Home truths from that inner voice
Anar Ali.
Anar Ali 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!”
But she gets where the anxiety stems from.
“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.”
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 Night of Power. .
The characters, their experiences, the way they navigate life’s events are real. 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.
“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 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 Kutch and found success as businessmen.
They settled in Calgary and Ali recalls funny and not-so-funny incidents. For the latter, one can attribute any number of other reasons, she says, 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.”
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.”