Brown Boy: A Memoir
By Omer Aziz
Scribner, US
ISBN: 978-1982136314
320pp.

Authored by Omer Aziz, Brown Boy: A Memoir is an honest account of working class immigrant life from a second-generation Pakistani-Canadian Muslim man.

Aziz was born and grew up in Scarborough, Canada, and spent his entire life combating racism and Islamophobia. By the end of the book, he leaves us — especially those Pakistanis such as myself who would never want to second-guess emigrating in search of greener pastures — with a reality check in the truest sense of the term.

Aziz’s Scarborough is a dangerous, working class suburb on the outskirts of Toronto, nicknamed ‘Scartown’ and “always described by its gangs, its shootings, stabbings and immigrant families.” To go by the author’s recollections, much though Canada seems like the go-to migration option for the current generation, the country still has a long way to go in terms of being more accepting and receptive of foreigners.

The book is a robust triangle that connects Aziz’s origins, what people see in him and how he perceives himself to be. By way of personal narrative, he battles with the contradictions and complexities of feeling like an ‘Other’, parallel to his anxious longing to become part of a Western world that never quite accepts him.

A young man from a working class immigrant Pakistani family in Canada details his life growing up as the Other in the West

There was incessant pressure from his family to keep his grades high and, compounded with it, were his struggles with external bullying. In 2003, when his father — “a parking officer who worked all winter and slapped tickets on car windshields, but at home he called himself an ‘officer of the law’” — was able to purchase a home in Mississauga, about an hour’s drive from Scarborough, Aziz reinvented himself into a “goon” out of fear of the aggressive tendencies of some of his classmates. His teachers, meanwhile, worried about his untapped talent.

In the midst of this personal struggle, he chanced upon a black man addressing the American nation on the television channel CNN, in his bid for the presidency of the United States. The man was Barack Obama.

“I stood, stunned, solitary in my amazement,” he writes. “It wasn’t just how the man looked, but what he was saying: how his name had given him problems, how he had struggled to see a place for himself in the world, how one’s background should not be a barrier to one’s success, how he was running for the highest office in the land to help those who had been left behind.”

That was when it dawned upon the mesmerised young man that he could “educate myself out of my apathy.” He applied himself to his studies with renewed vigour and earned a scholarship to Queen’s University, Canada.

This did not put an end to the bullying, though. With uninhibited candour, he recalls the night he went out to celebrate his graduation. His family was immensely proud, as he was the first one in the family to have earned a Western university degree and won a gold medal in his class, too.

Despite my protests, starting in middle school, my brother Oz and I began attending classes at the local mosque, Monday to Friday, for two hours, every evening after school. We donned a shalwar kameez and skullcap and carried our Qurans with us. I did not want to go, but in matters of faith, I had no choice. My mother was adamant as ever that her boys learn about their roots. — Excerpt from the book

Outside, however, was a different story. At the pub with a group of nine friends, he excused himself to go to the washrooms. When he returned, he saw that the boys had left the table to get drinks and the girls, who had remained seated, were being harassed by a huge white man.

Aziz stepped in immediately and the verbal skirmish quickly turned into a heated, dangerous argument, where Aziz was threatened by the white troublemaker’s friends, who happened to be former military men. The white man bragged about doing three tours of duty in Afghanistan where, he stated authoritatively, he had used “folks like you” as target practice. The incident left Aziz indignant with furious rage, and he felt as vengeful as he was dejected.

Despite this unsavoury episode, Aziz continued earning scholarships, first to the University of Cambridge, and then to Yale Law School in the United States.

The ugliness of racism also continued. In London to take the nearly four-hour Law School Admission Tests (LSATs), Aziz witnessed a group of five or six men hurling snowballs at a black woman who ran past in fright, covering her head with her purse. Aziz wanted to confront the bullies, but feared deportation. And, to prevent a headline such as “Cambridge Student Assaults City of London Pupils”, he too ran to save himself.

Not long after earning his law degree, Aziz became a foreign policy adviser in the administration of Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada. He was inspired by Trudeau, whom he saw as a progressive leader and one who was envied around the world. But it is dispiriting to learn that his experience was not all roses — Aziz narrates that once he was in the prime minister’s office as nuclear war hung in the balance that week, and was appalled to see how much of war and peace was dependent on the psyche of a few men.

According to the author of Brown Boy, brown people saw Trudeau’s government as one that genuinely cared about making the right decisions for everyone. As an immigrant working in one of the country’s most important offices, he dared to dream of the possibility that he could bring change for good under progressive leadership. Alas, that was not the case.

Aziz has written for several esteemed publications, but his narrative style, although crisp, is deficient in layers and shades. To illustrate this, his reference to Obama’s speech that warrants a major change in his own life, is overwhelming to say the least.

No doubt the passage is well-intentioned and soundly argued, but it comes across as though its only purpose is to allow Aziz to explain about his ‘Otherness’. The author imposes his message and thought on the readers, when it should be best left to the audience to come to their own decision about how they want to feel. By the end of the book, the heavy narration in lieu of objective analysis becomes oppressive.

In response to my email seeking to know more about the ideation behind the book, Aziz replied, “No story exists in a vacuum, and many stories led to this one. I went to multiple cities and had many fascinating interactions with people of all backgrounds while promoting the book and Brown Boy is prompting others to share their own stories, to feel seen in what they’ve experienced. If even one person feels less alone because of this book, I mark that as a huge success.”

Going home to Toronto to celebrate the book with family and friends was a special moment. As he wrote in his email, “All those sacrifices were worth it.”

The reviewer is a content lead at an agency, and a literary critic based in Karachi. She can be reached at sara.amj@hotmail.co.uk

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 16th, 2023