Across Times
In 2019, I was commissioned to write a speculative fiction short story for an anthology called After Australia, published by Affirm Press. My short story was called White Flu, and Affirm loved it so much they contracted me to write my debut novel. When the spec fic anthology came out, my contribution caused a racist stir, upsetting local white supremacists. I’ve talked about this before. One thing I haven’t talked about much is an event for the anthology that was later put on by the City of Melbourne, who asked me to write a short piece in the lead-up for their website.
I was happy to do so, and wrote something I thought spoke well to the concerns and ideas in After Australia, and which everyone involved—the editor, publisher, City of Melbourne program producer—loved. It was accepted, until someone higher up on the government chain happened to read the piece, and killed it before publication. Why? Because it featured a fictional, violent scene wherein a character whipped a dog. I was not asked to change or edit the work, it was simply killed.
I don’t know why this came into my thoughts today, but I admit to both annoyance and regret, because if the piece had been published, well, it might have gone some way to preventing certain dull reductive takes on my novel, even though the book I ended up writing is considerably different to the original story, not only in genre but most notably in its perspective, which shifted from first person narration to third.
The connecting thread is the preface in Son of Sin, a single paragraph told by the protagonist Jamal, which implies that the character is present and telling this story to an undisclosed narrator. I’ve received many reviews for my novel, and weirdly, none of them mention this; I really thought I was doing something obvious with that shift, but here we are. You never know how you’re going to be read—case in point, I for damn sure didn’t think fictional dogs being whipped would be read as more offensive or concerning than, say, the very real violence against Muslims referenced in the piece.
In any case, here is the piece in question. It’s called “Across Time with the Character Jamal Khaddaj Smith.”
ACROSS TIMES WITH THE CHARACTER JAMAL KHADDAJ SMITH
In the year 2020, the publication of a speculative fiction story titled White Flu stirred hysterical white supremacists into a nonsensical fury. Jamal Khaddaj Smith, narrating from an indeterminate timeline, told of a period in his life in which a mysterious pandemic broke out that seemed to be affecting people of Anglo heritage more than brown and black peoples, according to media overwhelmingly run by people of Anglo heritage, in a colonial society with a government also overwhelmingly white. It was not well received. I was lucky enough to secure a video call through space-time with this young man, a queer Arab not unlike myself, and ask him for more information.
“Are you in lockdown, cuz?” I said. His video was still resolving, and when it did, I struggled to hide my surprise.
“That’s long over, alhumdulilah,” he said, rubbing his white goatee. “You?”
“Sorta. It’s all over the place, but unevenly, you know?”
Jamal shrugged. “I can’t say.”
I should have upgraded my subscription to this program, on basic we only have 40 minutes, so I push ahead. “Look, I need to ask: since you’re from the future, do all the white people die?”
He laughed. “The future according to whom?” Someone called to him out of frame and he looked away for a second, responding softly. There were liver spots on his golden skin. A child scrambled into his lap and he kissed her forehead, her tight brown curls. “Hi Amo,” he said, and tried to hold her, but she squirmed away.
“Sorry, what do you mean?” I said.
He sighed. “In my life, in every life, there are countless timelines converging and diverging. How did you say it—all over the place, but unevenly. None of us live in the same world. You learn this as you age.”
“I don’t understand, could you be more cryptic?” It’s rude to be snarky with your elders, or any elders, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Even when you read a book,” he said, his eyes warm still, lips quirked in a smile, “the book exists in its own time, it has its own concerns, and is separate to us, even to the author.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but he continued—“Even!” he said, jabbing his finger in the air, and I heard the Leb resurface in his voice then, “Even in your own mind, you can travel in time. I visit my younger self often.”
“Okay, well, speaking simply for your time, since it’s your story, can you tell me what happens to the people?” I explained what went down. The death threats and harassment here in response to his life. As the interview was occurring, my phone buzzed: the Australian white supremacist who murdered 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, had just received a prison sentence of life without parole.
“I can’t say,” he said, “who knows when my story, my time, will connect with yours again? It’s best not to mess around with it too much.”
I swallowed my frustration. “Do you believe in fiction?”
He smiled. “Everything is fiction, habibi. The only truth you find will be in the hereafter.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s agree you wrote this fiction, and like all stories, it escaped you, and wormed its way through any number of timelines, why did you write it that way?”
Jamal sucked on his lips thoughtfully. “When I was a boy, my cousin Ali had a red-nose pitbull, you know? Her nose was actually pink, but anyway, he called her Red, because he had no imagination. She was a beauty, a real lean brown machine.” His gravelly voice was wistful, and I could tell he was gone, he was there again. “He liked to show her off to us, to anyone who came over. He’d get a tea towel out and present it to Red, he wanted her to latch on, to show off her lock-jaw, then he’d pull as hard as he could—and Ali, you gotta know, he was huge, tall and ripped, strong as—his biceps would tense and he’d lift and lift until her whole body writhed in the air, and still she wouldn’t let go. He was so proud of her, she was meant to protect his gear, you know. Truth is, she was a softie, and she loved us, and we loved her.”
He took a sip of water, and his hand shook as he raised the glass.
“Anyway, one day I was taking Red for her daily walk. We were walking past Mick’s place when one of his dogs, a real mutt of a thing, stocky and white, burst out from under his shitty fence. I tried to hold Red back, but the leash whipped out of my hands in the first second and she was off. They met in the middle of the road, snarling. Snarling. A sound like you wouldn’t believe. Bikies on the highway make less noise than these dogs, and the sound, it was alive, a hideous thing. I didn’t know what to do, I was petrified, but my body wasn’t waiting for me to make up my mind—I bolted back home.”
He paused. “You ever been so scared the world shakes to the beat of your heart? I’ve never run so fast. There was no one home, but I knew, suddenly, what I was running to, and once inside I grabbed one of Ali’s belts. Then I bolted back to the dogs, still ripping into each other, tumbling, brown and white, and red too where their blood showed, and I started whipping the fucking things. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was screaming. The belt slashed down, again and again, until I registered the yelps, and they scrambled apart, Red mewling at my feet while the white mutt limped back to its yard.”
I watched him return to his eyes. “It’s like that,” he said. “Society is like those dogs, and the story is the belt. I gotta whip you, gotta scream til my throat is raw, just so you hear me, so you know I’m there.”