The Lebs by Michael Mohammed Ahmad
Publisher: Hachette Australia (2018)
Available @ Hachette Australia
by Jenny Hedley.
According to writer Khalid Warsame, if you "ask anyone who isn’t straight and white and middle-class" they can tell you that there is a "system that is invested in the success of some and not of others; and you’ve got to be blind not to notice it." Michael Mohammed Ahmad, winner of the 2019 New South Wales Premier’s Multicultural Award for his novel, The Lebs (2018), fights the systemic oppression that Warsame refers to by using literature as an act of self-determination, a way to reclaim and tell stories. Inspired by African American feminist and social activist bell hooks, Ahmad founded SWEATSHOP: Western Sydney Literacy Movement in 2012 to address the lack of support for minority voices in the publishing industry. Ahmad writes that SWEATSHOP is "devoted to empowering people from socio economically challenged and culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds through reading, writing, critical thinking, creative expression and creative outcomes." There is a quote on SWEATSHOP’s website's home page, extracted from bell hooks: Cultural Criticism and Transformation (1997), that encapsulates SWEATSHOP's ideology: "We cannot begin to talk about freedom and justice in any culture if we’re not talking about mass based literacy movements. Because ... degrees of literacy determine so often how we see what we see."
hooks believes that "marginality is the precondition for a struggle to emerge that generates counter-hegemonic discourse, which in turn may become the voice constituting critical consciousness." She describes "coming to voice" as a revolutionary gesture of "moving from silence to speech." Ahmad’s literary revolution is subversive: righteous revelations artfully disguised behind vulgar, explicit portrayals of a group of people bound together not by race or religion but by the colour of their skin. He defines "Leb" as a cultural identity that grew out of the 2000 Skaf gang rapes in Sydney(1), out of the post-9/11 anti-Muslim vitriol and out of the 2005 Cronulla riots(2).
In her essay "Back to Cronulla" Fiona Wright revisits the infamous text message that circulated in December 2005: "It reads, in part, and with it’s original punctuation intact, 'every Fucking Aussie in the shire, get down to North Cronulla to help support Leb and wog bashing day', and 'this is our beach and they’re never welcome back.'"
Ahmad’s Lebs are Jordanian, Syrian, Palestinian and Indonesian; they are Sunnis, Shi’ites and Alawites; one is a Christian. Although Yassmin Abdel-Magied, "Australia’s most publicly hated Muslim," does not identify as a Leb, she clearly remembers the effects that 9/11 had on Muslims. In her book, Yassmin’s Story, she recalls how, suddenly, if you went to the wrong mosque or made the wrong joke, you could be considered a terrorist. "No matter how 'Australian' we were," she writes,
"different rules applied to us as Muslims in this society." Abdel-Magied wasn’t wrong. On Anzac Day 2017, an annual day of remembering those Australians and New Zealanders who have served their countries, Abdel-Magied tweeted "LEST. WE. FORGET. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine...)"; white Australia turned against her. Admittedly, her tweet was tone deaf in the eyes of Aussie veterans, but the truth is that Australia is a nation of forgetting, a nation built on genocide, a nation that denies indigenous sovereignty and continues to remove Aboriginal Children from their homes(3). For those of us who acknowledge the past and open our eyes to civil
rights violations taking place on the Australian prison islands of Manus(4) and Naru, where hundreds of refugees have been indefinitely detained, the words "Lest we forget" are fighting words. Although Abdel-Magied retracted her tweet and apologized, she was targeted with death threats, forced to move house.
Months earlier, when Lionel Shriver appointed herself the spokesperson for cultural appropriation at the Brisbane Writers Festival(5), Abdel-Magied walked out, enraged. While Lionel Shriver remains a best-selling author, Abdel-Magied, with her PhD in electrical engineering, lost employment opportunities in Australia, including her ABC TV gig, and moved to London. Again, different rules apply. One is forgiven: the other, blacklisted. The gulf between those with white privilege (including me) and everyone else is why we need literary activists like hooks, like Abdel-Magied, like Ahmad.
Ahmad’s The Lebs is a coming-of-age story set in Western Sydney, based on the author’s own experiences at Punchbowl High. It is the second installment in Ahmad’s trilogy of fictionalized, semi-autobiographical books. The main character is Bani Adam, meaning Child of Adam in Arabic, or: mankind. The title of Ahmad’s first novel, The Tribe, refers to Bani’s hundreds of extended family members in Sydney and Melbourne who belong to the Alawite faith. In part one of The Tribe, Bani eavesdrops and peers through doorways to reveal a multi-generational family living under a two-story roof; part two chronicles a wedding scene of hilarious, soap-operatic proportions; and in part three, the matriarch’s death mends familial splinters, trivial in the face of finality. Each of the sections begins with a looped passage of remembering, echoing the opening line of Ahmad’s short story "Alexandrian Lego": I was only [seven/nine/eleven] when this happened but it always feels like right now. This reflective device reminds us that the events to follow will have meanings interpreted by Bani’s (still, not-so-grown-up) teenage self.
In The Lebs, a similar looped passage introduces us to Bani, now a teenager at Punchbowl High: "I was fifteen at the time but it starts over again like I’m staring at the western suburbs through my rear-view." Where Ahmad captures heroic normality in his first novel, he unpacks western stereotypes of Arab-Australian Muslims in his second. The result is bold, fierce, unapologetic. The section titles—Drug Dealers and Drive-bys, Gang Rape, War on Terror—have less to do with content than with exposing politically-fueled newspaper hysteria. (Ruby Hamad -reminds us: "You can take the Leb out of Punchbowl Boys, but you can’t take the Bad Arab out of the imagination of white Australia.") In line with these tabloid shock tactics, no one is exempt from the hate speech of Ahmad’s characters, whose explicit language pokes fun at themselves, at each other, at other religions, other races. They are deeply misogynistic, calling Aussie girls "lowies" and "the biggest sluts." They use words like "Leb, Fob, Nip, Skip, Wog and Curry-muncher." Bobuq Sayed describes how Ahmad refuses to trade in the "currency of palatable assimilation."
In an interview for The Bookshelf, Wuradjiri author Tara June Winch criticizes The Lebs for relying heavily on grotesque character descriptions, saying, "You can move a reader without offending them." But chauvinistic and xenophobic attitudes are not the exclusive domain of Ahmad’s Lebs. Initially, I too took offense at Ahmad’s sexist language but discovered that the sting was owing to the familiar, uniquely Australian, derogatory nature of the dialogue. A decade of exposure to racial slurs and epitaphs on these colonized, unceeded lands has dulled my aural senses, but I still remember my first reaction: Australia is the most racist, fucked-up place. So in spite of—or maybe because of the accurate portrayal of misogyny in The Lebs ("I would dog every bro ... for another moment with that hoe")—I venture that Ahmad could be a feminist ally. One revealing line in the book is buried in the acknowledgements, where Ahmad has his own Bani-esque moment:
...shukran to my wife Jane ... I did not dedicate this book to you, because you are above it.
Ahmad presents us with a harsh critique of cultural relations between Muslim sects and highlights self-hating Bani’s interactions with white Australians. Bobuq Sayed describes The Lebs as an account of racial othering that provides "insight into how aspiring to whiteness manifests as a cultural affliction." He explores how Bani equates "whiteness with goodness, beauty, success and, specifically, being 'morally superior to the Lebs.'" In an interview with Sarah L’Estrange, Ahmad describes the way that Lebs perform a hyper-masculine version of themselves, playing the beast and dressing the part as a hybridized, temporary form of masculine protest, since that is what society expects. One of the book’s many laugh-out-loud moments is when Bani—who thinks he’s better than everyone else—dons a beret and bell-bottom pants in protest of the phallic-looking haircuts and tapered pants that his peers wear.
There is, however, an element of character development in The Lebs that feels rushed. In part three, post-high-school Bani performs ritual ablutions and swears off self-destructive habits after a night of drinking. Then over the next three pages he morphs into an amateur boxer, a tough guy. I scour Ahmad’s books for anything that might inform Bani’s metamorphosis and find only two mentions of boxing: in The Tribe, there’s a distant relative named Musa who is a kick-boxer; in The Lebs,
there’s a girl standing "with her legs apart, the way a boxer stands to keep his balance." As for Bani’s lack of physical prowess, he’s skinny and reluctant to engage in
fights. It’s only on the football field that can he "slam Usuf Harris into the dirt." The best foreshadowing of Bani’s athletic potential lies in the descriptions of his father, whose body looks like it’s carved out of stone. I struggle to believe that such a scrawny, lovelorn pushover could transform into a formidable opponent.
I can only trace the origins of Bani's overnight transformation to Ahmad's brutally funny essay "Bad Writer," wherein he describes how he was a boxer before he was a writer: "I strode into the Belmore PCYC like every other Lebo in Bankstown, with my chin high and my chest cocked and a cigarette wedged between my left ear and my razored head." Despite that underfed character arc, The Lebs deserves its spot in the literary canon for the beauty hidden within the ugly, for the places it dares to go. Part three concludes with a deliciously scathing expose of the leftist creative arts organizations that posit support of marginalized voices, but who appropriate and exploit these same artists. It is in these final scenes that Ahmad claims his space as a literary phenomenon. His sentences are tidy, free of fatty exposition. Vulgarity is necessary by now, no longer young boys hurling empty words, but artist versus org in a battle for self-determination, the author in fighting form. If The Tribe was
Ahmad’s coming to voice, then The Lebs was his unabashed claiming of space. He marries artistry to activism and wields the written word as a weapon for much-needed societal change. I anticipate Ahmad’s third installment of the Bani Adam trilogy will further smash down neo-colonial walls, challenge the trope of the "bad" Arab-Australian Muslim, and will continue to inspire underrepresented voices to tell their own stories.
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1In August of 2000, 18-year-old Bilaf Skaf, his younger brother Mohammed and up to 14 of their second-generation Lebanese immigrant friends committed a series of horrific gang rapes on three schoolgirls. The Skaf pack rapes were front-page news throughout the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. Conservative media outlets spun their coverage of such "ethnic crime gangs" to support an anti-immigration political stance.
2On Sunday, December 11, 2005, thousands of white Australian nationalists gathered on Cronulla Beach in Sydney to beat up anyone who appeared to be of Arab descent. Many wore Australian flags draped over their backs, or T-shirts that read "No Lebs," as they chanted "Aussie Aussie Aussie" and vowed to take back "their" country.
3First there were the Stolen Generations; now there is the Northern Territory Intervention.
4The hellish conditions on Manus Island are captured most poetically in Behrouz Boochani's award-winning novel, No Friend But the Mountains.
5On September 8, 2006, Shriver appeared on stage at the Brisbane Writers Festival to give the keynote speech on Fiction and Identity Politics, while wearing a Mexican sombrero. She said that she hoped that the idea of "cultural appropriation" was just "a passing fad" and she railed about only being "allowed" to write fiction that is "so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we'd be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with." Her defensive and totally offensive speech was likely provoked by the reviewers who took her book The Mandibles to task for being racist (the main characters in the book, a white family, put their black slave on a leash).