Brown Boy is an uncompromising interrogation of identity,
family, religion, race, and class, told through Omer Aziz’s
incisive and luminous prose.
In a tough neighborhood on the outskirts of Toronto, miles away from
wealthy white downtown, Omer Aziz struggles to find his place as a
first-generation Pakistani Muslim boy. He fears the violence and
despair of the world around him, and sees a dangerous path ahead,
succumbing to aimlessness, apathy, and rage.
In his senior year of high school, Omer quickly begins to realize
that education can open up the wider world. But as he falls in love
with books, and makes his way to Queen’s University in Ontario,
Sciences Po in Paris, Cambridge University in England, and finally
Yale Law School, he continually confronts his own feelings of doubt
and insecurity at being an outsider, a brown-skinned boy in an elite
white world. He is searching for community and identity, asking
questions of himself and those he encounters, and soon finds himself
in difficult situations—whether in the suburbs of Paris or at the
Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Yet the more books Omer reads and the more
he moves through elite worlds, his feelings of shame and
powerlessness only grow stronger, and clear answers recede further
away.
Weaving together his powerful personal narrative with the books and
friendships that move him, Aziz wrestles with the contradiction of
feeling like an Other and his desire to belong to a Western world
that never quite accepts him. He poses the questions he couldn’t
have asked in his youth: Was assimilation ever really an option?
Could one transcend the perils of race and class? And could we—the
collective West—ever honestly confront the darker secrets that, as
Aziz discovers, still linger from the past?
In Brown Boy, Omer Aziz has written a book that eloquently
describes the complex process of creating an identity that fuses
where he’s from, what people see in him, and who he knows himself
to be.