“Oh Crap! Is a memoir about a London boy discovering his ethnic roots in the Kashnir region of Pakistan. His culture shock drives the story with warmth and incredulous joy.”
OH CRAP! by Zubair Manzoor
Reviewed by Philo O’fuose
Rating: 3.5 STARS
As one might tell from the title, the memoir has something to do with using the toilet. But it goes far beyond that. The author has used access to a something so personal and mundane as a proper toilet facility as a metaphor for the staggering contrast between the life he has left behind in London and the new life he is navigating in his home village. The young Manzoor, seven at the time, takes us down his memory lane. ,
To his extended family that included his dearly beloved grandmother who held the home and ran it smoothly and his scarcely vocal but ever present grandfather.
The memoir, laid bare to the reader the heartbreak of a young boy whose parent had left him in a jaring new world with people that were more or less strangers, and the emotional emptiness that comes with it. But it also carried with it the warm feeling of experiencing through the author’s eyes, they constant aspiration for changes unfoldeding in the village like the promise of electricity and yes, a brand new toilet being dug in his compound.
The writing is straightforward, casual and yet, authoritative. The author had noted in the opening pages that he felt like it was his seven year old self writing, that much was reflected in the innocence of his prose. One could feel it from first page to the last they were being told a story through the eyes of a seven year old boy who doesn’t know all the answers to the the puzzles of their new society and yearns for home, even as this new place is fast becoming one.
Oh Crap! is a beauty to read, Manzoor is clearly a brilliant storyteller. The worldview is hilarious. Readers who aren’t conversant with the culture of Pakistan and Kashmir might still end up confused with many aspects in the book. This is the only problem I was left with after reading it. I will highly recommend for anyone interested in reading stories that contrasts cultures. To anyone keen to see a geopolitically important city in its early 80s rawness through the eyes of an outsiders that should and becomes an insider, this is the book you should read.