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[title]In ancient Malaysian mythology, there is a story of a princess wandering alone through a desert landscape, who, after much searching, finds solace in a paradisal garden named ‘Penglipur Lara’ – a lush oasis in which all of her worries vanish.
According to Bornean-Australian author, poet, rapper, hip-hop artist and woodcut printer, Omar Bin Musa, the melodious name of this magical garden has another very powerful meaning.
“I say this all the time, but I think it's really cool. The traditional name for a storyteller, or a wandering rhapsodist, was ‘Penglipur Lara’. The words in classical Malay actually mean a dispeller of sorrows and a reliever of worries, and it's also the name given to a garden of delights where all cares are lost,” Musa says. “I realised that when I told my stories, they would help me relieve my sorrows, but that was just a very personal and private thing – but then, when I got out there and started sharing my stories with other people, I realised you could also relieve their sorrows.
“It’s a pretty alchemical process, where you can take the darkest things you’ve been through and then somehow convert them into gold.”
Traversing darkness is an experience that Queanbeyan-born, Malaysian-Muslim Musa is all too familiar with, having had to form himself through the lenses of a number of starkly divergent worlds. Born to a Bornean father and Irish-Australian mother in what he describes as a “very working-class” universe in southeastern NSW, Musa grew up surrounded by many contrasting ideas of what he should be in a world that offered him a lot of criticism but very few answers.
“My dad was from a shanty on the ocean, those stilt villages in Southeast Asia, and he was born in a logging camp into poverty. So I was actually the only cousin out of many, many cousins that grew up in the West, and so I think there was an expectation that I might go down a different path in life,” Musa reflects. “And maybe I held onto that myself for many years, because I had this feeling of responsibility, and guilt because I had grown up with such privilege.”
Guided by his roots, Musa spent much of his early career as a poet, playwright, author and rapper referring to his experiences of racism and Islamophobia in Australia as fodder for his stories. He believes that the darker, more twisted moments of his life acted as the main engine behind his earlier work.
“You cop so much hate when your name is Omar Bin Musa with a public profile,” he says, wryly.
“There were definitely times in my practice where I aimed to be a disruptor with certain poems – that were a clarion call to shake people out of their complacency, myself included. The whole aim of them was to maybe just shake people awake a little bit about the society that we live in here in Australia, and some of our cultural amnesia, and apathy, and blindness, or inability to deal with the horrors of the past or the present.”
These responses to the thornier rifts of modern Australia continue to inform much of Musa’s practice, however, more recently he has intentionally moved towards brighter landscapes when it comes to his own expansive art practice, combining traditional Bornean woodblock printing with his own distinctive brand of millennial Australiana to create a fluid artform that now springs from what he calls “a place of light”.
Musa’s double-hinged practice – of wrestling with the contradictions of modern multiculturalism in Australia and celebrating the intricacies of his ancient heritage – has not gone unnoticed. The internationally renowned Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) invited him to perform on April 30 at their opening festival at their brand-spankin’ new home, Pier 2/3 – an expansive harbourside performance space that has freshly opened up its doors in the Walsh Bay Arts Precinct.
For Musa, a distinctively untraditional rapper and hip-hop artist, being asked to perform by a national institution so deeply rooted in classical music was a bit of a surprise.
“I did kind of think ‘OK, that's interesting that they're asking me to come and perform.’ It just sounds like maybe they're trying to be more expansive or open up the stage to different types of performances – and then open up the audience as well,” Musa says brightly. “I think that’s brilliant.”
Freely admitting he knows nothing about classical music, Musa’s presence at the ACO festival is indicative of a much deeper current of change bubbling beneath the Aussie art scene, with more traditional institutions now eager to shake up established boundaries in favour of amorphous art forms that better reflect the multilayered and diverse reality of Australia in 2022.
Musa’s Pier 2/3 performance will reflect exactly this, with his electrifying set poised to combine his woodblock prints (in the form of giant moving light projections), with his hip-hop music and spoken-word poetry in an immersive, audio-visual experience designed to saturate all the senses.
“It's like this really multidimensional, multifaceted performance that is kind of the summation, I guess, of all of these different forms that I've been experimenting with the last few years,” Musa notes.
It is this spirit of creation that keeps Musa going, however, at the very base of everything, just like the Penglipur Lara of Malay mythology, his art and storytelling practices are all about connection – to himself, to others, and to the celestial universe that exists around all of us. It is within this space that one can feel, momentarily, that they too are in a garden of delights where all cares, sorrows and worries are fleetingly and transcendently lost.
Currently, Omar is preparing to take off to New York and Europe for a book tour for his most recent illustrated poetry collection, Killernova, however, he is also working on more woodcuts and creating sculptural forms out of cast glass – many of which you can actually buy from him at a stall he is holding with his mate at Carriageworks on Sunday, May 1 (the day after his ACO gig). If you wanted to grab a piece of his work directly from the source, as well as from many other incredible Aussie artists, think about checking the Cut n’ Polish markets out.
You can catch Omar’s magic in person at his April 30 performance at the ACO's Pier 2/3 Opening Festival. Tickets are available right here for $49, with under 35s able to score a pass for $35.