Lamisse Hamouda Talks About 'The Shape of Dust'
'I find being Australian a disorienting experience'
News & Reviews Magazine
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The piece you’re reading now is an interview with Lamisse Hamouda. Lamisse (she/her) is a youth worker, writer, poet, performer and workshop facilitator. Her first book The Shape of Dust was co-authored with her father, Hazem Hamouda, delving into the experience of being a dual-citizen imprisoned abroad. Lamisse is an experienced workshop facilitator, having run creative writing workshops with QUT’s Carumba Institute, Inala Wangarra, the Institute for Collaborative Race Research, Emerging Writer’s Festival and Queensland Writer’s Centre. Her day job is as a youth worker, where Lamisse specialises in trauma-informed care for Unaccompanied Humanitarian Minors in residential settings. A theatre performer and poet, Lamisse occasionally combines the two through spoken-word poetry; she has featured at Bankstown Poetry Slam and Enough Said! Poetry Slam in NSW.
The short introduction is from News & Reviews creator and editor, Bri Lee.
I felt torn about whether or not to set The Shape of Dust as required reading for our February trip to Egypt. It’s an important and shocking work of dual authorship, simultaneously documenting Hazem Hamouda’s wrongful imprisonment and his daughter Lamisse Hamouda’s fight to try to free him:
In 2018, on his way to a family holiday in Cairo, Australian-Egyptian citizen Hazem Hamouda disappears without warning, going missing somewhere between landing and customs.
His eldest daughter, Lamisse, has recently moved to Egypt armed with a scholarship to the American University of Cairo, and overnight her world is turned upside down. With little Arabic and even less legal knowledge, she finds out her father has been arbitrarily arrested. Going up against the notorious Egyptian prison system, Lamisse discovers that the Australian embassy provides shockingly little support to dual citizens arrested abroad.
Shouldering the responsibility of her father’s welfare, Lamisse learns to navigate both deeply flawed systems, and freeing Hazem involves a reckoning with the two countries she’s called home – coming to terms with the prejudice and racism of the country she grew up in and the corruption in the country she was hoping to reconnect with.
The book paints a grim picture of government control over citizens in Egypt; corruption is endemic in their brutal bureaucratic processes. The Shape of Dust doesn’t necessary encourage Australian readers to think our carceral state is ‘better’—Lamisse’s reflections on colonisation and systemic racism in Australia are woven throughout—but it’s difficult not to feel gratitude for the freedoms and comforts a lot of us have here in comparison. As Lamisse acknowledges in this interview:
I don’t want to be part of a colony but my participation in it has meant access to material safety, clean water, an abundance of food, quality education, a well-paying job, public green spaces, beaches and the freedom and dignity to imagine a future.
Ultimately, I did make everyone travelling with me read this book. Why? I suppose that although travel is a luxury, and that we do it for enjoyment, we don’t only travel for luxury and enjoyment. Especially when I travel, and when people travel with me, we also do it learn. We do it to broaden and deepen our understanding about different places around the world, and to practice careful and thoughtful noticing of the things in our cultures and countries that are shared versus what is unique. I shudder to think of how many tourists arrive in Egypt every year, take in the stories of ancient Egypt, and wilfully ignore the present reality of modern Egypt.
While we were together in Aswan, the group came up with a list of questions to send to Lamisse. These are her very generous answers.
Bri Lee: Did you consider changing the structure of the book once Hazem stopped writing? Or, could you talk a bit about the process of finding the right format to fit the story?
Lamisse Hamouda: When Dad stopped writing, I wondered if there would even be a book. But when he told me he stopped, he also said he still wants to be part of the project. The question was how? What’s authorship if one doesn’t write? How do I do support Dad’s participation in this project if he is now experiencing writing to be triggering and painful?
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