Safia Fazlul's ​The Red One

Reviewed by Salma Hussain

(Mawenzi House, 2023)

Safia Fazlul’s sophomore novel, The Red One, was released in November 2023 through Mawenzi House. Mawenzi House, a small Canadian indie press, publishes about ten to twelve titles of fiction, poetry and non-fiction a year featuring voices from fresh, captivating, “multicultural” writers.
 
I first heard of The Red One because it was listed on CBC’s 30 Cdn Books to Read in Winter 2024. A few weeks later, Ali Hasan (author of Is There Bacon in Heaven?, and host and guest-host of various CBC shows) interviewed Fazlul on The Next Chapter. I looked up the synopsis of The Red One on the publisher’s website and was immediately fascinated: it was equal parts strange and compelling. Is this a thriller? With elements of magical realism? A feminist revenge fantasy, maybe?
 
I picked up the book and it turned out to be what my bookish friends and I call a “toothbrusher”—a book so engrossing that you can’t put it down (even while brushing your teeth). I inhaled it in two days, and I can now inform you that it’s a genre-busting novel composed of all three of the above—a thriller with elements of magical realism coalesced as a feminist revenge fantasy, and also, as I’ll explain below, so much more.
So.
                                Much.
                                                                    More.
 
The story starts off with twelve-year old Nisha’s sexual abuse and Nisha’s mother shaming her into silence. Nisha grows up, marries, and leaves her immigrant roots, but her childhood (shrouded as it was in secrecy and shame) does not permit Nisha to enjoy her newly-found material comfort. After Nisha starts using a fictional “red powder” and becomes increasingly dependent on it, the plot becomes super fast-paced and propulsive. The story takes twists and turns that I didn’t expect and all of a sudden (spoiler alert!), there’s a near-naked body, bound and gagged, in the trunk of Nisha’s car and Nisha must decide how to free herself from both the body and her own mind.
 
Fazlul’s frank examination of the ruinous aftermath of sexual assault, depression, PTSD, female rage, insular community approval, pretense and propriety is grim yet highly effective. When I say the novel is so much more, what I want to highlight is that the novel is concurrently a raw, unflinching depiction of a traumatized Muslim woman’s life lived under the mask of normalcy and a sharp middle finger to the inauthentic lives lived around her under the guise of propriety and piety. I’ve pulled these three quotes from the book to illustrate my point:

​My parents, Muslim Indians loyal to the traditions of the old country and obsessively religious, had a stellar reputation in the community. They valued their reputation more than they valued money because the latter they didn’t have and the former secured invitations to parties, networking, and a sort of social validation they could not get anywhere else.

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​I understand now the piety—just like everything else—was a show in the Khans’ world, there being an implicit competition on who could show more of it. The rich immigrants wanted the biggest house, the nicest car, the kid with the most degrees, and to off-set and conceal this blatant, un-Islamic greed, they also wanted to be the loudest Muslims.

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​A child of poor immigrants is a racehorse. Our parents had brought us to this Canadian track to win the race—their race. Having thrown aside their country, their families, the familiarity of an ancient culture, the race was now everything. The feelings of their children, their thoughts, their ambitions and personal battles simply did not matter.

​The above quotes are just from The Red One’s first chapter, mind you. The novel gets progressively more intense and blistering.
 
In one of the final chapters, Fazlul has this to say about the conversation between Nisha and a new friend:

​It’s an act of courage to reveal your sins to a fellow member in a community that derives entertainment and superiority from judging you. It’s an act of selflessness to admit your failings to make someone else with the same failings not feel alone. It’s an act of friendship.

​Fazlul may as well have been speaking about her own writing here—first and foremost, from the first word to the last, her novel is an act of radical courage and friendship.
 
Now allow me to also state the obvious: it’s terribly difficult writing complicated, messy female characters that challenge gender-based notions of shame, stigma and taboo. Readers (as in real life) prefer their literary female characters to be simple & palatable. They should fall into safe (and bland) identifiable tropes: the saint or the sinner. Fazlul adds to this already difficult task by creating a main character who is a married woman from an Indian Muslim immigrant background … and … well … now this is a very, very precarious undertaking indeed (speaking from experience as a fellow writer from an Indian Muslim immigrant background who writes ‘rebellious’ female Indian Muslim characters).
 
It goes without saying that when a writer from a Muslim background presents Muslim characters or communities, the expectation (and hope) often is that the representation will be positive and up-lifting, and that it will serve as a sort of buttress against the dismal reality of racism and Islamophobia in this country. However, this then leaves members of the community impoverished by the dearth of nuanced, challenging representations that do not infantilize or romanticize. We, like everyone else, need writing that grapples with the difficult truth of other dismal realities, i.e., sexual assault, patriarchy and sexism within our particular community (present in all communities, but present in unique culture-specific ways in our own). So where then to find provocative, intelligent representations that push and provoke us to critique our weaknesses and shortcomings so that our communities may work on improvement for the most vulnerable among us?
 
The answer lies in audacious, imaginative stories like Safia Fazlul’s The Red One--a novel that skillfully blurs reality and fantasy and offers a necessary, revolutionary third space. Talented, brave writers like Safia Fazlul appear prepared and equipped to lead us towards new and freeing terrain. The question remains as ever—are we willing to listen.

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​Salma Hussain writes poetry and prose. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Fiddlehead, The Humber Literary Review, Temz Review, Queens Quarterly, CV2, The Antigonish Review, The Hong Kong Review and Pleiades: Literature in Context. Her young adult novel, The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan, about a young girl’s immigration and menstruation journey, was published by Penguin Random House in 2022.