Fiction This article is more than 3 years oldReviewWe Are All Birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan review – a powerful debut
This article is more than 3 years oldBelonging and exile are at the heart of this novel of dislocation and trauma
Early in Hafsa Zayyan’s debut, 26-year-old City lawyer Sameer sits sobbing at the door of his smart London flat. He has been walking in Leicester Square, weaving absently between street performers and tourists, when he realises his pockets have been emptied – his phone, wallet and keys are gone. First comes panic, then a bitter sense of betrayal. How could a city he knows so well suddenly turn on him, he thinks, as though he were a hapless visitor? It’s a minor moment in a sea of troubles, but one that becomes freighted with meaning in this multigenerational novel about belonging and exile. It becomes clear, too, that Sameer’s growing disenchantment is symptomatic of deeper feelings of dislocation.
In We Are All Birds of Uganda Zayyan tells two stories across different timeframes, moving between Sameer in contemporary London and his grandfather Hasan in 1970s Kampala. While Sameer wrestles with his demanding job and contemplates a move to Singapore that will devastate his Muslim parents, Hasan grieves for his dead wife and struggles with his business as Idi Amin seizes power in Uganda. For both of them, the future feels uncertain, and Zayyan uses their dual narratives to expose the fragility of different forms of belonging, national and familial. Citizenship is an unstable experience for Hasan. He knows it can be rescinded. But Sameer too is troubled by the problem of how to belong to a culture that might reject you. When a colleague excludes him from a party since “you lot don’t drink”, Sameer becomes painfully aware of differences unnoticed before.
Zayyan was one of the winners of the #Merky Books new writers’ prize in 2019 and We Are All Birds of Uganda is published by the #Merky imprint, launched by Penguin in a collaboration with grime artist Stormzy. The prize supports authors under the age of 30 so that they might tell “the stories that aren’t being heard”. For the first part of the novel, Zayyan seems to be writing about ambitious young people and how they find their feet. That’s not an unheard story, but what’s distinctive is the modern, multi-ethnic vision of masculinity she presents and the solidarity that emerges from it. Sameer and his friends, Rahool and Jeremiah, have grown up together in Leicester. Now in London, they meet on weekends and play Fifa Soccer. Jeremiah is an aspiring music producer, big on Instagram, while Rahool, an IT consultant, has tired of London and is heading back home.
At his high-powered law firm, Sameer feels sure there “is nothing about his skin colour that has set him back”. It’s a complacency that Zayyan observes in order to strip him of it. When a colleague drunkenly attributes his advancement to “quotas”, it reveals an ugliness that Sameer cannot unsee. But it’s telling that Zayyan has Jeremiah, who is black, put a name to the discomfort Sameer feels, calling it out as racism. It prompts a question in Sameer: “What has Jeremiah experienced that bypassed Sameer because of the randomness of their pigmentation; the randomness of who they were born to?”
The turning point in the novel is a violent, racially motivated attack. An unnerved Sameer responds by searching for deeper roots, returning to what was once the family home in Uganda. His father warns him: “You won’t find whatever it is you’re looking for there.” But it’s here that Sameer’s story connects with Hasan’s, and Zayyan is finally able to make the weaker subplot mean something. When Amin’s regime made life for Asians in Uganda impossible, Hasan left, entrusting the house to his black servant Abdullah. It’s Abdullah’s granddaughter Maryam that Sameer finds living there still. She confronts him angrily: “Are you here to take it back? Is that what you want? This house? The store?” The legacy of empire is the knowledge that homes are not permanent and claims to land can be overturned. Perhaps predictably, Maryam becomes Sameer’s guide. When she gives him a tour of the city, it feels like a clunky device, but Zayyan is determined we see Kampala: modern, cosmopolitan and yet still scored by racial tension.
Zayyan writes Sameer’s experience of Uganda as a travelogue, a romance, a journey of self-discovery that veers close to sentimentality. It’s muddled, but perhaps confusion is the condition of a post-colonial culture. The novel captures how exiled Asians and black Africans are entangled in Uganda’s history, caught between the British colonisers of its past and the Chinese developers that are its future. Amid all this, the romance that evolves between Sameer and Maryam reads like a miracle, something good that might yet be salvaged from trauma. But Zayyan won’t allow such easy relief: the anxieties that have simmered throughout the novel finally surface at its end, taking a sinister shape in the shadowy last lines. It’s a daringly indeterminate way to end, and undeniably powerful too.
We Are All Birds of Uganda is published by #Merky (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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