Forest Gate Paperback – 19 March 2009

Powerful story helping you to understand dysfunctional mindsets of kids in gangs. A great piece of work. Well done.

For those of us who think of Somalia as a land inhabited by roaming gangs and pirates, this hard, uncompromising story should remind us that as with every country we know little about, it contains a rich and complex society. Certainly it is full of terrible violence and danger, so much so that many flee, but these refugees who have ended up in the urban wasteland of East London have not necessarily improved their lot. In "Forest Gate" they face brutality and bigotry and have to deal with a new - though not totally unfamiliar - structure of territorial gangs.A group of brothers in the story, not just thugs but highly sophisticated and thoughtful, survive by drug dealing. Says the brother known as "5:" "In the space of five years I've accumulated over thirty bank accounts. There's just under sixty thousand pounds in each one. Why just under sixty?" His brother James knows "that's the limit an individual is allowed in this country without risking the financial authorities being contacted behind their backs..[]..Swiss bank accounts are overrated." But in the end the dealing exacts a terrible price on their souls.Successive chapters are narrated in various person's voices. Woven into their lives is Meina, the sister of Ashvin, a close friend of the group who commits suicide at the beginning of the story, and a white ex-cop and/or intelligence agent, Bloom, who is a sort of godfather or uncle to them all: he had been a friend to Meina's father in Somalia, before her parents were killed before her eyes. Then there is the ineffectual gay psychotherapist, delineated with mordant strokes, who is all to clearly smitten by James and dismissed for that reason, and the detective who plans to get the gang for their dealing but who is changed by events...Plenty of depth here.There is far too much going on to summarize here. The writing is sharp and crisp - there's a neat set of descriptions of Meina's fellow passengers on the Underground: one fat woman is "eating chicken from a greasy red box" and "had a handbook in her hand, 'Basic Nursing.' She'd be the last person whose face I'd want to see if I was sick."Looking over what I've written, I can see readers asking "So where does the "inspiring" come from?" Two sources: the reminder that every human being has depths that are denied by the blight of stereotyping, and the sense of a new dawn, in a new place, at the very end.A book not to be missed.

Forest Gate tells the story of a young man and a young woman who are trying to find their way through some difficult times in the slums of East London. James is from a troubled English family. His mother is addicted to drugs and his siblings are all dealing. Meina, on the other hand, is a recent immigrant from Somalia. Her parents have been murdered and she was subsequently "sold" into marriage six times. Now she is in London, shepherded only by a somewhat suspect public official, and struggling to understand the cues of this new culture. When Meina's brother falls to his death from the heights of one of the Council Estate towers, Meina and James are left to sort it out.It is hard to look past the symbolism of this kind of death. Place matters, and here, place can kill. Why would Ashvin jump? It all points to his reaction to the soul-crushing place where he was taken, upon exile from Somalia. While he understands that he has come to the free world, and to one of the richest cities on earth, he only sees hate and poverty.This book builds well. It has a powerful beginning. The author establishes the personalities of the characters in the first few chapters. To me, the only let down was the trip taken by James and Meina out into the country. It is interesting to meet James' step sister, but in doing so, we have to move away from the tension that is brewing back in London. It is as if the characters flee before the book can realize its possibilities.The author has a nice way of telling a story. His sentences are direct, compact, and visual. That pacing is broken up by some evocative passages. One of my favorites is at the beginning of the book, when Meina thinks about her youth in Somalia. The other interesting thing about this book is the number of times that the author inserts references to important books. James Baldwin's writing is mentioned several times, as are the books of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. To me, this seems curious. Would teenagers in London, even ones with a understanding of race and history, reach for works by African-Americans?I have been looking for this book, in a general sense, for a long time. I am intrigued by these tall towers that were built with good intentions in the 50s and 60s. The idea was to create model cities with expansive park land, dotted with an occasional skyscraper. In Le Corbusier's vision, everyone would have access to fresh air and open space, even the poor. Le Corbusier had it wrong. Wherever these vertical cities were built, they produced social problems. "There Are No Children Here," by Alex Kotlowitz, is a great piece of narrative non-fiction that portrays the lives of small children living in the Chicago Housing Authority projects. The film "La Haine" is a disturbing film that shows how the same ideas are failing in the outskirts of Paris right now. In this case, Akinti is bringing some of the same problems to light, but through the experience of life in East London's Council Estates. "Forest Gate" might not have the scope of those two works, but it is still drawing on the same ideas. It is also hard to ignore how the Twin Towers, while not built as housing, were the object of so much anger.This would be a good book for people that enjoy literature with a social message.

In the old council flats of London, a tragic event ripples through gang and racial warfare. James, a local black British teen from a *successful*crack-dealing family, and his best friend, Ashvin, a poet-loving Somali refugee, jump off a towering building, nooses around their necks, in a suicide pact. Ashvin dies and James survives. Ashvin's sister, Armeina (Meina), hooks up with James in shared grief to forge a tentative but tender friendship. This is their story.There is a lot of potential in this plaintive novel of redemption. It has heart, and it murmurs. It doesn't quite sing, though. The story is narrated largely through Meina, with a few sections by James and other characters. The primary problem is that the author didn't adequately distinguish the separate voices of James and Meina--they are too similar. Even the cadence is synonymous, which you wouldn't expect from two people from separate countries and disparate backgrounds. Meina was raised in an educated home, by intellectual parents, and witnessed their terrifying, horrifying massacre at the hands of the Ethiopians during civil war strife. James was reared by the horrors and betrayals of his family and neighborhood. The lack of narrative distinction distracted and removed me from the immediacy of the story and conferred an unnatural tenor.The book was described as tautly constructed, written with a controlled rage. I disagree. Rather, the voices were a bit precious and lacking in the subtext necessary for the reader to register the contained rage. There was restraint, but it was unintentional. The wattage was dimmed by authorial trepidation, as if Akinti was unsure of asserting the fury of his characters. This created a languid tone and lack of muscle in the prose delivery. It felt like he was playing it safe to ensure that we connected with and liked the characters. I would have preferred that he liberate himself from that self-conscious mode and get out of his own way.Interestingly, his graphic scenes are very well done, crafted with menacing weight. They were not gratuitous. On the contrary, they exploded with tormenting finesse, like a coiled thunder. It permeated the prosaic air with a crackling heat. The violence that the Somalians endured during more than dozen civil wars is heartbreaking. And the devestrating terrors perpetrated on the youth in this London neighborhood are merciless and harrowing.If this debut novel went through a few more drafts, it could be a dazzling, evocative story, as Akinti's talent is evident. I look forward to seeing how he evolves.

This novel really knocked me out. A story of Somalian immigrant teenagers in a high-rise London council estate, it reminded me of Some Dream of Fools about immmigrant Algerian teenagers in a high-rise project on the outskirts ofParis, and also of Clint Eastwood's film Gran Torino, about immigrant Hmong teenagers in Detroit. The story thus is both personal and universal. The author is Nigerian, and now lives in the U.S., but he actually grew up in Forest Gate and must have seen a lot of what took place in the book. Worldwide, people are learning that the old rules and the old values don't necessarily work. The atmosphere is rife in all three of these stories and in reality, with gangs, guns and drugs. Ashvin, a Somalian boy, and James, his best friend, decide their only way out is through a suicide pact. They are going to put nooses around their necks and jump from the roofs of their buildings. Ashvin is killed, but James lives. He begins a relationship with Ashvin's sister Meina, but he's still in the same surroundings. His mother is a crack addict, his five brothers all are drug dealers, his father was shot and killed. He tells his half-sister, London takes no prisoners. But Meina, whose parents were murdered by Ethiopian soldiers in Somalia, disagrees. She escaped from a much worse environment. After a series of horrific events, the story ends on a hopeful note in a totally surprising place. James and Meina, despite all they have lived through, may have a future together after all. The book is not pretty, but it is well-written and takes you inside the newspaper headlines you read every day. Highly recommended.