Join Osman Yousefzada, an internationally renowned artist and writer.He will discuss his Memoir The Go-Between reviewed by Stephen Fry as ‘one of the greatest childhood memoirs of our time’. The book is narrated through the eyes of a child, trying to make sense of the adult world.
His visual art practice, has been shown internationally and his works explore themes of rupture, migration, intergenerational tacit knowledge, and these conversations take forms in sculpture, textiles and installation work. Yousefzada says ‘he copies his mother to become an artist.
Hosted by: Simon Guerrier, writer, producer, author of Sherlock Holmes - The Great War (Titan, 2021) and chair of the Books Committee for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.
ETA: I made some notes in advance of the interview and present them here, revised to incorporate some of what he told me.
Osman is roughly my age, born in Birmingham to migrant parents from Pakistan. His mother could not speak English; his parents were both illiterate in English and their mother tongue of Pashto. The Go-Between movingly tells the story of Osman's childhood and adolescence, as part of a strictly observant Muslim household and community in Birmingham in the 1980s. It’s honest and insightful, often funny and sometimes harrowing. I found it compelling.
Particularly effective is the way it’s almost all told from his childhood perspective, as he understood things (or didn't) at the time. In this way, he is direct witness to evocative sights, textures and flavours - and to threats of violence inside and outside the home - but takes all these things as they come, without judgment. When, for example, he describes a sleepover with other boys where they gang up and pull down his trousers. He describes the adults taking this seriously but doesn't quite understand why. We, as readers, do.
That’s not to say this memoir is uncritical. We can, I think, infer what he feels now in many cases. More than that, in telling this story of an insular way of living, Osman is also constantly making connections. For example, one chapter tells about about girls who “come of age” (reach puberty) and are withdrawn from school and view, and in some cases sent away to Pakistan, as dictated by their fathers and the other men of the community. Then Osman, who is not allowed to watch TV and rarely looks at a newspaper, spots headlines about Margaret Thatcher.
“She herself had been sent away, from her house at Number 10, by her very own men.” (p. 224)
Osman is a shrewd observer, the memoir pepper with vivid, telling detail. He's also had access - for a time - to a rarely glimpsed hidden world. His original title for the book was “God and Jelly” but I think The Go-Between is a better fit. So much of what he describes here is a world of strictly observed binary divisions: Muslim and non-Muslim, immigrant and born-here, white and non-white, male and female, the rules in the house and for navigating outside...
Near the end of the book, he describes a formative time as an art student in London, going out to clubs with his friend Emma, where he, “saw genders become fluid” (p. 340). Throughout this story, he has been fluid, somewhere between the two binaries - a boy among the girls and women, a child of his parents’ community and the world outside it. But he’s not alone: other children must navigate the nuances between these two worlds, there are his mother’s friends who wear lipstick or go without a veil, whose husbands - gasp! - serve them tea.
By conveying the vibrant colour and texture of his early life, he demonstrates that none of us live in black and white.
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