Into The Wilds

Into The Wilds is an anthology of short stories from British South Asian writers and the first publication from new imprint Fox & Windmill. Set up by two graduates from the University of Huddersfield as a start-up company, this independent publisher aims to publish works that reflect British South Asian culture. Habiba Desai and Sara Razzaq, like many readers from a non-white background, didn’t often see themselves in the fiction they read and decided to do something about it.

Journalist and author Saima Mir writes in the introduction to Into the Wilds about the importance of finding your life experience reflected in the fiction you read when you are a person of colour and the world around you prefers you to internalise and minimise who you are in relation to white people.

In order to fulfil our dreams and reach our potential, we need to see people who look like us doing the things we aspire to. We need to hear names that sound like ours in the pages of a book and in positions of power, because before we can become something, we need to believe it can exist. The achievement begins long before the practise, the test, the win. It begins in the mind when we form the idea of what we want to be and who we will be.

I went to the launch of the anthology at Bradford Literature Festival and was impressed by the passion and conviction of these two women in their twenties. What they are doing is world-changing. It not only opens opportunities for writers but, through their sharing of their experience at the intersection of being British and South Asian, it provides opportunities for people from all backgrounds to learn about what it means to be British South Asian. Literature’s role in developing an understanding of those who are different to us is as important as its role in making us feel recognised.

The collection is the result of a competition call, made up of eight poems and eight short stories selected from the submissions, and is bookended with poems by Zaffar Kunial.

I find poetry difficult to review, because it is so personal, both in the writing and in the reading. No two people will have the same response to any poem, and I guarantee that my responses to the poetry in this collection will differ from those of other readers. I will say, though, that ‘The Season of Pomegranates’ by Mariam Tasneem Chaudhry captures love in all its thrilling, transcendent sweetness.

The poems and stories alternate, creating a reading rhythm that allows for reflection, encouraging pauses. The narratives drop us into the heart of families, with their complex relationships and feelings, or spin us off into feelings of lust and passion between secret lovers. Authors explore the comfort of friendship between women, whether school girls on the cusp of puberty or adults experiencing the grief of divorce or bereavement. All the pieces have belonging at their core in some way, because whether and how you belong in Britain is at the core of the British South Asian experience.

The desire to belong and the challenge of identity for a brown skinned woman, measured by how attractive she is to someone white, is skilfully captured in ‘A White Boy Is Looking At You’, told in the second person. Author Sarah M Jasat builds an air of tension and hope as the observed main character unpicks what might be happening, before the realisation dawns that the boy doesn’t see her as a person after all, but as a means to an end. It’s a story about presumption, about clichés that persist, on both sides of the divide. I wanted it to continue, for the girl to examine how the encounter made her feel. Her feelings are wrapped up too neatly, glossed over, presented as a triumph that feels hollow after all the feelings that have gone before.

Samina H Bakhsh read from ‘The Trousseau’ at the launch event. The short passage she read only hinted at the beauty and compassion in this story of a mother letting go. In the moment of her story, Bakhsh gets across a lifetime of identity as wife and mother drawing to its close. Her character, known only as Ammi to her children, is given her own name, Parveen, in recognition of the completion of her role, as she prepares for her daughter’s wedding and looks back over her dutiful service to her family and community.

The stories and poems that struck chords with me, did so in a way that made me think of the friends I had at school and beyond, and the women and men I’ve worked with over the years, and what they have shared with me of their lives. ‘On The Blob’, an exchange between three friends about what their periods were going to be like and how their bodies were already changing, reminded me of the school friend who was changing room shy like I was, but for different reasons. ‘Across This New Divide’, which takes the story of a grandmother whose memories are being lost to dementia and focuses on the passed down recollection of how her village changed after Partition, made me think of another school friend who was Muslim and had a secret Sikh boyfriend, and a colleague who explained to me how she, as the third generation post Partition, had inherited anger about the violence shown to Sikhs by Muslims in Punjab. The poem ‘Hijab Diaries: A New Light’, with its stanzas “Islam, my love, all praise God got. / Begin this properly / let them not think façade, / of what?” and “Bright eyes now full of dawn, / different from the night before. / A Modesty would take shape today, / a new me, as I rub them sore.” brought to mind my housemate who chose to delve deeper into her religion, her inner spirituality demonstrated externally by her wearing a hijab and abaya, and the conflicting feelings she felt about how others would perceive her, including her family.

As with the collection Where We Find Ourselves, I know one of the authors whose work is included in this anthology. Her story closes the collection and is a fantasy work set in a land not of the Earth. It explores jealousy and the unknowability of others. The author, Dipika Mummery, builds a convincing world through descriptions of village traditions and the experiences of someone slightly on the outside of the community who wants to find her way in. It has quite a twist that is enigmatic and weird in the old meaning of the word, involving a becoming that is supernatural. Of everything that I have ever read by my friend, this is the best. When she read from it at the launch event, I was transported by the sentence that describes the villagers’ response to a story told around the fire, “The villagers sat quietly before their voices rose in approval of the story, like a flock of raven wings spiralling skywards from the cliffs above.” Reading to the end of the story, this description of the voices seemed even more magical.

Into The Wilds is a tremendous collection that presents interesting new voices that are a welcome addition to the literary landscape. It deserves to be read widely and to be available in libraries across the country.

Read 28/06/2022-30/06/2022

Rating 4 stars