You Think You Know Me

Hanan is a clever, highly motivated student and when she passes the entrance exams for Grafton Grammar School she is overjoyed.  This is the first important step towards realising her ambition to attend medical school and follow in her late father’s footsteps.  However, her excitement begins to disappear as she realises she is one of the few Muslim pupils in the school, and not a welcome one, at that. In response to the many racist comments and behaviours she has to endure throughout her years at the school she follows her mother’s dictate that ‘a closed mouth is gold’ and simply does not respond to the hatred around her, however difficult that may be.

Matters are brought to a head when the beloved school caretaker – a friend to many students, including Hanan – is murdered by a man identified as Muslim. The predictable backlash on the Muslim community, fuelled by tabloid newspapers and social media, hits Hanan hard and Mohamud’s dialogue and narrative structure place the reader in the centre of the vortex, alongside Hanan. A vicious cycle of violence begins which Hanan and her family must endure, just as they did in Somalia, seeing their father shot dead in front of them.

Hanan’s breaking point comes when her beloved twin brother Hussein becomes briefly involved in low-key criminal activity and she is attacked when she follows him to discover what he’s doing. In defending her, Hussein is stabbed and almost dies. When local newspapers report the incident their sympathies are all with the white attacker and his protestations of temporary imbalance marring an otherwise flawless character. Hanan decides to make a very public stand at the school’s conference on diversity – no more silence, only strength in her beliefs.  Her speech is a masterfully written paean to faith, diversity, clearly demonstrating that she has finally made the decision who she wants to be, without any holding back.

Mohamud, also a Somalian, has written from her own experiences of Islamophobia, vividly creating a community with a rich and vibrant culture and facilitating access to it not only through Hanan, her family and friends but with the inclusion of a glossary of habitually used words and phrases and a note from the author explaining her reasons for writing this, her first book. You Think You Know Me shows that you never do, if you view a person only through the lenses of faith and colour.