Michael Mohammed Ahmad is, by his own admission, at the top of his game when we meet for hot chocolates in Bankstown, a suburb of Sydney’s south-west, to talk about his latest work.
The award-winning author and founder of Sweatshop Literacy Movement, had, only a fortnight prior, won the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction for his third novel, The Other Half of You, which earned him his second Miles Franklin shortlisting (the first was for his previous award-winning novel The Lebs), but the subject of our interview is a piece of writing that came before the books that made him a notable name in Australia’s literary landscape.
That work is The Demon, a Lynchian physical theatre work that reimagines a dark story in the history of white Australia, interwoven with a surrealist allegory for the Australian demon of racism and xenophobia.
Drawing on the Chinese, Arab, Anglo-Celtic settler, and Indigenous backgrounds of its creative team, the action-packed thriller explores the bond of two detectives from Bankstown – Arab-Australian Jihad and his Aboriginal Muslim partner Matthew/Muhammad – tasked with investigating a crime allegedly perpetrated by Chinese-Australian street fighter Wei, who draws the detectives on a road trip from Western Sydney to Burrangong, the site of the violent anti-Chinese of 1861.
It’s a work that is layered with meaning, perfected over a decade as Ahmad’s career went from strength to strength.
I am really proud that as I grew up and became more experienced and more skilled, the show grew up with me.
“At the moment I am kind of at the top of my game but when I was invited to write this show, it was a real big gamble and a risk for [director and creator] Dr Rachel Swain and I always loved and admired her for taking that risk with me,” he says. “I am really proud that as I grew up and became more experienced and more skilled, the show grew up with me.
“But I do think back and go ‘Wow, there are scenes that I wrote before I had really done anything in my career’, and now my books and my reputation as an author is well-known enough to sell a ticket. But I really want people to know that I wrote this without the brand, just from the love of the story and the art.”
The story – and its themes – are close to Ahmad’s heart, and he hopes it will ignite important conversations about our nation’s history while demonstrating our potential when coming together.
“When I started writing it, I was looking at the past – at 1788, at the Lambing Flat riot, and at 9/11, but it’s interesting that it has repeated itself since we made the show,” he explains, evidencing the massacre of in 2019, the surge in in the wake of COVID-19 and , which raised conversations about the ongoing mistreatment of Indigenous people in Australia, particularly .
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the demon of xenophobia re-emerged in the process of writing this show and that these linked histories of xenophobia – Arab, Asian and Indigenous – keep recycling themselves. The story is about burying the curse, trying to put away this repeated cycle of xenophobia. My mission is to bring Australians – Blak, Brown and White – together, to show a picture of who we are, but also who we can be.”
Making the play a reality was also about coming together, and Ahmad collaborated with a team of writers and creators who hailed from the communities who are represented. In addition to receiving mentoring and editing support from Tony Ayres, Ahmad worked alongside co-writers Samantha Hogg, a Wiradjuri writer from Bankstown who oversaw all the First Nations content, as well as Sweatshop writer and Deborah Cass prize winner , who Ahmad says was important for Wei’s character in particular – a strong ‘warrior’ whose mission it is to bury the curse unearthed from her ancestors during the Gold Rush.
‘The Demon’, playing at the Sydney Opera House from 13 to 15 October. Source: Supplied
“I feel like there is a lot of conversation about how we can write these multiracial works in a way that is ethical,” he explains. “That old model of consultancy is very outdated, and I also think that it’s a white colonial model, where you get your Asian consultant or your Aboriginal consultant, but the writer is a white man. I think that’s a lesson for everyone working in TV and theatre now: the entire team has to be representative. ‘Nothing about us, without us’ is the saying.”
He’s also excited to be at the helm of something that pushes Western Sydney storytelling in new and bolder directions, with a show that combines “that gritty social realism that Australians have come to love from Western Sydney” with magic realism, resulting in a stunt-filled theatrical work brimming with Eastern mysticism.
And of course, there’s the thrill of being able to tell his “crazy wog family” to see his play at such an iconic venue, especially because of the effort and advocacy it took to have the Lebanese flag on the Opera House in the wake of the 2020 Beirut port explosion.
“It’s a symbol of the Lebanese community being recognised [as] valuable,” he says. “Our flag on the outside and our stories on the inside. It’s our country, and we have made it our space.”
runs at the Sydney Opera House from 13 to 15 October.
