“My job as a writer is not to tell a positive story, my job is to tell an honest and complex story,” he says. The Other Half of You is written with Ahmad’s trademark honesty and grit, but the affection for his characters, despite their very clear shortcomings, is obvious. “I feared my dad … not like I feared barking dogs and child molesters, but like I feared the sun, which gave me life, and could just as easily incinerate me,” Bani reflects at one point, of a masculinity that manifests itself both symbolically and physically in his life. In it, a young, naive and zealous love between a Christian girl and Muslim boy is brought to a premature end by the wagging tongues of Bani’s community and his father’s accusation that he had “brought shame on the House of Adam”.Īhmad balances his protagonist’s quest for the kind of love he’d studied in literature’s great classics with his respect and reverence for his father, the safeguard of his heritage and identity. to show their humanity Michael Mohammed AhmadĪhmad’s latest autofiction novel – the third instalment in the life of main character Bani Adam, following on from The Lebs and Ahmad’s first novel, The Tribe – explores a young Muslim boy’s complex negotiation of faith, family and tradition when it comes to romance.

“ bell hooks argues that we need to be able to honour and revere that which is masculine and beautiful separate from patriarchy.” I do want to talk honestly about problematic fathers.

“Most men of colour can’t escape being masculine,” he says, arguing that the way men of colour often look and speak aligns with masculine cues and stereotypes. He believes such portrayals are part of a “strong conflation in western culture between patriarchy and masculinity”, in which Arab men who happen to have masculine traits – Ahmad describes them as “big, dark, hairy and extroverted” with loud voices – are immediately seen as patriarchal. “I feel like Arab fathers and Muslim fathers, and more broadly, Indigenous fathers and fathers of colour – are always dehumanised, constructed our children in the same capacity as white men love their children,” Ahmad says.

The Lebs by Michael Mohammed Ahmad