★★★★★
Sometimes, cities are disguised as characters – housing signs, emotions and memories. Part of the festival’s Writing the City series, the Urban Institute’s Beth Perry converses with Sufiyaan Salam on his debut novel Wimmy Road Boyz. The story features Immy, Khan and Haris – ambitious and frustrated to boot – as they set off down Manchester’s Curry Mile for an energetic night of friendship and fun.
It is the urban North, Salam’s hometown of Blackburn, that shapes his explorations of place and gender. It seems having “met a ton of interesting characters” growing up does wonders for fleshing out a cast that is exciting to read about whilst remaining believable. For our main three, their emotional repression is represented through their occupation of the same physical space, the car, yet their minds are completely elsewhere. Salam also flips the coin by using external characters – the homeless man, thin white duke and street preacher – to respectively interrogate the protagonists’ inner monologue. Perry notes that they felt like Dickens’ ghosts of Past, Present and Future, to which Salam admits is probably a better comparison. His “three weird guys” were modelled after the three witches in Macbeth, serving as an eclectic allegory for the dilemmas ahead.
The characters are of a Pakistani Muslim background, and Salam repeatedly emphasises that this is “a British night out, but the flavour is just the one I grew up in”. He moved to Manchester in 2016 and found the transition dramatic, with its newly transformed skyline and much nicer district of Ancoats. He appreciates Manchester’s dynamic nature and how the city sees itself as an “underdog” yet contains million-dollar businesses. Perry compares the city’s lack of political bravado to how the boys in the novel are unable “to shout about themselves”. Understandably so, as Salam reveals he wrote the book with the UK race riots and conversations about what it means to be British at the back of his mind.
In this way, “the book is about rage” above all else. Salam argues that this rage needs to be well-directed. In the Taste of Lahore chapter, one of the boys flirts with a female character and Salam switches to the second-person point of view. This allows the boys to be seen in another light, showing that the “mess of their lives was also affecting the women in their lives”. In a book that targets toxic masculinity, it is a no-brainer that the perspective of women is utilised to show the outward consequences of its internal failure.
Reading out a passage from Wimmy Road Boyz, it is clear that seamless multilingual dialogue, overflowing similes and well-placed slang give life to a unique plot and characters who move beyond the stereotypical boundaries placed on their racial group. Flitting from Sabrina Carpenter to Salman Toor, Salam “wanted to balance the fun and serious”. He makes a point to portray these young working-class brown men as multi-faceted – well-versed in knowledge yet capable of making dumb emotional decisions – emphasising their humanity in a world that often forgets it.
