What I Will No Longer Write About as a Brown Muslim Writer

In my bohemian circle here in Barcelona, we've started a French-style Writers' Salon, where artistes such as I read out our piece, and then we talk about it. Here's what I said tonight...

Me, tonight, doing the brown guy thing to a room full of white people

I’ve written something especially for tonight’s Salon, and it’s about the things I now refuse to write about. The irony of writing down what I refuse to write about, of course, only dawned on me as I began to write it down.

I’ve been pitching novels since I was 18, back when you’d write three chapters and send it straight to publishers. You could even call them up, and they’d tell you exactly why they hated it. It was… character-building.

The first book I pitched, called TRAVELLER, was about a group of young ravers who dropped acid and discovered a portal that led them to meeting their future selves.

“I love the idea,” began the publisher, encouragingly, before crushing my spirit with the “but”. “But I see your name is Muhammad.” (I’ve since gotten rid of that name by deed poll, mostly because I never really knew how to spell it… but that’s who I was back then.)

“Muhammad. Shihab. Salim.” And I’m thinking, great. Guy knows my name. And he says, “It would be interesting to add a race element to the story.”

“But it’s about ravers,” I wailed. “Who take drugs and meet their future selves. We can call one of them Abdul, if you like.”

He came up with all these suggestions about how Abdul could be facing discrimination and prejudice and, honestly, it would’ve added such a grim edge to the beatnik, gonzo book I had in mind – I was young, cocky, and I was having none of it. Pretty much told him to piss off.

See, at that time I was a clubber, heavily involved in theatre and arts, and with the people I hung out with in those circles, racism just wasn’t a thing. The topic just seemed so passe. I was in the creative, druggy world, full of all kinds of colourful characters. I figured Hendrix and Basquiat and Hanif Kureishi had sorted that shit out long before I came into the scene.

But, I did want to get published, and conventional wisdom had it that you should give publishers what they want, and besides, it’s not such a bad thing to make your identity work for you.

And so I started writing a book about an Indian restaurant waiter, who suffers racist abuse from his customers, then gets his revenge by tying them up and torturing them in his basement. I called it TIKKA MASSACRE.

As most of you know, when you send in a pitch, you have to list a few similar books to convince there’s a market for yours, so I cited Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. Only mine is Bangladeshi Psycho.

“I love the idea,” came the response. “But… I’m uncomfortable about the protagonist being the perpetrator. We don’t want to fuel the notion that Muslim men are a threat to society.”

I had a friend back then who was an intern at a literary agency, who said: “Look, this is a business. Give them what sells. See what kind of books are actually being published by British Asian authors.”

“Like Satanic Verses?” I asked, getting excited.

“No, definitely not that one.”

The books by British Asian authors that were getting published were invariably set over three generations, beginning with a grandmother in Pondicherry, listening to the hullabaloo of street urchins while she sat under a banyan tree wafting her juices, and ending with a woman in Stepney Green rollerblading in a sari with her black boyfriend.

And so, I started writing a book called Brit(ish), with the “ish” in brackets, all about arranged marriages and racist fathers of white girlfriends and laboured metaphors about monsoon, the scent of cardamom, cloves and fucking fenugreek, but after three chapters I lost my will to live, let alone write. I had to take a lot of drugs to get through it.

Then 7/7 happened, which is the UK equivalent of 9/11. “Write about terrorism!” They cried. And so I did. About a hapless Bangladeshi guy who gets embroiled in a terrorist plot to blow up Glastonbury. I called it IN CASE OF TOURIST ATTACK.

I got an agent! The publisher she approached loved the idea, but… “They’re a bit concerned it’s a comedy. Feelings are still raw, and under the current climate, they’re not sure whether terror attacks is a topic we can laugh about.”

I swear, like about a minute later, Four Lions by Chris Morris comes out, about a hapless Muslim who gets embroiled in a terrorist plot. It’s laugh-a-minute hilarious, right? So I pitched it again. One rejection letter actually said, “I feel Four Lions has already covered the comical terrorist thing… and better.”

Nine years ago, I moved to France to be a stay-at-home dad raising a baby in a quaint French village. I wrote about it. Called it BROWN BLOKE AND A BABY.

“Plenty of books already about men raising children,” came the reply. I sort of thought that was the point: write what sells. But, here we go: “Maybe it would stand out if you add a Muslim element to it?”

So I re-shaped the book to crowbar in every Muslim reference I could think of that could possibly apply to an atheist brown bloke raising a baby in France. I called it ALORS… HOO AKBAR.

Yeah. No one wanted that one.

The last book I pitched, I wrote here in Barcelona. It had bestseller written all over it. I called it RACIST!  You’d pick that up in a bookshop, right? It was actually based on something that happened to me here. I’d just moved into to our apartment in Rambla Catalunya and a white expat neighbour outside the lift demanded I prove I live there. I was holding keys, I had my daughter in my arms, but she wouldn’t let up. I told her to fuck off and took the stairs.

Afterwards, when it became evident that I did indeed live there, she corners me, in an apparent bid to clear the air, and I swear she’s expecting me to apologise for being so rude to her. So I told her, politely, that sure, it’s fair to suspect that a brown man in Barcelona might be a robber, but then you saw my keys, heard my English accent, and I don’t know how many brown thieves go around robbing with a five-year-old strapped to his arms, but still, you didn’t see a fellow expat, didn’t see a father, but stayed focused on my colour. And, let’s face it, if I were an Amazon or Glovo delivery guy, you wouldn’t have bat an eyelid. You simply couldn’t comprehend how a brown guy, dressed as shabbily as I, could possibly live in such a swish apartment in the high-end of town and that, madam, is what makes you a racist.

She was horrified. Outraged. Like I’d be if she called me a Paki or whatever. So in this book, I exaggerated events to make the white woman go to ridiculous lengths to prove she’s not a racist, while the brown guy is having none of it.

I got an agent! The publisher he approached loved the idea, but… “Can we make the white woman more racist to justify the abuse she gets?”

“That’s the whole point!” I cried. “The brown guy is the bastard here. The white woman thinks she’s the victim!”

“Not sure how that’ll go down with the readership,” he said, and we’ll never know, because clearly, it never got published.

And so! I’ve made my vow. To no longer write about terrorism, arranged marriages, curry, identity politics, tokenism and socio-political alliances, race relations and retaliations, diversity ideals and ideologies, or whatever the fuck they think I should write about, because clearly, I’ll never write it like the oppressed brown Muslim victim they want me to write it as. And yet…

Now, this is something we can have as a talking point afterwards if you like, but I don’t know if any of you saw this brown guy you don’t really know approach the stage and think, “I expect him to talk about brown people stuff.” Stephen (who organised the Salon) certainly didn’t say, “Hey Shabby, can you write something for my white friends about brown people stuff.” And yet, that’s exactly what I’ve just done.

Why do we do it? Because we all do. I guarantee if you go on Netflix or whatever, scan through the stand-up comedy section and pick any person of colour at random, the black guy will have a skit that goes, “White guys be like this. Black guys be like this.” And the brown guy will do a head-nodding caricature of his mother, saying, “Are baba, why don’t you get married?”

Are we so desperate for validation from white people, some fucked-up post-colonial mindset whereby we’re programmed to entertain you, or garner your sympathy in our bid to be accepted?

The thing is, all artists are obsessed with identity. But the straight white artist has the luxury of being philosophical about “who am I?”, whereas we keep dwelling on “who do they think I am?”

Every artist from a minority group – the brown author, the black painter, the Jewish comedian, the lesbian singer, the disabled sculptor, the trans poet, are all asking,

“Where do I fit in?”

“Why do they hate who I choose to love?”

“Why do they think I’m going to rape them?”

“Why do police shoot at people like me?”

“Why don’t they care when children the same colour of skin as me get bombed in their beds?”

And all the while, the white artist ponders, “I think I’ll write a song about being a walrus.”