Salutation Road: Immigration, life and an alternative existence

In Sirad, the twentysomething protagonist of Salutation Road, I think many of us will find ourselves. She is a young woman struggling under the weight of our ruthless world, torn between competing demands: capitalism versus spirituality, culture versus individualism, stability versus loyalty.

Like us all, she is simply trying to survive the everyday and apprehended with a desire to shape a better life for herself and her family. 

At its core, this is a story of a woman who boards the usual commuter bus to work one morning from Greenwich and finds herself transported to her ancestral homeland of Mogadishu, face to face with an alternate version of herself and her family.

But bubbling under the surface is an interrogation of what it means to be a migrant, to be young, to live in a world that is both more connected yet more isolated than ever.

The twentysomething Malaise

It is often said that today’s twentysomethings are simply living an extension of their childhood. House prices keep them living at home until the cusp of thirty and beyond.

Our atomised, computerised world makes real connections harder to find — romantic relationships are harder to forge and friendships harder to maintain. The careers they have been told to work towards for their entire lives whittle into inadequacy within an economy in which everyone is struggling to get by. 

We see this captured by Sirad’s own experiences in Salutation Road. She is a woman within her own right but remains bound to her younger brother and mother through responsibility — yes, through love but also through the duty of paying the bills.

She clings to her old school friendships, her childhood bond with a local librarian and a somewhat inexplicable connection with a friend who doesn’t seem to understand her at all despite knowing her almost all her life. In many ways, Sirad never fully grows up — something I think many of us can empathise with. 

There is a certain nihilism in Sirad that I think we all feel to an extent in a world that has numbed us; we see this most in her reluctance to have a child in her thirties.

Unlike previous generations who may have never thought otherwise, she dreads crippling herself with further lifelong responsibility, her disillusionment with the state of our fractured society driving her to fear the prospect of welcoming new, innocent life.

It is refreshing, and even a little surprising, to see this hesitance within the bounds of a Muslim story. Wanting to be childless as a woman within many minority communities is still strictly taboo and Sirad’s internal struggles add an authentic sheen to the story and depth to her character. 

Post-Brexit angst

Salutation Road is set in 2016 just after the Brexit referendum, and it smacks of the zeitgeist of its moment. The hostility towards foreigners; the narrative about an influx of migrants taking over Britain; and the rejection felt by many ethnic minorities at the time, who even started considering abandoning Britain for their ancestral homelands, spurred by the knowledge that a vote for Brexit was evidence that their adopted home never wanted them in the first place.

This national apprehension is tangible in the novel and it feels like there is a sense of instability — of communities turning on each other, of the entire country holding its breath and being unsure of what comes next. 

There are other quintessential hallmarks of the time, too. We see the gang violence epidemic in Sirad’s and her mother’s fear for Ahmed, her younger brother, every time he leaves the house.

Now and again, the narrative is punctured with the news of yet another young boy being stabbed to death somewhere in London — a pervasive, constant reminder that being young and black in Britain, especially as a teenage boy, is as physically dangerous as it is precarious. 

The universal migrant experience 

In many ways, Salutation Road is an interrogation of the universal migrant experience — both of first-generation migrants and their progeny.

There are many scenes in the novel that any child of immigrants would see flickers of familiarity within: the tenderness with which our mothers cook us the food of our homelands or fill our homes with an otherwise forgotten native tongue; the burden of supporting migrant parents with official appointments, with bills, and nursing them through their homesickness; the way being an outsider in Britain eventually ruins you, in one way or another.

Though as universal as the presentation of the migrant experience is, it is also undoubtedly specific to the context of Somalia and the legacy of the civil war that impacted communities and families for generations to come.

It strikes me that what eventually happens between Sirad and her double is perhaps a metaphor for how civil war turns a fractured nation in on itself.

Speculative fiction as a vehicle for introspection

Perhaps the most compelling elements of the novel and something that I wish was explored a little further, are the parts that lie just outside of reality. 

Salutation Road is an example of speculative fiction — a genre that takes our world and pushes it one step further, incorporating futuristic or supernatural elements. The novel transcends the boundaries of what is real and possible, and the notion of an alternate version of ourselves, existing somewhere in our ancestral homeland asks an interesting question about how different we would be if our families had lived a different history, chosen a different path amidst war or poverty or instability. 

Any of us whose families come from somewhere else have asked ourselves the question: What if we had stayed? How different would I be now? 

Salutation Road takes that quandary and turns it into reality — poking the bear of our internal conflicts. The futuristic elements of the story cleverly allow Sirad to do what we can’t: the unique opportunity to face this question head on and actually meet this alternative version of herself. 

What Sirad does is perhaps not what any of us would expect we would do, but maybe it’s inevitable in a nation like Britain that changes us in more ways than we can know.

Nadeine Asbali is a secondary school teacher in London and a freelance writer. She is the author of Veiled Threat: On Being Visibly Muslim in Britain

Follow her on Instagram: @nadeinewrites

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