Shy Radicals,published by Book Works, 2017. All rights reserved.Hamja, a campaigner and art curator, isn’t an ordinary interviewee. Turning up in his Manic Street Preachers T-shirt, he looked intense the moment I saw him. He showed me into his local café in Tooting, the part of London town he grew up in, and pointed me to the table in the corner where he sat writing most of Shy Radicals: the Anti-systemic Politics of the Militant Introvert, a rare book that made me laugh and one that has puzzled many.
I suppose we read each book with the weight of our own history, and then our baggage merges with the author’s own. When I read Shy Radicals, a little girl came alive: the little girl who was silenced the moment she was brought into a class in a primary school full of pupils older than herself. Her grandmother worked as a full-time teacher there and had decided to let the school do the childcare for her. The child’s mum and dad lived in the city and were too busy to look after her themselves.
Barely five, this girl only knew how to be silent. She was made to sit through classes where loud pupils around her were keen to show their enthusiasm by collectively reciting stories and poems. They raised their hands, and answered every question put to them by teachers loudly and clearly. The little girl uttered no words, which marked her out as different and therefore odd. For the rest of her time in school she underwent extra training by a well-intentioned teacher who was determined she must be cured of her quietness.
