Interviews

“Telling Stories That Feel True”: A Conversation with Dur e Aziz Amna“The premise of the novel — a young woman’s departure from urban Pakistan to rural America on an exchange program — is rooted in autobiography. I did a similar exchange year during high school, back in 2008. When I decided to commit to my first novel in 2018, I knew I wanted to write about that experience, partly because it felt so strange and different from the rest of my life, and partly because 10 years had gone by, and I felt that it had sufficiently congealed in my mind to be turned into fiction.”

Essays

Your tongue is still yours: What happens when we lose the language of our ancestors?“We live in America, the graveyard of languages. There is deep-seated belief here, among large hearts that bleed blue, in the singularity of American diversity — as if no other place, neither the Tanzanian coast nor the island nation of Indonesia, has been home to tribes and clans that held their breath as they contemplated one another, spoke and discovered that their words were mere sounds to those other ears. Meanwhile, thousands wake up every day in phantasmal suburbs and line up for the drill. Assimilate. Acculturate. Eradicate. Data shows that first-language attrition is common in America, particularly among children who don’t live in densely immigrant neighbourhoods or around first-generation family members, children who come from language groups vastly different from English, and children whose parents claim more than one mother tongue. I grew up in Urdu and Punjabi. My husband grew up in Portuguese and English.”

Inheritance“In Paris, I thought that the answer to questions of belonging and unbelonging, the only way towards truth, was the written word. While writing the novel, I thought the same — who has ever written a true book without dreaming it to be the cure? I read my father’s words, and reconsider.”

Rutgers!“And that is the most essential, perhaps the only, education that college can provide. It teaches you that while the most priceless and indispensable part of you is the one that you brought here today, the one that was honed by childhood and class and race and culture, it is only when you are separated from that, when you attempt to transcend that and allow yourself to be lost without it, that you truly come into yourself. You will pick it all up again; remember, one forgets nothing. But now is the time to get lost, the way Hira did in her first few months in Oregon. Now is the time to cross borders, to move past comfort zones, to see the world through each other’s eyes. Now is the time to abandon notions of self that were prescribed by default, by the accidents of birth and geography. If you are lucky, you will come to find out that home can be a moveable feast, to be taken along wherever you go. You will know that your true home is the earth.”

From Portugal to the Ironbound“It is at this time that someone mentions the word “saudade.” There are a few wry looks, and I hear a sigh. The word, dear to the Portuguese, can perhaps be translated as a vague but constant longing for something, be it a homeland or an imagined past. At the heart of this feeling lies the acknowledged impossibility of attaining what is longed for. The Portuguese insist on the idiosyncrasy of the word, on its untranslatable nature. I was born and raised elsewhere, too, so I know a thing or two about saudade. Perhaps it was this feeling that made the Pinheiros move back to Portugal in the 80s.”

From Pakistan to Scotland: The many homes of my mother“There is a long history of Pakistani immigration to Scotland, starting in the 60s when post-war Britain’s hunger for cheap labour welcomed many to the weaving trade in Paisley, a few miles west of Glasgow. I haven’t pored over the data, but I’d wager that married women showing up alone for a PhD candidacy were not a big subgroup. Ammi arrived and set up residence in Govanhill. A few months later, both my brothers joined her. I was midway through my A-Levels and so I stayed with my father in Pakistan, visiting Glasgow only in the summers. If it seems odd to me now – how did my parents casually decide to cleave the family into two, something I can’t comprehend doing myself – at the time it felt like a corroboration of the central myth of our family. We were not like others. And our mother was certainly not like the others.”

Writing Into and Out of My Long-Distance Grief“A Palestinian friend tells me that in Arabic they say, “Ili raba ma maat”: The one who raises others never dies. Now I am a mother, and I find that grieving with a child is odd. The world tumbles on its axis, and yet complete despair seems impractical, because there is a hungry mouth to be fed, a pair of curious eyes watching as you weep. That day we learned that Chacha Jee was gone, my youngest brother, who was visiting, and I kept seeking the baby, not for catharsis (babies are terrible, squirmy huggers) but for comfort. He is new. He has years and years and years, inshallah. He will go places, to spots in time, where none of us will.”

Reviews

She’s a horrible character — but you’ll root for her anyway

American Fever by Dur e Aziz Amna review – a subversive debut

Finding a Sense of Self and Place in “American Fever”

Hunger and Home: A review of Dur E Aziz Amna’s American Fever

Other Resources

BBC 2 Book Club for A Splintering

Interview