Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Assalamu alaikum. I'm Latasha Russo, executive director of Sappalo Square. And welcome to on the Square, a special podcast brought to you by Sappalo Square in collaboration with the maidan, where every month Sappalo squad get on the square and in to some real talk about race and Islam in the Americas.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Salamu alaikum. I am ambatikazi. And I am the Senior Editor with Sapphilo Square. You're listening to on the square. Real talk on race and Islam in the Americas. Our guest today is Ali Abdulal, author of the new book Temple Folk, a collection of short stories portraying the lived experiences of black Muslims grappling with faith, family and freedom in America. Temple Folk, published in July of this year. A little background on Alia. She was born and raised in Prince George's County, Maryland. She has degrees from Oberlin College and the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies. Her stories and essays have been published with the Michigan Quarterly Review, the Rumpus, and the Chicago Quarterly Review. Temple Folk is her first book. Alia, welcome to on the Square.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Thank you. Assalamu alaikum. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: So I wanted to congratulate you on publishing your book, and if you can share the experiences that you've had so far with your book being published with.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: Us, sure, I'd be happy to.
So Temple Folk published on July 4 of this year, only two months ago, which is a happy coincidence in some ways, and something my editor had to point out to me that the Nation of Islam was founded on July 4 in 1930. I didn't even know that.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: No, I didn't know that either.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't think anybody at Simon Schuster knew that. And so it's only been two months, and so far, I would say, so. Good. The response has been pretty quiet. So I don't really have a sense of how people are reacting to this book.
It's probably better that way.
But, yeah, everything has been pretty cool so far.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Wonderful.
Yeah. I think it's an awesome achievement that you have to have your book published. I know for our listeners out there, we probably have a lot of writers and fledgling writers, especially for Black Muslims, to know that someone has written a book and published it with a big publisher. I mean, Simon and Schuster, that's one of the big five publishers. So that's a really awesome achievement for a Black Muslim writer. And inshallah your readership will only pick up as more people know about the book.
So I did want to talk a little bit about your life before we talk about the book.
I know that you have been learning Chinese for some time and have lived in China for a while, and I just wanted that's such a unique fact about you. And if you can tell a little bit more about this experience, how did you become interested in learning Chinese and wanting to live there?
[00:03:35] Speaker A: Absolutely. So when I was a student at Oberlin College.
I considered myself a budding Islamicist, and at the time, I was very interested in learning about Muslim minority populations in different parts of the world and had spent a lot of time in southern Spain learning about the Moorish presence there.
And as I was graduating college, I became interested in learning about Muslims in Western China, and I got a really cool fellowship to study among the Hua tzu of Kuiming Yun and China. And so I did not have a pure interest in the Chinese language or Chinese culture. I was really more so interested in this minority experience, and that was my entry point into learning about this culture.
[00:04:42] Speaker B: Okay, thank you.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: That's really you've studied at Oberlin College and London School of Economics. I mean, wow, that's a big difference.
Can I ask what you studied and why the London School of Economics?
[00:05:02] Speaker A: Sure. Well, I got my master's degree from the University of London School of Oriental and fine, because they're actually very close to each, so I can understand the confusion. But yeah, they're very different institutions. And I studied African history while I was a student there, really focused on East Africa and sort of the syncretic practices among Muslims in the literal world of Swahili speaking Tanzania. So I just wanted to learn about Muslims in East Africa, and that was what sent me to London.
[00:06:00] Speaker B: Okay, thank you. So your background and your professional background not being in literature or writing, so what made you turn to writing?
[00:06:16] Speaker A: It wasn't a conscious choice.
I don't know many writers. I know you're a writer. Too many writers that just consciously embark upon a writing path.
I think we have these traits that predispose us to a writing life, and those traits started developing in me at a very young age, and I tell this story differently depending on the day.
When did you become a writer? What was the starting point? And my mother, since I got this book deal and have published Temple Folk, she always recounts, when you were a little girl, you would always write stories, and I would post them in my office, and my colleagues would read them. And I have no memories of that. But I do remember as a middle schooler taking my first creative writing class, and every time it was my turn to share, I always stood up from my seat and read my little stories. And I always had a really big smile on my face as I was reading.
I don't know, I think there was something inside of me that had always loved everything to do with reading and writing.
Yeah, I mean, I really don't know how to tell that story of how I became a writer, but they're just all of these little talents and traits that I had that came together. Like, for instance, I've always had exceptionally beautiful handwriting, and even when I write, I write longhand, and I love looking at my own writing.
I don't know how this sounds, but I just think, oh my gosh, you have such beautiful handwriting. I just love to write. I love everything about writing. And so that's really how it happened for me. It just is part of me.
[00:08:27] Speaker B: Yeah, okay.
It makes a lot of sense. And there's, of course, no one story or one opening point, I guess, for me, if people and people ask me that, I'm like, well, I don't know. I've been reading. I guess maybe when I discovered Words, which was a long time ago, maybe I was already a writer then without actually putting a pen to paper yet, just that interest that I had with Words.
So that's writing in general. So I guess to move into the book. So these stories, temple folk, can you point to a time when you wanted to write these particular stories?
[00:09:12] Speaker A: The evolution of this project does not really begin with the stories as they are currently sort of positioned in this book.
The temple folk really began as an act of self creation. I felt this sense that I was not a presence in my own life because there wasn't anything in the culture to reflect me back to myself, and that there were these sort of fledgling attempts at telling Muslim stories, black Muslim stories, but that none of them resonated. I didn't feel like the target audience of the kinds of stories that were being told.
And I was also I don't know if you relate to this, but just deeply offended by the kinds of stereotypical images that were floating around out there about people like us. And something inside of me is just like, I could do so much better. I can do so much better than this stuff that's out here. And so it really began sort of in that way, knowing that I could do better and also just feeling like if I didn't do it, something inside of me was just not going to make it.
I needed these stories. I needed these stories.
And this may seem like an exaggeration, but I really mean it like the way we need water and air. I needed to write this book, and so I didn't know how I was going to do it because I didn't have any sort of formal writing education.
And when you make that transition from being a reader to being a writer, you sort of are asking yourself, okay, well, how do I start? Because you spend all of these years of your life sitting on the other side of these books, just being manipulated by these masterful writers, and you want to know how they do the magic that they do. And it took me several years just teaching myself how to approach the writing as a writer and not as a reader. And then as I started feeling a little bit more confident that I knew what was happening on the page, I just said to myself, So this is how it started. I said, okay, what I feel capable of is writing a book about African American Muslims as a series of maybe 30 vignettes on par with Gwendolyn Brooks. Maud Martha. Do you like that book?
[00:12:19] Speaker B: I have not read that one.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh, I love that book. It's a petite little book.
I think, technically, it's a novella.
And I shouldn't say reminiscent of Household Mango Street, because Household Mango Street derives its structure from Maud Martha.
But they favor each other, these books, because their chapters are very petite and they're little vignettes. They're very poetic style vignettes where you get to see distillation of the lives of these people in these domestic.
I just I've always loved Maude Martha. That's one of the books that I've read dozens of times. And as I started trying to write the vignettes, I then realized the mastery and the genius of Gwendolyn Brooks and how things that are petite are not necessarily easy because we can look at the scale of a piece of work and think, oh, think, oh, well, that's pretty brief. I can replicate that. Not so simple. Not so simple.
And so I started looking for other storytelling masters, people whose work could help guide me into a style of storytelling that was more suited to my capacities and stumbled upon the work of Edward P. Jones. And this is an interesting part of my story because I cannot point to the date or the time that I first read his work, but I think I was visiting my mother in Cairo, and my mom has always been an amazing curator of books in my life. She has excellent taste. And I must have found a copy of Lost in the City in her library. And I thought, okay, this is a book of short stories about African American people in mid 20th century Washington, DC. Let's give it a go. And I remember being completely absorbed in this book, and it was the same feeling that one feels when you're falling in love with someone, where there's just this instant recognition of some kind of compatibility, some kind of pull and tug that you have from one soul to another.
And he just got locked in my eyesight like Pepe le Pew or something like that. I just said, I love you. I love everything about you. I love your work. Oh, my gosh. And so I just really fell in love with his writing, and I didn't have any intention of patterning myself on Edward P. Jones, but I spent so many hours with his work that I think I absorbed a lot of his style. And so the stories okay, I'm sorry. I feel like I'm talking too much.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: You're actually answering what was going to be my next question, which was about your literary inspiration. So just carry on.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: Oh, perfect. So, Gwendolyn Brooks, we've already put her down, and then Edward P. Jones, who is like Zeus to me. He's the best living or dead to my sensibility. He's just a superior talent. And so I immersed myself in his work, and he has this one story, the title story of Lost in the City, which is a short story about a young woman named Lydia. Well, not a young woman. She's a professional woman who's just received some devastating news.
And on her way to the hospital to resolve this issue, she gets picked up by a man who drives a black diamond cab. And there is something about that man that just felt like, obviously he's a minor character in the story and is barely there on the page. He's there as a vehicle to get Lydia to the hospital. But there's something in the aura and the spirit of him that just resonated with this sense of, like, he could belong to the world that I know, the world of temple folk. Because so many of the men in the masjids that I frequented as a child were taxi drivers and just very sturdy, upright men.
And there was this contiguous feeling that I felt like there is an overlap here. Like, I can see this character inhabiting the world that I'm trying to imagine for my own writing.
And so I think I drew a lot from Lost in the City in terms of trying to establish the atmosphere of temple folk because there's something about the African American Muslim experience, as I was trying to imagine it, that really draws on that world of the mid 20th century African American sensibility, urban sensibility.
And his book really provided a wonderful aesthetic template for me to begin my work. Yeah.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: Okay. Thank you. So now I have some book recommendations.
I've read Edward P. Jones. I've read his novel what is it?
[00:18:27] Speaker A: The known world.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: The known world. Yes. Yes. But I did not know he had a short story collection, so I have some new reading. Thank you. I have read The House on Mango Street a few times, so that one I'm familiar with. And I do love Gwendolyn Brooks poetry, so I will definitely be reading that. Thank you.
[00:18:45] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:18:46] Speaker B: Yeah. So I wanted to talk about writing about challenging topics. I'm a part of a few writers groups, especially for Muslim writers, and this is something that comes up a lot in our conversations, right. Writing being Muslim or from a Muslim background and writing about Muslim experiences. Right. And whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing about difficult subject matter or taboo topics that we know happen in Muslims lives. But to write about it, to talk about it, can easily become controversial, even though we know it's a reality for a lot of people. And in your stories, you address these topics like polygyny and sexual identity and adultery, right. Things that we know but don't talk about. So I think it could be helpful for our listeners.
How do you write about these challenging topics, do you face any fear or have you faced any fear and if you've had to overcome that? So if you could talk a little bit about that.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: I feel that it's a prerequisite of the writer to address challenging topics when you are getting I don't mean to be prescriptive when I am thinking about something that feels uncomfortable, if a worry ever comes up that, oh my gosh, what are people going to think? I know that's exactly the thing I'm supposed to write.
[00:20:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: And so I move in the direction of the discomfort. I think that's a good sign to the writer that you're on the right track.
But I think the other side of the coin is that I don't think I would have been able to write this book if I were a presence in the Muslim community that raised know. I grew up in various masjids in the Washington, DC area, principally Masha Muhammad. There was another smaller congregation in Glenard in Maryland that has since, you know, when I went to college. Obviously, that was the first break with that community.
And then in my walk of life, I've just found myself at a great, as happens with many of us, at a great, not just social, but even ideological distance from the spaces that raised me. And it's been a heartbreaking evolution in some ways because these are the spaces that cradled me and where I was loved and encouraged to become everything that I am becoming today. But at the same time where I have a lot of disagreements with the things that happened and the things that continue to happen in our communities sometimes. And so it's been just personally challenging wrestling with these feelings of belonging, do I belong or not? But the gift in all of this has been the crystallization of my writing perspective. I think when I started wanting to write, I was very much a part of a standard Muslim community.
And my ambition at the time was, well, how do I write stories that depict Islam and Muslims in ways that agree with my beliefs as a very observant, in the standard sense, observant Muslim woman?
And that was the problem, frankly, that was the problem.
I don't think, at least in the way that I approached the writing, that and there are writers that do this, having read my fair share of Dostoevsky Brothers Karmazov, there are writers who do write from a religious standpoint, and the work is poignant and beautiful and it survives.
But I'm just not one of those writers. I had to develop a critical distance from the ideology itself before I was able to see it in a way that I could manipulate it for artistic purposes.
And so at this point, I really don't have that many concerns about who the work upsets or whether or not the things that people find in the pages agree or disagree with any ideological point of view within religious communities.
I only answer to what I know to be true about the rules of writing itself. I'm not trying to appease anybody except my own sensibility.
[00:24:52] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you for that. You kind of veered into what I was going to talk about next. And it made me realize in talking about your book, I left out an important detail for listeners who may not be familiar with your book at this point that not only are you writing about Black Muslims, but your writing focuses on Black Muslims within the Nation of Islam. And I think that's important for people to know for me.
And I've been sharing your book with other people, and everybody always has the same reaction at first, like, I don't know anything about the Nation of Islam. I don't think I've ever read anything about the Nation.
Just for someone on the outside, I feel like there's kind of like, for lack of a better word, for kind of like a secrecy.
And I think that's the case with Islam in general, too. If you're not a part of this religion, then you won't know.
So I think there's, like, a further remove with the Nation and for a lot of people to we hear things about what people in the Nation believe, but we don't know.
Just not knowing that. And your book being like the first time that I was reading anything about people within the Nation, and one of the things I was thinking is that you did a really good job in giving nuanced portrayals of the people. I think in fiction, that's not always the case, and certainly in our public discourse lately, that's one of the things I feel like is thoroughly lacking. It's like there's no nuance. Everybody wants everything to be black and white, even though it's not.
So I appreciated the nuanced portrayals in your book. And another thing I was thinking and reading, I was like, I can't say that they're necessarily favorable portrayals. I mean, they're just real, like, complicated.
I'm kind of babbling a little bit, but I wanted you to kind of talk a little bit about you kind of already have, but in writing about not necessarily your background, but a background that you're familiar with and the experience of and you've already talked about that, but a little bit more about that experience of writing something that is personal and something that is not well known.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: Yeah. There are so many things you said just now that I would like to pick up on. I had an event just a few days after Temple Folk was released in Brooklyn, New York, and there was a gentleman who attended this event, and afterward he approached me and told me that he was raised in the Nation of Islam. And he so appreciated my book because he felt that it was an authentic representation of the experiences of people who had been through the first resurrection experience, basically Islam between 1946 and 1975 in the Nation of Islam, rather. And I asked him after he said this to me, I obviously thanked him. But then I said, do you tell anybody that you were a member in your daily life? Is this information that you volunteer? And I knew the answer. And just as I predicted, he shook his head and told me, no, it's an open secret. I think a lot of people are walking around this country who have ties to this movement, who never discuss it because they are aware, as I'm becoming aware, and even sharing these stories. I was never in the Nation of Islam. I merely imagined this stuff. And even in sharing imagined stories about the Nation of Islam, I am learning what they know by experience, which is that when you tell people that you were part of this movement, they immediately become defensive and all of these concerns show up on their faces like, do you hate me? Do you think that white people are the devil? And do you have a racial superiority complex? Do you hate Jewish people? All of these things that people associate with this history.
And that's why it's rarely told, even though there are beloved figures in our culture who were connected and are connected to this movement.
Like, there's a whole international airport named after Muhammad Ali in Louisville, Kentucky.
A whole international airport, and this man was in the Nation of Know. There are a lot of prominent people in our culture and prominent people in our culture who are connected to this movement, but we never talk about it. And so it was just important for me to sort of expose the history in part because it's my own personal history. And I think this is where you wanted me to go with your question. My grandparents converted in the late 1950s.
And in the way that my grandfather relayed his conversion to me, he was frustrated and angry with the state of the country where black people were continually disrespected, put down, looked down upon.
And he felt that by joining the Nation of Islam, he could not only resolve some of the disagreements that he'd had with the Christian Church, but that he could address his own need to cultivate self love in himself and within his family.
And so there is something very pure there is a pure desire that a lot of people carried into the Nation of Islam to just want this desire, rather to see themselves in a more dignified light than the various narratives put forward within the dominant culture provided them.
And that pure and innocent desire was in many ways abused when people joined the movement because of the various kinds of abuses they were subjected to within the Nation of Islam.
But there is this mixed legacy that I felt needed to be addressed where there were these abuses, these terrible things that happened to the members terrible things, frankly, that the members themselves did, the terrible malfeasance of the leadership, et cetera.
And there again, there are all of the benefits that accrued not only to the members, but to the larger black culture in general, just because this organization existed. I just think that it's time to really get real about the ways that the Nation of Islam has benefited this culture, the United States culture, and also the ways that it has harmed the members. And so, in addition to all of the other things that this book is trying to accomplish, it's just trying to present a more complicated narrative of what this movement has meant within the history of this country. But also to put it within a historical context so that we can understand that what we see today as a thriving African American Sunni community in many ways is an outgrowth of the Nation of Islam and these early 20th century manifestations of Islam in this country.
And so it was important for me to try to structure the stories in a way that it could cohere with this historical narrative as well.
[00:33:53] Speaker B: Thank you so much. Thank you for that.
I want to kind of continue this conversation about writing about the nation, this particular background that many of us are unfamiliar with. I know that sometimes when we're writing from these perspectives, right, lesser known perspectives, lesser read and studied, sometimes there can be, like, a push to whether it's internal or external. This push to kind of write instructively, to try to teach people because they don't know about know to like like what Tony Morrison said about writing to the White Gaze, right? Or any type of outside gaze. And I know that can sometimes inhibit it can damage the writing itself. And then what that can do to a person's psychology when they feel like they're constantly being instructive.
It doesn't seem, from what you're saying, but have you ever felt that push in writing to be instructive? And the second part to the question, like, would you say to writers who want to write from a certain perspective that's less known or less popular, but don't want to fall into being a teacher or explaining where they're coming from? If you can talk on that, I.
[00:35:27] Speaker A: Think it's very easy to sidestep that concern altogether. I think your own sensibility will dictate the kind of work that you do. And when it comes to my approach to storytelling, I never really think about things like that. How do I instruct?
What I'm trying to do is keep things simple.
I feel that the more straightforward and plain spoken I can be, the better story I'm actually telling. And if I ever find myself in a place where I'm being overly ornate, I just feel maybe I have more thought work to do, that the better story is actually the one that is easier to read.
Yeah.
I hope that nobody feels obligated to respond to that pressure.
I hate to use this word you, you because, you know, you should do what you want to do, whoever's listening. But if someone were to tell me that I should be thinking a little bit more about how people are understanding the work, then I would say, no, I'm not going to do that because I don't okay. In some ways in the editorial process, I did face a little bit of that pressure. But I do have to say that the edits on Temple Folk were very light.
There was some concern with the use of Arabic words in the book and the sense that if I were to use more of them, that it would be too elaborious for the reader to constantly have to flip back and forth between the book and Google to say, okay, well, what does yamakaya mean?
What do these things mean?
And that was a concern. But other than things like that, I don't really respond to that pressure.
[00:37:56] Speaker B: Yeah, that's awesome. And what you were saying reminded me that you said you weren't formally trained in writing. You didn't do the Masters of Fine Arts, which some writers or some people who are interested in writing think that they have to have. Right? And of course they don't. And this confidence you have in your voice that I did do an MFA, and so I do feel like it helped me to gain that type of confidence. And so you mentioned already, like, your writing inspirations, but did you have any professional writing, I don't know, a mentor? Or did you read craft books?
Because this is kind of leading into my next question, because this is a short story collection, and I think that short stories is like a deceptive form. People think like, oh, if I can write a short story, it's easy. But like you mentioned earlier, it's actually much more challenging to tell a story, a full story, right in this compact form. So did you seek out any craft books or anything to help you with writing and then writing short stories in particular?
[00:39:11] Speaker A: No, I didn't. I bought a couple of those books and didn't read a single chapter of them. You know how you buy books and you're like, I'm going to tackle you? They never get read. I don't know.
They radiated something that was very repulsive to me.
Maybe it's pride, but I couldn't appreciate the filter because the little bit that I did read of these craft books didn't remind me of my own take on stories. And so they weren't helpful to me. Or maybe I'm just weird that way. They weren't helpful to me.
I can't say that I didn't have mentors.
I developed some friendships with some older people who indulged my interest in writing. I don't know how serious of a writer.
I didn't think they perceived me as being very ambitious. I don't know that they saw that in me. But. They were kind enough.
There is one gentleman in particular who I never actually shared my writing with him, but he was just someone who was like a wonderful sounding board to me. His name is Ethelbert Miller and he is a fixture in literary Washington, DC. And I reached out to him related to a project completely distinct from I wanted to do a go go documentary at the time. I love go go music. And so I reached out to him asking him if he would mind being a subject for interview, and he doesn't like, know at all. He's a New York transplant to DC. And so go go is not his thing. But he was kind enough anyway to just talk to me and it was just wonderful having his confidence. And just when that happens, it just makes you feel like, well, this accomplished person thinks something of me. Maybe I do have some talent. And that's sometimes all that you really need, it's just the confidence of people you respect that ignite something within you. And I think things like that actually, I don't know if that was as helpful to me as other people's disbelief.
I think it was people's disbelief in my capacities that was more of a motivation to me than the kindnesses that were shown to me by people like Ethelbert Miller. We all have stories. I'm sure you have your own stories of instances where you've shared work or told people about your ambitions and they sort of chuckle or laugh at you. And that's the embarrassing kinds of things that happen to artists when you're opening your heart and people just step on it. They don't just step on it. They squish it like an ants on the roadside.
And those kinds of things are the things that I think really make artists because you just have to have that softness that enables you to create, but also this toughness, this impenetrable toughness that says, it doesn't matter what the world throws at me, I'm going to do my work. I don't care what anybody says.
And so, yeah, I just developed. I've always had a lot of audacity, but the process of becoming a writer has just given me just untold levels of audacity.
[00:43:07] Speaker B: Thank you.
I hope that helps anyone who's listening, who is struggling with confidence, because I do feel like you have to have a bit of a defiance. And I know for me, I knew, thankfully, because I was already a part of a writers group before starting an MFA, I kind of knew I had to have that defiance going in. And I think that really helped me. I didn't go in like, oh, kind of timid, maybe I'm okay. I was like, no, I'm here. I'm here because I belong to know this is where I'm supposed to you know, I think that really did help me and the writers group that I was a part of, it was for writers of color. I'm from New Orleans. So it was in New Orleans. It was writers of color in New Orleans. And so they kind of gave know. I already had people basically know you've got what it know. So I went know with that feeling. I think that's just super like as your like whether you do MFA, read craft books, whatever, are you just winging it on your own? Like trying it on your own. You just have to believe in yourself.
Absolutely. Yeah. So thank you for sharing that. I think that's really important.
So I just have one more question.
It's one that all creative people love and I'm being sarcastic and that question is what is next for you? Are you working on anything else right now?
[00:44:34] Speaker A: Oh, you're going to hate me because I don't talk about my work.
I am working on something new and it's thrilling to me. It's exciting to it's very difficult. It's much more difficult than temple folk, frankly.
But the process of thinking about this is so delicious and hard and everything writing should be it's a painful process. I don't know how writing works for you, but it's always a painful process. But I liken it to childbirth, even though I've never had children. It just seems like when it's here, you'd forget about the pain.
[00:45:20] Speaker B: I think that's a good description.
[00:45:22] Speaker A: I have this new thing in my hands and yes, it took forever to create and yes, it was painful and tried to take me out, but it's here. And so I'm kind of going through the painful process of creation right now. But when you're built for it, you have to do it. You have to do it.
[00:45:48] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's all I really wanted to know. I wasn't trying to get you to talk about what exactly it is, but I'm just happy to know that you are working on something and I look forward to it. Inshallah so thank you so much. And I want to thank our audience for tuning into this episode of on the Square. You can find more information about what we discussed, including links and more by visiting Sapalosquare.com on square or Themaidan.com podcast. Our theme music is provided by Fanatic OnBeat. Thank you.
