{"id":15418,"date":"2020-08-05T09:35:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-05T07:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/?p=15418"},"modified":"2020-07-23T15:37:15","modified_gmt":"2020-07-23T13:37:15","slug":"the-story-of-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/2020\/08\/05\/the-story-of-us\/","title":{"rendered":"The Story of Us"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hanna Ali is a teaching fellow and PhD candidate at SOAS in London, and the festival director of Somali Week Festival, a 10-day London-based festival during London\u2019s Black History Month. She was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, which she was forced to flee for Sweden at the age of five. She moved to the UK ten years later. Her short story collection The Story of Us <\/em>was published by marketfiftyfour<\/a> in 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The collection consists of four short stories: \u201cSharmarke\u201d, \u201cThe Story of Us\u201d, \u201cKind of Love\u201d and \u201cBloated. While the last three form a continuity of sorts, the first is something of an outlier. It is named for the boy child of a seventeen-year-old mother who is forced to realise through his birth that it is her destiny \u201cto be a breathing vessel steered by a man in order to bring more men into the world\u201d. Married unwillingly to a man twice her age, she plans to take the child\u2019s life, to free herself from her forced marriage, but finds herself unable to go through with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Story of Us\u201d entails a double shift in perspective: to a first-person narrator, and a more clearly defined setting in a \u201cHampshire cul-de-sac\u201d. Three generations of women live in the same house, which the mother claims is still \u201cSoomaaliya<\/em>\u201d, even as the youngest, from whose point of view the story is narrated, plots her escape by going away for her university studies. The grandmother descends into dotage with her sense of humour intact, while the mother fails to understand her daughter\u2019s desire to study literature and be a writer. The narrator imagines conversations in which her mother tries to explain her own incomprehension to others: \u201cI don\u2019t know where I went wrong with her\u2026 She\u2019s fat, wants to become a writer.\u201d Ali treads a compelling line in the way she describes difficult family relationships embedded in situations of ambivalent cultural \u2018belonging\u2019, managing to thread humour into her accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cKind of Love\u201d seems to maintain a similar \u2018I\u2019 and tells of a love affair with Michael, a hash-smoking, pseudo-philosophising white boy with racist parents. Michael breaks up with the narrator, before she can tell him that she is pregnant. The final story juxtaposes a doctor\u2019s visit, in which the narrator is reassured about the health of her pregnancy, with a reliving of various memories. These include a preoccupation with the narrator\u2019s absent father, and describe the trajectory of her and her family from Somalia to Kenya to Sweden to Britain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ali\u2019s writing is characterised by a felicitous turn of phrase. She has a way of buckling two or three words together in surprising but evocative ways, and a capacity for refreshing metaphor. Her stories are telling of the European border regime, the dangerous journey to cross the deathscape of the Mediterranean, the reasons why one might be forced to do so, and the ambivalent destination of (un)belonging that once sought-after Europe comes to represent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ali\u2019s writing is characterised by a felicitous turn of phrase. She has a way of buckling two or three words together in surprising but evocative ways, and a capacity for refreshing metaphor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":15411,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[103],"tags":[200,291,54,221,292],"class_list":["post-15418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-great-britain","tag-hanna-ali","tag-kenya","tag-short-stories","tag-somalia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15418"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15431,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15418\/revisions\/15431"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}