Only an abject universe could contain the story of Bugger, Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s fourth book. With the stench of shit and damp clothes that smell of popcorn and vomit, with descriptions of bulging eyes and “sob-mucus” and sandwiches chewed with an open mouth, Ahmad builds a world able to hold the worst of acts. He leads the reader through abject details that say: this too is the world, and the human within it.
Review: Bugger – Michael Mohammed Ahmad (Hachette)
Unfolding over the course of a single day, Bugger is narrated by a young boy named Hamood. He lives with his mother and infant sister in a block of apartments in an unnamed suburb, rendered with material details that identify it as hard-up.
His father, a journalist, has left for an unspecified purpose, but linked to a missing girl, leaving Hamood to be the man of the house. The home is sacrosanct and it is made clear to Hamood that his father’s masculinity – one of care and strength, intelligence and courage – is to be his model, not the patriarchal and misogynistic messaging that is channelled through local television shows.
The father’s absence is integral to how the story unfolds in flashbacks. Objects that belong to the father, like his shaving gear, haunt the house and Hamood. It is clear that Hamood has internalised his father’s voice, so that the father’s expectations become the pressures he places on himself, even though he is no more than a boy in primary school.
The father’s absence also opens up a space in the family circle that allows Aloosh, Hamood’s teenaged cousin, to occupy a significant place in the life of Hamood. They are a strange pairing – a small boy and a giant – but they are two unforgettably complex characters.
Aloosh explodes into the narrative in a blaze of descriptive detail and action. He is the antihero from the start, both repelling and fascinating, terrible and magnificent. In his last years of school, he stands on the threshold between adolescence and adulthood. Brutal and tender in equal measure, his corpulence is a form of excess that refuses to conform to standards of beauty or behaviour. He is a character who cannot be contained by order and social mores.
His complex mix of tenderness and brutality culminates in the ultimate transgression. Yet nothing in Ahmad’s depiction ever justifies or seeks to condone Aloosh’s violence.
Vulnerability and violation
The novel opens in a cubicle in the boy’s toilets of a suburban primary school. Hamood is subjected to the cruel gaze of two of his peers, “the bark-skinned boy” and “the paper-skinned boy”, who ridicule him for the size of his shit and its stink. Though the two bullies disappear quickly, their “bulging eyes” stay with Hamood, almost cartoonish in their exaggeration.
This early scene dramatises Hamood’s vulnerability, but also the way he bears the intimidation and embarrassment with the quiet stoicism of a child who has already come to expect fortune’s slings and arrows.
A precocious child with parents who are both educated and loving, Hamood has been brought up to respect and revere language. He develops a system where profanities and vulgarities are redacted to their first letter, thus penis becomes the “p-word” and shit becomes the “s-word”. He is diligent and upholds this rule consistently, apart from a couple of slip-ups. He blurts out “condom” and “bugger” in the classroom, though his wrongdoing is inadvertent, as these are words he had not previously encountered.
The prose is styled to capture the voice of a child, but also to create the heightened aesthetic of a gritty superhero story. There is an extended section on Hamood’s beloved Power Rangers, a children’s television show that relies heavily on shiny spandex and dodgy special effects. Hamood’s recounting of an episode is both a note of nostalgia and a reminder of the formative role that television plays in the lives of children.
The exaggerated stylistics (“My teacher’s eyes burst longways like her brains have blown out”) and the withholding of precise geographic detail, such as the names of the suburb, the school and the homeland of Hamood’s parents (“the land that cannot be named”), are effective strategies that allow Ahmad to merge a recognisable world of the ordinary and the cheap (K-Mart and Paddle-Pops) with a larger-than-life aesthetic, even a hyperrealism in places.
The effect is particularly striking in the lack of information about Hamood’s background and where his father has gone. We have the material detail of a city with concrete buildings, chipped paint and bullet-holes, but no ability to locate the family’s origins or know why Hamood’s father would leave. His absence is not quite explained by the story of a superhero-journalist departing to put something right in the world. The apparent lack of an urgent reason to abandon his beloved young family leaves a tab open in the reader’s mind.
The flaw of child heroes is their vulnerability, their trust in the adults in their lives, their tendency to look to them for guidance. Hamood’s earliest life-lessons from his father were about being careful who to trust (his family) and being aware of who might need protecting (his mother and sister). The danger Hamood is likely to face will come from the racism that he is certain to encounter in the world on his doorstep.
Hamood thus learns to withhold the parts of his identity that make him different. He is to trust and value, over all else, the intimate circle of his family: his mother, his sister, his father, and his cousin Aloosh. The violation of that trust brings the novel to its dramatic climax.
Visceral lyricism
Resisting easy binaries, Ahmad includes characters, such as Mr Brown, the vice-principal at Hamood’s school, who have some power but use it to nurture, and who accept that the borders between the appropriate and inappropriate are difficult and porous.
Spatial poetics are also deployed with exquisite precision. The domestic world of Hamood’s dingy apartment, with its smallness and its few claustrophobic places for privacy – in the bathroom, in a bedroom with the door locked – prepares the way for Hamood’s crossing of the threshold between knowing and not knowing. Ahmad captures the anguish of this loss of innocence in a fluorescence of language. The irreversibility of experience is made corporeal in his visceral lyricism.
Bugger is a richly vernacular novel. Ahmad dramatises the stories of words and language as much as he does characters. We see the way words change and their power to change their referent. A name can go from being a simple proper noun to a term of endearment and tenderness – Hamoodi, my Hamood – with the addition of a single letter. We see that words are always tied to power and context. We see who has permission to be vulgar – advertising companies who make commercials selling Utes, for example – and who does not: small boys like Hamood, who come from other motherlands.
The challenge of telling a story to an adult audience from the perspective of child is great. It requires maintaining a perspective sophisticated enough to retain the interest of an adult, without breaking the credibility of the premise or patronising the child’s view of the world.
At times, the prose felt a bit too stylised, too self-conscious. In comparison to Aloosh and Hamood, the parents did not always hold their place in the book, too clearly representing the good and the tender, in surplus of what the plot required, almost as though Ahmad didn’t quite trust his own genius, or the reader’s ability to run with such a taboo story of abuse.
But the other side of the attention to language is that Ahmad realises some exquisite moments, when the heightened register soars and the reader is transported. In those moments, we remember that art is not so much about perfection as transformation.
Michelle Hamadache does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
