Omar Musa on his novel Fierceland, a “deliberate critique” of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Sharing the stage with authors Jeet Thayil and Iffat Nawaz at the Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest recently, Bornean-Australian writer and poet Omar Musa had the audience hooked as he read from his genre-defying new novel, Fierceland (published by Penguin). Musa, who is also an artist and musician, shared that his “polyglot, polyphonic” book is about the “faultiness of memory and truths that live on unstable ground”.

Fierceland is Musa’s second novel and was recently awarded the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Fiction. A scathing portrait of the ecological crises facing humanity in the era of the Anthropocene, the novel is told through the lives of Rozana and Harun, heirs to the blood money of patriarchal palm oil baron Yusuf. In an email conversation, Musa elaborates on how his book is a direct critique of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Edited excerpts:

Q: Fierceland foregrounds many important debates, from colonial origins of capitalist greed to widespread ecological crises. What was the immediate driving force behind the novel?

A: The immediate driving force was a combination of love, longing and fury. It was personal reflections about the dynamics of families, as well as privilege and complicity (my own included) in systems of oppression and environmental destruction. I describe Fierceland as a love letter to Borneo and an elegy for the things we’ve lost. I became fascinated by the dark, fraught world of logging and palm oil in Borneo. I knew that if I wanted to tell this story truthfully, I had to dive deep into the tectonics of capitalism and corruption; to grapple with the ghosts of imperialism and language. As individuals, how do we interface with momentous forces far bigger than ourselves? Do we engage with them out of choice or coercion? Is it even possible to heal the wounds we have caused or regenerate the things we have destroyed?

Q: There is a deliberate attempt to not explain for an Anglophone Western readership, when it comes to the Malay phrases and references in the novel. What was the thought process behind this aesthetic choice?

A: Accent and flow of speech are so closely tied in with identity, and representing the souls and dynamic lived experiences of my characters meant capturing them in the novel. Sabahan slang and Manglish have their own rhythm and texture, and the book wouldn’t have felt as authentic if I had made it rigidly conform to “proper English” (whatever that is), and if I had italicised words rupturing the page every few sentences. I look back on some of my early work, where I did that, or even had a glossary of Malay words, and it just seems so strange and othering now.

Deforestation in Borneo
| Photo Credit:
Wiki Commons

I really want people to engage with Fierceland on its own linguistic terms. As a reader, I find it fun to do that — I’m thinking of how revelatory it was to read Sandra Cisneros’s blend of Spanish and English for the first time, or even Irvine Welsh writing in Scots English. We live in a polyglot, interconnected world — if people don’t know what a word means, they can google it. I do it all the time with arcane English words, and academic writing or legalese, for that matter, which are also their own languages.

Q: While reading the novel, one is reminded of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to which there is also a direct reference. How would you say your work speaks to that colonial literary tradition of depicting indigenous landscapes and wilderness?

A: Well, Fierceland is definitely a deliberate subversion/ critique of Heart of Darkness. In the passage you’re referring to, a character responds to Conrad himself, saying that if you follow a river in Borneo, you will find that the land/ wilderness in fact has a heart of light, not darkness. The forest in my book also has its own voice and agency and spirit — it is not just a backdrop or to be exploited; not just a metaphor for the hearts of men. Likewise, I have tried to foreground the local characters, make them flesh and blood, when in a book like Heart of Darkness, they might only provide an impressionistic backdrop for the lives of the European characters.

Q: Have any of your personal experiences made it to the fictional landscape of Fierceland?

A: Oh, yes. There is a dark undercurrent beneath the shiny veneer of The Australian Dream. I have many times experienced the vile type of hatred that Harun and Crazy Auntie go through in the book, at a street level and of course on the Internet. Xenophobes and Islamophobes (and apologists for the genocide in Gaza) are running riot in Australia and the U.S. at the moment. But I’ve also experienced the more pervasive, middle class forms of racism and Islamophobia that Roz experiences (though probably not quite as excruciating).

I remember an awkward moment, when, like Roz, I was asked to give a speech at school about Islam and was “caught out” for not knowing every tiny detail about Islamic jurisprudence, as if by merely being Muslim, I was suddenly some type of spokesperson for the community. That type of thing has followed me around my whole life since 9/11. But while some of these things in the book are definitely informed by real life experiences, remember that it’s fiction — most of it came from my imagination.

The interviewer is a Delhi-based literary critic and research scholar.

Published – March 09, 2026 02:30 pm IST