We sat down with Onjali Q. Raúf, author of Boy at the Back of the Class. For ticketing and info, please find here.
The Boy at the Back of the Class has touched readers around the world since its publication. When you first wrote the book, did you imagine it would resonate so widely with young audiences?
Honestly, I didn’t have the foggiest! My imagination didn’t stretch that far. I still find myself in awe at how far this story has travelled – and all the unexpected places it has carried me to. I came into the publishing industry with one simple goal: to get a story published. If it could help a kid, somewhere, anywhere, understand they weren’t alone in what they were going / have been through, then that would have been a bonus. But the book being taken into school curriculums? Kids raising tens of thousands of pounds for refugee charities around the world? Getting thousands of letters over the years from children asking how they could help refugees – or coming up with ideas of their own to do just that? Not an inkling!
The story explores the refugee experience through the eyes of a group of children. Why was it important for you to tell this story from a child’s perspective rather than through the adults around them?
Because children’s sense of justice isn’t muddied and erased by the ‘grey space’ of racisms and racist geopolitics that infiltrates and diminishes the same in adults. They don’t dehumanise their fellow human beings as easily and as swiftly as so many adults seem keen to. Most children – unless indoctrinated from a very young age – don’t care about skin colour or where someone is from, what they look like, what their history is. They just want to be friends and play. They get the basics of humanity – that hurting someone – anyone – is bad. That dropping bombs on someone and punishing people for the crimes of others is not justice. That war and violence harms innocents – and that all of the aforementioned is inexcusable. They also see through the hypocrisy of adults with a sharpness too many underestimate. It’s why this story, which essentially revolves around a group of children making friends with someone who has had everything taken away from him – only works with children in the mainframe. World weary cynicism and racist hate and ignorance hasn’t captured them. Yet.
Your work as a human rights activist clearly informs the themes of the book. How have your experiences working with refugee communities shaped the way you approached writing Ahmet’s story?
This story would never have been written if I hadn’t gone out to the refugee camps of northern France following the breaking of Alan Kurdi’s story in 2015. There’s only so much any of us can learn from the sofa, telly or phone screen – especially when consuming news spun by our media channels. Getting out physically into the forests and muddy fields of those so-called ‘camps’, and witnessing, as I still do, the horrific, inhumane situations which the bravest, most courageous members of the human race are being forced to bear at the hands of ‘developed’ nations (the very nations bombing their countries and stealing resources), led to anger. Anger led to questions – questions such as, what on earth are refugee children, often forcefully separated from their families, supposed to do? How are they supposed to survive any of this? What kind of world are we creating where one groups of kids have everything, and the other has everything taken away from the again and again and again? Those questions – triggered by my team and I meeting a four-day old baby called Raehan in 2017, and to whom the book is dedicated – led to the story. It was the only way that story could ever have been born. There’s no way it would have been conjured up without my actively being in those ‘camps’.
Seeing a beloved novel transformed for the stage can be quite a special moment for an author. What was it like for you to see Nick Ahad’s adaptation bring the characters and their journey to life in the theatre?
Surreal. It still is, and I think forever will be. Especially when I get to see and hear the reactions of audiences – children’s and adults alike. Nick has done such a spectacular job of not just lifting the story up into reality, but giving Ahmet a roar that even I didn’t foresee him having. Whilst Monique, the cast, and all the creative teams have done such a beautiful job of bringing the characters I once had in my head into 3D life, that some days I still think I’m hallucinating. I’ll never forget watching the show for the first time with Nick – and barely being able to hear a word because I couldn’t believe any of it was really happening. Few moments in my life will top seeing the play for the first time.
The book balances humour, adventure and emotional depth while addressing serious themes. Why do you think storytelling can sometimes open conversations with young people that news headlines cannot?
Because books, stories, characters, are safe spaces. We have so few of those growing up – spaces where we’re not being watched and tested and drilled and ordered around every minute, but where we are, as children, set free to roam new worlds, meet new people, explore our own reactions to events contained to the space of a page. Reactions that include a freedom to ask questions. Questions that ordinary school lessons and other grown-up led activities might not give rise to. Without that freedom to roam and wonder and go on new adventures, we would all be lost, and living much smaller, constrained lives.
At its heart, the story celebrates empathy and the idea that even children can make a difference. What do you hope young audiences take away from the story when they encounter it on stage?
Hopes? I have three. I want kids to see this show and leave with real, actual knowledge of what is happening right now, in our midst. Real knowledge of the inhumane situations children their age, in families just like their families, are having to endure. Next, I want them to know that their questions – they ones they have swirling away inside them, are game-changing tools capable of leading them to great adventures, should they have the courage to ask them. And finally, that they DO have power, agency, a role in the world, no matter what the adults of that world might tell them. A power that often starts with changing the experiences of that world for the better, one friend at a time. That’s all.