Amidst the recent backdrop of racist and Islamophobic violence on our streets over the past week and a half, the premiere of Peanut Butter and Blueberries, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan’s debut play about how outside events shape the potential romantic relationship of two young Muslims, has become unintentionally timely.
As a writer, educator, and poet, Manzoor-Khan’s work aims to disrupt narratives about history, race, knowledge, and power, and offers tools to resist systemic oppression by unlearning what she believes society and the education system have instilled upon the British population.
With Peanut Butter and Blueberries, Manzoor-Khan attempts to move away from the usual dramatic tropes where Muslims only exist in relation to terrorism (as victims or villains), and challenges the central stereotypical conflicts where the main Muslim protagonists are often facing an internal conflict between their faith and religion, their hopes and dreams.
For Bilal and Hafsah, the central characters in Peanut Butter and Blueberries, the crux of their conflict isn’t their faith.
Bradford-born Hafsah and Brummie Bilal meet at the University of London’s SOAS, after he’s given a talk about a year spent in Kashmir. They find common ground over a ‘Bilassic’ peanut butter and blueberry sandwich made by Bilal.
She wears a hijab but is a student of gender studies, and challenges the patriarchy, which is just as well as Bilal has some toxic masculinity issues going on. After dropping out of an accountancy course and travelling in search of his ‘identity and roots’, Bilal still craves ‘white approval’, has complex family issues and has feelings of being surveilled and criminalised by the state.
Hafsah has ‘bigger dreams and hopes than finding a man,’ but is unexpectedly destabilised by Bilal when their budding relationship is impacted by the realities of racism and Islamophobia and the accompanying hypervisibility and hypervigilance that come with it.
In the tradition of unspoken religious boundaries, they never touch each other and their intimacy is shown through intimate looks, silences, and held-back touches.
Humera Syed brings a nice touch of naturalism to her performance as the ‘talks a mile a minute when it comes to colonialism’ Hafsah, while Usaamah Ibraheem Hussain is engaging to watch as the fired-up Bilal.
A lot of the dialogue is spoken directly to the audience and at times is both sharp and witty. However, at times it also didactically borders on being patronising and feels a little preachy.
Like the central relationship in Peanut Butter and Blueberries, the play never seems to really take off, lacks any real dramatic arc, and just when it feels like it is flatlining, Manzoor-Khan injects a storyline about Bilal leaving his bag on the train which confusingly feels very much like the kind of desperate clichéd trope the author is trying to avoid.
The production’s blandness is not helped by the mundane direction of Sameena Hussain which also involves some very cringeworthy stage choreography.
Despite its best intentions, Peanut Butter and Blueberries feels like a missed opportunity to tell what otherwise could have been an original and different tale of love.
