How Art Made the World ââ“ the Day Pictures Were Born

By Mary Woodbury

I had a wonderful talk with Michael Mohammed Ahmad, editor of the anthologyAfter Australia, founding managing director of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Motion, author, and and then much more. Our chat opened up doors for me to explore the promotion of literacy effectually the globe. Sweatshop is a literacy movement based in Western Sydney. The motility provides inquiry, training, mentoring, and employment opportunities for emerging and established writers and arts practitioners from Indigenous and not-English speaking backgrounds.

Nigh THE Book

This interview explores Dr. Ahmad’s novels, just focuses primarily onAfter Australia(published past Affirm Press, in partnership with Multifariousness Arts Australia and Sweatshop Literacy Movement).

In this unflinching album, twelve of Australia’southward nigh daring Indigenous writers and writers of color provide a glimpse of Commonwealth of australia every bit nosotros head toward the year 2050. Climate catastrophe, police force brutality, white genocide, totalitarian rule, and the erasure of blackness history provide the backdrop for stories of love, backbone, and promise.

The anthology features Ambelin Kwaymullina, Claire G. Coleman, Omar Sakr, Hereafter D. Fidel, Karen Wyld, Khalid Warsame, Kaya Ortiz, Roanna Gonsalves, Sarah Ross, Zoya Patel, Michelle Law, and Hannah Donnelly. It is edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad. The  original concept is by Lena Nahlous.

A CHAT WITH THE AUTHOR

Starting time, I would beloved to know more most the Sweatshop Literacy Motion, of which you are the founding director. How did this move come about and what kind of success has information technology had?

Sweatshop is a literacy movement based in Western Sydney, devoted to empowering culturally and linguistically various communities through reading, writing, and critical thinking. Over the past decade, Sweatshop has mentored an ongoing ensemble of emerging and established writers from the region who take come to exist known as the Sweatshop Writers Group. Sweatshop has also facilitated writing workshops and residencies in schools and universities, produced publications, podcasts, and short films, and we have presented book launches, seminars, readings, and performances at writers’ festivals beyond Australia.

It is difficult to know exactly how successful we have been in coming together our goals, but information technology always brings me not bad joy to think almost the thousands of young and emerging writers whom we take supported over the years â€" witnessing their intellectual development and providing them with public platforms to share their stories. I am particularly proud of the ground-breaking anthologies Sweatshop has produced in recent retention, such every bitSweatshop Women, which is Australia’southward get-go publication produced entirely by Indigenous women and women of colour, andRacism: Stories on Fear, Hate & Discrimination, which features 39 short stories and poems about the real-life experiences of racism faced by Australians on a daily basis.

Y'all accept likewise written some novels:ÂThe Tribe,  The Lebs, and  The Other Half of You.ÂWhat are these stories about?

The Tribe was the start novel I wrote in a drove of works on Arab and Muslim Australian identity. It is told from the perspective of Bani Adam, a fictional version of myself equally a child. The book details Bani’s domestic experiences inside a large Lebanese-Australian family.

The second novel I wrote in this collection isThe Lebs.The book follows on from The Tribe, only this time the stakes are much higher. Bani is now a teenager and he is dealing with many of the usual problems teenage boys face â€" coming to terms with his gender, sexuality, race, and class while also trying to obtain an pedagogy. This is complicated for any normal teenager, but for a ‘Leb’ growing up in the mail-9/11 era, what I am describing is a war zone. Bani faces a political climate that is dominated by news headlines in Australia and around the world, which take demonized and homogenized immature men like himself as criminals, gangsters, sexual predators, and terrorist suspects.

I wroteThe Tribe andThe Lebs with very clear intent: I was young and idealistic and genuinely believed that I could improve the global perception of Arabs and Muslims through my stories. But when information technology came to my near contempo novel,The Other Half of Yous, writing it was similar crying â€" the volume merely fell out of me involuntarily. I remember the night my son was born; his mother was comatose in her hospital bed equally I saturday in the darkness before her. I was cradling Kahlil in my correct arm and writing on my phone in my left manus. At the time, I did non know why I had of a sudden felt this tremendous urge to write; the words were simply pouring from me. Later, when I read over what I had typed, I discovered that I was reliving the surreal and mystical scenes I had witnessed during Jane’s labour and Kahlil’s entrance into this earth. These words ultimately becameThe Other One-half of Yous. If at that place is such a matter as a soul, and if it’s possible that your soul can somehow exist transferred onto a page, then my soul at present exists inside this one volume.

I found you by fashion of a Discord customs called Rewilding Our Stories, where one of our community members gave the Subsequently Commonwealth of australia  album a actually overnice review. You edited the anthology, whose authors are Indigenous and writers of color, writing mostly speculative or mod urban fiction and prose. How did this album come nigh?

In 2019, I was asked to develop a new album which imagined Commonwealth of australia in the year 2050. Originally conceived past the executive managing director of Diversity Arts Australia, Lena Nahlous, the publication would bring together Indigenous writers and writers of color from every state and territory in Commonwealth of australia. Together, they would create a collection of short stories and poems in the literary form called “speculative fiction.” In the aftermath of the Blackness Summertime Bushfires and amongst the COVID-19 pandemic, equally well as the #BlackLivesMatter protests, I could never acceptspeculated that by the fourth dimension the publication was complete, it would look more like a picture of our electric current reality, rather than our inevitable future.

As the editor of the anthology, I pictured a book that would imagine a earth subsequently empires, afterwards colonies, and later white supremacy. Then I called information technologyAfter Australia. However, the writer of Martu ancestry, Karen Wyld, sent me a story that intertwined three historical timelines, disentangling the complexity of contemporary Indigenous identity. And award-winning author, Roanna Gonsalves, wrote a love letter to the printing press, which examined the Governor’s Order in 1814. All at once it occurred to me that Australia’s future could merely be written on the foundations of our past and present.

As with a lot of fiction that explores environmental losses, some of the stories deal with climate alter and intersect directly with oppression in the form of racism and bigotry. What are your thoughts about the intersectionality of ecological and socio-economic tragedies? Do yous think things volition ever go improve?

Firstly, with regards to the question on the relationship between ecology and socio-economic tragedy, I strongly recommend the volume,Is Racism an Environmental Threat?,written by one of Australia’south greatest anthropologists and intellectuals, Professor Ghassan Hage.

Secondly, with regards to the question of whether things will get better, let me take it back toAfter Australia: I retrieve past far the most unique aspect of the album is the style in which all the stories and poems converge into a unified vocalism, speaking for our by, present and time to come as a whole. Wiradjuri writer Hannah Donnelly guides us on this journeying with her collection of stories titled “Black Thoughts.” In spite of the challenges nosotros currently face as a nation, Hannah’s words remind us that there is hope equally the world continues to unravel:Our time is a loop. We’ll observe our mode back, before, after…

What power do stories and art have in bringing about a more just globe, and what other projects is Sweatshop doing right now to expand that goal?

More broadly than just “stories” and “art,” I believe in the ability of literacy to bring about a just globe. The entire Sweatshop movement was inspired past the work of African-American civil rights activist, feminist, and writer, bell hooks, who argues that, “All steps towards liberty and justice in any culture are dependent on mass-based literacy movements, because degrees of literacy so oftentimes determine how nosotros see what we run into.”

In terms of other projects Sweatshop is doing right now â€" give thanks you lot, this question presents a perfect opportunity to announce that Sweatshop, Assert Press, and Diversity Arts are currently developing a follow-up toAfter Commonwealth of australia, calledSome other Australia. This time I have taken a backseat every bit the sub-editor, and the wonderful Tongan-Australian author and general managing director of Sweatshop, Winnie Dunn, is at the helm equally the editor.

Another Australia will feature a new cohort of super-talented and accolade-winning First Nations and POC writers, including: Osman Faruqi, Declan Fry, Amani Haydar, Jamie Marina Lau, Shirley Le, L-Fresh the Lion, Mohammed Massoud Morsi, Sisonke Msimang, Anne-Marie Te Whiu, Sara Saleh, and Nardi Simpson, and poetry and linocut illustrations from Omar Musa.

Definitely keep an eye out forAnother Commonwealth of australia, which will be hitting bookshelves in July 2022!

I am so excited about that! Did y'all want to talk virtually any of the writers or experiences inAfter Australia in more than depth? Do the stories all have place in Commonwealth of australia?

From the groundwork laid-out by the writers I’ve already discussed in this interview â€" Hannah, Karen, and Roanna â€" the other contributors each interpreted the theme of the book in their own unique and personal style: Zoya Patel detailed a dystopian (not-too-afar-and-kind-of-already-hither) future where bushfires have ravaged the Deed and our neighboring islands take drowned. As the dark-brown people are trying to arrive throughout Zoya’s story, in screenwriter Michelle Law’s story, the brownish people are trying to becomeout, while under the occupation of a fascist society that makes1984 await similarThe Fiddling Mermaid. Meanwhile, Noongar author Claire G. Coleman introduces us to the Ostraka Law of 2039; her story subverts the notions of systemic institutions, and explores both the physical and psychological prisons that manifest in a racialized society. Newcomer Sarah Ross re-writes her experiences every bit the child of an interracial same-sexual practice couple amidst the rubble of the Taj Mahal; and emerging poet Kaya Ortiz plays out our futurity as a lyrical exercise in multiple choice. Multi-award-winning author and illustrator Ambelin Kwaymullina sends Commonwealth of australia 2020 a dire message from the Ngurra Palya of 2050; and author and cultural critic Khalid Warsame depicts an surroundings that will probable feel the nigh mundane and safe amongst all the stories inAfterward Australia, until you lot realize it isn’t.

Perhaps the most controversial contribution inAfterwards Commonwealth of australia is written by the poet Omar Sakr. In his short story, titled ‘White Influenza,” Omar dissects the brilliant texture of multicultural suburbia against a global pandemic that volition be frighteningly familiar to readers at this moment in time, merely this item virus has selected “white” people equally its principal casualty.

And lastly, in an as prophetic story, the playwright and author originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Futurity Destiny Fidel, lays bare the tragictime to come anddestiny of so many immature black men. Future’s story, “Your Skin is the Simply Cloth You Cannot Launder,” recounts an incident in which he was going from door-to-door selling solar panels to the residents of Mount Ommaney, Brisbane. Suddenly, he is confronted and arrested past a group of white police officers, afterwards a complaint had come up through from a concerned citizen about a strange black man wandering the neighborhood. Future’south story arrived on my desk at the same time that protests throughout the United States and the rest of the world had erupted, following the murder of George Floyd under the articulatio genus of a white police officer; and a bottom known incident in which an innocent African-American human from Georgia, named Ahmaud Arbery, was violently gunned-downwardly by two white vigilantes that claimed he looked like a doubtable in several break-ins in their expanse.

Reflecting on all these stories now, I’k remembering what a truly special droveLater on Commonwealth of australia is, and I really hope people accept the time to read information technology.

Do you lot take whatever other thoughts to share or whatever personal stories you are working on at present?

Equally a affair of fact, something kind of odd happened yesterday while I was praying at Auburn Mosque: The ghost of Christopher Hitchens appeared before me and said, “Stop wasting your fourth dimension, there’s no afterlife.”

Anything else to add?

In a country where Ethnic people are regularly assaulted and killed by police; where young African men are demonized as â€œgangsters” by our news media and politicians; where Pacific Islanders are overrepresented in our prisons; where Muslims cannot conduct their Fri prayers without ever wondering if an Australian-born white supremacist is lurking exterior with a motorcar gun; and where we cannot become into cocky-isolation without blaming four-and-a-half billion Asians; solidarity betweenallAustralians â€" black, brown and white â€" is fundamental to our survival.

I can’t thank you enough for this vivid insight into your wonderful piece of work with literacy, people, and our planet. It’s truly inspiring.

This article is part of ourWild Authors series. It was originally published onDragonfly.eco.

______________________________

Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Dragonfly.eco , a site that explores environmental in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction nether pen name Clara Hume. Her novelBack to the Garden has been discussed inDissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Hereafter: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity(University of Arizona Press), and Dubiousness and the Philosophy of Climatic change(Routledge). Mary lives in Nova Scotia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the trouble of climatic change. It is both a report about what is beingness done, and a resources for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crunch then it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to activity. Fine art tin, and should, shape our values and beliefs and then we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front end of usa.

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