Omar Musa: “We are haunted by the ghosts of the past”

I think about it in two ways. The first is at the individual level – a very ancient, idealized story of children inheriting the sins of the fathers, and how, if we are participants in systems of oppression or exploitation, are we participants through choice or coercion? Perhaps even coercion may be done through bloodshed.

The second is on a much broader scale. I became interested in the legacies we have as post-colonial nations – whether it’s India, Nigeria, or Malaysia. I wanted to look at the relationships between these different but similar nations on a global scale. That’s why I have a section of the book set during the palm oil trade in Nigeria in the 1970s – to show that there are always deeper undercurrents going on beneath the surface. They do not exist in a vacuum in one area at a time; They are connected throughout the world, especially in places colonized by an empire or even a trading company like the East India Company.

I wanted to interrogate how land exploitation is inherited by modern corporations, industries and even governments – particularly in Malaysia, from the era of the North Borneo Trade Company.

The book resists spectacle when dealing with climate collapse, choosing instead to embed it in family life and everyday decisions. Why was it important for you to keep this crisis intimate rather than apocalyptic?

I mean, first of all, it’s a novel. This is imaginary. And I believe the best fiction is inspired by human relationships and dynamics. Otherwise, it could easily turn into controversy – and then at that point, you might as well write a non-fiction account of the palm oil trade. And many of them have already happened. I wanted to use that small window of intimate family relationships to look at broader conflicts. I also think that when we’re talking about the ecological crisis, it’s important to bring it down to that level – to see how it affects people on a daily basis. It makes it more real. It makes it more intimate, and in some ways, even more powerful.

Furthermore, most of the people I interviewed and spoke to during the research phase of this book were people who lived on the front lines. Only the heads of corporations engaged in extractive practices do not necessarily see the impact of climate change or environmental destruction. For example, mostly, these are fishermen. Farmer. They see that the seasons are changing. The tides are changing. The temperature of the water is changing.

Talking to many such people over the six years I spent researching the book changed my perspective. These global issues are personal – and I wanted to reflect that.

Keep Fiordsland Feels morally charged rather than neutral. What do you think about the land – not just as the setting, but as a thing that remembers, resists, or sometimes, even implicates the people who live there?

I feel like you said it better than me in the question. Space has always been important in my writing. but with this FiordslandI had some things in my mind.

For example, in books like heart of Darkness By Joseph Conrad, the land and landscape provide the backdrop for the characters’ dramas – used perhaps as a metaphor for the dark heart of man or as a silent witness to his behavior. But in a place like Borneo, the jungle has traditionally been understood to have its own soul, its own agency – something that should be respected, admired and even feared.

I wanted to bring that concept forward, so that the land is not just passive – the forest is not just something to be acted upon or exploited. He had his own agency, his own decisions, his own playfulness, his own aggression. And I thought that was fairer than just using it as a metaphor.

Family relationships are unresolved in the novel. Were you consciously resisting the idea that fiction should offer reconciliation or closure?

I think it comes back to this idea that we live with these legacies and echoes. We are haunted by the ghosts of the past – constantly shaped by our memories. I’m not sure there’s ever really such a thing as closure. Maybe there’s acknowledgment of the traumas and legacies you’ve endured, but actual closure? I’m not sure it exists.

With family relationships – especially their thorniness, their history – it seems very difficult to reach any resolution. And this struck me as truer to life: that these relationships remain in flux rather than being tied down into neat bounds.

This was also a conscious narrative decision. If the family dynamics in the novel are reflective of larger forces – colonial legacies, ecological collapse, historical violence – those forces themselves remain unresolved. We have not found a solution to the climate crisis. We have not found the end of those broad, deep journeys of history. So, it didn’t feel honest to impose that kind of reconciliation on the story.

There is a sense of rhythm and restraint in your prose. How does your background in poetry and music shape your sentence construction and the way you handle silence on the page?

I often try to find the shape, rhythm and rhythm of the prose through some kind of performative element. Although I write silently and take my time with it, when it comes to editing, I often read it out loud. This way, the awkward phrase becomes self-explanatory, and you understand which irrelevant words should be discarded.

For me, the playfulness and tension – the back and forth between very dense prose and very sparse prose – is something I personally enjoy reading, and I enjoy writing it too. I think poets can often fall into the trap of making all their prose dense and complex, without giving the audience or reader enough time to breathe and think.

I remember when I was younger, one of my English teachers said I had a Muhammad Ali — “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” — approach to writing, where I bounce back and forth between those different approaches. You can’t have too much float, and you can’t have too much sting. That’s how I see it.

You work in a variety of forms – novels, poetry, performance, music and even visual art. When you sit down to write fiction, what parts of those practices do you intentionally invite and what parts do you intentionally leave out?

When I’m in a more internal or introverted state of mind I lean toward writing prose and fiction. Since I’m also an artist, people often assume I’m a full-blown extrovert. But in reality, as I mentioned earlier, I spend most of my time quietly writing at my company.

Before, when I was writing performance poetry or rap music (while writing fiction) I would separate myself from the “aggressive” energy that was inside of me. However, recently, I have realized that I have a lot of equipment that I have taken advantage of over the years. So now I never leave anything out when it comes to writing a book. You’ll notice that there are also visual elements that I borrow from my visual art, and of course the music, and the musicality of the sentences.

Climate concern often comes with a desire for solutions or moral clarity. As a novelist, do you feel any pressure to respond – or is your responsibility something else entirely?

I think asking good questions is often enough for a poet or novelist. I’m not a politician, policy-maker or economist – coming up with complex, practical policy responses is entirely someone else’s job.

Having said that, in a book like this, I probably lean a little more toward finding and presenting answers – even if in a broader sense. From my conversations with people on the front lines – environmental activists and others – a recurring theme has been the importance of listening closely to civil society and indigenous communities, who hold forms of knowledge about land management that have long been sidelined or silenced.

I don’t answer in a prescriptive way – I’m not saying, “This is what people have to do.” But a central theme of the book is privilege and how it is used. If privilege is a resource, you can choose how to spend it. You can use it to preserve and maintain the status quo, or you can use it to challenge it. In that sense, the novel points toward responsibility rather than resolution.

Rutvik Bhandari is a freelance writer. He lives in Pune. You can find him talking about books on Instagram and YouTube (@themindlessmess).