You Think You Know Me by Ayaan Mohamud, 350 pages, Usborne Publishing, 2023. Paperback. £7.99

You Think You Know Me knew me. The revelation had me reeling. A part of me wanted to run and hide in a cave, and another wanted to go and buy all the copies of this book off the shelf so that no one could know. Ayaan Mohamud, through the voice of Hanan, speaks of the hurt that comes with being invisible and having front-row seats to blatant racist injustices that you can’t unsee.

“I don’t want to be the poster-girl for anything, let alone the poster girl for Muslims. All I’ve ever done is follow the rules, and yet, somehow, it still isn’t enough… Mr Davies wants a palatable Muslim, a token Muslim… Someone who does as they’re told because they’re too afraid to do anything but walk the tightrope. (p 169)

This book is about Hanan Ali, who lives in London with her mother, her siblings, and her grandmother. The absence of her Aabo, her father, is a gaping hole that is explained in one of Hanan’s flashbacks and looks at her story as a Somali refugee, “Sometimes, I miss how simple life was there. There were no ISIS jabs or you’re-not-one-of-us subtexts… There was war, but there was none of that, and there was all of my dad.” (p 113)

Hanan is a secondary school student who chooses to go to Grafton Grammar School, an elite grammar school where – as a person of Somali descent and a person who chooses to cover, she is a minority. Although she finds allies in unusual places, she states, “We might all be Grafton Grammar girls, but we’re all living very different versions of it.” (p 72)

Mohamud addresses the inequality and injustice of micro and macro aggressions – especially in the media, and the corrosive impact it has on the psyche of a Muslim woman. How the death (and life) of a white man is more valuable than the life of her twin brother, who is assaulted, and how every Muslim bears a burden of guilt at some point in their lives.

This is Ayaan Mahmoud’s first book, and her piercing honesty is a beautiful but painful read. Although this is a book of fiction, there is a lot of identity discourse within it, and I suspect that Hanan’s fictional reality has given the author a licence to really delve into the deep emotions that come with the social landscape that Hanan occupies.

I am deeply grateful for that depth, but I did feel that the book felt very predictable and lacked an original plot. A bit like a rom-com whose end you know even before you get there. Mohamud’s ability to capture the nostalgia of the homeland, the emptiness of loss, the pain of racism, and the light of hope is exemplary.

I cannot wait for her to write a second book.

Aasiya I Versi