First, a confession: having opened Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s new novel Bugger, I put it down again for a month. I knew – at least in outline – what was coming, and I knew it would be hard to read.
This is Ahmad’s fourth novel, following works including The Tribe and its sequel, the Miles Franklin-shortlisted The Lebs. As with Ahmad’s earlier writing, Bugger is layered and politically attuned, attentive to the intersections of race, class, gender and power. But where The Lebs expands outward into the violent social world of Punchbowl high dchool, Bugger does the opposite, spiralling inward over the course of one day, towards a single devastating moment.
The novel’s central character, Hamoodi, is a kind, curious and eager-to-please 10-year-old boy trying to find safety and belonging in a world which dangles both just out of reach. He is also acutely, anxiously aware of his own difference. When two boys at his school begin picking on him, he understands something that he can’t yet verbalise: “They’re chatting and grinning to each other about something … pathetic, and I know that something is me.”
Hamoodi’s parents are strangers to this new country. They are caring and intelligent, but lack the tools to keep their children – or themselves – safe from harm. Hamoodi has been taught to assimilate. His parents tell him to “never name the mother-country, [never] speak the mother-language. If anyone ever asked me where we were from, I needed to say ‘Here’.”
But what happens when the danger comes not from the unwelcoming world outside, but from within the family?
Hamoodi’s father, a journalist, is a stabilising figure and Hamoodi’s model of masculinity. But when he abruptly disappears, Hamoodi’s mother becomes “a shell of herself … on the couch, staring out the window in a forever dream”. Hamoodi’s anxieties about his family surface in moments of shame: “Fine, I’m dumb, okay … is that what you wanna prove – that my mum’s too poor to buy me a dictionary?” he asks his teacher.
With his father gone, Hamoodi tucks his sleeping mother in, compelled to “become manhood”. It is a terrible inheritance for a child. Who will keep him – and his baby sister Annabel – safe?
It is in this context that Hamoodi’s older cousin Alooshi appears, physically rescuing Hamoodi from his bullies. Alooshi is bigger, stronger and meaner than everyone else Hamoodi knows. But he’s also family, and capable of surprising gentleness. He plays with his cousins, teaches them how to brush their teeth; Hamoodi loves him, and he struggles to understand the duality that he sees: “Just a few hours earlier, I watched my cousin use these very same hands to cave [heads] in … covered in blood and flesh clots. How is it possible that a person can shift … so easily?”
But when he is left in Alooshi’s care, Hamoodi discovers first-hand that even family cannot keep him safe, and that violence rarely has neat boundaries. Ahmad has a remarkable ability to instil a deep tenderness for his characters, even as they act with terrible violence. Alooshi’s casual cruelty towards slugs, dogs, even other children, is accompanied by the refrain, “They’re just animals.” His violence is dehumanising. But in Ahmad’s work, everyone is human.
From the first page of Bugger, Ahmad plays with language: who has the right words, who lacks them, and what can happen in the gaps in between? As Alooshi grapples with the language he is now required to use, he stutters and trips over new words, struggling to voice sentences. These words and phrases appear on the page as repeated rhythms, fractured lines that create a sense of poetry or play.
When he says the word “bugger” to a teacher – a word so common in Australia it is repeated in jest on primetime TV ads – he is sent from the classroom; a reminder that, for some people at least, some things must not be spoken.
Ahmad’s use of language stands in for the way childhood abuse often involves the silencing of a victim, the removal of language. In this context, Ahmad’s work is profoundly political: insisting on language, insisting on a voice, claiming a mother tongue; the language of truth.
Bugger is difficult to read. Not because of any literary failure – on the contrary, Ahmad’s grasp of his craft and his unflinching honesty are to be lauded – but rather because of what it demands of the reader. To bear witness to the harming of a little boy. For Hamoodi, there are no resolutions but the realisation that he “will never sleep again … in a world where there are no men; a world where there are only boys and beasts”.
Questions about some characters – Hamoodi’s disappeared father; his uncle; Alooshi’s background experiences – are left unaddressed. While perhaps a meditation on the shock of violence and the uncertainty of life, these choices left the wider narrative feeling unfinished. And while it may not be the responsibility of fiction to offer either hope or resolution, I couldn’t help wondering both what and who this story is for. Is it a warning, an act of witness, or an artefact of personal processing and reflection?
In the final page of the book, Ahmad presents an “un-acknowledgement”: “How selfish of me to ask any dignified creature to share its burden?” And yet, this is what Bugger offers. In writing Hamoodi’s story, Ahmad demands that language make space for the unspeakable.
• Bugger by Michael Mohammed Ahmad is out now (A$34.99, Hachette)
