Fierceland

The globe-spanning epic of power and family secrets from the Miles Franklin listed author. 

Susan's Review

While the contemporary Australian literary culture is pleasingly diverse, writers with a Borneo heritage are relatively rare. I first became acquainted with one such writer when I read Omar Musa’s poetry collection, Killernova: an exploration of Musa’s Malaysian background and the devastating consequences of colonialism, accompanied by images of his beautiful wood carvings. And while I haven’t yet read his debut novel, Here Come the Dogs, longlisted for the Miles Franklin and the International Dublin Literary Awards, I’m impressed by his second and ethically powerful novel Fierceland. Like his poetry collection Killernova, the novel focuses on the deleterious effects of colonisation: the loss for indigenous people of their traditional culture, language and identity, and the destruction of the physical environment. It’s a politically charged family saga set mostly in Malaysian Borneo that blends social commentary, a morality tale and elements of the mythic and the supernatural. It’s a “big” read, both literally and metaphorically; coming in at 370 pages, it confronts us with important questions about the abuse of colonial power and the need to preserve the language and culture of the indigenous population. 

The narrative is grounded in the personal experiences of siblings Roz and Harun, who return to Borneo after many years abroad to attend their father Yusif’s funeral, and to deal with his morally corrupt legacy. Yusif acquired his immense wealth as a palm oil baron during Malaysia’s period of economic prosperity by destroying huge tracts of rainforest; his children, feeling complicit in their father’s insatiable desire for profits, have chosen to strive for redemption. Their sense of guilt is compounded by the knowledge that their father was responsible for the violent disappearance of a man who tried to thwart his ambitions.

As the novel’s title suggests, its tone is sometimes angry, but the critique never lapses into self-righteousness or preaching. Fierceland is also, and above all, a haunted narrative: the siblings are haunted by the ghosts of family, language and the forest itself. The return of the past is also symbolised by the voices of the vampire women who died in childbirth: a particularly melancholy expression of irretrievable loss. But the novel also offers hope for the future, embodied in the figure of Crazy Auntie, who translates poetry into endangered languages, and in the personification of the forest “speaking back” to the colonisers. Musa’s incorporation into the narrative of Malay, Manglish (Malay-English hybrid) and other indigenous languages is a further sign of cultural preservation. His decision not to translate every non-English word into English places the English-speaking reader in a position of discomfort or alienation, effectively re-creating the experience of colonised people forced to learn the language of the oppressor. 

A friend once told me there are essentially two different kinds of novels: lying-down and sitting up. Lying-down novels are for reading on a sofa or at the beach — books read primarily for entertainment or escapism; sitting-up novels jolt or shock us out of our indifference to injustice and suffering. While Fierceland is unarguably the latter kind of novel, it’s neither didactic nor bleak. Instead, it immerses us in a gripping story and encourages reflection on the issues it explores. Musa’s skills as a visual artist inform his evocative images of landscape, while his talents as a poet are evident in both his lyrical use of language and the hip-hop rhythm of some of his sentences. 

Fierceland is a formally inventive and deeply satisfying novel, with a clear and timely relevance for the white colonisers’ treatment of Australia’s First Nations people. Highly recommended.

The book will be available in September. You can pre-order your copy at the Lane Bookshop.

Publisher Review

'An impressive, urgent novel by a talented and courageous writer.' - Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West

After many years abroad, Roz and Harun return to Malaysian Borneo for the funeral of their father Yusuf - and to reckon with their inheritance. A renowned palm-oil baron during Malaysia's economic rise, Yusuf built the family's immense wealth by destroying huge tracts of rainforest. What his children know is that he was also responsible for the violent disappearance of a man who stood in his way.

Harun has become a successful tech entrepreneur in Los Angeles, Roz is an artist struggling to stay afloat in Sydney. Now they want to return something their father stole from the forests of their homeland. In their quest for redemption they grapple with the legacy of power and corruption, dreamers and exiles, thugs and zealots. Most dangerous of all, they are haunted - by the ghosts of colonialism, the ghosts of family, the ghosts of language, and the ghosts of the forest itself.

A trailblazing journey across the globe, Fierceland weaves the past and the present into an emotionally powerful family saga that plays out at a mythical scale.

'Exhilarating, melodious, smart, resonant about the fragility of our times . . . A revolutionary novel of consciousness with Borneo at its core. This is the novel I've been waiting for.' - Ellen Van Neerven

'Potent and powerful, Fierceland is a shapeshifting novel of great reckoning; a brutal, beautiful study of wilderness within and without, of the ghosts that afflict and follow in the wake of family, legacy and complicity.' - Hannah Kent

'Surprising, surreal, and written with gripping poetic prose, Omar Musa reminds us why he is a virtuoso storyteller.' - Sara M. Saleh

'If ever there has been a Great Bornean Novel, Omar Musa's Fierceland is it. Borneo writes back in these pages, offering up a breathtaking, heartbreaking, headspinning reply to decades of Malayan supremacy and erasure. But Fierceland is more than simple polemic- it is a wild, poetic, ride, both lyrical and pyrotechnical, through the light and the darkness of a family and all its histories. Vehemently, furiously, it asks the great timeless questions- what does it mean to belong to a place? What do we owe our homelands? What do they owe us? Who gets to take, and who must give?' - Preeta Samasaran