I'm Not Hungry Anymore
Hasib Hourani on Omar Sakr
Edited by Eda Gunaydin
Ramadan is one month long and its timing follows the lunar calendar. This means that each year, it inches backwards twelve days. My tenth birthday, in September 2006, was on the first day of Ramadan. As I write this opening paragraph, it is April and we’re one week in. Between 2011 and 2018, Ramadan spanned the months of July and August—the northern hemisphere summer holidays.
As is the case with Christmas in Australia, public space is decorated with lights and banners during Ramadan in the Muslim world. Shopfronts set up festive displays, restaurants offer special menus; and the nightlife is otherworldly. So, between the years 2011 and 2018, Arab and Muslim writers in the diaspora were going back to blood-home over the holidays and seeing festival. They were seeing celebration, and spectacle, and most importantly they were seeing exception, because Ramadan is a rift in the year’s routine, and even more so when it aligns with time off from school or work.
I have been thinking a lot about what that overlap of ‘holiday’ and ‘Ramadan’ did to my generation of the diaspora, specifically the writers, many of whom came of age in that eight-year window. We who were experiencing homeland in its exceptional state and, because we were at an impressionable age, internalised it. After reckoning with the experience for ten years, we’re now grown-ups writing large bodies of work, and the results of that eight-year phenomenon—although now a decade gone—are finally being published.
As I write, I’ve now spent three years trying to find a contemporary English-language novel that does the Arab identity justice. I often end up a hundred pages deep in words that don’t feel either like me or for me. The same symbols are rehashed by different authors for different stories. Stories written as outside-placed, inward-looking voyeurs.
🧿
Son of Sin is Omar Sakr’s debut novel. After publishing two collections of poetry, Sakr has turned to fiction to depict the life of Jamal Khaddaj Smith, a queer man living in Western Sydney born to a Lebanese mother and a Turkish father, from whom he is estranged. We meet Jamal as a young boy and follow him into adulthood as he moves between Western Sydney and Turkey to map himself and his history.
It is reasonable to look at the work as an echo of Sakr’s own lived experience as a queer man himself, also born to Turkish and Lebanese migrant parents and raised in Western Sydney. In fact, Sakr opens the book’s acknowledgements with a thank you to Jamal, his ‘distant avatar’ who ‘[carried] the weight of [his] unreal life’. He continues, ‘This is a work of fiction … but the pain I had him shoulder is very real.’ In 2019, Sakr published an article with the ABC, a panorama of Mersin, Turkey, wherein he connects with his estranged father; in Son of Sin Jamal does the same.
So, to go back to the lights, and the banners, and the festive shop-fronts, this superimposition of spectacle over an ordinary landscape has become an overworked mechanism for contemporary SWANA (South West Asian and North African) writers. Reading Son of Sin, it is everywhere.
In an early scene, Jamal is watching his grandmother entertain an infant relative while ‘crooning Arabic lullabies’. The mention of ‘Arabic’ here is intentionally placed: an overt signal to the reader that this migrant grandmother sings in her mother tongue, as though we would have assumed otherwise or perhaps forgotten. But what makes this clause so jarring isn’t simply the referencing of a mother tongue, it is the overt mention of ‘Arabic’—generic, obvious, and neglecting a foundational rule of creative writing: show don’t tell.
Elsewhere in the book, a little green cedar tree sways from the rear-view mirror. The aunty sits on the veranda drinking ahwe, smoking argileh. The imposition of a Lebanese dish, in its Arabic name, sowed into scenes like wildflower: erratically scattered and careless to the landscape. Jamal wakes up as the ‘adhan [sinks] into [his] skull’ and I think of every Western-made documentary or war film that opens a scene with dawn and the call to prayer. I think of exoticisation, orientalism, and White celebrity writers adding a clip of the adhan to their Holiday-in-Morocco Instagram highlight, followed by a screenshot of Wikipedia’s ‘Fajr prayer’ webpage.
In an attempt to remain one step ahead of the reader’s psyche at all times, Sakr shoehorns several cultural references into prose that could have otherwise spoken for itself without further embellishment. In the first five chapters of the novel, it’s rare to find dialogue between the characters that don’t reference the fact that they are fasting, that they are Lebanese, in Western Sydney, or getting ready for Eid. As a reader, I feel disrespected. It seems as if Sakr does not trust me to read the work’s immense cultural significance. The narrative feels saturated and waterlogged, leaving little space for readers to infer the context on their own, which is a shame considering inference is a fundamental mechanism for writing poetry and Sakr is, in my mind, a natural-born poet. Certain expositions pander especially to non-Arab and non-Muslim readers who may not be familiar with our myriad subtleties and in-jokes. In a scene between Jamal and a family friend, Sakr follows Jamal’s question of ‘who’s the ninja?’ with a disclaimer that he was talking about a woman in a niqab, disrupting the pace and stunting what otherwise could have been quick and witty dialogue. After Jamal calls someone ‘Kholto’, Sakr explains that ‘every adult was an aunty or uncle’. But referring to an elder as ‘aunty’ or ‘uncle’ is not Arab- or Muslim-specific; most people of colour will already know what Sakr means: that this familial title is a sign of respect. These passages confirm that Sakr’s imagined reader isn’t one of us, but rather the aforementioned outside-placed, inward-looking voyeur, who looks upon the world—and thus in on our lives—with a white gaze.
I am currently a participant in the Slow Currents Writers’ Workshop, where four writers in Australia and four in Aotearoa meet fortnightly and learn how to be better writers of colour. As I write this review, I am reflecting on our session with Piyali Bhattacharya. Writing fiction is really tricky. I myself haven’t quite yet figured out how to do it. Piyali makes me realise that fiction is the hardest genre to master as an ethnic minority in the cultural West. This is because we are writing foreign items and ideas, but at no point in the scene are we able to pause and explain ourselves without automatically curdling the pace and the world-building of fictional prose. Piyali compares the writer’s explanation of cultural difference to the act of feeding children broccoli: we must hide it by covering it in cheese. I struggle with fiction because I love so much the process of context-giving, I like doing it overtly.
A few weeks ago I was out for coffee with my friend Hala. She is Egyptian, born and raised in Auckland. Hala told me about her time in Cairo in 2020, recalling when one of her friends asked her, why do you guys [Arabs in the West] put the ‘ein on everything? He was referring to the evil eye symbol, and how diaspora kids tend to put the emoji in Instagram captions, display names, bios. Hala and I talked about identifiers that day, how we use the symbol as a cultural marker. But it’s important to explicitly mention that this is a marker that non-SWANA folk can pick up on as well. The ‘ein isn’t used for people like us to find each other; it’s to say ‘we are specific’ in a language that everyone can understand.
There are certain phrases you will find in almost all contemporary English-language Arab literature. Identity markers that function like the ‘ein, displaying culture to any outsiders.
I made a checklist in my head two years ago. It consists of:
one food item (in Arabic, like koosa, laban, ahwe);
a reference to the earth or to the soil
and its relationship to hands;
the word teita, jiddo, mama, or baba transliterated, rather than ‘grandmother’ or ‘father’, etc.
It’s unsurprising that food features on this list—the generation of writers who were conflating homeland and spectacle may have been doing so because their most distinct image of blood-home is during Ramadan, a month in which food is foregrounded in both superficial and spiritual ways.
The list is easy. It is a cop-out. But we’ve been absorbing it for years and now it has become second nature. In fact, I can do it right now without hesitation: my teita’s hands knead the earth and the dough and with it, the Zaatar pie is ready.
Of course, any one of these things alone is not a cliché. I do it myself. I write about fennel, I write about food, my manuscript rests on a crux of rocks and rubble. I would never call my teita by another name. But stuffing every item from the list into the thin casing of a single paragraph or stanza is predictable. It becomes a recipe. And many English-language Arab writers end up making the same dish.
On page eleven of Son of Sin, Sakr writes:
‘His teyta sat in front of the clock, hunched over a large metal bowl full of mincemeat, onion and spices that she was rolling into kibbeh. She anchored him right away, every part of her solid as the earth, her wrinkled skin, the kerchief tying her hair back, the rhythm of her hands.’ [emphasis mine]
To see Sakr tick off my checklist in this way negates the very argument that we have been pushing for years, not just as Arabs, Muslims, or people of colour. We as minoritised folks more broadly want outsiders to understand: there are a hundred ways to be.
🧿
The book’s second section, ‘Mercy, Mersin’, where Jamal visits Turkey and his estranged father, is near-flawless. In this section, Sakr no longer relies on overt signifiers as demarcations of culture. ‘Mercy, Mersin’ is a less vexing read, demonstrating the subtleties required to portray people and place without exposition. Reading this section, my initial apprehension dissipates.
Here, Sakr speaks to the shock of returning to blood-home and being siphoned away from the other tourists, despite still feeling like one. He writes of a warning given to Jamal from an old university tutor: ‘… [children of migrants] stand out to the homeland just as aggressively as any other tourist’. Then he nullifies this warning with a rebuttal, ‘Years later, he discovered this didn’t apply to him … [when] he approached, Turks melted away, nodding or looking down, dismissing him instantly as one of them.’ With this, the reader gets to experience the negotiation of the self in real time. Presented with conflicting ideas of how we, as those across the diaspora, fit into our ancestors’ homelands. The reader must acknowledge that there is no textbook answer, that it changes from person to person. ’Mercy, Mersin’ redeems the previous section, ‘A Night of Power’, a regressive depiction of a second-generation migrant’s life in Western Sydney. Comparing these sections, it feels as though I am reading two different books.
In ‘Mercy, Mersin’, with this simple establishing of Jamal as being ‘one of the Turks’, Sakr writes honestly. He isn’t trying to come up with clever ways to situate Jamal as Turkish enough; he is writing Turkey as he knows it. We lose the transliterations and the didactic translations that follow them. We lose conversations that superimpose Arabisms into the text.
Sakr writes of Jamal’s father, Cevdat, ‘[calling] out to Fatima in Turkish, and she [replies], yelling out over the passing cars.’ Cevdat and his brother laugh, before turning to Jamal and translating, ‘I’m sick of watching her pack up her store, and she goes, she’s sick of hearing me bitch at her from my balcony’. We can see here that there is no need to transliterate the Turkish. I suppose this is done because Jamal doesn’t speak the language, and although the narration is in the third person, we’re still learning of life in Turkey through his eyes and ears. That swift interaction between Cevdat and Fatima is so organic, and so easy, that it tarnishes the Lebanese narrative and exposes it for what it is: Sakr relying on the aforementioned recipe. Perhaps this stems from internalised pressure. In the contemporary Western canon, SWANA culture has been homogenised, neglecting the multiplicity of identities that include Kurdish, Assyrian, Persian, Amazigh and Turkish, amongst countless others. Due to the SWANA region being predominantly made up of Arabs, this cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity has been flattened, resulting in tropes of the ‘Middle East’ equating solely to ‘Arab’, marking Arab stories as the most relevant, most culturally dominant, and most in-demand when depicting the region. Perhaps Sakr ends up replicating the recipe because this is what people want and expect.
Towards the end of this trip to Turkey, Jamal’s father plays a recording of a poem in Turkish. Jamal asks what it means, and his father responds, ‘It’s a love poem … but more than that, I don’t know how to say it in English.’ That line alone does justice to the Turkish language in a way I wish had been granted to the Arabic. Instead, whole phrases from the Qur’an are translated into English and made to sound feeble, embarrassing. I seek refuge in Allah from the outcast devil doesn’t hold the same pang like a’oothu billahi min al shaytan al rajim does. This disjunction introduces a valley between the Muslim reader and the poetics of Islam. I can’t imagine myself reading those translated English words and associating them with the rushed and scared whispers that would come out in the dark, or over a bridge, or in the shower, or just because. The shame and fear of Muslim childhood doesn’t translate. Not to mention, the Qur’an is only ever recited in Arabic, regardless of whether or not you speak the language.
It is also while reading the Turkish section that I understand why four of the six authors who blurbed the book refer to it as fiction written by a poet. It is ‘poetry as prose’ and ‘a poet’s novel’. Sakr’s craft is described as ‘intensely poetic’, using language ‘with a poet’s hunger for truth’. In ’Mercy, Mersin’, we finally find some of the trademarks that poets are known for. Sakr is verbing nouns when he describes a love interest as having ‘orange eyes honeycombed in the dark’. In another scene, he writes, ‘they stayed together for a minute or ten, softening’. Later, Jamal observes that ‘all we are is memory and myth, and memory fades’—that line closes a chapter, and we as readers must sit with it, and breathe.
There is, of course, the paradox of the Turkish narrative feeling tenfold more authentic than the Lebanese one, even though it’s what Jamal has spent his life removed from. One could argue that this is intentional. That Jamal feels like an outsider in Western Sydney, and that is what informs the obvious voice and stunted cultural references. But the cultural references aren’t just stunted or obvious—they are sometimes simply incorrect.
Son of Sin is a warning to writers who are interested in codifying their culture: you cannot do it alone. The book is littered with linguistic errors that would have been spotted and amended easily if there were a cultural reader on board; this goes for both the Turkish and Lebanese narratives. In Turkish, Sakr opts for the Arabic spelling of words like ‘Hussein’ and ‘Astugfirullah’, rather than the Turkish spellings—‘Huseyin,’ ‘Estagfirulah’. Some words are missing their diacritics, some are simply misspelled. Entire words are outright incorrect. Having said that, there are some linguistic charms throughout the mother tongue transliterations: Sakr chooses to spell out the words ‘kholo’ and ‘kholto’—meaning ‘uncle’ and ‘aunty’—in an accented Tripoli dialect. For any non-Arab readers, it should be said that these words are traditionally spelled, ‘khalo’ and ‘khalto’ when transliterated. But in both Arabic and Turkish, the spelling of transliterations are inconsistent, and there are discrepancies in the capitalisations of proper nouns such as ‘teita’ and ‘jiddo’. At first, it seemed as though the italics were reserved for Qur’anic verses only, but I soon learned that it was just sloppy editing—the italics are inconsistent for both translation and transliteration. This is not to say that Sakr has done a bad job at writing the Arabic, but I wonder whether the non-English text was treated with the same amount of care during the editing process, or if the editor just skimmed right over it?
Ultimately and unfortunately, as English-language writers of colour in the cultural West, the onus falls on us to mitigate any cultural errors in our work. But this doesn’t mean doing so in isolation; in fact it’s integral to refer to fellow writers of colour to do much more than proofread: we need community members to let us know whether or not you can see the broccoli.
✷✷✷
Hasib Hourani is a writer, editor, and arts worker living on unceded Wurundjeri Country. His practice disrupts expectations of place and archive and has been published in Meanjin, Overland, Australian Poetry, and Going Down Swinging, among others. He is currently completing his debut book of poetry.
Thank you to Jeanine, Ashraf, Sara, Adalya, Mohanned, and Rida, who I consulted while writing this piece. Thank you to Eda for such careful and enlightening edits.