Wajahat Ali on His New Memoir and the Merits of Investing in Joy

“Go back to where you came from.”

It’s an insult that, unfortunately, many of us have heard. For writer, playwright and political commentator Wajahat Ali, it’s also the title of his new book — a memoir he calls “a love letter to a country that doesn’t love us back.”

The book traces Ali’s childhood in Fremont through his activism as a UC Berkeley student after 9/11, and the challenges he’s faced as a son, a father and a writer. It chronicles his near-death from a heart condition, his young daughter getting cancer and his parents going to jail. The book is also, somehow, hysterically funny.

Ali shared some of his reflections about Islamophobia, humor and resilience with The California Report Magazine host Sasha Khokha.

Interview excerpts have been edited for brevity and clarity.

On representations of South Asians and Muslims in pop culture

Growing up as a child of the ’80s and ’90s, I inhaled American pop culture. Growing up, you don’t sit there and go, “I am a Muslim Pakistani son of immigrants. I am left-handed and wearing Husky pants.” You’re like, “I’m just a kid and I’m an American.”

But you internalize being the other. You see movies where you are either the sidekick, the villain or you’re completely invisible. Like action movies where Chuck Norris used to go to Middle Eastern countries and just blow up swaths of brown people all the time. He was the hero and you’re rooting for him. Or you’re watching that movie “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” Even then, as a 5-year-old, I’m like, “This is not how my people are. We don’t eat chilled monkey brains or drink eyeball soup.”

But then you don’t realize, oh, the joke’s on me. I’m the bad guy. What does that do to your sense of self-worth, your self-esteem, your image of beauty? When you look at yourself in the mirror, do you love yourself or do you hate yourself? Are you taught to hate the color of your skin, the shape of your nose, your ethnic last name? Many people, without ever really thinking about it, internalize these images, for the rest of their lives.

An excerpt from “Go Back to Where You Came From”:

I’m about as American as chicken korma, apple pie, and chai, but even after forty years, I’m still told to “go back.”

Where, exactly?

In America, who (and what) are you when you’re both “us” and “them”? When I’m a native but seen as a foreigner? When I’m a citizen but also seen as a perpetual suspect? When I’m your neighbor but also seen as an invader? When I’m a cultural creator but also seen as an eraser of white identity and European civilization?

According to mainstream code, I will never be “ordinary” or “a real American” from the “Rust Belt” (unless you consider California the heartland which, let’s face it, no one does). My parents are seen by some as potential terrorists because they’re from Pakistan, even though they’ve lived in this country for over forty years.

Can I be a “real” American when I’m not white no matter how much Fair & Lovely cream I slather on my skin? The answer in 2022 is “Yes, but with conditions.”

But I don’t want conditional love. I want more from America and my fellow Americans.

On life as a young Muslim in post-9/11 America

I was liberal in college and was, I guess you could say, an accidental activist. But a lot of it was book learning. Let me be blunt, and some people might not like to hear this, but a lot of those kids are good, well-intentioned kids who haven’t lived those experiences.

They read about poverty. They haven’t tasted poverty. They read about oppression. They’ve never been oppressed. They’re like cul-de-sac social justice warriors, right? Their heart is in the right place. Their mind is in the right place. I was like that, but I didn’t really taste it. My [immigrant] parents tasted it. But they protected me. So I was kind of in a suburban, protected shell living the American dream. A kid who was at UC Berkeley and was thinking about going to law school.

Then 9/11 happened, and overnight we became citizens and suspects. Overnight, we became terrorists. The American story had a remake, and tag, Muslims were it.

We were the villains. Not just Muslims, but those who look Muslim-y. All of a sudden the entire target was on our back. This country went mad after 9/11. This country went so crazy, we renamed french fries as freedom fries. This country went so nuts that they canceled Susan Sontag. They canceled the Dixie Chicks, who are like the whitest women on Earth.

So what do you think they were doing to Muslims? They were surveilling us. They were entrapping us. They went after our organizations. They went after our charities. What is the type of effect that has on Muslims? A chilling effect. Fear. There were hate crimes against Muslim women.

All this was happening as I was a student at UC Berkeley. Overnight I became this accidental activist and this representative of this thing called “Islam” and “Muslims.”

I learned then that we would have to be something called the “moderate Muslim” in order to be accepted by America. That meant condemning violent acts done by people we’ve never met. Even if we condemned violent acts, and no matter how nice and shiny, we were still seen as suspects. That’s what happened, and we realized, “Oh crap, we’re not white. We’re actually, for a brief moment, living the Black experience in America.”

On ‘actively investing’ in joy and humor

I think humor is important for us to simply have catharsis, to have joy. For people of color to have joy.

The two things that have surprised people most about the book is that people didn’t expect it to be so funny, and people didn’t expect it to end on such a hopeful note, and they needed that hope. The hope that I try to give in the book is an earned hope, not a Hollywood Hallmark hope, where they tie on a bow at the end to make you feel better, like cotton candy. It tastes good for the moment, but afterwards you feel really bad and you get angry, right?

Earned hope is confronting the demons, acknowledging them. Walking through the [forest] of horrors and then coming out with the scars and the wounds, but still standing. The journey of horrors, which is the life of so many Americans who still haven’t tasted the American dream. They’ve lived the American nightmare. And this pandemic, which has flattened us but flattened us unequally and revealed the wonderful X-ray of this country — all of its goodness and badness — perfectly laid bare.

As so many are suffering, I have made the decision in life to actively invest in joy. You have to actively invest in it like exercise. You have to make the intention and then you have to develop the discipline, because for so many of us, we don’t get joy, we don’t get to laugh. Instead, the narrative that we were taught was suffer, but suffer well. Suffer but suffer proud. Suffer, but suffer silently. Smile, even though you’re crying inside.

When [our then-2-year-old daughter] Nusayba was diagnosed with cancer, my wife and I could have easily gone to this mental quicksand of, “Why us? Why us? Why, God?” You’ll never receive an answer to that. That whisper eats away and destroys you. But instead, we said, “This is life. Life happens.” There’s good and there’s bad. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. It’s how we choose to confront it.

I remember I used to sit there at night after my kids went to sleep during my daughter’s stage-four cancer, where we didn’t know if she’d survive. I imagined burying her. I imagined her dying. I imagined [calling her grandparents], saying she died, because I had to prepare myself as the father. But then I made the choice of imagining her alive and healthy, wearing her “Encanto” Isabella dress, full of life. I chose to invest in that story.

Even though it feels like you’re on the edge of the cliff and the cliff is falling, you know, you never know, sometimes the page turns and brings with it a plot twist, and it leads to a better story. And [after being diagnosed with a serious heart condition], I should be dead. Literally, I should be dead. But here I am talking to you. Still alive. My daughter is still alive. So how can I not invest in hope?