[00:03:11] Wajahat: Thank you so much for reading the book and I'm glad you liked it, which shows that you have exquisite taste, sir. Good to talk to a fellow Bay Area native. I'm now in Virginia because I married way up and my wife makes more money than me, is more educated and smarter, and better looking. I'm also a smart man, which is why I followed her here. The universal is often found in the specific. That's what sometimes folks forget, especially when it comes to corporate storytelling. You try to hit the four quadrants. You try to make something appealable to everyone, and then you do your market testing.Then you end up making this gruel, which isn't even tasty gruel, it's watered-down gruel, and no one likes it.

What I've found is the more specific you get, the more honest you can be. Then in that specificity, like you mentioned there are these key points that you mentioned, specific details that you were able to latch onto like the Bash Brothers. Which for those who don't know, was that glorious year where Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire were just crushing it for the As, or just growing up in the Bay Area, Fentons Ice Cream. Apparently the Pixar folks like Fentons a lot as well. It's the ice creamery that the old man and the kid went to at the end of Up. People find an entry point.

In this particular book where I tell this story, a story of America from a particular perspective of a son of immigrants, and a Muslim, and a person who I think both experienced the American dream and the American nightmare, a lot of people are like, I'm not brown. I'm not a son of immigrants. I'm not Muslim. What do I care? Then they read the book. Not everyone obviously, because some people could read the book and be like, none of this relates to me, but hopefully it's interesting for them.

You'll be surprised that so many people are like, “I too wore husky pants,” and there's a tear of trauma, or “I'm also left-handed.” I get these amazing messages from white folks. These emails when I go and talk, they're like, I too was X, Y, and Z, I relate to this. I think it's an eye-opening experience for them to like, oh, I have an entry point. Then it warms the audience a bit into be like, this isn't that much of an alien story. I can relate to this fish out of water story. For those who can't relate to it, it's a real authentic, if you will, insight into a story and a world that they didn't know.

Oftentimes when we are travelers, and you don't want to be the ugly American, but you go with a curious open mind and heart to another country, and you often hear people saying, what do the locals have? Like stop giving me the overpriced, watered down tourist crap. Then you go and you're like, this is a new experience. I didn't know. Even when it comes to food, a lot of my friends, they would go like, “Give me the authentic desi food. I didn't know I was eating watered-down crap for all these years.” It also shows me, and something I've always believed in– again, I have to use this type of language, we'll talk about it a little bit more– is that we were told, people of color, that our ethnic stories would not relate to the mainstream. I always said I have faith in the mainstream, which is always code word for white. They will cross the road, invite them, they'll come and eat the masala and the spices. Just have faith in them. That has been my long-term investment, that I have faith in audiences and I have faith in people. If you give them a quality product and you try to be honest, you won't win everyone, but at the end of the day they'll respect it more than gruel.

[00:06:36] Host: You talked about in the book, when your play was released in New York, your play, Domestic Crusaders, that there were people who came from immigrant families who said, that reminds me-- I think it was Ecuadorian, I can't remember. They said, that reminds me of my family in the way that we would talk in our household.

[00:06:58] Wajahat: The first time we did-- it was a soft premiere of the play in New York on 9/10/2009, and it was at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe where we did our five-week run. Before we did the premiere, it was the birthday of the late Miguel Algarín who is one of the co-founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which is a historic, now institution in the Lower East Side of New York. For his birthday, we did a potluck and then we did the play. At this simple birthday party was Miguel Algarín, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, these titans.

There was one Pakistani in the audience, my mother had come up. My mother made biryani in the small kitchen in Queens of our stage manager. Then that ended up being the hit dish of the evening. The biryani was polished clean. People were like, this is amazing. In the audience, you had Italians, Jews, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans, that was 95% of the audience. Now here you had this play about a Pakistani-Muslim American family. This was our test, will this diverse crowd of just really literary ballers be able to appreciate this play? Judging from that response and that enthusiastic response… and specifically during the intermission, a gentleman came and found me. He goes, "Are you the playwright?" I said, "Yes." He goes, "Have you studied Jewish theater?" I'm like, "Maybe through osmosis, but not specifically." He goes, "This reminds me a lot of Jewish families and Jewish playwrights. I really appreciate the writing. I just want to shake your hand." Then afterwards, Miguel's sister, Puerto Rican, she says, "Man that's how we fight in our house." Ishmael Reed is the producer of the play, he's African American, and my director, Karl LeBlanc is a Russian Jewish descent.

Again, the universal is found in the specific, and in the specificity there's authenticity. When we water down our cultures for sake of assimilation, the question is what are we assimilating into and what are we giving up? Oftentimes we're giving up all that richness that is part of CRT and wokeness. That is dangerous and scary, but that's what gives, literally, our stories and our food flavor that makes it so enjoyable for the masses.

[00:09:17] Host: I want to talk a little bit about the importance of who tells the story. I have a writer friend, he's Eastern European, talented writer. His dad immigrated here. He's born here and raised. He wanted to write this story. He wrote a pilot for a story about a family on a Native American reservation. It was moving and a wonderful, beautiful story, well-defined characters. I kept telling him that, that's not your story to tell. He said, "This is a story that 's going to create representation. Just imagine like a television show where everybody on the screen is Native American and you're telling the story. It's a story that we here in America, we don't get to hear that often." I said, "Yes, I agree."

[00:10:08] Wahajat: This is where it gets really interesting, is whose story is it to tell? Who tells the story? Who tells it well? Oftentimes, historically, this is where it's interesting. I would hate to live in a world where men can only write about men and can't write about women, and I can't write about white characters. That's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is historically, those of us who are people of color or marginalized have not been the protagonist of our own narrative, and we have not been the authors of our own narrative.

Oftentimes we have been looked at and viewed, and written about as exotic animals observed by zoologists, who look at us with both fascination and horror. Oftentimes they get it wrong. They get the story wrong. They put on their cultural blinders. Oftentimes, not always, but the narrative that comes out is one that debases us, humiliates us, or exploits our communities to a point where we look at our representation and when you're not offended, you just laugh because it's so ridiculous. Like Apu or like Indiana Jones, Temple of Doom, which I loved as a kid, but you go back and watch it, now, you're like, this is--

Even then I knew how silly it was. My kids saw it recently, and they're like, "This is ridiculous." If you don't remember that movie, he goes to India, and I'm not Indian, but it doesn't matter. It's a fill-in for all brown people. We're eating eyeball soup and monkey brains, snakes, and brains. It's just horrific. What that does is, people are like, “Suck it up. Be a man. Stop being a snowflake.” It creates perceptions, and it creates perceptions that also influence policies. It's very easy to create policies of war when you have completely dehumanized the other.

We don't have to look back at colonialism because you look at the war on terror. When you look at a poll done of 1 billion-- Gallup did a poll in 2009 of 1 billion Muslims. They said, "What do you love about America?" They loved American freedoms. They loved democracy. They loved education and technology. What did you hate about America? What they hated was the hypocrisy and the disconnect between American values and its foreign policy. What they also hated, number two on the list, was the humiliating depiction of Islam and Muslims in US media.

That's how powerful the story is. Because if you look at media and pop culture, it's one of our greatest and most powerful exports to the world. Movies, TV shows. If you see people-- Right now what's happening, say, how the right wing in particular is weaponizing homophobia, they're deliberately using these tropes that you and I grew up with of the sexual predator, of the gay man who's going to take your child. That has a reboot now in 2022 with sex trafficking and grooming. What does it do? It dehumanizes an entire group of people, which then leads to what? Violence!

In addition to just hurt feelings and hilarious stereotypes that are not representative of real life, it also puts a target on a community's back. There's a lot happening with who tells the story and how that story is told. I'll also say this. It's not that white folks can't tell a story. It's when those white folks or someone outside of your tribe, whatever that tribe is, does the story well, meets with the folks, is accurate, and authentic, you'll see that very same community praise that person. You'll see them respect that person. That person did their homework. Thank you.

It's not like only brown people can tell brown people's stories, but when brown people have never been able to tell their stories and has been whitewashed, that's when you want to get to equity and say, yo, can you give us a little room and space and investment and let us be the protagonist for our narrative?I wanted to give a nuanced answer to this so people appreciate that it's like, "Oh, just because you're not from that tribe, you can't tell that story?" No. Tell that story well. Get the buy-in from that community and do your job-

[00:14:04] Host: Do your research.

[00:14:04] Wahajat: -and then you will be respected, but also we're dealing with the fact that historically, it's oftentimes always been white guys telling our story and oftentimes not telling it well.

[00:14:12] Host: I want to talk about this catch-22 that exists a little bit with regards to the arts, with regards to film and television specifically. It's a privileged profession-

[00:14:25] Wahajat: That's right.

[00:14:25] Host: -to be able to sacrifice, to be a starving artist. A lot of second-generation Americans have this, and you wrote about this in your book, the parents that say, "I didn't come to this country for my child to be X, Y, or Z."

[00:14:45] Wahajat: An English major.

[00:14:46] Host: Yes. Or an artist, or a musician, or whatever the thing is that uphill battle of, yes, you may be living out of your car and eating whatever, Taco Bell! It is a privileged profession. It's a financially privileged profession to make those sacrifices. That catch-22 comes from the lack of representation but also the lack of that open door, or that permission to go and struggle, and to even go to college for, like you said, an English major, or a theater major, or a screenwriting major, is a big risk and a big investment that may turn out to be nothing. When these families sacrifice so much to come here to work hard, that's a really tough thing to say, "Yes, I'll let my child do that."

[00:15:49] Wahajat: I mentioned about it in the book because for many immigrants, imagine the sacrifice. You come to a country, you leave everything. You leave your family. You leave your culture. You try to learn a new language. You try to integrate. You have the uphill burdens of people oftentimes mocking you, not knowing you. You have to build a community from scratch. You sacrifice a lot. Now you have American kids, born and raised in this country oftentimes, they're like, I don't want my kids to go through what I had to go through.

They have an opportunity to pursue their dreams. They have an opportunity to get a jump-start on life. I've given them enough of a foundation. I joke that there's this immigrant checklist of American success which gives you a holy trinity in the last 20 years. There's now another slot in there. There's four occupations; doctor, engineer, big catchall business, and corporate lawyer. Then the fifth option is failure. That's it. That's all you get. Those four and failure.

Oftentimes you hear immigrants say, “These are the people who are respected. These are the people who have success. These are the people who have stability. These are the people who get good spouses. These are the people who get good homes. These are people who have good credit. We came to this country, and when we die we say, ‘Aha, look, we've set up a future generation.’ We didn't come to this country for you to be some loser writer, hustling and being poor. Why did I break my back for you to go into arts, or you to become an ‘academic doctor’? What am I going to tell the family at home?”

It’s tied directly to representation because they did not have a model of success. They're like, “Show me. Show me where people like us have made money, and where someone marries a starving writer, and when our stories are exalted, and you can get a good house.” It's not enough for that generation sometimes to have faith. That faith has to have something tangible attached to it. You can't necessarily blame them. I'm not too hard on them because I know how much they had to give up. It was very hard for them, and it still is hard for them to come around to the fact that, oh, my son and my daughter might have a different American checklist for success.

Not only that, it's in our community's long-term interest to have writers and elected officials, and teachers, and activists, and people doing public policy. This is how we really integrate and thrive. Instead, they're like, who the hell's going to marry a frigging writer? You're going to be broke-ass broke. Prove to me. Prove to me that this occupation you're pursuing has some financial stability.

That's why when a guy like me who's nobody but can write a book and that book gets reviewed, and the book has positive praise, and the book is published by Norton, and they see me on TV, you see that generation now saying, ah, Wajahat made it, and if Wajahat can make it, maybe my son can make it or my daughter can make it. That's why it's so important to have that type of representation.

[00:18:44] Host: I know you're a fellow comic book nerd.

[00:18:48] Wahajat: Indeed.

[00:18:49] Host: Ms. Marvel, I don't know if you had the opportunity to watch that series or--

[00:18:54] Wahajat: I did.

[00:18:55] Host: I'm blushing as I'm even about to say this, but I learned so much about cultures that were oblivious to me from a Marvel comic book TV show. I learned more about Partition from that show than I did from any history class I [crosstalk]

[00:19:17] Wahajat: Isn't that wild?

[00:19:18] Host: It's insane, but it did something else. I heard about Juneteenth from the TV show, Atlanta, as a grown-ass adult, which is sad. It's sad on my part for not knowing more, but I just blame the education.

[00:19:34] Wahajat: A lot of people learn about the Tulsa Massacre from the Watchmen HBO series.

[00:19:37] Host: Same. Likewise. Yes. Ms. Marvel did something as well that you did in your book. It's what we started off this conversation with. It leaned into those commonalities that we mentioned, of this young American experience, the fandom, the junk food, the music, the parties, crushes, eye rolling at your parents, the pressures of school. It normalized without ever feeling heavy-handed of anything. It just felt, this is another slice of American life, so beautifully, in my opinion, and so important too to see that represented without there being Islamophobia or… It was just life and family life.

[00:20:33] Wajahat: It's an example of how you take pop culture representation and when it's done well. With Ms. Marvel, for those who don't know, I know the creators of Ms. Marvel, G Willow Wilson, who is a white convert to Islam, and she made it with Sana Amanat, who was at that time an editor at Marvel, but now has been promoted to a lofty creative position. Sana is a Pakistani-Muslim American child of immigrants from Jersey. She's like, "Hey, Willow, let's create this character," six, seven years ago, "called Ms. Marvel." In the vein of Spider-Man. A young teenage girl who's a nerd, who's likable, who has the same problems of trying to please her parents, but a good kid, high school crushes. Then she discovers powers. What happens? The typical superhero story, but told through the specificity of this brown girl who's Muslim and has an affectionate love for her culture and her religion, and her eccentric family. Totally normal stuff, if you think about it. Nothing really outlandish or outrageous, or even that risky, but you've just never seen this story and the superhero origin story told from this point of view.

Lo and behold, Ms. Marvel blows up and becomes a big hit, and to the point where we're like, oh, Disney and Marvel are like, we got something here. Now she joins the Avengers and she has a TV show. I remember my wife in particular was just like, loves that show. She's like, we didn't have this growing up. I bought my daughter a Ms. Marvel action figure. It's one of the situations with the TV show, they did a really good job, is that they brought in really diverse writers and actors. This is where I think having that type of representation matters because the showrunner is a Pakistani woman.

That specific episode of Partition is tied to the– I'm not going to give you too many spoilers, but it's tied to the story. People learn about Partition. We had no idea. So many people died. It was so traumatic. This explains the animosity between Pakistan and India. We have no idea that, look, there's a character wearing a hijab, but she's got a boyfriend, which is so real. Just because you're religious doesn't mean you're not doing the same old stuff. Pop culture oftentimes has been a vehicle to help us imagine a better future or a worse future, but also has been a vehicle to Trojan Horse, I think, more diversity, which is why cultural and stories are also so threatening to people right now, and why you're seeing books being banned, because that's the power of stories.

[00:23:05] Host: I want to talk about being a parent. How your role of baba changed your perspective, changed how you write and why you write.

[00:23:19] Wajahat: I'm a baba of three little wildlings. Ibrahim, my son who's eight, and Nusayba, who is six, and our pandemic baby, Khadija, who just turned three. In the book I mentioned this, and even now I mention, when you become a father or a parent, how can you not change? It has to change you. You're now responsible for life. People who say they haven't changed, and I'm like, I really worry about your children. Because I hope you change. I hope you become more selfless. I hope you become more generous. I hope you think about consequences in the future.

For most parents, I know people who care about being a parent, we're freaked out. We joke, I just hope my kid's future therapist bill is at a minimum. Can I just reduce the therapy bill? How am I going to mess this kid up. Inshallah, you hope you don't, right? At this age that I'm at right now at 42, I think there's a reason they call it midlife crisis, even though I don't consider it a crisis because we're at this age where we're witnessing death and life in giant waves at the same time, where we're bringing in our children to the world and our friends are having kids, but then we're burying our elders.

Then you realize, oh, I have gray hair. Oh, I'm beginning to look a lot more like my dad. Oh, I've discovered that I need to eat fiber. Oh, I actually have less years ahead of me than behind me. Huh? Which is stuff you don't think about at 20. I did because I was a precocious melodramatic kid. I've had multiple midlife crises in my life. We're at that stage, right? I think you get to that stage as a father and you sit there and you think, I might not have enough time to do everything, and I might not live long enough to see the realization of the dream, but my kids might be able to see it.

I think, especially with men, they've shown that when men get married and start families, it motivates them to make more money. They're like, oh, and it makes perfect sense to me. Men who are married and have kids actually have higher earning than single men. Because I think there's a drive in us, for most of us, that says, I might not make it, but my kids, they deserve better. It links us back to our immigrant parents. I might not be able to achieve the dream. Maybe I could see enough of it and my kids can see the dream. For me, when we're dealing with climate change, a pandemic, the rise in the mainstreaming of white supremacy, literally.

I think about, and I mentioned this in the book, my job as a parent. Is it to be a gardener and plant a seed, and maybe I'm lucky enough that we all experience the shade and I get to eat the fruit. Or am I a janitor, and my job is just to clean up this crap so my kids at least have some walking space. Or am I Hodor from Game of Thrones? For those of you who don't know, Hodor was a giant creature whose literal purpose in life was to live at this perfect moment where he uses his giant body to block the door and give his friends and allies enough time to escape. He literally uses his body to block a door and impede the path of rampaging demons. A hoard of demons. He dies, he sacrifices himself and his body, and to "hold the door". Maybe that's my job. Maybe my job is just to hold the door to give our kids' generation a chance.

I think like that now, but I hope, I hope, I hope that maybe I can be a gardener and plant the seeds, and if we're lucky, live long enough that our generation and our kids' generation can both enjoy the fruit and the shade. If not, then our kids' generation, inshallah, can enjoy the shade and the fruit. That is what's changed my mindset and my goals, and what my purpose is with the time that I have left.

[00:27:10] Host: I love this term "inshallah". Is there a future that you can imagine where that's a term that is thrown out whether you're Muslim, wherever you're from, that it is a term that just becomes popularized and used in regular colloquialism?

[00:27:29] Wajahat: We're already there. In the 2020 presidential domains, Joe Biden dropped it. In hip-hop songs it's there. My co-host for our podcast Democracy-ish Danielle Moodie, is a black woman, a daughter of Jamaican immigrants. I think she's atheist, but her parents are probably Christian. She ends every episode with “inshallah.” "We'll come back next week if we still have democracy, inshallah." When I was in law school, most of my friends weren't South Asians and Muslims. I said it all the time, by the end of law school, all these guys are saying inshallah. Like, "Oh man, inshallah, I hope we passed the LSAT." Even in Middle Eastern countries, not everyone's Muslim. There's a lot of Christians, a lot of people who are atheists.

Inshallah, it's a beautiful term. It literally means if God wills it or God willing, but it also means hopefully. You don't have to be religious to say it. Again, look at Middle Eastern countries where there's people who aren't religious or people who aren't Muslim, but it's part of the mainstream, like you said. It's a word which I just use. I've always just used it, and people are like, "Wait, what did you just say?" I'm like, "Inshallah, inshallah." At first, they're like, "Inshallah, inshallah." Then afterwards people just use it because it means hopefully, God willing, this will happen. I feel like give it five more years, I think it'll even be more mainstream.

[00:28:43] Host: It leaves us with an uplift at the end of the sentence. It always finishes with instead of ha, na, da, da da, we go da, da, da, da.

[00:28:53] Wajahat: Hopefully there will be a better future, inshallah. It does do something. The word… words matter, and the language that we use also influences our perceptions and our attitudes. I think you're right. If you say inshallah instead of saying, "It's all over. Let's go eat food," or you're like, "It's going to be tough, but inshallah, hopefully things will be better. Let's go eat food." It's a little twist. Maybe our life needs that little positive twist.

[music]

[00:29:22] Host: If you would like to continue the conversation, visit wajali.com for more stories from our guest. Visit Orange County Grantmakers at ocgrantmakers.org, and the Orange County Community Foundation at oc-cf.org. To listen to more episodes and to find books written by and recommended from our guests, visit pastforward.org or follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.