Michael Mohammed Ahmed’s television debut as a young Lebanese Muslim man saw him portraying a drug dealer on cop drama East West 101.
After watching himself on TV, the words of his cousin lingered on his mind.
He said, “That was hectic, bro. You were the lowest piece of shit I've ever seen on television…” And something really clicked, I realised that I can't be the prop in this stuff. I can't be the body for a group of white writers to project what they have to say about us.Michael Mohammed Ahmad
In this episode of Seen, Yumi Stynes chats to award-winning novelist and playwright Michael Mohammed Ahmad about being vilified, reshaping his narrative, and changing the story for emerging writers of colour from Western Sydney.
Hosted by Yumi Stynes, Seen is a podcast series about cultural creatives rising to excellence despite arriving in a role-model vacuum. Over the series you'll hear from trailblazers like disability advocate Hannah Diviney, artist Atong Atem, Olympian Ellia Green and more about the transformative moment when they felt seen.
Host: Yumi Stynes
Created by: Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn
Executive Producer: Kate Montague
Producers: Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn and Cassandra Steeth
Junior Producer: Alison Zhuang
Sound design and mix: Ravi Gupta
Theme music: Yeo
Art: Evi-O Studios
SBS podcast team: Caroline Gates, Max Gosford, Joel Supple
Special thanks to Khalil Ahmad
Transcript
(Theme music building)
Michael Mohammed Ahmad: The darkest and most upsetting experiences in my life have not been those incidents of sexual abuse or violence or exposure to drugs. The most upsetting experiences in my life have been the way in which I've been stereotyped and demonised, right up until right now.
Stynes: Imagine what it’s like to be considered devilish, inherently evil - not because of your actions, your work, nor your words - but because of the way you look. Like, could you actually imagine it?
Speaking is Michael Mohammed Ahmad, a Muslim Arab author from Western Sydney who was a boy in high school when the infamous crimes of gang rapists, the Skaf brothers brought anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment in Australia to feverish heights.
Ahmad: Three of the young men who were implicated in those crimes were from my high school from Punchbowl Boys. This was a school in the western suburbs of Sydney that was surrounded by barbed wires and cameras. It was regularly appearing in the media. I would come home from school and see my friends literally on the news, shaking the fences of the school and saying, “we’re in a jail cuz.”
Stynes: I’m Yumi Stynes and this is Seen, a podcast about trailblazers who, unseen by the mainstream, rise to excellence anyway.
We start by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we record, whose cultures includes a rich tradition of storytelling and history-keeping, the Cammeraygal and Gadigal people, and their Elders past and present.
(Music fade out)
This episode features some explicit language, and references to violence and rape. Please listen with discretion.
(Sound design: beach waves, kids playing, seagulls)
Ahmad: One time I met a girl at the beach. We exchanged numbers. We became friends. We'd been talking for a couple of weeks. One day, randomly, her sister called me and said, “What do you want with my sister?” I said, “We're just friends.” And she said to me, “You fucking Arabs, all you want to do is rape.” And hung up. That girl never talked to me again.
That kind of narrative that Arab and Muslim men were sexual predators was very effectively propelled by a shameless media and political agenda. I still to this day have to confront a community and a culture that assumes the worst of me. That assumes that I have sexually predatory agenda.
(Music)
Stynes: Today I’m talking to Michael Mohammed Ahmad, a doctor of Creative Writing and one of the first authors to unblinkingly own the term “Leb,” to capture the experience of muslim and middle eastern people in Australia. He’s a community leader and a creative mentor and has won a series of important literary prizes for his books The Tribe, The Lebs and The Other Half of You.
But as a school boy, the only representations he saw that looked like him were terrorists, gang rapists and drug dealers.
(Music fade out)
Stynes: Dr. Michael Mohammad Ahmad, tell me why you have two first names?
Ahmad: I was born in Sydney's inner west to a first generation Lebanese migrant family, and their natural instinct was to assume that the name Mohammed translates to Michael. They were doing this as a strategy, a defence mechanism. They were in a predominantly Anglo-Celtic community, and they were giving their children these anglicised names so that they can avoid racism.
(Music)
Ahmad: By the time I was ten years old, we had what I like to call our second migration from Sydney's inner west to the western suburbs of Sydney. We moved to a suburb called Lakemba, which had so many Lebanese people there that we affectionately called the neighbourhood Leb-kemba and the reverse happened.
(Sound design: school bell, school crowds)
Ahmad: I remember going to school and the teachers reading out my name, Michael Ahmad on the roll and all the Arab and Muslim kids being like, “Why is your name Michael? Isn't it Mohammed? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself to be so self-hating?” And so I flipped it back to Mohammed.
(Music, sound design fade out)
Ahmad: As I got older, I began to use both name strategically. I always had to assess when it was safe to be Mohammed and when it was safe to be Michael. When you're out in some of these country towns in Australia and you're even just ordering a cup of tea and they say, “What's your name?” You kind of look around and say, Is it safe to say Mohammed? And so at a certain point in my life, I decided to identify with both names because like a lot of Australians, clearly I have an identity crisis.
(Music)
Stynes: Mohammed’s grandparents and father fled Lebanon during the Arab-Israeli War and arrived in Australia in the late 60s, early 70s. During that period, and in the 9 years after the war, the Lebanon-born community in Australia increased by 212%
Mohammed was a part of the first-generation of Lebanese-Australians who called themselves ‘Lebs’.
Ahmad: What's so interesting about the idea of Leb is that it's not shorthand for Lebanese, but the manifestation of this kind of brand new identity that emerges after 9/11 in the western suburbs of Sydney, that even young men and women who aren't from a Lebanese background were identifying with.
I had peers who were Iraqi, Jordanian, Palestinian, Syrian, even Malaysian and Indonesian, who were all identifying as Leb and were being identified as Leb due to a series of characteristics. A way of walking, a way of talking, a way of dressing and a Middle Eastern appearance.
And that term, Leb, became a uniquely Australian identity and a representation of a subculture that had emerged in response to negative media attention. And of course one of my books is literally called The Lebs, and it's about that identity.
Stynes: Mohammed grew up watching the mainstream media reporting on the Skaf Gang Rapes, 9/11 and the Cronulla Riots. Reports which highlighted and attached blame to the perpetrator's racial and cultural identities.
Ahmad: There was a folk devil narrative about Arab and Muslim men, drug dealer, sexual predator, terrorist suspect that had been going back and forth. It's assumed that if you're under scrutiny, you'll just behave to get rid of the scrutiny. But there's a lot of evidence now that shows that especially young men, marginalised young men, will play the stereotype. They will actively perform the thing that the dominant white culture is afraid of because it can be empowering for them to scare white people, that's a quote from Bell Hooks.
In 1998, on November 3rd, there was a front page article in the Daily Telegraph of these young Arab Australian Muslim boys that were called the Lebanese gang, flashing gang signs and saying that they could get a gun easier than buying a pizza. The headline was “Dial a Gun.”
Further investigation showed that those boys had completely made up that story. Now, of course, why would an organised criminal gang who could get guns and were involved in drugs reveal themselves to the mainstream? Why would they actually admit that they were a group of gangsters? What those boys worked out is that it's actually empowering to play that gangster. And if you talk to them and I talk to a lot of those boys, they’ll tell you that’s the easiest way to get girls.
Stynes: Oh (laughter)
Ahmad: Yeah, because they get to be the bad boys.
Stynes: It must have been such a head trip to be at high school when the Skaf gang rape case was all over the papers. I found it traumatising to read about it. I felt sick every time there was a news story about it. And there were many from the assaults to the trials to the sentencing and even later when their appeals were being heard. But I can't imagine what it was like for you.
Ahmad: Australia has a very long history of sexually predatory behaviour from men. If we look at incidents in the western suburbs of Sydney, one of the most heinous crimes that had ever been committed in the western suburbs, the same suburbs that these boys were from was the rape, torture and murder of Anita Cobby perpetrated at the hands of white men.
Now, the problem is that when it comes to men of colour and First Nations men, we often attribute the blame to their race and their culture and their religion. The news reports at the time were saying this is a problem imported from the Middle East, even though these are all Australian born young men.
Stynes: Like a lot of the people on this podcast, Micheal Mohammed Ahmad had things to say. Even at 19 years old, he wanted to be seen. He wanted to become visible.
Ahmad: Before I wanted to be a writer, I actually wanted to be an actor. I had aspirations of being a Hollywood movie star. I even remember rehearsing my Oscars speech. (Laugh) I remember going for auditions, and the only call-backs I would get, the only opportunities I would be offered would be to play Lebanese drug dealers.
Stynes: That was literally it?
Ahmad: Literally. At a certain point I had all but given up and then I had been cast in the new show East-West 101.
(Sound design: police siren, music)
Stynes: EastWest101 was a cop drama starring mixed-Iraqi-Hungarian Australian heart throb Don Hany and it was a hit when released in 2007. Considered pretty progressive at the time, rewatching it now, I actually find it a little excruciating…
Ahmad: This is an old problem that we have when film writers and TV writers want to create a balanced portrayal. They'll say, “Well, we got a lead Arab cop. So it's okay to have 600 drug dealers.”
Stynes: And in case it’s not clear, if the only Asian woman I see on screen is a downtrodden underage sex worker - I hope it makes sense to you that that doesn’t equal representation. That puts shame on my Asianness. It’s demeaning.
Not to throw shade on sex workers at all - but if, among the hundreds or thousands of faces we see in the media, we see one person on screen who looks like us, and that one person is humiliated and victimised? Then I feel humiliated and victimised.
Australian television at the time of Michael Mohammed’s casting was rewarding Chris Lilley for performing blackface as ‘Jonah from Tonga’. There were Asians everywhere, everywhere in real life but none in entertainment, and if you saw an Arab onscreen, they had on a suicide vest - or something equally awful.
Ahmad: I was cast in the third episode of season one. And in that episode, I play a character named Vinny Mahmoud. I'm caught with this bag of drugs and I'm pushed to make a deal with the cops. That they would not imprison me if I spy on my gang. And so I go to my gang in the next scene wearing a wire, the gang catches me and then there's a scene where my foot gets blown off.
I was told by the director that I should consider myself fortunate to have the funniest line in the whole series. Which was “My foot! My foot!” Then what happens is, I'm dragged by the gang, thrown into the back of the sports car where the big henchmen. If you want to talk about the negative representation of Arab and muslims, the representation of Pacificas was even worse. The Islanders were all represented as the beefcake.
Stynes: The muscle.
Ahmad: Muscle henchmen. So in this scene, I get dragged, thrown into the back of this sports car that's driven by a Pacifica henchman, the muscle. And then he drives me around the corner and throws me onto the street curb.
(Sound design: car door close, car drives off)
Ahmad: And the character of Vinny was so insignificant the last you see of him is out on the street curb with his foot blown off. I’m a young man and this is a time when any representation feels like good representation. I call my entire family. I said, “I'm going to be on TV.” And when I say my entire family, you have to understand we're Arabs. So, you know, my aunties and uncles and my cousins and my five siblings and my mom and dad, you know, it's a big spectacle.
We're sitting around the living room watching that episode. But I will never, ever forget what happens next. The episode ends. Everyone comes over and congratulates me and says, Well done. And then my cousin comes up to me. And he says, “That was hectic, bro. You were the lowest piece of shit I've ever seen on television.” And something really clicked.
I realised that I can't be the prop in this stuff. You know I can't be the body for a group of white writers to project what they have to say about us. I needed to be in control of the story. And it was the moment that I shifted gears I moved away from wanting to be an actor and working in the field of acting and into the field of creative writing. And since then through my work at Sweatshop and through my own books, I've been creating the narratives that are spoken about us. And that's the way it should be.
(Music)
Stynes: It was a turning point in Mohammed’s life. He decided that he wasn’t going to embody the villain for a measly actor’s cheque. If the only way he could participate in Australian culture was by enforcing demeaning stereotypes - he’d change the culture.
(Music fade out)
Stynes: It felt like when you were starting out, you were very much alone, looking for other positive or at least nuanced representations of Muslim men. Are you alone? Did you ever see somebody ahead of you and think that's who I want to be?
Ahmad: When I was younger I saw my identity as a muslim, more important than my identity as an Arab. And I really defined myself through my religion and my cultural religious upbringing. As I've gotten older, I've become far more in tune with the significance of my Arabness.
Because I've come to understand that Islam for me and for every other Muslim in the world is a choice. You choose to follow the religion of Islam, or at least you should be choosing to follow it. You shouldn't be doing it out of a sense of obligation. In fact, the Quran says “there are no compulsions in Islam.” But what I've learnt in recent years and what I've come to understand is that you don't choose to be an Arab. That is hardwired into my ancestry, into my DNA, into my family structure.
You know I remember when I was doing my PhD., I was quoting Ghassan Hage's work quite a lot, and one of my white supervisors put a little comment in his mark up of my thesis in the draft of my thesis. He said, “I don't know why you keep quoting Ghassan Hage, there are all these other white men that have produced great scholarship in this area. And then he said, “but I suppose they're not the kind of Arab intellectuals you aspire to be.” And I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, nah, they're not the intellectuals I aspire to be because they're not Arabs.’
Stynes: I mean, how dare an Arab intellectual aspire to be like another Arab intellectual right?
To this: Mohammed talks about “mirroring.” Which is a pretty core idea of this podcast.
In 2009 a photo went viral - of president Barack Obama, in a formal suit, in the Oval Office, bending down to let a young black boy, who’s also in formal wear, touch his hair.
Ahmad: Later it was revealed that the way that photo came to be is that boy was invited to ask the new president any question he wanted. And he asked the president, “Is your hair like mine?” And Obama bent over to let him have a feel and decide for himself.
And this is what we mean by mirroring: the symbolic significance of seeing people like yourself in positions of authority and power, and how that inspires and empowers you to feel like you can achieve a certain level of accomplishment.
And I would like to think that the work, not just that I'm doing, but the work that all the amazing writers that Sweatshop are doing and all the amazing First Nation writers and writers of colour are doing at the moment is about mirroring. It's about giving our hope to the next generation.
Stynes: Has anyone told you that they felt seen by your work?
Ahmad: Yes. And it always makes me blush and cringe. What's so interesting is that quite often people will tell you your book is the first book they've read. That's quite a common experience for minorities.
There's this myth that marginalised people, people who are low income people from low income backgrounds and culturally and linguistically diverse people are not interested in reading. That's a myth. The reality is, they are not given the opportunity to read anything that would make them want to read. That speaks to who they are and reflects and represents who they are. And the minute you give a community access to a work that speaks to them, they will read it easily. Which is why so many young people of colour and First Nations people in Australia will tell you that the first book they read from cover to cover was a book written by somebody from their own community because it was the first time that they were reading something that they could relate to and that seemed to be speaking to how they felt inside.
Stynes: Mohammed is the founder of The Sweatshop Western Sydney Literacy Movement. Inspired by the writing of social activist and author bell hooks, the movement was created to help empower culturally and linguistically diverse communities through reading, writing and critical thinking.
It has mentored and collaborated with writers for ten years now. Proudly supporting the early careers of now award-winning writers like Evelyn Aurelyn, Amani Haydar, Jazz Money, Sara Saleh, and many more.
Even though the work Sweatshop does is highly regarded and even life-changing for some of these young writers, the folk-devil narrative still follows Michael Mohammed.
Ahmad: There are still people in the community who have stereotyped our organisation as a cult, as some kind of ISIS cult that's preying on kids and converting kids. This kind of white supremacist racist narrative. That feeling, being called those things when I'm trying to do good work in my community has been more hurtful than anything else I've experienced in my life. And the reason that's been so hurtful is because it's literally dehumanising. It literally takes away your humanity and turns you into a monster.
Stynes: So what keeps you going?
Ahmad: What keeps me going is when I get to meet intelligent, young, critically conscious people of colour and First Nations people who are passionate about writing and reading and who will come to my organisation. Sweatshop Western Sydney Literacy Movement, and say “I want to write.”
And we work with them, we train them, we employ them, we connect them to the industry, we publish them. And over a period of ten years of collaboration, we see them develop their literacy and their critical thinking skills, and they end up with a book deal and a couple of grants and a couple of literary awards. And they've not only empowered themselves, but they've empowered their communities, they've empowered their families, and they've empowered a whole generation of kids who identify with their story and who now feel represented.
(Music)
Stynes: Okay, so here’s where it gets personal… Have you heard the expression “model minority”?
It’s a way to describe an ethnic person who does everything right. Like an Anh Do type guy. They’re a model citizen. They don’t just pay taxes - they volunteer. At school they get immaculate marks. They’re moral and ethical, they’re humble, they’re kind.
There’s a feeling in this country that to be accepted as Australian, you can be non-white but you have to act culturally white and be a model minority. And if you challenge that idea, or appear ungrateful, not meek enough, you can pay with your career.
And you know what, in some ways, every episode of this podcast is going to unpack the experience of either embodying or resisting being the Model Minority.
Ahmad: There's this assumption that the reason minorities in white settler colonial societies get in trouble is because they don't behave. But there's a lot of evidence that shows that even when we play the model minority, we are still demonised and dehumanised. And so this idea that we can somehow appease white racists is a fantasy. And I got to a certain point in my life where I realised that it's actually not my job to reassure racists that I don't mean them any harm. I think of that as like a sheep reassuring a wolf that you mean no harm.
Stynes: From growing up with the deeply dehumanising stereotypes of gang rapists and terrorists, Mohammed took control of the narrative. But while creatives feel pressure to be the “model minority”, Mohammed took risks. His characters are complex. They’re real. They’re often awful.
Ahmad: I have always been a in a kind of contradictory experience with my family and particularly with the men, because I recognise their behaviour and I've been very critical of it and I've been very critical of myself because I recognise that there was certain learnt behaviour that has taken me years and years to unlearn.
And at the same time I am sympathetic to their situation. Because not only do they have to deal with poverty, not only do they have to deal with low literacy. They also have to deal with a culture and a society that generally demonises them in a way that other communities are left off the hook, specifically white communities. I'll give you a really good example of what I mean. People will remember the cartoonist Bill Leak, who passed away not so long ago, but just before he passed away. As a matter of fact, he was under a lot of heat. There was a lot of controversy around the cartoon that he'd created of an indigenous father not recognising his own son.
The subtext is that these indigenous men don't love their sons. They don't recognise them. They don't care about them. People forget that. Actually, Bill Leak had drawn almost identical cartoons about Arab and Muslim men, a cartoon that I'm specifically referring to where there is an Arab father dressed in like a Palestinian military outfit, throwing his child into a war zone and saying, “go and win daddy’s propaganda war for him.” And of course, this ties into that Orientalist narrative that the reason the Palestinians are suffering is because their parents are using their children as human shields. There is this idea that we don't love our children. And so these kinds of narratives have been created in Australia, these these narratives about indigenous fathers and about Arab and Muslim fathers. And the subtext in every one of those cases is that we don't love our children as much as white men do.
In my work, I construct the Arab fathers in not necessarily a positive light. Most of the time I'm very critical of so much of the toxic patriarchal behaviour that goes on in these communities. The problem is that it's often assumed that it's a cultural and religious problem when in reality it's much more a class problem and it's a problem of education. There's a lot of research that defends this claim that if you are dealing with a middle class, educated Arab Muslim man who's been to university, and done an arts degree, his views will be as progressive regardless of what generation of Australian these his views will be as progressive on issues like same sex marriage as any, white Australian man.
And then if you've got the same kind of man culturally and religiously, but they are uneducated, they didn't have access to school and they grew up in a very low income home where the people around them were not educated. They're very likely to have very conservative and oppressive views on certain issues. So as I've gotten older, I've become very sympathetic towards those men. And in fact, the work that I've been doing is about breaking the cycle.
Stynes: And can I point out that when a white man is toxic or commits violence, his cultural and religious background is not scrutinised - not even faintly. It’s understood that it’s a class problem and it’s a problem of education. The media interprets the influences upon a toxic, patriarchal white man with way more nuance and reality than it does for a man of colour. Maybe that’s because unlike skin colour or country-of-birth, cycles of poverty and poor education can actually be changed.
(Music)
Stynes: Mohammed has seen a breaking of these cycles within his own family.
Ahmad: My dad was illiterate until the age of 40.
Stynes: 40?
Ahmad: His backstory is that he was born in Lebanon. My grandfather came first in 1969, and then the rest of the family came in 1971. My dad came at the age of about eight or nine. He had 11 siblings. Three of them already had passed away in Lebanon from measles. So there was eight kids, my grandma and my grandfather.
(Music fades out)
Ahmad: My grandfather died the same year that the family comes. So my grandmother has these eight kids. They all leave school. The girls get married and have kids very young and the men go into the workforce.
So my dad never had the opportunity to develop an education, either in Arabic or in English. When he was 40, he began to make some nice connections and some friends at Lakemba mosque and the teachers at the mosque, the Arabic teachers, they would sit with him a couple of hours a day and they would teach him to read Arabic and specifically to read and recite the Quran.
And now he's a Qari, which is the word we have for a reciter, somebody who goes to the mosque and reads Quran for funerals and reads Quran during Ramadan. The one thing about the Arab men in my life that I've seen time and time again is their capacity to change, to learn and to grow and to better themselves and to become more positive figures in their families. And that's all we can hope for from the men in our community.
Stynes: That's beautiful. And now it comes full circle because he's coming over to your house to teach your son Kahlil.
Ahmad: It especially comes full circle because my dad was very, very critical of me marrying a white girl and having a child with a white girl. And it has been very uplifting, not just for me, but for the broader family and for the broader community to see that journey that my father has taken from such a hard time that I had with him and he had with me when I was younger. And the very difficult fights we had with each other to the point we are at now, where now my dad comes to our house and he teaches my son to read and write in Arabic, memorise and learn prayers from the Quran.
Stynes: What has made you feel seen and you feel visible, Mohammed?
Ahmad: In terms of being seen reflected, mirrored. If I had that, I probably wouldn't have had to write the books I've written. But to have felt like somebody was articulating my pain, clearly to me and giving me a vision of what I needed to become. I've had that moment.
Edward Said was one of the first scholars to comprehensively demonstrate that Europe and the United States had a very long and very toxic history of constructing the Orient, constructing Asia and the Middle East in a particular way that constructed us as barbaric, savage, primitive. And that this was a very effective strategy in justifying conflicts and invasions in these parts of the world.
Edward Said was the first person to open that up and I felt seen. Not because I was seeing myself mirrored or represented, but because I was being told directly through the work. This is the portrayal that has been created about you your whole life. I have exposed it for the nonsense and rubbish that it is. Now you have the power to go and create an alternative narrative.
Stynes: Mohammed You're the only Muslim Australian writer to be shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Not once but twice, most recently for The Other Half of You. Congratulations and also congratulations on winning the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction late last year. That puts you in some pretty white spaces, those literary circles of, you know, accolades and I guess kind of entering the establishment. What's the experience like for you?
Ahmad: I do think that something exciting about what it means to have a totally different type of person getting up and experiencing these awards for the first time. And look, prize money is nice. Saying you've got an award for your CV, a nice sticker on your book. Those things are really nice but more importantly than that, is what it says about where Australia is psychologically when it comes to talking about literature.
(Music)
Stynes: Literature is about storytelling. And for readers like us, it’s that storytelling that creates empathy for experiences well beyond our own. So what’s the opposite of empathy? Is it demonisation?
Michael has a painfully real understanding that a lack of empathy, which in this case can translate to Islamophobia - has endangered his community.
Ahmad: In 2019, an Australian born white supremacist entered two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand and slaughtered 51 Muslims peacefully conducting their Friday prayers. That was one of the darkest days in my life as it was for many, many Muslims across Australia and New Zealand.
(Music fade out)
Ahmad: The realisation that this history of Islamophobia had finally culminated in an Australian born citizen going to that most extreme place. For our community, we felt like we'd failed after years of trying to prevent a tragedy like this taking place.
I have to believe that a young person like this growing up in Australia, anywhere in Australia, if they had been exposed to Arab and Muslim literature at a young age. If he, the person who committed a hedious crime, if he was at a school from a young age where he was reading stories like the other half of you reading stories like Muddy People by Sara al-Sayed, reading stories like Losing Face by George Hadad and seeing the complexity and the humanity of our community. I have to believe that we might have had a chance in preventing that tragedy.
I do believe that. That great writing has the capacity to change, to change people and to change societies. And throughout history, we've seen that change has often been led with literature. Which is why literature scares people, which is why books get banned and why it evokes fatwas and why, you know, we see things like book banning because we know that it has the power to change.
(Theme music building)
Ahmad: That's the more important part for me. It's not the award itself, but it's that. I hope that it means that our work will end up in more hands and create a more promising future for our nation.
Stynes: Art, laughter, literature, lovingly created by a wide spectrum of creatives - people who look like what our communities look like. Weird and diverse and full of glorious difference. All of whom deserve to be seen.
This has been Seen. Hosted by me, Yumi Stynes, created by Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn with Audiocraft, in collaboration with SBS.
From Audiocraft this show was produced by Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn and Cassandra Steeth, our Junior Producer is Alison Zhuang. Sound design and mix is done by Ravi Gupta, and the executive producer Kate Montague.
The SBS team are Caroline Gates, Joel Supple, and Max Gosford.
Our podcast artwork is created by Evi O Studios and music is by Yeo.
(Theme music fade out, music sting)
Ahmad: So, Kahlil, what do you think of my books?
Kahlil: I love them very, very much.
Ahmad: And out of the three novels that I've written, which is your favourite one?
Kahlil: I love the other half of poo!
(Music sting)
