Samina Ali is an award-winning author, influential activist for Muslim women’s rights, popular public speaker, and curator of the groundbreaking global exhibition Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices.

Samina’s debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2004), was the winner of France’s prestigious Prix Premier Roman Étranger Award and a finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction and the California Book Reviewers Award. Poets & Writers Magazine named it a Top Debut of the Year. Samina is a recipient of fiction awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

NPR has featured Samina on both national and local stations. She’s been a regular columnist for the Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, and she has written for the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Child magazine. She has also been a consultant for iTVS and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Samina’s essay “Labor of Love” was included in the anthology All the Women in My Family Sing: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom, edited by Deborah Santana.

Samina is an influential advocate and spokesperson for Muslim women’s rights worldwide, who has served as a cultural ambassador to several European countries for the U.S. State Department. She is a founding member of American Muslim feminist organization Daughters of Hajar. The group’s peaceful march into a mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia, to advance equality became part of the documentary The Mosque in Morgantown, which aired nationwide on PBS as part of the series America at a Crossroads. Samina was a featured speaker at the 2017 conference of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, an international advocacy organization founded by five women Peace Prize laureates. In 2013, she curated the acclaimed global exhibition Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices, showcasing work by Muslim women artists, activists, and thought leaders around the world.

Samina’s second book, Pieces You’ll Never Get Back (Catapult), is a harrowing memoir about her unlikely survival after the birth of her son. Throughout, Ali weaves in beliefs from her Islamic upbringing that are significant to her seven-year journey of recovery — thoughts surrounding death, the afterlife, resurrection, and reincarnation — illuminating surprising commonalities between Islam and Christianity and other faiths. Pieces You’ll Never Get Back is both deeply personal and an inspiring example of human determination and courage for anyone facing overwhelming odds. @samina.ali.writer

Where were you born and raised? How did it influence your writing and your thinking about the world? I was born in Hyderabad, India and raised both there and in the US. I happen to be raised bi-cultural and bi-lingual in two twin cities: the twin cities of Hyderabad-Secundrabad and the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul. My family immigrated to Minneapolis in the early 1970s when I was about a year old. But my parents were so rooted in India that my my mom would return to Hyderabad with my two brothers and me every single year. We'd stay there for months at a time. This meant I grew up going to school in Hyderabad and also going to school in Minneapolis. It was confusing and lonely. When I was dropped into the classroom in Hyderabad, my classmates would jeer, "The American student is back!" When I was dropped back into school in Minneapolis, my classmates would chuckle, 'The Indian is back." No one wanted to be my friend because they knew I'd be gone in a matter of months. So I turned to literature. Characters in books became friends; their losses were my losses, their struggles were my struggles. I got lost in their worlds, liberated from my own bifurcated one. It wasn't long before I started to realize, however, that even books didn't represent how truly split my existence was, and that led me to try to capture my experience in words. Since I was growing up learning both English and Urdu, I wrote my stories in both languages. Urdu is written right to left while English is written from left to right. On the page, the two languages would crash into each other like the earth at fault lines and cause visual disruptions that were so satisfying to see because it finally represented how I felt inside.

What kind of reader were you as a child? What books made you fall in love with reading as a child? My parents are Indian immigrants, so they pushed me to go into the medical or business field. They didn't take me to bookstores or encourage me to write. In fact, they became upset when they caught me writing. They'd sacrificed so much to immigrate, and they wanted me to take advantage of the resources offered in America. So, the only books I could get a hold of growing up were mass-produced books I could purchase at stores like Target, where my mom would shop. I'd throw a book into the shopping cart along with her laundry detergent. V.C. Andrews, Agatha Christie, anything with a bit of mystery in it. Later, I turned to Toni Morrison and Mariama Bâ and Paule Marshall, women writers of color who were centering their experiences into what was then a very white male American canon and normalizing their experiences. It was exhilarating to find these writers and they became my role models. When I published MADRAS ON RAINY DAYS (FSG), my novel, it was the first time that a Muslim woman of Indian heritage had been published in the US. I couldn't have done that without these women showing me the way.

Describe your typical writing day. I'm trained as a fiction writer, and I teach fiction writing. However, my current book is a memoir. To write it, I really had to unlearn some fictional craft that I was relying on: scenes, dialogue, etc. I had to privilege voice and let it tell the story, rather than try to show it in scene. In memoir, structure often comes last, which is also different than novel-writing. So that was frustrating for me as a trained fiction writer. I wrote and wrote and wrote various drafts of the memoir over several years, knowing the structure wasn't right. When I finally had the breakthrough, I needed and been praying for, I was then able to structure PIECES YOU'LL NEVER GET BACK into short chapters so that the narrative mirrored my broken brain. 

Currently, I'm back to writing a novel again. I'm finding myself in a different process than when I wrote my first novel or even when I wrote my memoir. I am organizing the story in my head, figuring out the first chapter and the inciting incident, the plot, the characters and their strengths and weaknesses. I'm able to hold all this in my head because I have experience now as a writer. I could have never created the narrative design of my first novel in my head (not even before the brain damage)!! I was too young and inexperienced then. With my memoir, I had of course lived that story, but I still had to write my story in a way that touched an audience -- in a way that was beyond my memories. So each book so far seems to have its own very unique gestation.

Tell us about the creative process behind your most well-known work or your current writing project. The reason there's 20-plus years between my two books is because I had massive brain trauma in the midst of writing my first book. This meant that when I went back to writing that book, the experience of writing was not so much about expressing my creativity but more about creating neural pathways. Creating pathways is such a painful process that I would be plagued by a headache minute into my writing. I'd write until I couldn't keep my eyes open against the pain. Then I'd simply swivel in my chair, away from the desk, and let my body fall to the ground. I'd lie there curled up in pain. In later years, whenever I thought about writing, I saw myself curled up in pain, lying on the ground next to my desk. I couldn't go back. For years, I stopped writing -- which is so sad because writing is what helped to rewire my brain when even the neurologists had given up on me. Writing had saved my life. But the trauma -- I just couldn't get through it. Finally, I realized that in order to write again, I had to get back down on the ground. I had to go through the trauma to get to the other side.... and so I did by writing this memoir. The through line might be about my brain recovery, but it's really a love letter to the art of writing. To words and creativity and art.

Do you keep a journal or notebook? If so, what’s in it?
When I wrote PIECES YOU'LL NEVER GET BACK, I hand wrote one entire draft in a journal. The act of writing with a pen activates different parts of the brain and this means that different parts of the story emerge than when I'm typing on the computer. I wrote one draft of MADRAS ON RAINY DAYS in journals as well. Both of these books are so personal to me that I think it was necessary to get that intimate with the story.

How do you research and what role does research play in your writing? Research is vital to writing books, even memoirs. For PIECES YOU'LL NEVER GET BACK, because I was writing about the brain and about the medical aspects of pregnancy, I interviewed experts: neurologists, OBGYNs, a top researcher of pregnancy complications. I needed their knowledge to help provide my personal story credibility. Credibility is one of the most important aspects of writing. I tell my writing students to think of "credibility" as another craft element, as important to the book as dialogue, POV, plot, tension. If a reader comes across a line that doesn't feel right or factual, they will begin to question whether or not the writer knows their material. And the moment a reader questions the writer's authority, the book loses its readability. Readers begin to question what else might not be accurate in the narrative. At that point, readers put the book down. So research, research, research!! If the setting is a winery, make sure you understand everything about that life, including what types of corks are used for which wine bottles and why. If one of your characters is a tennis pro, make sure you know everything there is to know about the mind and emotions and drive of a tennis pro -- and of course everything they would use: what clothing they prefer, which rackets, what kind of court. Details like these give a book credibility, and that level of credibility is what brings the story to life.

Which writer, living or dead, would you most like to have dinner with? Indian author and activist, Arundhati Roy. Her novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997. She courageously fights for human rights and is hyper critical of imperialism and has gone up against the Indian government. She's unafraid to speak up for those who are voiceless and uses her high profile to benefit the less privileged. At dinner, I would just sit and listen and learn and inhale.

Do you draw inspiration from music, art, or other disciplines?
Music and visual arts and movies/series -- all creative disciplines are deeply inspiring. In fact, when I was struggling with the narrative form of my memoir, it was in going to see Kehinde Wiley's exhibition at the de Young Museum that helped me to have a breakthrough. For several years, I'd been writing that narrative chronologically, but I knew it wasn't right. I just didn't know how to disrupt it. When I saw how his paintings are juxtaposed inversions of each other, I suddenly had the breakthrough I'd needed. The narrative design had to mirror the brain damage! Once I understood that, I sat down and wrote the memoir in six weeks. Whenever my creative well runs dry, I turn to other disciplines to refill me.

AI and technology are changing the ways we write and receive stories. What are your reflections on AI, technology and the future of storytelling? And why is it important that humans remain at the center of the creative process? AI will never go away. I've heard that there are hundreds of AI generated novels being sold on Amazon right now. I have a 15-year-old daughter and I see how natural it is for her to turn to AI for help, whether it's to edit her short stories or to come up with ideas. I'm Gen X, so I didn't grow up with AI. I grew up valuing words and imagination and HUMAN creativity. It's imperative that we find ways to limit AI from the creative process. I say that because, as my current memoir shows, I used writing to help me overcome my brain trauma. I had such massive brain trauma after the birth of my son that neurologists were pessimistic that I would go on to live a "normal life," and one came out and told me I'd never write again. My higher functions were damaged: the functions to imagine, to think, to create, to plan, to project myself into the future or into someone else's POV. These are the functions that make us distinctly human, separating us from animals. But I grew up thinking Words were sacred, not only because I grew up a reader but because, as a Muslim, I was taught that words come from God. Just as the Bible says that in the beginning there was the Word. Writing to me is a sacred act, my place of meditation and prayer. When I was told I would never write again, I couldn't accept that my life had come to an end when I was just 29 years old! So I forced myself to sit at my desk and write. In the beginning, I couldn't deny the doctors were write. I couldn't write. The brain damage meant I had severe aphasia so the words I was thinking were not the words that I wrote on the page. Different words came out. Often, I wasn't even writing words, just random letters mashed together, but my brain visually saw that they were the words I'd intended to write. It was a dark period in my life. I often wanted to stop and give up. But I also had a newborn to raise. So I kept at it. Kept going back to the page. And days became months and months became years and that was how I wrote my novel, MADRAS ON RAINY DAYS. I forced my brain to rewire those pathways that were broken and which the neurologists didn't think I'd ever regain, those pathways that make us human, the very pathways we use as writers. If we turn to AI, if we stop using these neural pathways, imagine what will become of humanity? How bleak and myopic the world will be!

Tell us about some books you've recently enjoyed and your favorite books and writers of all time.: A Life of One's Own: 9 Women Writers Begin Again by Joanna Biggs is my favorite book right now. I read the book and then I listened to the audio version all the way through and then I listened again. On the verge of divorce, Biggs turns to celebrated 9 women writers and investigates their lives to learn how they overcame struggles and grief of their own. Every time I go back to this book, I find solace myself as a woman and as a writer and just as a human being. I don't feel so alone in my own grief. The narrative is so intimate that I feel like I'm sitting in a salon with dear friends. It brings me back to my childhood days when I turned to literature for companionship.

The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
We are the only animal that creates art. When I was severely brain damaged and endured many, many days when I'd lost the higher functions of my brain and could no longer appreciate art, my life turned myopic and bleak. Lyrics and notes from songs had lost all meaning and merely caused headaches. Visual art was nothing more than a collision of color without any meaning or purpose. I didn't feel connected to other human beings. It was a dark and lonely existence. Arts and culture are what separate us from all other animals. We've been expressing ourselves since the beginning of time, starting with cave walls. Even our bodies were canvasses: people invented jewelry, make-up, tattoos, clothing. Art is what makes us human and gives us a uniquely human experience. Again, I say this from personal experience, as someone who fought to get back her higher functions of creativity and imagination. Art connects humans by reminding us of our commonalities. During times of great upheaval, such as after 9/11 when people feared Muslims, I used my novel to help bridge communities. The novel showed the humanity of Muslims at a time when people couldn't see past their fears. The State Department noticed this and even sent me to different European countries, and I spoke on one instance just two blocks from the Madrid train bombing. That was the first time people in that neighborhood had met a Muslim and I still remember how they walked into the auditorium, so apprehensive and even angry. By the end, we were hugging and crying. I was the curator for Muslima: Muslim Women's Arts & Voices, a revolutionary exhibition from the International Museum of Women/Global Fund for Women. As curator, I wanted the audience to come and see the various realities of Muslim women, to break through the singular story we'd created that all Muslim women are veiled and submissive. The beauty of art is that people want to be moved. People read a book and watch a movie and enter a museum with the expectation that they will be touched in some way, that the art will leave an impression and change them. Because they are open to change, art can help deliver messages far more powerfully and effectively than lectures. Art can also change culture. In the US, for instance, Muslim immigrants had brought over the practice of keeping Muslim women separated at the mosque and stuffed inside a back room. I took the message of my novel to the streets and formed a Muslim American feminist organization and we marched peacefully into a mosque in West Virginia to protest this cultural practice. Because of our actions, the largest Muslim organizations in the U.S. changed the bylaws and declared that all women can walk through the front door of any mosque in the U.S. and pray in the main sanctuary. That small act not only changed American Muslim culture but was featured in TIME Magazine and a documentary, The Mosque in Morgantown, aired nationwide on PBS as part of the series America at a Crossroads. All that started with my novel -- as did the healing of my brain. I literally owe my life to the creative process and art.

Interviewed by Mia Funk

A Labor of Love

By Samina Ali

Excerpt from the anthology, ALL THE WOMEN IN MY FAMILY SING: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom 
Edited by Deborah Santana

I delivered my son right here at UCSF hospital. Like many women – and especially women of color – when I complained of symptoms during my pregnancy, I was dismissed. What follow is what happened right after my final visit with the OB

I went into labor the same night I spoke with my OB.  While I was pushing, I complained of severe headaches and chest pain, vision problems. I was ignored again. For my heart pain, I was given Alka Seltzer. Twenty minutes after delivery, I had a seizure. And there my memory fails. What follows is what I was told by others. 

Eight hours after my seizure, I was finally wheeled down for a CT scan of the brain. It showed what the doctors weren’t expecting: two hemorrhages, one in front, one in back. One was a subarachnoid hemorrhage, which, my younger brother, who was a resident in neurosurgery at the time, told me kills 60 percent of patients. That is, patients who have no other medical condition but the subarachnoid hemorrhage. I had other things going on.

Liver failure. Kidney failure. Heart damage. Pulmonary edema. Single-digit blood platelet count. Blood that had stopped clotting. Such severe brain swelling that it wouldn’t respond to medication and the doctors were planning to drill a hole in my head to relieve the excess water. Hundreds of strokes, that was what the doctors thought was happening in my swollen brain, a galaxy of popping and shooting blood vessels.

The neurologist told my family that if I was lucky, I would die. If not, my husband would end up being my ward.

I am told I went into a coma. I am also told I was being awakened frequently to prevent me from moving even deeper into a coma. When awake, I am told I did not recognize anyone, not my brothers or parents, not my husband.

So what is it that I remember? I remember my son, shoving and winding his way out of me and thinking he had a long body. I remember the shock when I finally saw him, his face so different from what I’d imagined. For nine months I had been preparing my white husband for a brown baby. Yet, here he was, born with skin fairer than even my husband’s, and gray-blue eyes.  I remember wanting to hold him, but the doctors had whisked him to a table far from me to be wiped and cleaned, his lungs sucked of impurities.

Then there is darkness. And two people inhabiting this darkness.

The best way to describe it is by the epidural I’d been given during delivery. I hadn’t wanted it, enjoying each spike of pain that brought me closer to my son, but the nurses had insisted. Then the doctor injected it incorrectly so it numbed only half of me. I was thrilled, and, during delivery, reveled in the left side of my body, the side alive to the pain of emerging life.

Like that, were two selves in the darkness where I was, and only one was “waking up” at the doctor’s insistence. This self, whenever she was awake, thought of Ishmael, and screamed that he was still inside her, wanting to come out. It seems the internal clock had stopped during delivery. So the one who had her eyes open, shouting for her son, was the one who was asleep. And the one awake was the one inside the darkness. 

Darkness. That is what I remember. An enveloping darkness where there are no relationships, no ties, no love, no fear, no creation, no connections. And, in this way, there is peace.

It is said that at the end of Buddha's life, when he was asked what there was to know about death, he turned over his bowl. Meaning, an emptiness within an emptiness.

I was living inside that turned over bowl.

Coming out of it -- the miracle that it was -- was indeed a reincarnation.

But a month after being released from the hospital, I was still sunk in a depression that frightened even me. I kept asking myself why I had suffered so much -- and still was, right eye blindness, debilitating headaches, breast milk so full of toxins it had to be pumped and thrown away. I was a writer whose speech had left me. If I wanted, I couldn’t stand by myself and walk from my bed to the bathroom let alone take a shower or brush my teeth or sit on the toilet in privacy. Although I was now a mother, I was as helpless as my newborn. How would I raise him when I couldn’t take care of myself?

Then one morning, while I was holding my newborn, he reached up and touched my face. His gray-blue eyes stared into mine, as though understanding something about me I didn’t understand myself.

I’m not alive, I suddenly realized, not even now that I’ve returned from the hospital.  I’d become so focused on what I’d been through that I’d lost sight of what was before me: my son, our future together

Life, it is not simply to be alive, it is to be awake. 

This is what my son taught me.