Interrogating your privilege can be a divisive, somewhat uncomfortable endeavour – but the way it underpins everyday lives makes for great fiction.
It’s a topic that has been explored via familial relationships in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, through the employer-employee dynamic in Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, and in a schoolgirl narrative in Alice Pung’s teen novel Laurinda.
Australian author Zeynab Gamieldien’s second book, Learned Behaviours, also tackles the issue, via a murder mystery: a searing look at how the intersections of race, class and gender can affect the trajectory of a person’s life, even when they no longer seem consequential.
It follows Zaid, a prospective barrister who has made considerable efforts to shed his past in a diverse outer part of Sydney known to locals as The Area, which he describes as a “broad collection of western Sydney suburbs with Canterbury-Bankstown at its heart”. He has travelled overseas, lived in London, drives a Mercedes, and works a job that sees him socialise with the wealthier and whiter north shore and eastern suburbs types on weekends. There he “assume[s] the role of informant” on the quirks of his past life; it’s a currency he trades off in his new world.
That past comes back to him in the form of Amira, the sister of his high school best friend, Hass, who killed himself after being arrested for the murder of a female friend in their final year of school. Amira has found Hass’s diary and asks Zaid to read it, convinced her brother might have been innocent. Her request draws Zaid back in time to confront painful memories, make rattling revelations and square up to his own role in his friend’s death.
Told between his high-school past and the present, Learned Behaviours isn’t a typical murder mystery. Fans of true crime and meticulously plotted crime fiction might find the ending lacks the kind of detail that provides closure; they might even scoff at the possibility that the police bungled the investigation so spectacularly. But this book is not about a clean finish or plausibility (I could never imagine the boys I know from The Area keeping a diary, for example). In it, the intricacies of the murder investigation take a back seat to the bigger themes of belonging, upward social mobility and wrangling a past that weighs heavy on your present – not just in Zaid’s case, but in that of his father, Tapey, who is constantly dwelling on the injustices he experienced in District 6 in apartheid South Africa.
Gamieldien has done an excellent job of interrogating privilege without being sententious or didactic. It’s in the cost of Zaid’s barrister training, which he feels more than his moneyed colleagues; it’s in the bills piling up in his father’s home, and Tapey’s reticence to seek compensation for the wrongs done against him; it’s in his sister Iman’s struggle to leave an abusive relationship in London and return home with a young child in tow.
Despite appearances, Zaid knows he has not really “made it”; he’s perpetually on the outer edge of his colleagues’ orbit, lacking the fancy school connections that are traded for favours in the workplace, and the weekends away at coastal second homes.
Like Gamieldien’s debut, The Scope of Permissibility – which explored the push-pull of faith and desire – Learned Behaviours explores social codes and what happens when they are broken. Zaid’s inability to swim is a motif, representing how the stark disparity between social classes is experienced on even the most mundane levels. Zaid does his best to rectify it, and the novel is littered with scenes where he plunges himself into bodies of water, hoping for a shift.
Early on in the story, Zaid realises that “‘making it’ is not synonymous with movement”, and that social climbing does not ensure success or belonging. As he ventures back to The Area more frequently – to continue visiting his father, yes, but also to spend more time with Amira – Zaid begins to recognise that getting out of The Area doesn’t mean escaping it.
Learned Behaviours is a pacy, compelling and immersive narrative that deftly tackles a weighty topic. It’s understated but sophisticated, with more than one tragedy at its heart: a murder, yes, but also a necessary reminder that some people can “afford missteps … requiring only a single step to get back on course”, while others need to tread more carefully, or risk being derailed for ever.
Learned Behaviours by Zeynab Gamieldien is out through Ultimo Press, $34.99
