| A baby with wings. A pearl diver’s magical abilities. A glamorous love story. Inspired by Bollywood, Anar Ali explores the ideas of home and exile, optimism and pessimism, reality and magic in Baby Khaki’s Wings, a collection of seven wonderfully imaginative stories set in locations around the globe, from Canada to east Africa.
While some of these stories focus on the immigrant experience of the east African Ismailis, a Muslim group with origins in India, Ali also intended for the collection to address the larger idea of rootlessness in society. "There is a desperation for home… (when we are) living in a time of so much change," she notes.
Ali herself is no stranger to change, having moved with her family from Kenya to escape the persecution of Idi Amin’s military regime in 1972. Many Indians living in Africa had become successful businessmen, traders and merchants, while others were prominent medical practitioners or educators. Seeking a scapegoat for economic problems and looking for a way to seize valuable assets, Amin decided the country’s approximately 80,000 Indian residents should be expelled – 30,000 fled to Britain and 5,000 to Canada, while the rest relocated to India, Malaysia and the United States, all within three months of Amin’s decree.
Anar’s family eventually immigrated to Red Deer, where her father managed a hotel. While she and her four sisters were excited to experience new things, including snow and Santa Claus, they soon found that they "really stuck out" in their new home. Their experiences are represented loosely in the story A Christmas Baby, where principal character Mansoor does his best to provide a better life for his growing family, despite discouragement and opposition. Ali drew on one of the traditional values of Ismaili culture – providing a better life for loved ones – to help shape the story.
Ali has noted that it was a "big decision" to use the Ismaili community in her writing. This Muslim group has a long history of loss and relocation. Often the community has practiced the Muslim tenet of taqiyya (voluntary dissimilation), or pretending to be something else as a survival technique in times of persecution. She tries to be respectful of the community in her writing and uses references that are specific to Ismaili culture. At a recent reading in Edmonton, she was approached by Ismaili audience members who were pleased to hear these familiar cultural references, and felt it was time that their way of life was written about.
Despite her aspirations to write, Ali initially completed an undergraduate degree in business at the University of Calgary and worked with a major corporation before realizing that she was living a life "that she didn’t really want." After taking a year off to travel in India and east Africa, she returned to Canada and enrolled in a master of fine arts program at the University of British Columbia. Being around other writers was encouraging, and Ali came to the realization that it didn’t matter if no one read what she wrote, as long as she kept working at it. "This idea gave me great freedom to push the boundaries in my writing."
Ali’s latest projects include a novel based on A Christmas Baby, as well as a novella entitled The New Mombassa, in which a ship sailing from the city of Mombassa is diverted to an underground river and lands near Drumheller. |
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