Waitaha reviews: National Anthem

National Anthem by Mohamed Hassan

Published by Dead Bird Books

I’ve seen Mohamed Hassan read in public, and it is a thing to behold. In fact, we share a publisher and he read at the Auckland launch of my collection of short stories. It left me in a difficult place- how could I ever compete with that?

I definitely couldn’t compete, and when I read Hassan’s book, I am humbled again at the way he can pack meaning, emotion and grace into each of his poems. This is a beautiful collection that questions and interrogates what it means to belong, what it means to be a person of colour in a world set up by those who aren’t, what it means to long for, to miss, to love. 

This is Hassan’s second collection of poetry and it is remarkable in its clarity. These are the poems I would give to students who ask why, who challenge, or who feel othered for whatever reason. These are the poems that reject the easy reduction of an author to a single identity and while it is so easy to imagine teaching these poems to show a Muslim point of view in New Zealand, they are so much more than that. They are battlecries, mic drop of challenges to the status quo, and urgently necessary. The more I read them the more I think that maybe it isn’t only our students who need these, but rather us.

Hassan’s wicked sense of humor comes through in poems such as ‘Customs: a love story’, a poem about the racial profiling that Hassan faces in airports as though it is a romantic comedy. 

To look at the way language, media and speechmaking shapes our collective responses, ‘White supremacy is the song we all know the words to but never sing out loud’ is invaluable, a deliberate flaying the public words around the 2019 terrorist attack on the mosques in Christchurch. To build understanding of colonialism and the lens that it creates that can become all consuming, you should just read the whole thing. 

Just read the whole thing. 

Reviewed by Laura.