5 Questions with Joshua Mostafa
Joshua Mostafa is a writer living in Bulanaming/Marrickville.
His work explores possibilities of form across poetry, drama and prose fiction.
He recently graduated from the Writing and Society Centre, Western Sydney University, where his research explored the poetics of oral storyworlds.
No.1
Your verse drama, Angauwa, is set in the third millennium BCE, and reimagines stories from ancient Greek and Indian epics as a power struggle and culture clash between horse-riding warriors and villagers on the Danubian Plain. We rarely see art set in the prehistory period nowadays. How was Angauwa conceptualised, and why did you choose to focus on this time period in particular?
In 2001, I spent some time in the American Midwest. Coming from the UK, where I had grown up between multicultural English cities and the mountains of North Wales, this environment felt strange: new, artificial, homogeneous and flat. Streets on a grid. Undifferentiated fields of corn. Barely any buildings older than a century. It was alienating, Umheimlich. Of course there are much older Indigenous cultures associated with the area, but they have been pushed to the peripheries by settler-colonialism. The newness of the place made it feel fabricated—an ersatz environment, a Sim City.
As a reaction, I went to the nearest university library and checked out books on history, archaeology, the ancient past—the older the better. I became fascinated by comparative linguistics, and the hypothesised protolanguage ‘Proto-Indo-European’. I have an Anglo-Irish Australian mother, and a Bengali-Indian British father; the notion that the languages on both sides of my family sprang from a common source, if you went back far enough, was a compelling discovery. I thought I would write a novel set in the deep past, but I was a young father and didn’t have time. Years later I came back to the idea, and ended up writing a play instead.
No.2
What does the word ‘Angauwa’ mean, or is meant to represent?
‘Angauwa’ is the name of the play’s central character. At the time of the play’s setting, the first fully-functional writing system was only just emerging in Sumeria. Writing would not arrive in south-eastern Europe until over a thousand years later. So we don’t have records of the language spoken at that time.
We can make educated guesses, though. Based on the later emergence of languages, archaeologists and linguists have inferred that it was likely that a language ancestral to Greek, Armenian, Persian and languages of northern India—a late Proto-Indo-European dialect—would have been spoken by at least some of the population. I formed the name ‘Angauwa’ by joining the Proto-Indo-European root form gau-, meaning ‘joy’, with an-, meaning ‘not’. So ‘Angauwa’ means ‘unhappy’. As to what this applies to the character, or to the play—I’ll leave that open for readers or audiences to decide.
No.3
In 2019, you won the (sadly now-defunct) Viva La Novella prize, which resulted in the publication of your novella, Offshore, published by the also now-defunct indie press Brio Books. This book is set in the future, and features rival paramilitary groups fighting as Sydney descends into chaos. Do you see these works as connected?
Only vaguely. I suppose they both arise out of alienation from the cultural shallowness of settler-colonial society. But formally, thematically, in tone and in voice, they have ended up at completely different places.
No.4
How did it feel to develop a show like this while a very real political crisis of polarity was itself developing outside the theatre walls? Is there a specific point of view you’d like to show, or is it more open to interpretation?
I don’t intend it as an allegory. I’ve tried to make the storyworld cohere and operate according to its own internal social and cultural logic. Angauwa is the result of a long process of notes, sketches, research and writing spanning over two decades marred by many crises: the war on terror, the global financial crisis, the pandemic, civil wars and wars of aggression, genocide, and the reactionary convulsions of nationalism currently consuming the decadent and dysfunctional west. Of course, things can seep into the work unconsciously. But I believe that if you’re going to take the past seriously as a setting for fictional work, you have to try your best to bracket out the present and let the story play out in its own terms.
I suppose the only intentional way that any of these trends has affected my work is that I’m contesting the meaning of the deep past. Indo-European studies have always interested fascists and reactionaries—thus the perversion of the term ‘Aryan’ and the misappropriation of the svastika, an ancient Indian symbol, by the Nazis. There’s a contemporary right-wing subcultural obsession with the Bronze Age as a kind of romantic utopia of untamed masculine virtue. But the deep past is not reducible to such shallow propaganda—or indeed, to any allegorical or didactic reading. The deep past can be interpreted in many ways. I have tried to retain that ambivalence and polyphony in the story of Angauwa.
No.5
What was your production process like? What are some things that you learned perhaps on a more tactical level that might be helpful for less experienced creators and performers to understand if they’re wanting to develop a similar project?
My main piece of writing advice is to use the materials that make you feel most comfortable. For me, that’s a good quality pen and a sturdy notebook. I like to write my first drafts by hand. I’m less likely to be blocked that way—and if I do get blocked, I think through the problem by writing it out. In the process of typing them my first draft, I make changes as I go, forming the second draft.
The biggest epiphany I had in writing Angauwa was in changing how I dealt with cliché. At first, I found the fear of writing cliché debilitating. Then I read Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Gadamer talks about ‘prejudice’ not as a pejorative, but as the unavoidable, and useful, first step in building historical understanding. I applied this to my creative process. I wrote out all my naive ideas about the Bronze Age, and set about testing them by imagining how they would work psychologically and sociologically—then, as contradictions emerged, refining them. There’s no shame in having an obvious first thought. It’s where you take it next that matters.
Find Out More
Who are our ancestors, and how did they live? Join playwright and poet Joshua Mostafa for a premiere reading from his new stage play, Angauwa. His thrilling verse drama, set in the third millennium BCE, reimagines stories from ancient Greek and Indian epics as a power struggle and culture clash between horse-riding warriors and villagers on the Danubian Plain. This special performance by actors will be followed by a panel discussion, in which Mostafa will reflect on the hazards and unexpected joys of reanimating prehistoric storyworlds.
Angauwa premieres as part of Sydney Fringe on 12 Sept. Tickets and more info here.