When I was young, my Bangladeshi dad embodied immigrant parent cliches. We grew up in a corner shop and he ran a restaurant and takeaway. He regularly, unequivocally demanded that his children learn a skill that we could take anywhere in the world as there might come a day when we’d find out “this country isn’t really ours”. Not even having a white English mother gave us full claim to England, he warned.
I dismissed this as the understandable but overwrought concerns of an immigrant. This was my country and nothing could change that, not the racist abuse I heard in the shop or the racist graffiti on the front of the takeaway.
My father’s concerns feel less paranoid today. It’s not hyperbole to say I’ve never felt less connected to my homeland than I have of late.
That’s one of a million reasons I wanted to adapt The Boy at the Back of the Class. Onjali Q Raúf’s magnificent, huge-hearted novel is a special piece of work. In my stage adaptation I’ve added a moment where the heroic teacher Mrs Khan describes To Kill a Mockingbird as her favourite book. She shares with her class of nine-year-olds the lesson Atticus Finch tells his daughter Scout about walking around in someone else’s skin.
The reference I’ve added is deliberate; I think Onjali has done something as remarkable as Harper Lee in humanising a group of people by allowing a reader to walk around in their shoes. For Lee it was Black Americans in the middle of the civil rights movement. For Onjali, it’s refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in the middle of whatever this epoch will be called when more evolved humans look back in years hence.
Onjali’s beautiful book tells the story of Ahmet, a little boy who flees war-torn Syria and washes up in a British school, without his mum and dad. When a classmate overhears unsympathetic adults talking on the bus one morning celebrating that the “gates are going to close” on the country, she and her friends set off on an adventure to reunite her new friend Ahmet with his parents before it’s too late.
It was, and I’m probably speaking out of turn here, a nightmare to adapt for the stage and I’m glad it’s now over to the brilliant director Monique Touko to shepherd on to the stage and to solve the big problems of the story.
Problems such as Ahmet, one of the main characters I had to put on stage, not speaking English. Or that the big adventure involves a trip to Buckingham Palace. And that the rhythm and structure of the novel completely resist the demands of stage storytelling.
I loved the challenge. The north star when I was writing my script was the heart of Onjali’s novel: she wanted to show readers that Ahmet isn’t “a filthy refugee kid” as he’s called by someone in the book, nor is he “just another immigrant” – he’s a person. A little boy without his family; he’s a human being.
When I said yes to writing the adaptation for the Rose theatre, Kingston, it was in March 2022. Pictures of the little body of Alan Kurdi were seven years old and it felt as if the world’s compassion for dead refugee children had been used up over his single image. Words such as “swarm” and “invasion” dominated over compassion and humanity in our national conversation.
The play, Onjali’s story and the need to humanise refugees have become more depressingly necessary with time. I’m glad my adaptation of her novel is about to tour the country, but I’m sad that it feels like it’s howling into a bitter, nasty wind. But, if one audience member feels like they’ve walked around in someone else’s skin, and if it makes them a little more human and their response to people looking for a home more compassionate, then it will have been worth it.
By the way; it is also a really good, fun adventure story and surprisingly funny.
• The Boy at the Back of the Class is at the Rose theatre, Kingston, 3-22 February. Then touring until 1 June.
