Full interview with Uzma Jalaluddin, author of Ayesha at Last, at Eden Mills Writers’ Festival
Karen K. Tran: In an interview with CBC Books, you said that when you were growing up, a lot of books about the immigrant experience were “filtered through a condescending, sometimes erroneous lens.” Did this frustration at all influence why you wanted to write Ayesha at Last?
Uzma Jalaluddin: Writing a book is so strange. You start off in one spot and end up in another. But I think when I first set out to write the book, there was a certain element of trying to right historical wrongs I saw as a voracious reader and representation of immigrants and children of immigrants. I found the same stories being told over and over again. For instance, the one where the child is trying to break away from the traditions of their parents but in a way that seemed to me, held no nuance for the way that children actually interact with their parents. They have respect for, but maybe struggle against, some of the beliefs that their parents bring back from their own countries. I also saw there were a lot of stories where the dominant culture is the superior one, where “true assimilation” happens when the second generation immigrant child basically forgets who they are and the religious beliefs of their parents and then completely assimilates. And that is the end result. I wanted to bring a little more context to that conversation through some of the writing that I did. But in a way that wasn’t heavy-handed or went to the other extreme. I wanted it to be entertaining. So that was my motivation for writing a book.
KT: How does it feel to be able to represent your community with a more accurate depiction, to be able to sort of rewrite those books that got it wrong?
UJ: Great. I feel very privileged to be able to have this opportunity to tell these kinds of stories. Certainly when I began writing my book, and the other stories that I’ve written in the past that haven’t been published many, many years ago, I never thought that A) my book would ever see the light of day, and B) I wasn’t really sure what the reception to it would be. So it’s been surprising and also very gratifying. I hope that it’s kind of opening doors for other people, telling their stories. My story is about Muslims and second generation immigrants but certainly it’s not “the story” — it’s a story. I hope that as more books from diverse perspectives are released, they’ll encourage other writers to tell their own stories.
KT: You’re also a columnist for The Toronto Star. How does that differ when you’re writing for the newspaper compared to when you’re writing for your book?
UJ: Asides from the process of it — a book is a gigantic project and is the work of many years, many revisions — a newspaper column are little short snapshots. Publication is immediate, so I can write something and see it in print the very next week. So the immediacy of journalism, I think, is very gratifying for writers. Whereas when you’re sometimes working on a book, you can be working on a book for 10 years. I worked on Ayesha at Last on and off for eight years. When you start writing a book, you never know where you’re going to end up, so my first drafts looked very different from the final draft.
KT: What are your next plans?
UJ: I’m continuing to write for The Toronto Star as long as I possibly can, I really enjoy writing my column. It’s a humorous parenting column called “Samosas and Maple Syrup.” I’m working on my second novel which is untitled as of yet, but it’s similar to the movie You’ve Got Mail (1998) but set in Toronto — same neighbourhood as Ayesha at Last — with different characters and with rival halal restaurants. And it’s a comedy.
KT: What are you currently reading?
UJ: I’m kind of in between books. I just picked up a bunch of books so I’m excited to read Kim Fu’s Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore. I just heard Craig Davidson read from The Saturday Night Ghost Club and that looks really interesting.
Feature photo by Karen K. Tran/The Ontarion