Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.36
https://orcid.org/0009-0007-8040-6594Zainab Sulaiman’s book, Simply Nanju, has garnered critical praise for its anti-ableist portrayal and, just recently, its disturbing examination of disabled embodiment, poverty, and the grotesque. This article focuses on how the school's visibility and knowledge could be distributed rather than on representation. It claims that Sulaiman creates the school as a disciplinary space in which the bodies, behaviour, movement, cleanliness, and achievement of disabled children are constantly observed, classified, and corrected, but that the novel’s detective narrative is experienced in reverse. Nanju, Mahesh, and their young colleagues steal the very practices they associated with institutional surveillance, observation, record-keeping, suspicion, spatial monitoring, and rule knowledge, and turn them into ways of inquiry. The disabled child then stops being something known by the adult and starts to acquire knowledge. This turnaround is not a matter of a single click, nor does it represent a joyous occasion. Disparities in the distribution of poverty, domestic violence, access to care, and interpretation of actions are the result of poverty and social disadvantage. The essay proposes “watching back” as a useful description of Sulaiman’s distinctive politics of disabled childhood, drawing on his reading of the novel through Michel Foucault’s account of disciplinary surveillance, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s work on staring, Tobin Siebers’s complex embodiment, as well as the capabilities tradition of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and the narrative prosthesis of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder.
Pankaj, and Randeep Rana. “Watching Back: Disability, Surveillance, and Child Agency in Zainab Sulaiman’s Simply Nanju.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 658-73, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.36.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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