MICHAEL MOHAMMED AHMAD The Other Half of You. Reviewed by Paul Anderson
Michael Mohammed Ahmad completes an enthralling trilogy of autofiction with The Other Half of You, his third novel.
These three books portray the young life of Bani Adam, Ahmad’s alter ego, who is also a Muslim Arab-Australian writer from Western Sydney. Bani is in his twenties, emerging as an author and now father to a son, Khalil. Chronologically it follows The Tribe (2014) and The Lebs (2018). The books contain common elements, but The Other Half of You can be read as a standalone novel.
The titular ‘you’ the book addresses is Bani’s newborn son, Khalil.
In a three-act structure it tells the story of the child’s parents: Bani and ‘the one I chose for myself’, Khalil’s mother. Her identity is only gradually revealed, creating a tension in the novel. Each of the three parts begins, lyrically, at Khalil’s birth in 2015 – ‘All That Was’, ‘All That Is’, ‘All That Will Be’ – suffused with the love poetry of his son’s namesake, the Lebanese poet Gibran Kahlil Gibran. Bani tells his son, heart-piercingly, ‘Any mistakes that brought me to this moment, I would not hesitate to make again.’ At the beginning of chapter three Bani refers to his son as ‘my half-caste, half-insider, half-outsider’ – but let there be no more spoilers in this review.
Bani’s first love in the novel is his girlfriend Sahara, who, being Lebanese Christian, a ‘wood-worshipper’, he keeps secret from his family. ‘Too much Glebe in her to be a Leb, too much Lebanon in her to be a hippie.’ Bani moves between uni, where he is studying for a BA, his family home in Lakemba (ubiquitous stone lions, concreted yards, white-tiled floors), where he lives with his parents and many siblings, and Sahara’s place – until he is dobbed in. His father lays down the law: Bani is expected to marry within The Tribe, to marry an Arab Muslim Alawite, and perpetuate the bloodline, The House of Adam. The young man is terrified.
My father had taught me long ago [when Bani was six] that he was the source of all my strength and all my weakness … From then on I feared my dad, not like I feared barking dogs and child molesters, but like I feared the sun, which gave me life, and could just as easily incinerate me.
Bani is also fearful of his godfather Abu Hassan and, above all, of offending Allah. ‘Please Allah, when I’m gown up, make me my dad.’
He knuckles down to abject work in his father’s army disposal shop Cave of Wonders and the discipline of boxing training at the Belmore PCYC gym. A succession of match-making dates ensue by parental arrangement with girls from The Tribe. Readers may already suspect this is never going to work: Bani is a romantic, after all. The female characterisation in these vignettes is in your face – the narrative is entirely Bani’s point of view – as is the cultural obligation for the young to get married and procreate.
But who were these girls trying to impress? The Arab boys I had grown up around saw straight blonde hair and dry fair skin and stark blue eyes as a random head job; it was the olive-skinned girl with the black eyelashes and the black curly hair who they saw as the mother of their children.
Bani is just not into girls like Dima, Zena and Zainab – he sees them as pretty but vapid, as ‘Wog’ not White. We are not told how these girls view Bani, but we know and are repeatedly told he has a ’big, broken nose’. And that he has been asked before, ‘So, is your dick bent too?’
Bani is drawn to another type – white-skinned, blue-eyed, gauche, other – to their souls. This is his dilemma. But he martyrs himself for the cause, even gets a nose job, is soon engaged and – ‘Holy shit, this is my wedding!’ All his wife really wants in return is to know he will let her wear a G-string after they are married. After a lavish overseas honeymoon they begin their life together in a garage at the back of his dad’s shop in Lakemba. Bani’s gag reflex kicks in: he spews from anxiety then sleeps on the floor, revolted by his predicament.
But Bani does not know how to ‘forget to think’. He eventually finds a way to undo his mistake and along the way comes of age as a writer.
Bani is a relatable, self-aware character and his interior life is one of self-flagellation: he is a ‘self-hating Leb’, a ‘gronk’ (stupid), getting about in flared (women’s) jeans, and saying ‘bro’ or ‘cuz’. He is biddable and ardent. There are familiar tropes and coarse vernacular: Bani’s addiction to Maccas, his self-deprecation, his use of the c-word, references to ‘Nips and Curries and Fobs’ and Skips. This is how Bani speaks, but The Other Half of You is more concerned with storyline than voice.
Some of the references to literature are clunky. Lolita was an apt touchstone in The Lebs because of Bani’s crush on his teacher Leila Haimi — and it’s one of the canonical works cited again here. But labelling Abu Kareem, a potential father-in-law, Abu Humbert Humbert, feels forced. The scenes where characters quote to each other from classics or parse famous author quotes sometimes fall flat. The device is more effective when done en passant, as in ‘the day Sahara finished reading A Woman of No Importance and said to me, “So Oscar was just into dick, right?”’
Occasionally the novel gushes. There is a long riff on Gibran’s poem On Love and its ‘grounded to whiteness’ line is looped. More often the narrative is devotional in tone and truer, with some unusual memory slips and poetic descriptions: ‘and her voice was like a harp — soft and blue’. The references aren’t perfectly meshed, however, and sometimes the result feels like a mashup. Bani’s friend Bucky (from The Lebs) has cameos here but his inclusion feels underdeveloped. Several chapters are brilliant — the engagement party is one such set piece:
‘Blonde is the bait,’ my mother-in-law-to-be said to us both earlier in the week, ‘and black is the fish in the frypan.’
(Too late, Bani!) Other chapters sag: the punch-on between cousins is a long digression.
Ahmad is good at integrating Muslim culture and customs within the text. There is an exposition of two Alawite men greeting each other for example — kissing, reciprocating. It’s respectful and requisite. The translations from Arabic are seamless too, running on:
‘Ahla, ahla,’ he said as we shook. Welcome, welcome.
It’s clear Bani owns his identity.
The Other Half of You, the book and the title, are cleverly multi-layered. ‘I am the other, and you are half the other, and your mother is the other half of you.’ The author may also be addressing his tribe or readers more generally — it’s a book that bears rereading.
It’s convincing on interracial relationships. Bani tells his son:
Khaleel, yaa aani, yaa habibi, yaa rouhi: take what you want from your Arabness. And do not feel entitled to your Whiteness. As both — you are neither.
He is so over stereotypical racism ‘constantly threatening me’; is bored, even, when it’s polite:
You see Khalil, your mother wasn’t swimming in my culture, I was swimming in hers; her family just couldn’t see it.
Bani experiences the White gaze a couple of ways: ‘the White woman’s gaze’ where he is judged for being a Leb; and later racial fetishization, also for being a Leb. These themes brought to mind Kiley Reid’s Such A Fun Age (2019) and its questioning of specific Black-White relationships.
The Other Half of You is a Künstlerroman of sorts and ficto-memoir — a contemporary Australian story of an author as a young man and a father’s unflinching love. Bani Adam is funny, punchy and emotional, a great character to read. However categorised, the writing is brave, authentic and unrestrained as it imparts slices of Lebanese-Australian life. Khalil would know his father were he ever to read this novel.
Michael Mohammed Ahmad The Other Half of You Hachette 2021 PB 352pp $32.99
Paul Anderson is an editor and volunteer with Dirt Lane Press. He was one of the editorial committee for the 2020 UTS writers’ anthology Empty Sky published by Brio Books.
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