''I only ever asked you for one thing,' my father said, a quiver in his voice. 'Just this one thing.' It was as though I had smashed the Ten Commandments.
'Oh father,' I cried in Arabic, grovelling at his ankles while my mother and siblings looked on. 'The one thing you ask of me - is everything.'
'Bani Adam has known all his life what was expected of him. To marry the right kind of girl. To make the House of Adam proud.
'But Bani wanted more than this - he wanted to make his own choices. Being the first in his Australian Muslim family to go to university, he could see a different way.
'Years later, Bani will write his story to his son, Kahlil. Telling him of the choices that were made on his behalf and those that he made for himself. Of the hurt he caused and the heartache he carries. Of the mistakes he made and the lessons he learned.
'In this moving and timely novel, Michael Mohammed Ahmad balances the complexities of modern love with the demands of family, tradition and faith. The Other Half of You is the powerful, insightful and unforgettable new novel from the Miles Franklin shortlisted author of The Lebs.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph :
'Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.'
- Gibran Kahlil Gibran
'This year’s Miles Franklin shortlist is lyrical in voice, complex in form, and perhaps a little more hopeful than usual. The threads of shared concern across the volumes leave me wondering whether there is something in the zeitgeist.' (Introduction)
'It was at a March 2002 camp at the Sydney Academy of Sport and Health where I overheard Steve Jones, who was awarded dux that year, talking about my family.' (Introduction)
At Home with Michael Mohammed Ahmad
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2021
23448980
2021
single work
podcast
interview
'Michael Mohammed Ahmad is the founding director of Sweatshop Literacy Movement and editor of the critically acclaimed anthology 'After Australia'. Mohammed's debut novel, 'The Tribe', won the 2015 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelists of the Year Award. His second novel, 'The Lebs', won the 2019 NSW Premier's Multicultural Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award. 'The Other Half of You' is his third novel.' (Production introduction)
'Michael Mohammed Ahmad completes an enthralling trilogy of autofiction with The Other Half of You, his third novel.'
'“Never marry an outsider, never have less than five children, never go against the family, never go against the village, and never question me.” So ran the script that Arab men in Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s family passed onto their sons.' (Introduction)
'The Other Half of You isn’t written just for all the readers out there who get what it’s like to be the child of migrant parents. It’s not just written for those who know already what it’s like to deal with growing up in a home where the culture on your doorstep is interpreted as threatening by the adults in the house. It’s not just written for those who know what it’s like to grow up where the only home you have known, Australia, consistently rejects you by asking you to be something other than yourself in order to belong. Arab people in particular, Muslim people more broadly speaking—for they are not interchangeable terms—are overwhelmingly regarded with suspicion and hostility here, and that changes what it is possible to say now.' (Introduction)
'Bani Adam returns as the narrator–protagonist of Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Other Half of You, a sequel to his two previous books. The most recent one, The Lebs (2018), gave us the story of Bani’s teenage years at Punchbowl Boys’ High School: the trials of a Lebanese Muslim boy in a majority Lebanese Muslim community nestled inside the larger, diverse territories of Western Sydney, in post-‘War on Terror’ Australia. The Other Half of You is an account of Bani’s late teens and early twenties, and of an inner conflict between religious, cultural, and romantic pieties.' (Introduction)
At Home with Michael Mohammed Ahmad
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2021
23448980
2021
single work
podcast
interview
'Michael Mohammed Ahmad is the founding director of Sweatshop Literacy Movement and editor of the critically acclaimed anthology 'After Australia'. Mohammed's debut novel, 'The Tribe', won the 2015 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelists of the Year Award. His second novel, 'The Lebs', won the 2019 NSW Premier's Multicultural Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award. 'The Other Half of You' is his third novel.' (Production introduction)
'It was at a March 2002 camp at the Sydney Academy of Sport and Health where I overheard Steve Jones, who was awarded dux that year, talking about my family.' (Introduction)
'This year’s Miles Franklin shortlist is lyrical in voice, complex in form, and perhaps a little more hopeful than usual. The threads of shared concern across the volumes leave me wondering whether there is something in the zeitgeist.' (Introduction)
