Identifying with Terrorists: Reading and Writing Others In Sunjeev Sahota’s Ours Are the Streets

Sunjeev Sahota’s novel Ours Are the Streets tells the story of a young British Muslim man’s path to radicalization. It appears to be another fictional attempt to ‘get inside’ the terrorist mind. This essay argues, however, that the text dramatizes the pitfalls of empathic identification via a focalizing character whose mental state becomes unstable and his narrative increasingly unreliable. The protagonist’s uncontrolled Theory of Mind causes him to misrecognize others and their motives, even as he seeks solidarity. The reader too is led into an interpretative labyrinth which raises questions about the ethics of reading fiction and empathizing across cultural difference.