Home truths from that inner voice

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

 At the book launch for Night of Power, Anar Ali thanked her parents for their support, even with “worrying hearts”. And then added, “but not always”.

That was unintentional, she clarifies, because she understands. She knows most parents want security for their children, immigrant parents even more so, perhaps.

“They’ve gone through their own – dare I say? – hell. They were somebody back where they come from and have faced barriers here. For better or for worse, some of those expectations pass on to the child.”

She always wrote as a child but never imagined a career as a writer.

“I come from a family where I was encouraged to read a lot, but if I said I wanted to write, the response was, ‘Why?’ I don’t blame them, it’s a reasonable question. It can be hard for parents when the neighbour’s kid is a doctor. What is your kid doing? Oh, she’s a writer... but she doesn’t have a book out yet! It can be a struggle. But there’s also comedy in there – I’d like to develop it for television one day!

“I knew that I genuinely wanted to write when I was living this other successful, good life, when I realized that this is not what I wanted to do.”

Ali, who is also a screenwriter and worked on a new medical drama from CTV/NBCUniversal, Transplant, explores some of these immigrant realities in her book.

The characters, their experiences, the way they  navigate life’s events are so real, it’s like you know them. The jobs one takes as a used car salesman or gas station attendant, the dry cleaning businesses one starts, the pressures one puts on children to opt for “safe” careers. And the parental expectations that seep down through generations.

“As a fiction writer, you make up a lot of stuff, but you also end up taking things from life,” says Ali. “Some emotional truths in the book are close to me. How do you find yourself in a new place, for instance? The eldest child takes on a role in many communities, but specially in ours. There’s a genuine concern for mothers who may have been forced into non-traditional roles in the new country, who may be subject to varying degrees of abuse.”

A son, like Ashif in her book, might see himself as the protector, but also at some level resent it because it does not translate to his own romantic reality, she says. There’s double or even triple pressure – to live up to parents’ expectations, to be the protector and to achieve his own dreams.

And yet there are no villains in this story. The characters may be flawed, but we empathise. To tell it just the way it is was the most important thing that drove the story says Ali. As a woman writing about patriarchy, she wanted to show that it hurts men also. Maybe differently, perhaps not to the same extent, but the expectations, the pressures, are on them, too, and they vent in different ways.

“Reaching out can be hard for men. Things have changed, but for older men, it can still be hard to be open about their feelings. That doesn’t mean they don’t have them. It was a feminine perspective on how to heal, move forward, help each other. At the core, most of us are normal, ordinary people with good intentions.

“The book is about what happens to us when we can’t be what we want to be. What happens to family, to gender roles and to relationships when expectations, family responsibilities and conventions collide. This can happen to anyone, but we see it specially in immigrant communities where people struggle to control the change within the family structure while dealing with the sea change outside. ”

Ali worked on the book for close to eight years.

“I lived with the characters. They needed to trust me, to tell me things. I needed to listen to their stories with an open heart. As my editor Nicole Winstanley said, I wasn’t willing to compromise. I had to take the time to enter the characters, to learn their perspective to do justice. There’s also so much history in the book – the Ismaili community has had multiple migrations – and I wanted to traverse that emotional landscape respectfully.”

From there to the book launch was a much shorter journey. Her first book, Baby Khaki’s Wings, a collection of short stories, written as part of her Master of Fine Arts program at the UBC, was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, the Trillium Book Award, and the Danuta Gleed Literary Prize. She sent it out, not really hoping for much, but quickly found an agent who found a publisher who signed her up for a two-book deal with Penguin.

“It was lovely, it was rare, I felt very privileged. But the pressure!” she says with a laugh.

Ali came to Canada as a child in the mid-70s as part of the wave of Ismailis seeking safety. Her family is from Tanzania, her grandparents having moved there from Gujarat and Kuttch and found success as businessmen.

“We were not from Uganda and while not directly threatened by Idi Amin’s policies, felt the reverberations. For my father, the wheels had started turning even before Amin’s policies. There was concern about where Indians would go with the pan-Africanism movement taking hold. He met a Canadian who said we’d be welcomed in Canada where Pierre Eliott Trudeau was making the country open and multicultural.”

Her father applied and things moved quickly, bringing the family to a new country. They settled in Alberta.

At her school, kids didn’t know where Kenya was. They didn’t know what being a Muslim meant and she didn’t even want to get into explaining Ismailis.

That shows up in the book: India-Africa-Muslim... No, but where are you really from? As if they were border guards and he was trying to enter the country illegally. It left him feeling like he doesn’t belong here. But he doesn’t belong anywhere else, either.

The home economics teacher who went around the class giving everyone whipping cream but not her. The instructor during swimming lessons who turned to her to teach CPR and then changed his mind, picking another student.

“Why didn’t I get any whipping cream? I felt terrible at the time. Looking back, it could have been because she ran out or because she thought I had dietary restrictions or any number of other reasons. But sometimes it is exactly what you think it is, your instincts are mostly right. But then sometimes, because you’re accumulating these over time, your instincts fail you. And that’s why it’s so difficult to pin subtle racism.”

There were funny experiences, too. She grew up with the last name Mohamed Ali and the school was convinced that she was related to the boxer.

“I’m so not an athletic girl, I believe I was a great disappointment!”

And good times, too. Her family owned and ran a motel, next to which were ones owned by the Nenshi family.

“Nahid and I were forced to hang out. He was such a nerd and so was I that I didn’t want to hang out with him, but the families were friends. He didn’t care about all of this stuff. He was just so confident in himself. And now he’s a beloved mayor. That makes me so hopeful.”

Ali is celebrating the way the book has been received and all the praise and great reviews it has garnered.

“I should be floating, but really, I feel very grounded. Of course, like all writers, I feel I could have done this part a little differently or that part better, but overall, I feel great.”

She has been an aunt since she was very young and is extremely close to her six nieces and nephews and one grandnephew. One of her nieces came down from Calgary for the book launch.

“I get to be this offbeat aunt and enjoy them!”

She practises yoga daily, loves hiking, walking, art, culture and food and travelling.

While she can and does write any-time, anywhere, she prefers doing so at home, she says.

“It’s an austere space, by a window. It gets messy when I’m writing, so I keep it simple. I tend to wear the same thing – I have several of the same thing! – eat the same things, listen to the same music for days. It’s almost meditative.”

 Ali quotes the poet Meena Alexander who described herself as “a woman cracked by multiple migrations” and says she writes because this is her process of making herself whole.

“I write because I have this need to write, and also because I hope that in the process, I connect with my readers in ways that make them whole, too.”

She tells aspiring writers to believe themselves.

“That’s different from believing in yourself. If you know instinctively that something is happening, don’t dismiss your inner voice – it rarely lies. All of the other stuff, the hard work, the reaching out to other writers, will follow, but the biggest thing is to listen to and trust your inner voice because you know it’s the truth and only you can offer that truth – no one else. You tell your story and it becomes a universal story because we are all connected.”