Brown Boy: A Memoir

Aziz’s memoir follows the familiar arch of the immigrant/minority story in which the protagonist works hard, overcomes racism and poverty, and finds success. His trajectory: Working class Pakistani family in a poor Toronto neighborhood, the shock of finding himself among privileged whites in college, adventures in Oxford and Yale, and then on to the corridors of power.

The book is at its most interesting when Aziz goes deeper into particularities: the fear of violence in the masjid, the fear of violence (again) in the ghettos of Paris, the suspicion from both Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem, the tokenism and politics of Yale, and the racism in Trudeau’s administration.

There are some unexplained holes in his story: Are we show more really to believe his life miraculously changed from shiftless "goon" (his term) to scholarship recipient just from seeing Obama speak on TV? What happened between graduation and becoming a foreign policy advisor to the Canadian prime minister?

Aziz writes well, if at times too melodramatically for my taste, and I kept thinking of him as the anti-Richard Rodriguez (the author of Hunger of Memory) — instead of falling for the myths of meritocracy and assimilation, Aziz says he wants to help open the world for other Brown people. Let's hope he does. show less

This is a book which is both encouraging and disheartening. Omer Aziz relates his experiences as the child of Pakistani immigrants to Canada, his parents hopes for his future, how he turned a disregard for education into a desire for the best education, and how he experienced the disillusionment of system racism in the position he held after graduating from Yale Law School.

I thought the book was an honest rendering of his experiences, but there were two things with which I was not comfortable. The first was the opening chapter of the book in which the author was pulled out of a group of white tourists to be interrogated by Israeli police? Was this supposed to be a political statement? The second was that his quest to become more highly show more educated happened in an instant, almost miraculous sudden awakening.

Other than those two issues, the book addresses the issues of a person of color trying to “make it” in an elite, dominant white society. I especially liked the last chapter in which the author visits Pakistan to learn more about his roots. show less