'Most literary novels are about the middle class, so much so that we don’t often think about class when we read them. Being middle class – like being white and male – is read as the universal human experience. There were no people like me or my family in the novels I read as a child. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, this exacerbated my feelings of inferiority and marginality. There was a sense that to obtain the life my parents wanted for me I had to leave them and my class behind.'
We were technically perfect for each other. Two Shia Iraqis, not too liberal, not too conservative, kind, young, educated, from loving families who supported us all they could. If we were to fail against all these odds, despite doing everything as God wanted, something must really be wrong with us. So we tried our hardest not to fail, even when the more we learned about each other the more disappointed we became.
(Note: this essay was first published in The Lifted Brow)
The curious and disturbing wonder of encyclopedias is their deadpan quality. Like the archetypal stern schoolmaster, they are not big on jokes...Blind catalogues of other stories they are hiding or eliding, encyclopedias can’t or won’t fess up to the blinkers they are wearing. Neither the rose-coloured glasses, nor the telescope myopically fixed to one eye.