“You are a child of Maandeeq, the she-camel of prosperity, raised in the oral tradition on a diet of poetry, music and Grisly Tales for Somali kids, yet still shaped by this colony.”
This is an extract from BOHOLYOW, a zine by Parramatta-based writer, editor, and archivist Ilhan Abdi. Arriving in Australia as a refugee after the collapse of the Somali state, she came to know her culture primarily through its absence. She moved across Auburn before settling in Regents Park in 2007, where she attended Al-Faisal College. Rooted in the Somali oral tradition, her practice led her to create dhageeyso, an online archive celebrating Somalia’s musical heritage. When we speak, our conversation quickly abandons the usual hierarchy between interviewer and subject. Ilhan talks with a rare, agile speed, arriving at a new thought before the previous one has even settled. Curious about what drives that energy, I ask how her trajectory began.
“In 2019, I started [digital archive] dhageeyso in an effort to share in my excitement, discovery, and search for belonging in Somali music with my online friends and the wider Somali diaspora on Twitter and Instagram,” she says. “I longed to find my place in the Somali tradition, and I was determined. I would make my way back from the west coast of eternity and carve out a place for myself in the sandy beaches of Mogadishu.”
This is Ilhan’s picture of a deliberate internal exile. A physical return to the years when her findings exist is impossible; the journey is instead one of inward intimacy and personal satisfaction.
Dhageeyso, meaning to listen, archives 20th century Somali music and theatre. Ilhan physically gathers rare songs, recordings, and cultural fragments into a shared digital cloudspace.
“I was a child of the West, and I was desperate to see myself in something Somali,” she explains. “When I say ‘see myself’, I don’t mean representation for representation’s sake. I had plenty of that. I felt clumsy and awkward re-engaging with Somali culture on my own, without the authority of my parents, whom I viewed as the arbiters of Somaliness.”
Ilhan’s charming answers make it easy to imagine her on a summer night at iconic seaside hotels like Al-Uruba and Jazira, back in Mogadishu’s 1980s glory days, dressed in sequins, alive to the rhythm of Somali soul music. Especially because I, too, know how to enter a whole country through fabulation. Moving from Brazil to Australia as a child, then back to Brazil, and again to Australia as a teenager, I learned to treat cultural differences as invitations; I accepted some, refused others.
Ilhan agrees with my metaphor. Curious if other diaspora members were walking on a similar path, I asked about her experiences finding them. She points to her work with The Writing Zone at Western Sydney University. As editor of its anthology, Sky’s Conversations, now held in the National Library of Australia, she curated a space where local writers could engage their heritage without repeating familiar ‘foreign background’ scripts.
I ask if Ilhan has felt welcomed into the Australian literary scene. No, she says, describing what she encounters as not exclusion alone, but the terms through which inclusion is offered.
“What I struggle with in the Australian literary scene,” she says, “is seeing our writing skills valued as much as the trauma we narrate.” Dissident writers, Ilhan suggests, are too often asked to open up their trauma before their craft is even considered.
She describes a pressure to make cultural difference recognisable in ways that can flatten the very ambiguity that makes art possible. For Ilhan, there’s little room for the parts of an experience that cannot be translated into a story about who we are in Australian writing.
“Other individuals from Anglo-European ancestry don’t have to prove that they are racially or ethnically traumatised to be celebrated or given a chance to. Their idiosyncrasy doesn’t depend on that.” She calls it laziness: an insistence on the obvious: “Black, hijabi, Muslim.”
Beyond her critique of the Australian literary establishment’s demand for identity trauma lies my final question: what would her writing be like if she felt free from these constraints?
“For way too long, archiving and researching served as a shield to me. Perpetual preparation was my way to hide behind the comfortable defence of still learning,” Ilhan says. “I have been avoiding whatever strips that cover away, hesitant to share a thought without polishing away its rough edges until it is erudite enough.
“And writing about homeland, longing within the diaspora feels particularly precarious. It can easily rot into cliché. I am concerned not just about failing to translate my intentions for a commercial literary establishment, but about fully exposing my vulnerability to an indifferent room. I have to move through that. Right now, that is where my writing and I are heading.”
This article has been commissioned in partnership with Diversity Arts Australia’s Creative Pathways Parramatta project, supported by the City of Parramatta. Diversity Arts Australia receives core funding from Creative Australia and Create NSW.
