Shahnaz Ahsan on why she wrote her book 'Hashim & Family' and the importance of archiving history

When I told my grandmother that I was writing a novel, she got cross. Why are you writing fiction? she asked. History is what matters, not stories. I told her that the book I was writing was inspired by her experiences as a young Bengali woman arriving in Britain in 1965. But people need to know that these things really happened, she said. It’s not just a story.

The demarcation between ‘history’ and ‘story’ is not as clear as my grandmother would like it to be. Every family history is crammed full of stories: the mundane, the fantastical, the brushes with danger, the victory of survival.

These tales are told at family gatherings, once everyone has eaten and the pots and plates have been cleared away.

We would gather together in one room, tucked into sofas, huddled together under blankets on the floor: sisters, cousins, aunties, mothers, all ready to hear those well-known tales with the same thrill they always brought. We had heard the stories so many times before – sometimes ghostly, sometimes scandalous, sometimes unbelievable, but always ours. There was the story of the time my great-great-grandmother chased a wandering tiger out of her kitchen. And the story of how my grandfather escaped arrest by the Pakistani Army during the Bangladesh Independence War in 1971 by promising to give the soldier a Marks & Spencer cardigan.

Late at night, sometimes my grandmother would tell us the story of the distant cousin who died at the bottom of a lake; they found her sitting perfectly cross-legged, serene, as though a water-spirit had taken her. I loved hearing all these stories; each one felt like a thread connecting me to a history longer and stronger than I could ever realise.

I was about eight years old when I first realised that some of these stories could be written down. I was rummaging in the attic and found a small red notebook – the first few pages were covered with my mother’s familiar writing. It didn’t seem like a diary, so I started to read. It was the beginnings of a story: a little girl has been woken in the middle of the night by her mother and told that they must flee – the army was coming. The women frantically gather a few precious items and set off with their children along the hidden pathways into the hills, making their way silently through the pitch dark to escape capture.

The men hide in the paddy-fields among their long stalks of rice, praying that they are not found by the ruthless soldiers. I recognised the story as one I had heard my mother telling many times before – it was her own experience of being in Bangladesh during the Independence War. She was the little girl in the story.

Thrilled by the possibility of being able to read, and not just hear, one of these familiar stories, I begged my mother to finish writing the story. 

I could not understand why stories like the ones my family told were not found in books, when they were the most captivating I had ever heard. It was my main motivation for writing Hashim & Family – a novel inspired by the experiences of my own family and set between Britain and Bangladesh over a period of twenty years.

When my grandmother began to read it, she started to understand why I had chosen to write fiction rather than record it as history – or the ‘truth’ as she saw it. It’s painful, she told my aunt. Too painful sometimes to read. The novel contains things that are drawn from the stories she shared with me: the horrors of war, but also the hostility and exclusion she felt in Britain – racism, violence, alienation. Some things are easier to say than to read.

But my grandmother’s commitment to preserving personal histories continues unwavering. In the wake of a horrific family tragedy – the death of her teenage son in a racist attack at school - both she and my mother worked with the University of Manchester to found a special library collection focused on the study of race, migration and ethnic diversity. Named after my uncle, the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre is housed in Manchester Central Library and hosts an archive including oral histories and testimonies from migrant women in Manchester of my grandmother’s generation.

There is a reason why ‘history’ matters so much to my grandmother. Like many other women of colour, she has the desire to be heard.

For her experiences to be acknowledged and recorded for what they are. While literature can be a vehicle for popularising these accounts, bringing them to a wider audience, the importance of recording and sharing migrant women’s experiences through oral and written testimony is integral to understanding not only the wider cultural and social history of Britain – but also to truly recognise and validate the lives of these women.

Shahnaz Ahsan is an author. Her debut novel Hashim & Family is out now.

You can buy it from Waterstones, Hive or get the ebook here.