The possibility of falling short

I first came to know Omar N’Shea through his book-length essays published in Aphroconfuso. I was immediately drawn to his style of writing, the subjects he explored, and the way he brought his work to life when reading it aloud. At the time, I didn’t know Omar personally, though I had already read most of what he had published on Aphroconfuso before meeting him for the first time at a cafeteria in Mosta. I remember worrying that I might arrive late, or that I wouldn’t be equipped to discuss certain topics with him. But Omar quickly put me at ease, and we spoke as though we had known each other a thousand times before. To me, this reflected a kind of shared vulnerability — the very quality Omar would later describe to me, both in writing and in relation to the act of writing itself.

By the time we first met in person, we had already invited Omar to the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival, and our meeting became a welcome opportunity to get to know the man behind the words. Hours passed quickly as our conversation flowed with ease, and I discovered that we shared more than I had anticipated: our working-class backgrounds and stories of loss, for one. In preparation for the Festival, I devoted more time to reading Omar’s newly published work and met him on several further occasions. His reading at the Festival’s opening event — the open mic in Gozo — captivated me as much as it did the audience, who were left eager for more.

Indeed, reading in public requires a certain courage; but then again, so does publishing work that can be perceived as deeply personal. Omar describes his writing as “private inasmuch as I write myself into every project I undertake, yet I have always begun from a very public idea.” Delving further into the fine line between the public and private, he claims: “Most essay writing begins from introspection. I begin from the public, and it is the public that leads me inward to memory and reflection.

Once there, I can only make sense of things through a sociological and historical lens. I try to understand the genealogy and historiography of a subject, even my own affective landscape, connecting the public, the national, and the international to the private. This method is simply the way I find meaning. I do not write to publicise the genealogy of my own life circumstances. I write because my experience mirrors that of many from my social class and ethnic background, people who share my habitus and milieu. I aim to give literary voice to this shared life and to bring it into public discourse.”

Writing oftentimes becomes the tool with which we give a voice to our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions; a tool which Omar held back for many years. Or rather, he had been accumulating his ideas and techniques, and he is now putting them to very good use. As he claims: “I started writing in my native language when I turned 50 – not because I never wanted to be a writer; far from it. I’ve always read like a writer – never read like a reader.” Writing gives Omar “my memories, my life, and the lives of the people and places I write about a framework, an aesthetic apparatus, a language. It restores our poetics and metaphors.” When asked whether writing unclothes him, he explains that, rather, he was unclothed before he began writing, and it is through writing that he learned to dress and to come out.

To an extent, this idea of writing that unclothes us is a political one, as much as many other aspects of writing are. That is the way I see it, and the way Omar sees it too. He claims that: “I do not think there is ever a moment when writing is not politically charged, certainly not for me. As an Assyriologist, and therefore a historian, I bring to my literary essays the tools and training of my discipline. I’ve been taught to attend closely to the political dimensions of events, agencies, and affects, all embedded within larger networks of power. To write about affect, agency, and embodiment is already to make political choices.

It demands an awareness of historical silences, of archival erasures, of the permissions and restrictions imposed on those who moved or could not move, who spoke or were unheard, who appeared or were systematically disappeared. Writing, especially when it concerns bodies and borders, is never neutral. It both reflects and reshapes the movements of power. That is why, in Es Sidr, I speak of attempting to write a political history of the technologies of the body caught in the cracks of history, those interstitial spaces where ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, and global structures collide. These are the places where the archive stutters, where state narratives falter, and where something else, something messier and more resistant, can emerge.”

Publishing the personal, such as the letters received by one’s mother, is also a political act of sorts. In writing Es Sidr, Omar’s primary concern was permission. “My mother has passed away, and I do not know whether Otman is still alive. Negotiating the right to publish their letters and to write about both of them without direct consent was fraught. The editors and I had long discussions about what it means to release correspondence from people we can no longer reach, whether because they have died or have simply disappeared from our lives.” The leap in publishing them or not came through deciding that Omar would treat the letters as a historian would: as primary sources. He sees the letters as “significant historical records, offering insight into the workings of power, gender relations, and politics” and ultimately treats them “as the primary sources they are.”

Harking back to the starting point of this piece, Omar’s words resonated with me deeply: “Too often, Maltese non-fiction centres upper-middle-class perspectives that fail to resonate with the rest of society. They do not connect with my experience. People from my milieu are often assumed to be unliterary, preoccupied with more pressing matters than literature, as if literature were the exclusive domain of a leisurely class. Yet the idioms, vernacular, metaphors, thought patterns, and rhythms of working-class queer communities are worthy of archival preservation and literary representation. When I write in the first person, it often stands for that milieu, that class, that habitus. For this reason, I would like to discard the idea of writing as a sliding scale between public and private. My work is all of these at once: private, public, national, international.”

The Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival, being a Festival for all people, from all backgrounds and social statuses, is similarly open to all, blurring the lines between audiences and performers, different art forms, and diverse literary genres. As Omar explains beautifully to me: “The most compelling writing does not pretend to have fully succeeded; rather, it lets the reader feel the edges, the uncertainties, the possibility of falling short.” And that is one reason why as his reader and interviewer, I am made at ease.

Omar himself comes to the “literary form through academic work, and the essay provides a phenomenal space for me to bring together thought processes, connections, prose, syntax, colour, glitter, and a kind of conceptual wholeness that academic editors often overlook or actively discourage.” As a queer writer, he claims that the question for him is not whether he fails to embody affinity, but whether he can resist the pressure to produce affinity at all, as he describes it, “to produce legibility and narrative satisfaction.” He continues: “I prefer to work in registers that move between memory, theory, and affect, to meander between the archival and the personal, the snake around the polemical and the playful.” Literature is not only for the highbrow. We all love listening to stories, and we all have a story to tell.

I’ll close off with Omar’s wishes for the upcoming Festival: “We see a lot of blurring now in writing—some of the traditional boundaries have long disappeared and become mainstream now. I do not think literature is restricted to fiction and therefore I think it is wonderful that the Mediterranean Literature Festival have invited a non-fiction writer this year. I am really looking forward to presenting the essay at this festival – the essay has a long history in the Maltese literary milieu.” We’re surely looking forward to listening to and reading more of Omar’s works and thoughts.