We Are All Birds of Uganda

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Zayyan tells the stories of two men, one in contemporary London and the other in 1970s Kampala. Both experience racial attitudes that cause them to feel alienated and dislocated from those they love and the place they believed was home. This book covers a wide range of themes, from colonialism, racism and its different forms in Britain and Uganda, family duty, religion, belonging and love. Recommended Reads about Race, Racism, and Demarginalizing History - Necessary Non-fiction You Should Read for Life-changing Insights and Impact The digitally native, all year round, online literature and books festival, with new content released every week is a free-for-all-users festival.

We Are All Birds of Uganda - LoveReading We Are All Birds of Uganda - LoveReading

The novel tells the story of Sameer, a young London lawyer with prospects and the possibility of a lucrative move to Singapore. It also tells the story of his grandparents as they have to leave Uganda. That part of the novel is epistolary with letters from Hassan’s grandfather to his deceased first wife. The chapters alternate between the two and the switch of styles does work.Glareolidae is a family of wading birds comprising the pratincoles, which have short legs, long pointed wings, and long forked tails, and the coursers, which have long legs, short wings, and long, pointed bills which curve downwards. Honeyguides are among the few birds that feed on wax. They are named for the greater honeyguide which leads traditional honey-hunters to bees' nests and, after the hunters have harvested the honey, feeds on the remaining contents of the hive. The emberizids are a large family of passerine birds. They are seed-eating birds with distinctively shaped bills. Many emberizid species have distinctive head patterns. His future, and that of his children, becomes increasingly precarious as the regime led by Amin make it clear people from the Indian sub continent are no longer welcome in Uganda. Everything that Hasan thought he knew and understood is thrown into confusion, including his own citizenship. He’d relinquished his British passport upon independence but, his birth in Uganda now counts for nothing. So where, he wonders, does he belong?

We Are All Birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan | Waterstones We Are All Birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan | Waterstones

There's some interesting and relevant material here but as a novel this feels over-ambitious and a bit clumsy, the result, perhaps, of trying to do too much in one book. This is a novel of family dynamics, racism and politics. Hassam sees himself losing his livelihood and being discriminated by other persons of colour, but he is not without his own prejudices. Sameer finds his career clashes with his family ambitions of taking over the business.... Read Full Review UGANDA. Hasan is struggling to run his family business following the sudden death of his wife. Just as he begins to see a way forward, a new regime seizes power, and a wave of rising prejudice threatens to sweep away everything he has built.One of my favourite thing within the novel is the simplistic way in which Zayyan delineates Islaam. The gradual and tender process in which its tenets become woven into the threads of Sameer's being; offering itself as a spiritual haven. I always find these stories of displacement difficult to read, they elicit so many emotions, but this is a wonderful and deeply moving novel, and first time author Hafsa Zayyan should be justifiably proud of it. If you do not have Ugandan citizenship, and you do not have British citizenship, then you are a stateless person, as I found myself to be. To become stateless is to be expelled not ,only from Uganda but from anywhere on Earth. I imagined myself as Armstrong, floating in outer space, untethered. There's quite a few interesting turns in the story and the different impacts of racism in both their lives. Impacts that might be a surprise to those that don't know about the long history of Indians in Africa. It doesn't seem like it's a perspective that's been written about very much in previous literature.