August 03, 2015
Every few years I take a
few months’ break from reading books on the contemporary political and social
issues of our days, and instead plunge into the exhilarating world of fiction
writing. The power of novels, short stories and other forms of writing is that
they allow a reader to transport him or herself into endless other worlds, time
periods, cultures, and human conditions. They allow individual readers to
discover—one story at a time—that their own fears, dilemmas, anger, pride, and
wonder are shared by millions of other people around the world, that we are not
alone in our struggles.
So last month I ventured
very far afield to read a tale of adolescent youth in ethnically mixed British
society, whose main characters are two teenage British-Pakistani girls
struggling with issues of identity, class, family, prejudice, religion, and
youth gangs, against a backdrop of politics, history and global wars. I read
the book to experience the ability of literature to transport me to an alien
world of British-Pakistani teenage girls—and to re-discover how good writing
lets us empathize with the sentiments and life struggles of the people who
inhabit those distant worlds.
I also read the book, You’re
Not Proper, by Tariq Mehmood (HopeRoad Publishing, London) because of a
fleeting comment to me by the author, a colleague and friend at the American
University of Beirut, when I asked him why he was writing about teenage girls
in urban England. He replied: “Each person has a story worthy of telling, and
the world wants to hear those stories.”
That struck a chord with
me, because I also teach non-fiction writing to university students and
journalists (even though some of my critics often claim that my own political
analysis veers into the world of fiction, but that’s part of the thrill of our
brazen craft), and I always tell my students that even a journalistic text
should transport the reader into a new time and place, with its own characters
and struggles.
So I started reading
about the two main teenage characters, Kiran and Shamsad, and their families
and friends in a northern England town with a significant Asian immigrant
population. The big issues in the girls’ lives include the usual teenage
things—friendship, acceptance, boyfriends, parental controls, status in the
schoolyard—but also issues distinct to that community and time, like religion
and its role in personal and public life, racism and anti-Muslim
discrimination, links with the home country in Pakistan, relations with white
English boys, and, “dark kids who realize they’re not white, and their struggle
to know how they fit into the society around them,” in Mehmood’s words.
When I asked him again
why these girls’ stories should interest readers around the world, he quickly
charted a global context of English language children and youth literature that
is overwhelmingly dominated by white Western writers and publishers—“the world
of imagination of young children is so utterly white, and has been colonized to
the point where non-white kids have lost both their past and their future.”
The actual story of Kiran
and Shamsad is an emotional and family mini-thriller of sorts, with mixed
white-dark families, complex and hushed pasts, captivating characters, personal
transformations, and half a dozen tragedies and joys. The actual story is only
half the tale of the book.
“By writing the stories
of these young girls, they suddenly become human,” Mehmood told me, as he
guided my discovery of the world of youth literature and British-South Asian
communities. “Each one of us has a story that deserves and needs to be told. If
it is not told, then someone else’s history becomes the story of our own lives.
Writing and reading such stories helps us recognize that each flower has its
own scent, and it transforms us. Reading the stories makes us ‘we’, otherwise
we are all only ‘i’. Reading other people’s stories also helps us grasp the
universal sense of hope. Young kids are not necessarily locked into prisons.
Their walls are imaginary, and they can break out of them. Kids should be proud
of their lived experiences, and they can change their world if they wish.”
As I journeyed through
the several worlds that Mehmood had experienced, and has captured and crafted
anew in this captivating story, I was also reading news and analyses of current
global encounters that also touched on political, cultural, religious and
racial dynamics, and important issues of dignity, respect, pride, and rights—such
as Iran, China, “Islamic State,” Ukraine, trans-Mediterranean migrants,
Baltimore, and many others.
I think my journey into
Kiran’s and Shamsad’s lives helps me understand these current events a bit more
profoundly and accurately. I suspect also that what I understand better through
the thrill of reading is, in fact, myself. We can’t ask for much more on a lazy
summer day.
Rami G. Khouri is
published twice weekly in the Daily
Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam
Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American
University of Beirut. On Twitter @ramikhouri.
Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri -- distributed by Agence Global