Tariq

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Tariq lives in the tower blocks at the edge of town, where there’s no power and the only way to charge your phone is at school or at the bar, a suburb where there’s nothing, where families struggle to survive. Tariq has a sister who works all the time and is among the few people who believe in him, an older brother who is a drunk and violent, an absent father who works double shifts at the feed mill, and a mother who takes care of his prematurely born younger brother full-time. Tariq is one of the few in the neighbourhood to attend secondary school, a language high school, that he wanted to enrol in at all costs, against all odds. Then things started to fall apart, everything crumbled and Tariq risks no longer finding, no longer seeing that path off the beaten track, far from a fate already written by the place where you live, free from the labels that are pinned on you and trap you. He does badly at school and becomes Tariq the fool, the troublemaker who frightens his teachers and prevents them from teaching, the one for whom there is no hope. So, when a letter arrives from the school announcing his suspension, Tariq guides us into his world, between bewilderment and fear as his faint hopes crumble. In the first-person story of a week in his life, the week that separates him from the parent-teacher-student meeting that will decide his fate, we follow Tariq around the neighbourhood. We enter his thoughts, his fears, his anxieties and his hopes, during those days of limbo, of frantic running until his muscles burn and his head clears, of hours spent in his freezing shelter among old tin cans. We join him inside those tower blocks with no electricity or heating, where the lifts do not work, among the burnt tyres people use to keep warm, among petty crime and the playground made of broken cars and old washing machines. Yet even in a place that is like a prison, a black hole that sucks in and swallows those who live there, there are those who try to escape a fate that is already written; there are glimmers of light in Tariq’s life, glances and words of care – few but meaningful –, that come from his sister and his peer Jasmine, who shares his stumbles and desire for redemption. Jasmine, who lives in the same block, attends science high school and is good, very good at biology. Jasmine, who is hungry for the future with her curiosity, determination and brilliant mind, who, like Tariq, believed she was different from the others living in that black hole, but then became pregnant and her life turned into confinement.
In less than a hundred pages, using concise, precise language and highly readable fonts, Tariq reminds us that there is always a glimmer of hope, that it is possible to try to free oneself from labels and stereotypes, that it is possible to be “different”.