Books

Omar Musa
Fierceland

It has been a decade since rapper, slam poet and visual artist Omar Musa published Here Come the Dogs: a debut novel whose loose-limbed, performative approach felt like a weapon to puncture a complacent society’s decorum. The Bornean Australian brought street culture to the literary establishment and was duly praised for doing so. But as critic Stuart Hall suggests, there’s always a double movement involved in a case like Musa’s: incorporation and resistance. “Subculture makes trouble,” wrote Hall, “and the system makes profit.” It is a credit to Musa that this issue is a shaping question in his second, more ambitious novel.

Fierceland divides capitulation and resistance between siblings Rozana and Harun, the children of a driven, self-made Malaysian businessman named Yusuf and his impeccable yet pliant wife, Jenab. We first meet the family in the late 1990s living in Kota Kinabalu, the regional capital of Sabah on the Bornean coast, and Musa is careful to introduce the domestic unit via the sensibility of its most guileless, innocent member.

Roz is a tomboy who loves drawing and playing The Legend of Zelda on her Xbox with her little brother. At 12, she’s aware of her family’s relative privilege – Yusuf drives a Lamborghini, they have a live-in maid – but not how this prosperity has been won. The opening section represents a tutorial on the ruthlessness required to come out on top in the “New Malaysia” inaugurated by then prime minister Mahathir Mohamad.

Yusuf determines that his children should come with him on a camping trip to the deep forest upriver, where the state has permitted his company to remove timber for the site of a thermal power plant. What the kids don’t know, delighted by their experience of untouched wilderness, is that the volcanic activity attested to by a scientist attached to the project is bunk. Yusuf is running a bait-and-switch to gain a foothold in the pristine forest. No power plant will be built, though large-scale palm oil plantations will be.

The locals are not so credulous. To protect their homes and livelihoods they resort to guerilla tactics: sand in diesel engines, slashing tyres. When Yusuf’s fixer and the camp men find their presumed monkey-wrencher – a kind and gentle local employee who has in recent days taught the children to fish the river and given them some inkling of the forest’s mysteries – they savagely beat him and steal the small glass bead that is his sole treasure, without realising that Roz and Harun are watching from their camp bedroom window.

That the initial narrative ends here telegraphs its significance for the kids and the novel as a whole. When we next meet Roz it is in Sydney in 2018, when word arrives of her father’s death. She has spent the intervening years in antipodean exile from her family and its ever-increasing wealth, a struggling artist driven by anger shaded by sorrow.

When perspective switches to Harun for the first time, it is to allow Jenab to share the same news about Yusuf’s death. The young man is about to enter a meeting with investors in his lucrative Silicon Beach start-up in Los Angeles, and he barely skips a beat. Roz’s little brother has cleaved from her in almost every respect. He’s grown into a self-assured and controlling man much like his father – though he, too, has maintained a distance from Yusuf.

The funeral – like that of Logan Roy in Succession – suggests a dramatic and public locus for a domestic dispute to unfold, and Musa delivers on that possibility. But there is also a narrative behind the narrative in these pages. As a series of interstitial chapters take us further back in time, ranging across continents and historical eras, Fierceland resolves into a ghost story about a tiny murrina portrait that carries a lasting curse.

That Studio Ghibli’s animated masterpiece Princess Mononoke should be Roz and Harun’s favourite film as children is telling. The film describes an animist world in which forests have agency through spirits and gods, much as those the Borneans of Sahab once inhabited, and it regards curses as a form of ecological feedback – technological mastery misused results in retaliatory action from the natural world.

Musa proves adept in melding worldly domestic drama to something deeper, though in his retrospective chapters he does not always observe the paradoxical law of those giants of the modern historical novel Hilary Mantel and Marguerite Yourcenar: to speak to the present, historical fiction must be grounded with absolute fidelity in its moment.

But Musa’s talent has always been allied to his energy. At its best, Fierceland takes the descriptive verve of Musa’s poetry and welds it to a celebration of the natural world despoiled by Yusuf’s boundless ambition. He runs real voltage through the damaged personalities of Roz and Harun as they come to terms with their father’s inheritance.

The question of incorporation and resistance eventually moves beyond Roz and Harun; it becomes part of the tragic logic of history. Yusuf, we learn, climbed out of absolute poverty by dint of sheer ingenuity and will, and yet capitulated to the cold logic of neoliberalism, just as the Spanish Catholics brought their God to the region in centuries past seeking to save souls, but instead inaugurated an immensely destructive colonial project.

All art is a kind of haunting, Musa writes at one point. This novel is a plea from the insubstantial realm of the imagination. It demands that we understand the systems our actions drive in the world, so that we might yet dismantle them.

Penguin Random House, 384pp, $34.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 6, 2025 as "Omar Musa, Fierceland".

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