An Interview with Sehba Sarwar
By Aditya Gandhi, Pomona '22
Image courtesy of Sarwar.
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Sehba Sarwar is a writer, activist, and visual artist based in the greater Los Angeles community. She has worked as a journalist, educator, nonprofit founder, and more. Her work focuses on issues of immigration, borders, and displacement, with her most recent novel Black Wings continuing this conversation.
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You are an ardent activist. Do you carry your interest in politics into your writing and art?
It’s all intertwined. If you have any interest in what’s happening around the globe, it does eventually weave its way into the writing and the work that you do. An organization that I founded in Houston and ran for almost twenty years grew out of a poem I’d written in resistance to something that was happening in Pakistan.
The word “politics” in the U.S. means something very different from what it means in Pakistan; “politics” does not mean running for office, but just a general sense of what is now called social justice. I was marching in the streets for women’s rights when I was a teenager, and my mother was an educator and part of the hunger strikes for teachers’ rights. My father was a doctor, and he had been arrested while he was still a student for fighting for students’ rights. So, I guess it’s in my blood. In our house, we always had political discussions and conversations, and people came through. There was always a blend of art and activism in the home. Some of the most famous poets, singers, and dancers of Pakistan have come through our house in Karachi and performed there and were imprisoned at some point.
It’s just something you take for granted—you just understand that language, art, body, or the work we create can be an appreciation of a flower, but often it has to be in relation to something happening in the world around us.
But I don’t create message art. I don’t begin an art project or a publication or an essay with the idea: “Oh, I must get somebody to change their mind.” The passion behind the piece is the starting point. For an essay I had in the New York Times, I wrote about the arrest of a family friend. It’s an essay not about what was wrong or right about what happened, but about what was happening in Karachi at that time. Black Wings, my novel, is the same; it tackles women’s issues. If there’s one message in the book, it’s that I would like people to think about the world differently, think about my part of the world differently. But I don’t begin with, “I must change their lens.” It’s a story that I share from my perspective because not everybody in Pakistan was raised the way I was raised. I don’t fall to that stereotype, yet I’m often pushed into that stereotype. So, when someone opens Black Wings, I want them to read with their minds open and not back it into the corner of, “Oh, I see the picture,” because it’s not. It’s the story of one divorced Pakistani woman living in Houston.
Your website emphasizes that you want to encourage awareness and action among people of all backgrounds and describes your work as “transnational.” Yet Black Wings is a story about women, specifically a Pakistani woman, as you were saying. In what way do you think writers can reach people of all backgrounds while also writing stories from the point of view of a specific demographic?
A lot of times as writers we face several pressures, and I know that with Black Wings I faced a lot of pressure to make Yasmeen, the protagonist, conform to what we think stereotypically of Pakistani women, which is not the truth. There are layers and a multiplicity of stories, just like there is a multiplicity of stories for white people. No one will ask a white writer, “Oh, how does this speak about white people?”
As writers, we tell the story from a very specific space, but the issues are global and universal. There are definitely many women who’ve experienced conflict with their mothers, estrangement, loss, the death of a loved one—issues that many families have in different ways. It becomes a universal story, but it is definitely specific, and it has to be specific to ring true. The characters have to be grounded in their realities and in their truths, which in most cases are based on their identities.
To go back to the term “transnational,” I think it’s often new for people to think about; a lot of people think that just because you or your parents were born in another country, you must be an immigrant. But my narrative is by no means the same as the story of many friends I have whose parents were born in Mexico, who came with their family. Maybe that’s how you can define “immigrant”—if there is even a way to define “immigrant”—that at least you moved with your family.
In my case, I moved to the U.S. as a student and never came to stay; my family was always in Pakistan. The move has been very slow. I’m married to a Chicano educator and his background was completely different, but then the same, too, because it concerns changing borders. I have the history of Partition in my background, and he has the history of the moving U.S.-Mexico border while his family remained in one place. For me, “transnationalism” just means that I am lucky enough to move between spaces. I definitely have two homes—I would have ten if I could. So, I don’t claim nationhood. “Transnationalism” is a resistance to the border itself.
What are your thoughts on the idea that writers should “start with what they know”—in other words, that they should only write from the point of view of a character with the same identity as them?
I think it’s a really complicated question. So write what you know—it’s important. But does that mean that we get limited then, that we can only tell a story from our perspective? This has been an age-old conversation. I don’t think we should limit, but I do think there is such a thing as cultural appropriation. I’m thinking about this book, and I’ve very conveniently forgotten the name of it. It’s a book written by a Latina who had good intentions, and she writes in the perspective of a Pakistani boy who comes to the U.S. as a refugee, and he gets grounding through baseball. Her intentions are good; she wants people to empathize with this boy, his background, where he comes from. But by page three it’s clear she knows nothing about Pakistan. She’s making references to a man and a woman hugging at Karachi's airport. That's inaccurate—affection between couples doesn't happen in public.
If we’re going to write about something we don’t know, we better research it well. We have to live through that experience as much as possible, talk to people. I wrote this murder story, and I had to go talk to cops. And the protagonist is Pakistani, and most of my protagonists are, but this protagonist was a social worker, which I’m not. Yasmeen from Black Wings is a divorcee, which I’m not. We don’t have to constrain ourselves with a space so tight we can’t get out of it and use our imagination. At the same time, we must do our research if we’re going to step outside our space. It’s critical. I think a lot of people, like the woman who wrote about the Pakistani boy, write with the intention of delivering a message. I don’t think literature can stand the test of history and time if it’s written with that intention.
Can you speak more on this idea of writing without some intended message in mind?
You have to tell your truth. You have to hold firm to your truth and stay with it. Black Wings, the first edition, was published in Pakistan. I have a very good agent in New York who tried to get it placed through a U.S. publishing house, and she had some really big publishing houses looking at it. I got the same feedback from three editors: “Yeah, we love it, but can you make Yasmeen more Muslim?” or “Can you make more references to 9/11?” That would have meant changing my character and changing the contents, and I chose to not do that. That is not the integrity of the character, that is not my integrity, that is not my truth. I am not writing to make money, although of course I want to make money and support myself through my writing and my art. But I’m not beginning with that dollar sign in front of me, saying, “Oh, I’m going to write something so I can make money.” I am writing from that perspective of truth and integrity to myself. So, in the end, I chose to go with the Pakistani publisher, and it was fine that way. The book would have been very different had I gone along with what the U.S. editors were pushing me to do, and I could not have stood with it. I could not have stood with pride with the book and said, “This is mine.”
You’re also a visual artist. Do you find that your art and writing overlap with or influence each other at all?
Absolutely. I’m primarily a writer, but I began with visual art. I have always moved between the two. Writing has been my medium for a long time, but at the same time in 1999 I began a literary collective which then morphed into a nonprofit, social justice, arts organization. So it’s always been hand in hand, but simultaneously I’ve always been writing.
This most recent project, “On Belonging,” which I brought to Scripps, has been commissioned by a museum in Houston, and they had asked me to do a performance to complement this work by a Palestinian artist. I used the text for the performance from a memoir that I’m working on right now, and I extracted the text and then I had a performance, but then I also wanted to do a visual arts piece with it. All this is to say that it’s all kind of woven together. It’s hard to know what comes first—I guess the writing comes first, but I’ve always given myself space to do whatever comes up for me, and I’m lucky I’ve been able to do that.
It’s all intertwined. If you have any interest in what’s happening around the globe, it does eventually weave its way into the writing and the work that you do. An organization that I founded in Houston and ran for almost twenty years grew out of a poem I’d written in resistance to something that was happening in Pakistan.
The word “politics” in the U.S. means something very different from what it means in Pakistan; “politics” does not mean running for office, but just a general sense of what is now called social justice. I was marching in the streets for women’s rights when I was a teenager, and my mother was an educator and part of the hunger strikes for teachers’ rights. My father was a doctor, and he had been arrested while he was still a student for fighting for students’ rights. So, I guess it’s in my blood. In our house, we always had political discussions and conversations, and people came through. There was always a blend of art and activism in the home. Some of the most famous poets, singers, and dancers of Pakistan have come through our house in Karachi and performed there and were imprisoned at some point.
It’s just something you take for granted—you just understand that language, art, body, or the work we create can be an appreciation of a flower, but often it has to be in relation to something happening in the world around us.
But I don’t create message art. I don’t begin an art project or a publication or an essay with the idea: “Oh, I must get somebody to change their mind.” The passion behind the piece is the starting point. For an essay I had in the New York Times, I wrote about the arrest of a family friend. It’s an essay not about what was wrong or right about what happened, but about what was happening in Karachi at that time. Black Wings, my novel, is the same; it tackles women’s issues. If there’s one message in the book, it’s that I would like people to think about the world differently, think about my part of the world differently. But I don’t begin with, “I must change their lens.” It’s a story that I share from my perspective because not everybody in Pakistan was raised the way I was raised. I don’t fall to that stereotype, yet I’m often pushed into that stereotype. So, when someone opens Black Wings, I want them to read with their minds open and not back it into the corner of, “Oh, I see the picture,” because it’s not. It’s the story of one divorced Pakistani woman living in Houston.
Your website emphasizes that you want to encourage awareness and action among people of all backgrounds and describes your work as “transnational.” Yet Black Wings is a story about women, specifically a Pakistani woman, as you were saying. In what way do you think writers can reach people of all backgrounds while also writing stories from the point of view of a specific demographic?
A lot of times as writers we face several pressures, and I know that with Black Wings I faced a lot of pressure to make Yasmeen, the protagonist, conform to what we think stereotypically of Pakistani women, which is not the truth. There are layers and a multiplicity of stories, just like there is a multiplicity of stories for white people. No one will ask a white writer, “Oh, how does this speak about white people?”
As writers, we tell the story from a very specific space, but the issues are global and universal. There are definitely many women who’ve experienced conflict with their mothers, estrangement, loss, the death of a loved one—issues that many families have in different ways. It becomes a universal story, but it is definitely specific, and it has to be specific to ring true. The characters have to be grounded in their realities and in their truths, which in most cases are based on their identities.
To go back to the term “transnational,” I think it’s often new for people to think about; a lot of people think that just because you or your parents were born in another country, you must be an immigrant. But my narrative is by no means the same as the story of many friends I have whose parents were born in Mexico, who came with their family. Maybe that’s how you can define “immigrant”—if there is even a way to define “immigrant”—that at least you moved with your family.
In my case, I moved to the U.S. as a student and never came to stay; my family was always in Pakistan. The move has been very slow. I’m married to a Chicano educator and his background was completely different, but then the same, too, because it concerns changing borders. I have the history of Partition in my background, and he has the history of the moving U.S.-Mexico border while his family remained in one place. For me, “transnationalism” just means that I am lucky enough to move between spaces. I definitely have two homes—I would have ten if I could. So, I don’t claim nationhood. “Transnationalism” is a resistance to the border itself.
What are your thoughts on the idea that writers should “start with what they know”—in other words, that they should only write from the point of view of a character with the same identity as them?
I think it’s a really complicated question. So write what you know—it’s important. But does that mean that we get limited then, that we can only tell a story from our perspective? This has been an age-old conversation. I don’t think we should limit, but I do think there is such a thing as cultural appropriation. I’m thinking about this book, and I’ve very conveniently forgotten the name of it. It’s a book written by a Latina who had good intentions, and she writes in the perspective of a Pakistani boy who comes to the U.S. as a refugee, and he gets grounding through baseball. Her intentions are good; she wants people to empathize with this boy, his background, where he comes from. But by page three it’s clear she knows nothing about Pakistan. She’s making references to a man and a woman hugging at Karachi's airport. That's inaccurate—affection between couples doesn't happen in public.
If we’re going to write about something we don’t know, we better research it well. We have to live through that experience as much as possible, talk to people. I wrote this murder story, and I had to go talk to cops. And the protagonist is Pakistani, and most of my protagonists are, but this protagonist was a social worker, which I’m not. Yasmeen from Black Wings is a divorcee, which I’m not. We don’t have to constrain ourselves with a space so tight we can’t get out of it and use our imagination. At the same time, we must do our research if we’re going to step outside our space. It’s critical. I think a lot of people, like the woman who wrote about the Pakistani boy, write with the intention of delivering a message. I don’t think literature can stand the test of history and time if it’s written with that intention.
Can you speak more on this idea of writing without some intended message in mind?
You have to tell your truth. You have to hold firm to your truth and stay with it. Black Wings, the first edition, was published in Pakistan. I have a very good agent in New York who tried to get it placed through a U.S. publishing house, and she had some really big publishing houses looking at it. I got the same feedback from three editors: “Yeah, we love it, but can you make Yasmeen more Muslim?” or “Can you make more references to 9/11?” That would have meant changing my character and changing the contents, and I chose to not do that. That is not the integrity of the character, that is not my integrity, that is not my truth. I am not writing to make money, although of course I want to make money and support myself through my writing and my art. But I’m not beginning with that dollar sign in front of me, saying, “Oh, I’m going to write something so I can make money.” I am writing from that perspective of truth and integrity to myself. So, in the end, I chose to go with the Pakistani publisher, and it was fine that way. The book would have been very different had I gone along with what the U.S. editors were pushing me to do, and I could not have stood with it. I could not have stood with pride with the book and said, “This is mine.”
You’re also a visual artist. Do you find that your art and writing overlap with or influence each other at all?
Absolutely. I’m primarily a writer, but I began with visual art. I have always moved between the two. Writing has been my medium for a long time, but at the same time in 1999 I began a literary collective which then morphed into a nonprofit, social justice, arts organization. So it’s always been hand in hand, but simultaneously I’ve always been writing.
This most recent project, “On Belonging,” which I brought to Scripps, has been commissioned by a museum in Houston, and they had asked me to do a performance to complement this work by a Palestinian artist. I used the text for the performance from a memoir that I’m working on right now, and I extracted the text and then I had a performance, but then I also wanted to do a visual arts piece with it. All this is to say that it’s all kind of woven together. It’s hard to know what comes first—I guess the writing comes first, but I’ve always given myself space to do whatever comes up for me, and I’m lucky I’ve been able to do that.
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Images of Sarwar's exhibit "On Belonging" at Scripps College, courtesy of Sarwar.
Who were your biggest influences? Does your work deviate from theirs?
I go through so many books, and right now I’m going back to reading Toni Morrison because my daughter’s fifteen and she’s reading Toni Morrison. You know, it’s kind of like who you think of as a model of your writer—or not model, but writers who have shown you different paths of how writing can happen, of how deep and rich a novel can be. There’s Julia Alvarez, there’s Michael Ondaatje, there’s Arundhati Roy, and then I have a stack of my friends’ books that have come out. I don’t have one writer that I uphold as sacred. It’s just a whole array.
What do you hope that people get out of reading your work?
Right now I’m mostly producing in the West, but even for people who are reading my book in Pakistan—like I said, it doesn’t fall into that stereotype of what it means to be a Pakistani woman. If anything at all, it’s to recognize that there are layers and layers of stories, and all communities have multiplicities of stories. I hope my work is a reminder to not push anybody into a box and say, “This is who you are,” because we all have rich stories to tell. I would love for people to read my work and to be reminded of that, to be inspired to share their own.
I go through so many books, and right now I’m going back to reading Toni Morrison because my daughter’s fifteen and she’s reading Toni Morrison. You know, it’s kind of like who you think of as a model of your writer—or not model, but writers who have shown you different paths of how writing can happen, of how deep and rich a novel can be. There’s Julia Alvarez, there’s Michael Ondaatje, there’s Arundhati Roy, and then I have a stack of my friends’ books that have come out. I don’t have one writer that I uphold as sacred. It’s just a whole array.
What do you hope that people get out of reading your work?
Right now I’m mostly producing in the West, but even for people who are reading my book in Pakistan—like I said, it doesn’t fall into that stereotype of what it means to be a Pakistani woman. If anything at all, it’s to recognize that there are layers and layers of stories, and all communities have multiplicities of stories. I hope my work is a reminder to not push anybody into a box and say, “This is who you are,” because we all have rich stories to tell. I would love for people to read my work and to be reminded of that, to be inspired to share their own.