Tinker. Tailor. Jihadi. Poet. Boy In this fast and furious ride of recent history—the times before and after the 9/11 attacks—the words leap off the pages like magnesium wires selectively burning in the air. At times it seems that Jihad is being projected as a career option.
It’s easy to get distracted by the sheer energy generated by Guy Gunaratne’s first-person narrative. It’s partly interrogation as Yahya Bass, an orphaned Iraqi born into an impoverished family in London, rolls up the sleeve of his interlocutor, Mr. Mister of the title, and cajoles and pleads with him as he tries to save his life. How highlights appear to be separate bins.
He is held in solitary confinement in a detention center in the UK as an unnamed special investigator tries to break his defence, in what is commonly known as “Muslim extremism in Britain”. Or what others have attempted to label ‘Islamism’ – as one might package a distorted form of thought process as bread.
terror and the goat boy
The time frame is spread over two parts, from 1990 to 2005 and from 2010 to 2015. Episodes of global terrorist attacks.
Part of Yahya’s apology, if we may call it that, is that there is no meaning that explains what happened to him. Towards the end, he compares himself to an octopus – translucent, shapelessly floating, without a spine, as he puts it. But he draws followers during one part of his life’s story, from the siren songs he is able to conjure with an allure of the poetic power that Islamic poetry encourages, along with English. Gunaratne’s gift is to demystify vocabulary in a way that connects people to more than just sounds and ideas.
The reader is seduced by Yahya’s power to project the trajectory of his own transformation and is appalled at falling into the trap of believing the inevitability of his choices. To that extent, Robert Veracic’s Jihadi John: The Making of a Terrorist (2016), a more honest account, about the life and fetishes of a militant’s acts of brutality on camera.
tragedy of not having
Since Gunaratne’s first novel (in our mad and furious city, 2019) slammed London and shook its hidden pockets full of immigrants, tearing off its chains to find a place that could be called the anger of Earth’s migrant majority. It is a form of reverse appropriation whereby those disenfranchised and alienated by the colonial machinations of deceit in the name of progress descend upon the fair city of London to apologise.
Or, as in recent times, revenge. It is a tragedy of not being played on a global scale with consequences in our backyard. The famous ‘other’ from the colonial point of view is now our twin, the monster we are. It is they, or are we, the grandchildren of the colonial agenda, drifting through the void in search of redemption, creating many errant children.
Gunaratne’s carefully written chapters come to the fore as performances. He may have been a master puppeteer who pulled the strings of his characters while teasing the audience: “You! Hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother! – to underline a corrupt and decadent society.”
His triumph lies in being an entertainer in the Dickensian sense of the word, and like that master of obscurity, tossing his minted chocolate among haunted urchins and jihadi johns lurking in the dark. It is a tragedy of not being played on a global scale with consequences in our backyard. The famous ‘other’ from the colonial point of view is now our twin, the monster we are.
mister, mister
boy gunaratne
tinder press
₹899
The author is a Chennai-based critic and cultural commentator.