Omar Sakr’s foray into fiction began with him doing his own thing.
“One of the first pieces of advice I got from an older writer some years ago was don’t publish your first novel because it’s going to be autobiographical, you can’t help it,” he says. “But rather than not publish the first novel, rather than being afraid of the idea of autobiography, I just thought I would run toward it and really own it.”
The bisexual Turkish-Lebanese Muslim poet has explored the multiplicity of his identity in literary publications, anthologies and his own poetry collections: These Wild Houses, and the Prime Minister’s Literary award-winning The Lost Arabs. But it is in his debut novel Son of Sin that he really leans into his lived experience growing up queer and Muslim in a broken family in western Sydney.
The result is an unflinchingly honest, vivid and intense work, spanning a young man’s formative years and the pain and pleasure that comes with negotiating – and breaking – rules around family, faith, culture and desire. Sakr writes lyrically and pointedly, exploring the impact of migration, racism, class and abuse on the lives of western Sydney families, and the younger generations coming to terms with who they are as they navigate circumstances well beyond their control. For Sakr and his peers, this was their parents’ illiteracy and its corresponding poverty; a recurring and threatening police presence; and gendered biases and homophobia.
Sakr leaned into it truthfully; for instance, the emails that main character Jamal receives back from his father after coming out are slightly edited replicas of emails Sakr received from Turkey from his own father, who has since passed away. The process was not without pain, but enabled the author to really “savour [life] from the position [he’s] now in as a stable independent adult”.
“A lot of what I experienced was terrifying and traumatising, not because it was violent, but because I lacked the information to contextualise what was going on and to understand the forces that were playing out in the lives of everyone around me,” he says. “So revisiting it now, many years later, I am able to see my family clearly, I am able to love them more deeply, and I’m also able to be more forgiving toward myself. Up until writing this book, I still had a lot of self-loathing, judgmental thoughts about all the things I should have done and said, and all the ways I saw myself as having failed as a son, as a brother, as a nephew and so on.”
It’s difficult, as a reader, to see exactly how Jamal, son of an absent father and a drug-dependent mother, might have failed. Like most young men his age, he’s just trying to make sense of a life that he’s emotionally ill-equipped to deal with. Complicating things further are his same-sex desires, fraught in an environment that is deeply homophobic.
After having sex with Bilal, another boy in the community, Jamal notes that Bilal is “comfortable and confident” not coming out – acquiescent even to his father, who has a bride in mind for his son.
It’s a delicate exploration of the ways in which those from traditional communities must strategise around their queerness in order to live; of the reasons why some might never come out at all.
“What Bilal says to Jamal is, ‘Come out to what?’” Sakr explains.
“Where is the community for him to come out into? Where’s that queer Arab community? Where’s that queer Muslim community? Where’s he going to go? There’s nothing there. Family is everything to us, and it matters so much, and we’re not willing to just go ‘fuck ‘em’, and go live by ourselves. Anglo queers [can say] ‘I am going to go over here and live my best life and if you don’t want to be a part of it, well, bye’.
“Many people in our community choose the opposite. That sense of duty, of love, is so powerful. And maybe it’s because we understand how much our family needs us. There’s an economic disparity too, so the power dynamics are very different. Our parents don’t have super; they have kids. And the kids are meant to take care of them, that’s the retirement plan.”
The correlation of queerness with femininity is another uphill battle in these communities. Of coming out to his father, Sakr says:
“He definitely struggled to believe that I was queer because I was so masculine in my presentation,” he explains. “I have a beard; I am 6′1″; people are more likely to be afraid of me than to think ‘there goes a guy who likes men’. The masculinity is what he struggled with and maybe if I was more femme he would have been [able to] see it.”
Sakr hopes his novel enables “queer Arabs and Muslims to feel more at home in the world, to be more comfortable being themselves”.
After all, he’s not shied away from embracing his identity, despite saying it’s “contested”.
“Various people in each community try to erase me,” he says. “The Muslim community wants to say that I am not Muslim because I am bisexual, the queer community wants to say I am not queer because I fell in love with a woman and married her, the Arab community wants to say I am not Arab because my father’s Turkish, the Australian community [won’t] have anything to do with me because of all of the rest of it.
“I don’t have any doubt about who I am, and it comes through in my work loud and clear.”
Son of Sin by Omar Sakr is out now through Affirm press
