Literary Fiction by People of Color discussion

Hello everyone,

I'm excited to share my coming novel, The Gospel according to Uhura, and I can think of no better place to discuss its themes of cultural displacement, inherited faith, and the search for a new moral language than this community.

The novel follows Hamid Rahman, a young Afghan refugee whose perilous journey to seek asylum in the UK is a spiritual one. Arriving on British soil, he carries a profound crisis of faith—his traditional certainty shattered by the political violence and hypocrisy he fled.

In the isolation of the UK's asylum system, Hamid is torn between despair and the seductive comfort of fundamentalist certainty. His intellectual quest leads him to two unlikely guides: a Nigerian-British Muslim convert caseworker and a Sufi-leaning librarian. This search ultimately culminates in a peculiar source of truth: the 1960s television show Star Trek: The Original Series.

Through the ethical dilemmas of Captain Kirk and the logic of Mr. Spock, Hamid constructs a new moral framework based on reason, universal ethics, and the Prime Directive.

Hamid finds his new "gospel" in practical service within the refugee community, adopting the Star Trek communications officer, Nyota Uhura, as his personal spiritual archetype. Uhura is the essential figure who ensures understanding and dialogue across divides.

The novel’s final question is: What kind of faith can a displaced person build when all their certainties are gone? The answer it provides is that true faith is not certainty, but a commitment to the ongoing work of justice and connection.

To kick off the discussion, I would like to offer free PDF or EPUB copies of The Gospel according to Uhura to anyone interested in reading and sharing their thoughts here.

To receive a copy, please simply reply to this post with the word "Uhura" or "Request" and let me know your preferred format (PDF or EPUB). I will follow up with you via private message to arrange the file transfer.

I would love to hear your thoughts: The novel grapples directly with the legacies of Western and non-Western cultural frameworks. Do you think a character finding their moral compass in an American science fiction series, integrating it with their Muslim background, resonates with the theme of identity in displacement?

Thank you for letting me share, and I look forward to your feedback!