Samina Ali is the author of Madras on Rainy Days (Farrar, Straus, Giroux / 2004). Shauna Singh Baldwin is the author of, most recently, The Tiger Claw (Knopf, 2004).
Samina Ali is the author of Madras on Rainy Days (Farrar, Straus, Giroux / 2004). Shauna Singh Baldwin is the author of, most recently, The Tiger Claw (Knopf, 2004).
Which country/countries do you belong to
legally/spiritually?
I am an American citizen, naturalized when I was about eight. I was born in Hyderabad, India and immigrated with my parents to the US when I was close to 6 months old. I grew up in both places; it was important to my father that his family not forget our heritage, meaning our Indian culture and Urdu language and religion of Islam, so he sent my two brothers, mother and me back to India every year. In India, I went to a Catholic school and l learned Urdu and Arabic and Indian English, and while here, I studied French and English. I grew up very confused and never knew what was my home. When I was in India, I wanted to be in the U.S., when in the States, I wanted to be in India. It was in India that I felt American and in America that I felt Indian -- how is that for split identity! I remember Western travelers used to tell me how "at home" they felt in India, that it was their "spiritual home", but my own confusion really prevented me from understanding what they meant. It wasn't until I went to Italy in 2003 and spent some time there that I got it. Italy did feel like home to me, strangely, I did feel connected to the history, the people, the place. Spiritual home to me, then, implies a place where one journeys and feels roots that are imperceptible, indefinable. That's how I felt in Italy (and I've traveled to many places and not felt that).Do you believe a writer can ever be apolitical? Should we?
India is my birthplace and home, my heart, my core. My first book, MADRAS ON RAINY DAYS, is entirely set in Hyderabad because I wanted to start at the roots and then branch out. Now I feel comfortable writing about America in my second novel. Strangely, after the publication of my novel, I also finally feel at home in both America and India. It's almost as though the two places were dueling inside me, each trying to express itself, each with a distinct identity, and only when I gave a full voice to one and am about to give a full voice to the other that both are satisfied. Writing has brought me home.
I think there are many writers out there who are apolitical, who write simply to tell a story or who write simply to get published. Writing for writing's sake. I was at the LA Book Festival in 2004 and had this same question asked of me. There were four other panelists with me and all of them insisted that they were simply telling a story, nothing more. Three of those other writers are white males. When I finally spoke up, I seemed to have started a huge debate! What I said there is what I still believe: some of us simply do not have a choice but to be political in our writing. For instance, I am a Muslim woman. For many years now, there have been many other people telling the story of Muslim women.At 19, I read that you experienced an attack by Hindus in Hyderabad. Have you drawn on that incident in your writing, yet? Was it in any way responsible for your becoming a writer?
Today, when Muslim women are the hot topic, the voices speaking out for them are still not Muslim. I am aware of what is being being about Muslim women and, more importantly, who is saying it. As such, it's very important to me to give a voice to my own experience and to have that one experience be expansive enough to include a general human experience even as I am dispelling stereotypes.
When I was trying to sell my book, I had editors ask me forthrightly to change parts of it: set half in the U.S. and half in India; have the American lover, Nate, storm Layla's wedding and "save" her, like a literary Rambo figure; show how Muslim women are repressed in India, denied their freedoms, asexual, while showing how America affords them freedoms they never dreamed up. Again, a perpetuation of stereotypes -- worse, it would have been coming from a Muslim woman!
The act of writing for me is political. But for me, as a Muslim woman in post-9/11 America, almost every act is political: the way I dress, speak, present myself, raise my child, write!
I grew up half in India so I grew up with military curfews and riots. This is simply part of life there, unfortunately, the civil unrest that results from tremendous political ambitions. The incident you're speaking about happened after I had gotten in my arranged marriage to a man back in India when I was 19. I had been married to him for close to six months by then and living with his family in a neighborhood that was predominantly Hindu. It was election season, which is when these old wounds get stirred, and a Hindu man came to our home one night and told us that our house was targeted. He said a gang of Hindu men was coming that same evening. We thanked him for informing us, but then there was nothing to do. It was dark so we weren't safe in trying to run away.In an article in Rediff you say: "In the post-9/11 environment, Muslims are overtly discriminated against, stereotyped, demonized. Muslim men are seen as terrorists and 'evil,' controlling and dominating women. Muslim women are seen as sexually repressed and uneducated, their bodies and movements controlled. I hope the novel exposes Western readers to ordinary Muslims and thereby humanizes them. I also hope Layla can prove that a woman, even a Muslim woman, can come out from under the weight of tremendous familial and cultural expectations to become her own person." Post 9/11/01, has there been any change in your editor/publisher's perception of your work? Did the Attack on the World Trade Center affect the willingness of US editors to publish your work?
Our neighbors suddenly seemed like strangers or, worse, enemies. We had no phone, and even if we did, no police to call. Usually the police are involved in these crimes -- remember, these are political crimes that manifest as religious ones. My mother-in-law, a conservative Muslim woman who only liked me to dress in loose shalwar-kameezes told me to put on jeans under my clothes -- to further deter rape. She and I stayed in my bedroom all night, locked inside the house and then the room, while the men of the house went to the roofs. It was the worst night of my life. I thought I was going to die -- with strangers!
My parents and brothers had already returned to the States and I believed I would never see them again. Then it occurred to me: here I am, having fulfilled each of my parents' dreams for me: I was the dutiful daughter who was doing a business major at university, who had gotten into an arranged marriage against her will to a Muslim Indian man, who had spent all her life traveling between two countries and two languages, and all for this! In all my parents' efforts in trying to keep me protected and safe, they had landed me at death's doorstep. Worse, I had allowed it to happen because I believed I didn't have a choice. I had handed over my life to them. I resolved that night that if I did ever make it back to the U.S., I was going to begin my life, lead it the way I wanted, and not be confined to my parents' and culture's and religion's expectations of me.
And that is what I did. The gang never did make it to our house. As in the novel, they did stop and murder a Muslim couple before they got to our house, and somehow this deterred them or they used up too much time, who knows, but we were saved. I will never forget though that I was saved at the price of a fellow Muslim sister's life. She was raped and murdered. I've written this exactly in the novel. I gave her a voice. I gave my story a voice. Elie Weisel says that writing is a way of saying, "this happened to me, this is the way it was, a way of saying 'Ameen.'" Well, this did happen to me and this is the way it was, and now I say Amen!
Most people think that selling a book after 9/11 must have been easy for a Muslim woman. It really wasn't. I was writing about Muslims, yes, but certainly not writing about what others wanted to hear. In hindsight, it makes sense to me that FSG published my book without changes to my message. The publishing house does a marvelous job of publishing writers from places like South Africa and other politically charged areas of the world, places that cannot be excused or lied about, and neither, unfortunately, can the story I've written. Not only did the publishing become more difficult, but the audience is also more reluctant to see the message. I'm working against many stereotypes and machines of power and Muslims have no power right now. So any change I make will be slow yet valuable.Did the Attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11/01 and the threat of terrorism/being labelled a terrorist affect your writing life in any way?
I've not written a new work since 9/11 so I'm not sure how it will affect my characters. However, I am working on a novel right now, just at the beginning of one, and I am working through this very issue. I'm not sure how to touch the topic because it is so loaded.Have you experienced racism or have you been targeted as a visible minority in your home town or while travelling? Has there been an increase since 9/11/01?
Interestingly, there are young American writers I know of out there who have already published on the subject, even moving their characters into Iraq and telling the story from the Iraqi point of view, but I cannot write something without fully digesting it in all its nuances. I wouldn't feel responsible as a writer or thinker or human. Since my characters are Muslim, it's especially important that I understand and present this accurately. The larger Muslim community in America has really been supportive of my work and my message, and the weight of their faith does give me courage to proceed.
Fortunately, I haven't, but I know it's because of the way I look and people's ignorance: no one knows how to place me; even other Indians sometimes ask me where I come from! I've traveled with my two brothers, however, and both are men who are over 6 feet tall with black hair and dark eyes, Muslim names and faces, and it's a hassle. They get stopped at least three times even before they reach the line for the security check. Then they get pulled over again.Salman Rushdie, writing in the Virginia Quarterly, says: "Even the literature of other countries is failing to make its way into the United States. The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) regulations now restrict the editing of work from what are called enemy countries. If a text arrives from, let's say, Iran or North Korea and is subjected to editing in the United States, that can be dubbed trading with the enemy and possibly lead to criminal prosecution. This is an amazing upside-down piece of insanity. If it were applied backwards to the period of the Soviet Union, it would mean that people editing samizdat texts in the West could be subject to prosecution. The madness in this is that if you publish the text unedited, as a mess, that's all right, but if you try to perform the normal publishing function of editing so that you can present it to the public in a clean form, that's a crime."
A few times I've been stopped at the airport while trying to check in. I was told my name was on the "terrorist list" and it would take 45 minutes to clear up. God knows what they then do to "clear this up," but in those 45 minutes to an hour, I sit and fume! Yet it always come down to this: we are all doing this to each other. Muslims and nonMuslims alike. There is no one to blame.
Has your work been
affected by the new rules, and if so how?
This is crazy! No, fortunately, I've not experienced anything outright. Again, the pressures I feel are unspoken. The message I want to deliver about Muslims is one that many people in this country, at this point in history, are simply not yet ready to hear. I was at a Yale conference recently, and when I brought this up during my symposium, all of us in the room said simultaneously, without even planning it: "Oh yes, the subaltern CAN speak, but will anyone listen?"