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192 pages, Hardcover
First published August 2, 2022
This sense that whiteness itself was worth thinking about from within, and my need to write this novel grew during the aughts, when I lived in London, encountering more of a threatened whiteness during the unease that morphed into Brexit.
I wanted to explore whiteness as honestly and sympathetically but also unsparingly and brutally as possible, as one might explore religiosity here in Pakistan, where there’s been a rise in intolerant discourse. I watch parallels between Muslim-majority societies and white-majority societies, and I participate in an acknowledgment of a sense of loss. I don’t regard whiteness as a monolithic thing. All of my characters are experiencing the loss of whiteness in different ways.
For this handful of characters, whiteness dies as a mutual participatory category.
One morning, Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.At first, Anders calls in sick to work, shuts himself in, and avoids everyone he knows, willing his newfound melanin to fade away as quickly as it came. But his metamorphosis is not an isolated incident, and soon enough pale folks all over are turning dark. Racial panic seizes the collective imagination as the supposedly stable ideas of race and identity are overturned: what was certain is no longer, tensions overflow into the streets, and riots ensue.
"the cleaning guy looked at Anders and said, no, and then he added, less abruptly, and not with a smile, or not with a smile on his lips, although perhaps with one in his eyes, it was difficult to tell, honestly it could have been the opposite of a smile, and with that peculiar expression, the cleaning guy added, what I would like is a raise.Subtlety, then, is the author's mode in this thought-provoking novel, and it could perhaps work as a gateway to deeper confrontations with the issues of racial injustice and racist insecurity. While it may not be everything one would expect it to be, it certainly is well-written, an allegory well-suited for our times.