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DIDIHOOD ~ Issue 74

DIDIHOOD ~ Issue 74

Meet the Didi: Sadiya Ansari

The Didihood
July 01, 2024

Happy Summer, Didis! We can’t believe we’re halfway through 2024 already! It was great to see so many of your at our Summer Social in Toronto. We hope to have more events planned for you this year, so stay tuned.

Meet the Didi

For July’s Meet the Didi, we’re chatting with Sadiya Ansari, whose book In Exile, is releasing on August 13! Sadiya is a Pakistani Canadian journalist based in London. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, VICE, Refinery 29, Maclean’s, The Walrus, and the Globe and Mail, among others. She has reported from North America, Asia, and Europe, and her work has changed legislation and won awards. She is co-founder of the Canadian Journalists of Colour, a 2021 R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellow, and a 2023-24 Asper Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia.

Tell us about yourself growing up, did you always love writing and storytelling?

I was born in Karachi, and had a tiny stopover in Frankfurt, Germany, and then grew up mostly in a pretty suburban experience in Markham, Ont. The one thing that I loved about that was that Markham is the most diverse place in Canada, so like my frame for what was normal or mainstream was really kind of influenced by coming of age there.

My love for literature started with reading, and I have my mom to thank for that — she taught me how to read super early. One of her many careers was an early childhood educator, and she struck some deal with her employer that I could attend the Montessori she taught at — gotta love the brown hustle! Books have been my most steady companions since, and as a journalist, I really love to get lost in fiction. I try to read four or five books a month.

My mom also taught me to write by the time I was in kindergarten, and that’s when I started to “write”, which was really summarizing other children’s books I had read. (Hopefully, I’ve become a less derivative writer.) I also loved writing poetry as a child, which now strikes me as a bit weird. But my great-grandfather was a poet, so perhaps it’s in my blood.

What has your journey been like navigating journalism in Canada as a South Asian woman?

There are so many layers to this experience. First, I went back to school to do a second graduate degree in journalism because I was working in the public service and was bored out of my mind.

The first part of navigating that with immigrant parents is them looking at me like, you want to do another graduate degree to do what now? My parents read the Toronto Star every morning, and it was my dream paper to work at, and so when I started working there, they were super proud.

Early in my career, I just tried to keep my head down and stay in the game — I did so many internships, took short-term contracts, would leave a contract before it ended to go to another job. I had experiences that spanned from uncomfortable to horrific in my early years — from a journalist in his 60s giving me a wet kiss on the cheek the middle of the CBC Vancouver newsroom and no one addressing it to being told by an editor that he would refer to me as the “brown one” if there wasn’t another brown reporter in my cohort.

On the storytelling side of things, it was equally complicated but with much more at stake. Canadian media is a different landscape today than when I started over 10 years ago. Most of my editors were white, and that doesn't mean that they all didn’t consider perspectives outside their own. But a lot of the people I worked with only saw people like themselves as their audience. So it was really tough when I’d pitch stories shaped by the communities I was a part of, and hearing editors consistently respond, “I don't really think that's a story.”

Some of it was a result of being young and not always having a sharp editorial sense. But when I look back now, I tend to think there was definite bias in who they thought their audience was and what they thought their audience was interested in. And it seemed some of those editors didn’t have an interest in growing their idea of audience to include people like us. Receiving lots of discouraging messages about story ideas can make you change your idea of what a story worth pursuing is — and that can be really, really damaging.

Of course it’s encouraging to see how the conversation around race has shifted, and which publications have put in more care. But I think the danger of window-dressing is definitely still there, and there have been far too many stories I’ve heard of younger journos afraid of reprisals if they go against received wisdom in a newsroom.

You’re also one of the co-founders of Canadian Journalists of Colour. Why did you start it?

There were many reasons — first and foremost for BIPOC journalists to have a forum to talk about the kinds of things I mentioned earlier that were happening to all of us. And I think I just got increasingly angry as I saw BIPOC journalists shut out of opportunities, because so much of Canadian journalism is about who you know, where you went to school, and on occasion, who your parents are.

In magazines in particular, I noticed how closed off it was how people just hired people that they knew. And it really just got me thinking that we just need our own process where we can share opportunities with each other.

Instead of knocking on the door of the old boys’ club, hoping for an in, I decided we should just make our own club. Along with co-founders Natasha Grzincic and Anita Li, we did just that.

Your upcoming book ‘In Exile’ which is about uncovering the truth behind a family secret, sounds fascinating, can you tell us about it?

My daadi lived with my family for the last 10 years of her life. She arrived at our suburban home outside Toronto when I was five, and she was kind of a fearsome matriarch to me. Daadi was such a devout Muslim, and so strict with me and my sister, that when an aunt told me when I was around 10 years old that Daadi had left the family for 15 years, I couldn’t really reconcile the woman who yelled at me during Quran lessons with someone who coloured too wildly outside the lines. My dad didn’t see her for nearly two decades, since he had already moved to Canada by the time she returned to the family. And yet, during my childhood, I saw them chat casually every day. Coming from a concept of culture that tells women in particular that you will be punished for your mistakes, as I got older, I was fascinated by her transgression — leaving her children for a man — and her children’s ability to accept her again.

I was also really curious about the 15 years she lived in a town called Haroonabad, quite close to the Indian border in Pakistani Punjab. I knew she divorced her second husband, the reason she ended up in Haroonabad, a few years into that period but I didn’t know why she stayed. No one in my family had ever visited, and in 2022, my father and I went together. I wasn’t so hopeful we’d find much, but we met so many people who knew her and loved her. A big part of the story ends up being about those missing years.

The book unfolds in alternating chapters. There are chapters from my perspective, taking the reader on the journey with me as I uncover family secrets, that follow the rules of journalism. And then there are chapters that unfurl Daadi’s story, written in more a creative non-fiction style, recreating the events of her life based on interviews, letters, photos, and rooting that all in the historical context of that time, including how Partition upended her life.

Why was it important for you to tell your grandmother’s story?

There's such a huge idea of shame in every culture, but in South Asian culture in particular, like it's not just individual shame, it's also familial shame. It was interesting to me that my family is relatively conservative, and yet, they were able to bring back their mother after this “shameful” episode. It really got me thinking about culture and and these really strict confines of what we think as culture, especially because I often didn't feel like I belonged in my culture. I thought I couldn’t be accepted or understood because of my lack of interest in marriage and children, and it made me distance myself from my culture.

But thinking through Daadi’s story made me consider what culture is in a radically different way: What if we are the people who decide what we want our culture to be? I started to see more and more evidence that suggested we get to decide. We can decide if someone breaks a taboo that they can still be loved and accepted again.

What would your advice be to younger Didis, who not only want to do what you’re doing but are also maybe defying cultural expectations while doing so?

One thing I do try to tell younger journalists is that just because you don't see the kind of story that you want to tell doesn't mean there’s no room for it. It just means no one's told it yet and it probably needs to be told because someone like you hasn't been in a newsroom to bring up this kind of idea.

Relatedly, you don’t have to represent your community! I would love for brown women to not feel the burden of representation in their work, to be able to make a doc about a llama hobby farm, or a personal essay unspooling their fascination with tortoise-shelled buttons, or an analysis on how the centre of Europe is moving east.

For younger Didis in any creative field, I would advise them to dream their wildest dreams. So often we see the limitations put on us by other people, and certainly in my career, I worked hard to just stay employed for years without really asking myself what my deepest desires were when it came to my creative life. Having a dream can help set goals that are meaningful to you, ensure you dedicate time to your craft, and it can also help nudge you to build a likeminded community.

IN EXILE is out on August 13. Pre-order it here.