all gathered around me, they made me suck my big Western belly in, and they lifted up and they tied the sarong perfectly. and they said, “No, you need one more thing. You need one more thing.” 

 

And they gave me a jet black songkok, which is the traditional Malay Muslim cap. They perched it jauntily on my head, tipped it to the side, and of course, I got some jet black Ray Bans, so that I look extra boss, you know, [audience laughter] and then went to the wedding. We were sitting there eating our ayam masak merah, eating the durians, eating the rendang. There was a special display of the ancient form of Malay martial arts, which is called Silat. So, people flipping and rolling around and fighting each other. 

 

But then, at a certain point, someone decided to bring out a more modern contraption, a modern form of entertainment, which was the karaoke machine. [audience chuckles] Any of my Asians out there would feel me, you know? [audience laughter] So, I bring it out, and all these people start singing these really saccharine love songs. I couldn't understand a word, but I knew exactly what they were talking about. Then, suddenly, my cousin says to me, he says, “Hey, Omar, I want you to get on stage. I want you to do that thing that you do, that type of poetry, that hip hop, that thing that you do in Australia. I want you to perform in front of us for the first time.”

 

Now, I'm shitting myself being here at the Sydney Opera House. But I think that was the scariest show that I've ever had to do. It was a family reunion. I was standing there bared, completely exposed before my family for the first time performing something that I loved. And I said, “I set sail on a river of thoughts, A Dreamtime Neverland. Carry the torch for my fam, I light it up, stand up proud. Try to represent my folks The only way I know how. So I honor them every time I jam on the drums. Do it for my fam In the shanties and slums, Do it for my people, The ordinary people. I do it for my uncle Who fell for the needle.” 

 

And I stood there and they were cheering and applauding and clapping their hands. I went and I sat down next to my grandmother. My grandmother looked at me with these piercing eyes and she said, “You know, I never learned how to read or write.” I said, “I know.” She said, “You know, I've been illiterate my whole life. I left home at the age of nine and tapped rubber and lived on the streets.” I said, “I know.” She said, “But I have 150 poems in my head that I created when I was living out there, kicked out of home at the age of nine. AB AB Pantuns, the traditional improvised form of Malay poetry. This poetry that you're doing now is like the poetry that I used to help me get through these hard times.” 

 

And it was then that I realized I had found my own parang, my own machete, my words that could cut through worlds, that could cut through time and even generation. It was that moment that I wondered what is more powerful, the language of words or the language of feeling? Thank you.