‘I hated it’: How poet Rania Omar reclaimed her Western Sydney roots

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Coming from western Sydney, Rania Omar dreaded the inevitable questions from her classmates at Burwood Girls High School.

“I would always get questions from other young people asking me, ‘Oh, are there always gunshots?’ and ‘Aren’t you scared’,” says 25-year-old Omar, a Muslim woman from a Lebanese background.

“I hated it, and I was embarrassed living in western Sydney. And then I grew to resent western Sydney because of all the ways we were represented in the media. As any young person does, navigating the world and growing up, you’re like, ‘This identity doesn’t look very good, and I don’t want it any more’.”

‘I was so shy growing up.’ Now, Rania Omar’s work is featured in a ground-breaking new book, and she will perform at this week’s Culture X Festival.

It was only as she matured that Omar, now a poet, writer and visual artist, began to realise that deep down her love of her faith and identity was unshakeable.

“I went to university and when I reflected on what made me feel safe and comfortable, it was my community,” she says. “It was walking down the streets of Greenacre, getting all the love and all the smiles. If I’m struggling with something, someone immediately comes to help me. There is so much community and companionship within Western Sydney, but I wasn’t seeing it because I was too busy hating it.”

As a youngster, writing and books were Omar’s refuge.

Bankstown world music collective, Worlds Collide, will feature at the Culture X festival.

“I was so quiet,” she says. “I was always reading and so shy growing up. Then I realised how much this was disadvantaging me. I wanted to connect with people so desperately, but I was getting in my own way. So at university, I was like, ‘OK I’m going to scare the crap out of myself’. I put my hand up in class to ask a question. And then, with small things like that, I built up my self-confidence of speaking in public, and people perceiving me, and not running away immediately when people looked at me.”

Now Omar’s work is featured in a ground-breaking new book, Ritual, a collection of work from 39 Muslim-Australian poets, published by Sweatshop Literacy Movement.

“I think it’s so incredible to see so many Muslims writing,” she says. “It feels like a really cool expression of under-expressed voices from a community that is still marginalised and discredited and has all of these terrible things attributed to it. Everyone’s expressing their stories really kindly and with these beautiful values. That’s what I really love about Ritual - it’s literally all of the voices I’ve heard growing up, but put together with their best foot forward.”

Rania Omar has been passionate about the written word since she was young.

Omar will perform some of her work at this week’s Culture X Festival, a three-day festival of cross-cultural music, parties and workshops at Bankstown Arts Centre. There she will join other poets, performing alongside Persian music collective Avaye Rood, in a concert on Sunday.

The roots of Omar’s poetry were sown as a youngster when she wanted to be a songwriter, spurred on by the music of favourites such as Selena Gomez.

“My poetry started out as songwriting, but the form was longer, and it didn’t fit songwriting,” she says. “But it was really vulnerable and expressive in the way poetry is.”

The first time she shared her poetry publicly was at a Bankstown Poetry Slam, a day she will never forget.

“It was scary as hell. I was shaking so much I’m pretty sure I was vibrating on stage,” she says. “The first poem I shared was about body image, as a person in a bigger body struggling to navigate being a woman in this world. I was scared, but it felt so safe as well because Bankstown Poetry Slam is a really safe space. No one is judging you and if you’re struggling, people give you support and time.”

‘We’re going to have fun and we’re going to express ourselves and we’re going to be silly. We’re going to be vulnerable’

Rania Omar

The concept of safety – physical, emotional, cultural – comes up all the time in conversation with Omar, who is quite open about her own struggles with mental health and physical disability.

“There are limited safe spaces for people with my experiences, and people from Muslim communities specifically,” she says. “This [the upcoming festival] is a huge safe space. We’re coming here as people of faith and people who have shared common belief systems and values. We’re going to have fun, and we’re going to express ourselves, and we’re going to be silly. We’re going to be vulnerable.”

Culture X Festival is at Bankstown Arts Centre from September 12 - 14.

Ritual is available now from Sweatshop Literacy Movement.