NUISANCE MANAGEMENT
Here’s the beginning of the joke: in 1932, Australia went to war with emus. Fucking emus, dude. Those absurdly huge birds that can get over six feet tall, and they can take bullets and keep running. Yeah. Those guys. You don’t get to declare war on emus, man, they declare war on you. And the Australians tried that shit anyway! I’m not even Australian and I could tell you all the nitty-gritty details of that war: it started when farmers went to the Ministry of War because the birds were eating up their wheat. The wheat was being planted by World War I veterans and the wheat prices were falling because of the Great Depression. The genius who came up with this plan to go to war was some guy called George Pearce. Dude, I know who George Pearce is and I don’t even know my grandmother’s name.
Yeah, the Australians lost, of course -- Wikipedia says “Outcome: Failure. See Aftermath”. That’s how bad it was. I know more about this “war” (Wikipedia puts it in quotations in the article, nice) than I know about my own family. There’s a YouTube video I watched a couple years ago, and then bam: there are the facts, now I know about that time emus defeated the Royal Australian Artillery, and I still don’t know who the hell I am: that’s the tragedy of diaspora and parents who want to move on and leave behind all of that, that’s why they moved, and now their children are stuck knowing that emus were compared to literal tanks and nothing about their own blood.
There’s no Wikipedia page about how my parents got from here to there. I’m pretty sure I could find a wholeass book written by some academic about the emu war. My people don’t get scholarly books for the public to see, we get headlines calling us shit like terrorists and extremists and Islamists, because that’s when it’s okay to look at us. And even then, those aren’t even my people, not really -- everyone thinks we all just look vaguely the same. My people -- I don’t know who they are, not really, not beyond the bond of God-fearing and hijab-wearing. Ah, but I digress. Let’s talk about absurd history. It’s easier; the emus are done and fought, stuck in 1932, while my history is ever-winding, growing in every direction and I can’t track it down, can’t open a Wikipedia page on it. So let’s start again.
Here’s the beginning of the joke: in 1932, Australia went to war with emus.
Jannah Yusuf Al-Jamil is a Muslim-American writer, a life-long searcher, and a co-founder of antinarrative (@antinarrativeZ). Find their work in Yuzu Press, IMPOSTOR, Pollux Journal, Overheard, and at jannahyusufaljamil.carrd.co.