Finding the path from ideals to reality through story
Interview with author, Huda Al-Marashi on her journey as a writer
Before we begin…
Some of us start out life starkly aware of expectations and values communicated by our parents, our religious communities and our culture. Some of us grow up in secular environments where the expectations and values may appear to be both less formed and less onerous, and the role of choice seems to play a bigger role. How has this played out in your experience? How have you viewed the constraints – or lack of them – in your life? How have these helped you , hurt you, or otherwise shaped you as you made your way from childhood to adulthood?
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Am I doing enough? A conversation with Huda Al-Marashi
“Our Iraq was the one that lived on in our parents’ memories, frozen at the moment of their 1970s departure, immune to time.” ― Huda Al-Marashi, First Comes Marriage: My Not-So-Typical American Love Story
“Ideals are beautiful, they're enchanting, they're such a promise of reward if you follow the rules, right? But life wasn't meant to be lived along those ideals. It's impossible many times, and then where are we after?” - Huda Al-Marashi, from our interview below.
Listen to our interview here:
Huda Al-Marashi was six when she met the boy who would become her future husband. She was eighteen when she married him. The years in between were shaped by the conflict between yearning for the kind of romantic American love story that involved wooing, dating, kissing, and romance and the equally strong desire to be the good woman she was raised to be: intelligent, chaste, and happy to be married to someone who shared her family’s values as Iraqi Americans. She wanted both.
Huda’s memoir, First Comes Marriage: My Not-So-Typical American Love Story, captures that struggle in a fresh, funny, and poignant way but she doesn’t stop there. She writes of the few years that followed the wedding with humor, honesty and self-reflection that took time and distance to find. In doing so, she opens a window that allows the reader to see not only the differences between her Arab Iraqi culture and ours, but the universal fears, hopes, and struggles for identity that all newly married couples face, particularly if they marry young. In the process, she discovers that no matter how love or courtship evolves, most people end up with the same problems to solve, the same need to grow, the same constraints imposed by building something new with another person.
“I had been to Hadi, both a help and a hurt. How woefully unprepared for the task of marriage I'd been. Nobody ever warned me of the gravity of blending two lives together. Nobody ever told me I'd hold another person's sense of self in my hands, that I'd have the power to both build and destroy the life I now shared.” - Al-Marashi, Huda. First Comes Marriage: My Not-So-Typical American Love Story,
In a recent conversation, I had a chance to ask Huda about this journey as well as her journey as a writer which has taken some interesting turns including interrogating whether story is “enough” to show the things she wants to show. Since publishing First Comes Marriage, Huda has made the leap into fiction for younger audiences. She wrote her most recent novel, a middle-grade story called Grounded, with three other authors, a collaborative feat that boggled my mind. All of her projects are driven by the same desire that filled her in the wake of 9/11: to help bring Muslim voices and characters alive on the page and in the hearts and minds of readers.
More about Huda
Her other writing has appeared in various anthologies and news outlets, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and Al Jazeera. She is a fellow with the Highlights Foundation Muslim Storytellers Program. And a public speaker who makes her home in San Diego. You can find her at her website and follow her on Instagram and Facebook.
Here are her books
Our interview is the fifth in this year’s series spotlighting writers who call San Diego home. You can listen by clicking on the link above. Check out some of the highlights from our discussion below and let us know your thoughts.
What drives her
“I am motivated by exploring the Muslim American experience. It's what got me writing in the first place. This was post 9/11 America and then the stakes intensified with the Iraq war. As an Iraqi American I just wanted to write something that would make my family and our people more real in the eyes of, you know, your average American reader, I just didn't see our stories being told in any kind of nuance or with any kind of relevance.
[Initially] I was telling an immigration story of my grandparents and how they came to the United States. But when I started to try to sell that book, I heard from agents that this kind of fish-out-of-water-coming-to-America story had been told so many times, could I think of a different spin to put on it? And that's when I started looking at it through the lens of love and relationship, because it was something that was a fresh take on that kind of immigrant coming to America's story. Relationship stories do tend to tug at our hearts and when you look all around you see we are all kind of obsessed with our own relationships.”
And then in Grounded, I wanted to explore a Muslim American child whose parents had maybe been in the U. S. for a generation and was trying to figure out where she fit. Because that's what I'm seeing with my kids is they're starting to ask themselves, you know, what does that identity mean for me? You were born here, where do I fit? And so that was what I was playing with, with my character Nora, in Grounded.
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On the switch to fiction from memoir
“I love memoir. I love it as a genre. I love it for what it does for us as writers. I think I will always be a memoirist at heart. But I think people are better readers of fiction.
I know when my memoir, First Comes Marriage,, has been read by a memoir reader. Do you know what I mean? Like, there are people who just get that genre. They get that level of self analysis and why we're doing it. They understand that the person on the page is also to some degree, a character and that they are never reading the whole self.
But there's another kind of reader who comes to memoir and is reading it the way they would a story or a novel and be frustrated that it is not fitting the parameters of the fiction that they expect. Maybe they judge the protagonist in a way they would if it were a fictional character.
And so then I asked myself the question of fiction is the way to communicate and people are having an easier time engaging in the conversations through fiction, then why am I slitting my wrist and bleeding on the page to write memoir, right? If, if we can have a better conversation through fiction, then maybe I should be trying my hand at this.”
Writing for younger readers
“Writing one of the stories for Once Upon an Eid [a middle-grade anthology about Eid written by multiple authors] and then Grounded, kind of pulled me into the middle grade space. But in each one, I used the invitation and the opportunity to share some aspect of identity that had always intrigued me.
I'm seeing that the earlier you start, we're kind of pouring the foundation for these future tastemakers who will later be able to, you know, see themselves and enjoy this very diverse fiction no matter what their cultural background is.
And the kids are amazing. We did our school visits at very much white majority schools, in affluent communities for our first launch. And it was incredible to see the kids relating to those characters as if there was just like no veil of identity there. Oh, it was awesome.
And then on the other side, once there was an Iraqi American girl in the audience. Just to see the way her face lit up when I told her that I also was Iraqi American – she just jumped out of her seat and you know, those types of things were incredible.”
Is story enough when it comes to the important things we want to say?
“In the beginning as a writer I think I was very enchanted by story and what story can do, that we can really tuck into people's hearts and change minds and show things that we really need to show. The older I get, the more I'm asking myself, is this the most powerful way to reach people?
You know, is it really story? Is story really doing it? So, I, I do think it's very powerful, but then I also wonder, like, am I in the world enough? Am I having... You know, conversations enough. Am I doing enough? Is the story enough? You know, and, and I think that's why, for me, the motivation is always to show something important with the story.”
Collaboration – with the right partners – can be fun
“It was a lot of fun, a lot of fun, and I feel like it has spoiled me to other writing projects. It felt like being in a writer's room of a movie set or something, because we were all together plotting and, um, plotting out our next steps, and then drafting and instantly getting feedback from each other.
It was written over the pandemic. So it was a lot of Zoom, two, three hour long Zoom session. It was a fantastic experience, And the other piece of it that felt like a real gift that I really, really enjoyed was intimately watching the way three other authors work. “
Listen to the entire interview
To listen to the interview, complete with secrets to successful collaboration, click the link below.
Looking for your next read? Huda’s got recs
When I asked Huda to share some books she’d recommend to readers, she sent back this wealth of fiction, nonfiction, adult, and middle grade books. Have you read any of these yet?
Recent Reads: Yellow Face by R.F Kuang, Huda F Are You? by Huda Fahmy, Hijab Butch Blues Lamya H, An Unlasting Home Mai Al-Nakib
Similar to First Comes Marriage: The Good Daughter by Jasmin Darznik, The Locust and the Bird by Hanan Al Shaykh, A Tender Struggle (Formerly titled: My Accidental Jihad) by Krista Bremer, The Girl Who Fell to Earth, by Sophia Al-Maria, Love in a Headscarf by Shelina Janmohamed.
The “Grounded” Authors:
Aisha Saeed: Together Tree , Written in the Stars, Amal Unbound, Bilal Cooks Daal, Yes No Maybe So, Once Upon an Eid, Omar Rising
Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow: Mommy's Khimar, Your Name is a Song, Abdul's Story, Hold Them Close, Salat in Secret
On “Both, And”
When trying to do “both” leads to new territory and common ground.
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Great interview. I am excited to check out Grounded and to share it with teachers and our school library. I also found the comment on memoir as portrait helpful. It is a version, a rendition of a story... as someone writing one, I find this lifts a burden or fear that I will get it wrong.
I’m excited to listen to this interview Betsy and Huda. Thank you both!