English Rebel Academy review by Mohammed Hanif – a confirmed Booker contender | imaginary

MMuhammad Hanif’s novels treat the most troubling aspects of Pakistani history and politics with an uneasy, almost betrayal, irreverence. His 2008 Booker Prize longlisted debut, The Mango Explosion Affair, was a starkly comic portrait of General Zia in the days before his death in a suspicious plane crash in 1988. Disguised as a murder, it was a satire of religiosity and military tyranny. Dark comedy, full of satire that combines farce with harsh truth-telling, has also been the style of choice for other thorny topics, from violence against women and religious minorities in Alice Bhatti’s Lady to the war machine in Red Birds.

Hanif’s new novel confirms his status as one of South Asia’s most funny and disturbing voices. The story begins immediately after the execution of ousted socialist Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto by Army Commander Zia ul Haq. After the execution, disgraced intelligence officer Jules was sent to Oak Town, a secluded area where “he would need to create his own entertainment and come up with a mission to shine in this punitive position.”

He’s kind of lucky. Bhutto’s sympathizers, called “gyalas,” feel sad and angry. Many believe he is still alive, that the military government is hiding him, and some, to Ghoul’s horror, set themselves on fire. Ghoul springs into action and crushes the protests. Known as “Piston” to his peers, he has another reputation to uphold, and he does so with equal commitment, regardless of the fact that a woman is carrying his child.

Meanwhile, there is trouble at the door of Sir Baggie’s Rebel English Academy, an English basics center located within the local mosque complex. Imam Muli brings an unexpected visitor, Sabiha. Sabiha’s husband has just died in a mysterious fire; Her parents, Bhutto loyalists, are political prisoners; She has a gun, and worse yet, she has an attitude. Could Baaghi put her down for a while? Indebted to Molly in more ways than one, Buggy is in no position to refuse.

The academy is a place of learning, and to stay there Sabiha must live as a student: “Write what other students write,” he tells her. “But remember, you are not an ordinary student: you are a witness to history.” Thus begins a series of first-person, “homework” chapters that punctuate the main narrative, in which Sabiha tells her tragic life story and names the perpetrators. Already suspected of being a deviant Marxist and a gay man with a dangerous cruising habit, Buggy is now also harboring a fugitive sought by a thuggish ghoul.

The smart, tense and suspenseful tale combines the slapstick and fun of a cat-and-mouse movie with the serious business of a state-of-the-nation narrative. It strongly confronts rape culture, media censorship, and the suppression of opposition. One of its achievements is to reclaim rumor and gossip from the margins of official politics and make them an integral part of its narrative engine, dramatically illustrating how it can destabilize the monopoly of state-sanctioned truth, and testifying to the pressures of enforced silence..

The book’s perusal is a virulent polemic against the widespread cult of Pakistan Testimonies, Or martyrdom. One character (called Shahid, the Arabic word for martyr) makes a point of filming a self-immolation, while Jules Al-Shahwani constantly pretends to be a soldier “bored in the trenches, ready for martyrdom,” to lure women into his bed. Hanif’s criticisms are multifaceted. They target not only corrupt power in its various forms – military, religious, patriarchal – but also the gift of salvation that such institutions claim to offer. His feminism is rigorous and purposeful, while on the subject of faith he is not afraid to violate taboos or flirt with heresy. What concerns Hanif is the exploitation of the Qur’an. In his first novel, Zia ul-Haq treats it as a revelation, and sifts through its pages in search of verses that support his grand ambitions. Here, Molly uses this to achieve more physical ends: to justify a second marriage, and to mask the exploitation of a vulnerable young widow in the language of righteousness.

As secular and religious beliefs respectively, Baaghi and Mauli serve as ideological heavyweights. While Molly espouses a kind of religious despotism, insisting that “my only policy is God,” Baghi is driven by doubt, rejecting religion as “the opium of the masses” and seeing it as his mission to liberate the rural population from “the yoke of capitalism and feudalism.” Hanif presents both as far from ideal, and while his book resists any hackneyed metaphor of nationhood, the relationship between the pair, sustained through uneasy compromise, suggests the limits of ideological purity, as well as the necessity of compromise.

Why is the English Academy “rebellious”? Because, for its founder Baghi, it is the place where the “rebels of tomorrow” are made: children who, while learning English, are taught to doubt and question; Which will be “armed with a language that pretends to serve power but in the end will destroy it.” That rebellious, resourceful spirit flows through Sabiha’s stories and on every page of Hanif’s wonderful novel. Interspersed with provocative themes and themes, this novel about life under authoritarian siege is intensely local, indisputably global, harrowing and rebelliously entertaining: a surefire contender for the Booker Prize.