Erum Shazia Hasan

Hasan’s début novel begins with promise and intelligence. It focuses on Maya, a woman who works for a Geneva-based NGO dedicated to running orphanages in Africa. As the book opens, she has been directed to travel to the (fictional) village of Likanni in an unnamed African nation to deal with a scandal. Marc, a colleague with whom Maya worked for a decade, has been accused of the rape of twenty-year-old Lele, a local girl who assisted with administrative duties at the Likanni site. Maya was the one who allowed the child to shadow her on the job some years before. Now, in response to Lele’s sexual assault, violence looms. Enraged locals have gathered for days outside the charity’s office in the repurposed dormitory of a former Catholic monastery. All staff but Marc and his supervisor, Chantal, both French nationals, have been sent home.

Since Maya forged such strong bonds with the people of Likanni during her years there, she’s considered the ideal official to calm the volatile situation. Ostensibly, her job is to investigate the allegations and report to headquarters, but the real expectation is that the charity’s brand be preserved so that valuable donors aren’t lost. As far as Maya is concerned, this is her last undertaking on behalf of the NGO. She’s had enough of the work and is convinced that the West is largely responsible for the very problems it purports to be addressing. She wearily observes that if humanitarian workers are in the field long enough, they can no longer feel at home anywhere. The superficiality and materialism of the West are intolerable, while remaining in war-torn, famine-prone regions becomes untenable. Once idealistic do-gooders have witnessed so much cruelty, violence, and suffering that they become blank, incapable of feeling much of anything at all.

Since Maya took on an administrative role in the organization five years earlier, she has typically travelled to Africa only a couple of times a year to perform oversight. Even that has become too much. She now has a young daughter, and her marriage to an older, wealthy, high-powered lawyer is on the rocks. She’s well aware that her husband is having an affair and that when she’s away he brings his paramour to their high-end L.A. home. Another interesting detail about the main character is that she herself was an orphan, adopted from Bangladesh by solidly middle-class, white Californian parents. She has no connection with or feeling for the South Asian country she was born in, no familiarity with its culture, but is frequently asked by Americans where she’s from and notices that people are puzzled by her lack of an accent. In Africa, though, Maya is never taken for anything other than a “First Worlder.”

I was initially very impressed by this novel. It’s full of sharp—and sometimes scathing—insights and observations about humanitarian work and those who are drawn to it. The early part of Maya’s investigation into the Likanni scandal is handled well and convincingly by the author. Maya comes across as ethical, principled, and determined to handle the matter fairly. She knows both parties, Marc and Lele, and in fact credits the former with having saved her life during a traumatic period in Likanni. However, the novel takes a real nosedive just past the halfway point. What seemed to be a serious and realistic work of fiction addressing a compelling and topical matter turns into a melodramatic thriller, largely because of the author’s clumsy introduction of an unconvincing local character. Credibility is sacrificed to a twisty plot. Maya goes rogue, behaving like an unhinged teenager.

My overall impression is that Hasan wasn’t clear about the sort of book she wanted to write. Hopefully, with her next effort she’ll know.… (meer)

In We Meant Well, the tautly written debut novel from Erum Shazie Hasan, Maya has worked for many years for an international charity, rising through the ranks to become director of the charity’s field office in Likanni, a small, isolated village in central Africa. The charity’s mandate is to improve the lives of children left orphaned by conflict and disease, and every year uses its stellar reputation and aggressive marketing to attract millions in donations from people all over the world. As the novel opens, Maya has taken a step back from the Likanni field office and handed the reins to Chantal, a colleague. At home in Los Angeles, where she is living with her husband and daughter, she answers the phone in the middle of the night. It is the charity’s head—in full damage-control mode—calling from Geneva to tell her that she must return to Likanni immediately to deal with an emergency. Marc, one of the field office staff—a colleague with whom Maya worked for years—has been accused of assaulting a woman from the local community. Though reluctant to leave her daughter, Maya complies, and, following an arduous journey, arrives in Likanni to find the charity’s compound surrounded by protesters. By now, Maya has learned that Marc’s accuser is Lele, a girl she knows well, the daughter of a local chief. Lele was also working in the field office, a position that Maya had secured for her. Maya narrates the story of her investigation into the circumstances surrounding an incident that, if handled poorly, could damage the charity’s global reputation and threaten its ability to attract funding. Facing pressure from the Geneva office to deal quickly and decisively with a situation that is turning more complex by the hour, Maya is also reeling from the discovery that her husband is having an affair. We Meant Well depicts a strong young woman pushed to the brink, grappling with personal and professional betrayals, who finds herself forced to confront an array of unpleasant realities, about herself, her work, and the people she thought she could trust. Hasan’s novel also comments on a bigger picture, regarding Western interference in the affairs of poorer nations, and suggests persuasively that good intentions don’t always mitigate the damage done. We Meant Well, in the diverting manner of a whodunit, grips the reader from the first page. But this is also a bluntly told story of human weakness and moral failure in which “truth” ultimately proves elusive.… (meer)