Go Back to Where You Came From

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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As the two towers fell, I was standing in my pajamas, staring at the TV, and I realized our lives had forever changed. There was a permanent fork in the road for my generation. A disruption in the timeline. A disturbance in the Force. For us, there would always be a pre—9/11 and a post—9/11 world. A few hours earlier, I had been a twenty-year-old senior still trying to figure out his major and serve as a board member of the Muslim Student Association of UC Berkeley. Instantly, I was transformed into an accidental activist, a global representative of 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide and a walking Wikipedia of 1,400 years of all things Islam.

I have to be perfect, because any flaw, mistake, errant word, or quote can and will be used against me and all my people in the court of public opinion. On the drop of a dime, I have to be an expert on the following topics: Islam, Quran, the Prophet Muhammad, Sharia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, India, Hamas, Hummus, Hezbollah, Arabic, Agrabah, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Al Aqsa, Aladdin, Salman Khan the Bollywood Actor, Salman Khan of the Khan Academy, and everything in between. I have to be able to explain them to a skeptical national audience, being sure not to say anything too radical or extreme, because that one mistake will be emblazoned on me like a scarlet letter and be used to beat up this thing called the “Muslim world.”

GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM

“Go back to where you came from, you terrorist!”

This is just one of the many warm, lovely, and helpful tips that Wajahat Ali and other children of immigrants receive on a daily basis. Go back where, exactly? Fremont, California, where he grew up, but is now an unaffordable place to live? Or Pakistan, the country his parents left behind a half-century ago?

Growing up living the suburban American dream, young Wajahat devoured comic books (devoid of brown superheroes) and fielded well-intentioned advice from uncles and aunties. (“Become a doctor!”) He had turmeric stains under his fingernails, was accident-prone, suffered from OCD, and wore Husky pants, but he was as American as his neighbors, with roots all over the world. Then, while Ali was studying at University of California, Berkeley, 9/11 happened. Muslims replaced communists as America's enemy #1, and he became an accidental spokesman and ambassador of all ordinary, unthreatening things Muslim-y.

Now a middle-aged dad, Ali has become one of the foremost and funniest public intellectuals in America. In Go Back to Where You Came From, he tackles the dangers of Islamophobia, white supremacy, and chocolate hummus, peppering personal stories with astute insights into national security, immigration, and pop culture. In this refreshingly bold, hopeful, and uproarious memoir, Ali offers indispensable lessons for cultivating a more compassionate, inclusive, and delicious America.

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem

Everything is Normal

GO BATCK TO WHRE YOU CAME FROM

* I will absolutely take notice next time I see him in that role, however.

argumentum a minore ad maius

Go Back to Where You Came From

I remember watching Wajahat Ali as a guest either on CNN or MSNBC a couple of times and liked what he had to say but didn't know anything else about him. Later on, I did follow his little daughter's fight with liver cancer on his social media and it was heartbreaking to see his family deal with it all while also raising awareness about cancer, the treatment process and the expensive healthcare system in the country. So, when I saw this audiobook available as an arc on netgalley, I knew I had to pick it up.

Right from the first page, you know the one constant in this book is going to be the humor. He starts the book listing off some of the vile hate mail he has received, but narrates in such a dramatic style that you are horrified but can't stop laughing either. And that kind of dichotomy persists throughout. He is adept at weaving the personal and political, connecting each aspect of his Pakistani-American life with the larger narrative about being from a brown Muslim immigrant family in America. He doesn't shy away from talking about many tricky topics, especially the colorism, anti Blackness, fatphobia and repression of mental health issues in the overall South Asian community and how all this has deep personal as well as political implications for the everyone who is part of the community. Even though I grew up in India and he is a Pakistani-American and both of us have very different backgrounds, I found his growing up experience very relatable, especially with regards to the skin color and weight - I may live in the states now but the fat shaming and talks about my bad dark skin tone never stop. I also absolutely loved how liberal he is with the use of Urdu words and even the way he tells his story is all very very inherently desi and I was very engrossed throughout.

I don't think I would have been able to finish this book without all his humor though. Because the author's life hasn't been easy. From being a relatively privileged and sheltered kid to multiple life threatening experiences, incarceration of his parents and being abandoned by many people he thought were family friends, multiple bankruptcies before turning 30 and coming of age as a young Muslim activist in the aftermath of 9/11, his life story is full of challenges and obstacles and this memoir is a tale of resilience in the face of adversities. It's also a story of the deeply loving family and how they overcome all their troubles together, never losing hope, trying to use their experiences for the betterment of others.

Overall, this was a spectacularly narrated memoir by the author Wajahat himself who uses his signature humor, very dramatic but excellent storytelling skills and his amazing writing talents to tell a story which is at once personal and political, which is true for every single brown immigrant and Muslim person living the reality of America. The book may start with hate mail and get cynical in between at times, but he ends it with hope - hope he feels we need to invest in because despite feeling masochistic sometimes, hope is what we need if we ever want to truly fulfill what encompasses as the Amreekan dream. I would highly highly recommend the audiobook because I don't think just reading it will give you the full experience of this book.