East West - The Asian American Lifestyle Magazine

By Kanupriya Vashisht

Born in Hyderabad, a predominantly Muslim city in India, Samina Ali, like many of us, has a story to tell, but hers is no ordinary tale.  It is a story she hopes will inspire progress in her community and allow women to “ . . . begin to understand their God-given rights.”

Ali immigrated to America with her family when she was 6 months old, and for the next 18 years her life was sliced in two. She was made to spend six months of every year in Hyderabad and six in Minnesota, teased in America as “the brown girl,” and in India as “the American.”

At 19, Ali’s parents forced her into an arranged marriage with a Muslim man from India. For two years she did not tell anyone she was trapped in an arrangement that had gone terribly wrong. Her husband was gay and her marriage had never been consummated.

Ali married again — this time a flamboyant, windsurfing American. The fairy-tale ending, however, still eluded her. She developed serious complications during pregnancy, and the next three years were spent recovering. The second marriage crumbled under the pressure a year later.

The pent-up pain and trauma finally imploded and Ali sought refuge in words. “Writing ‘Madras on Rainy Days’ became a long process of unlearning the shame and embarrassment I was made to feel by my parents and Muslim community in Minneapolis for having to get a divorce. I wrote countless drafts before I could detach myself enough to tell my story,” Ali says.

Her autobiographical novel, “Madras on Rainy Days,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was awarded the Prix Premier Roman Etranger 2005 Award by France. It was also chosen as one of the top five best debut novels of 2004, by both Poets & Writers and the Northern California Book Reviewers. “Madras” made the finalist’s list for the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Award and California Book Reviewers Award. The novel has now been translated into many different languages and released around the world.

Layla, the central character of “Madras on Rainy Days,” struggles to internalize the divergent worlds of liberated America and conservative Muslim India. Her angst is at the core of Ali’s own existential dilemma. "I was supposed to inhabit America without being inhabited by it," she says.

Ali says it was only when she started reading the Qur’an with her mother-in-law and realizing her rights as a Muslim woman that she was able to take control of her life. She learned that women in Islam, for instance, are given the right to agree or disagree to a marriage. “I wanted to prove that women in Islam do have rights,” Ali says, “rights over their bodies, rights over their marriages, rights over their futures. Most can’t access those rights because they are simply denied to them.

Fittingly, Ali, 35, is now part of Daughters of Hajar, a group of new generation Muslim women who stormed a mosque in West Virginia in 2004 to assert their rights to equality within Islam.

Asra Nomani, author of “Mecca – An American Woman’s Pilgrimage into the Heart of Islam” and founder of Daughters of Hajar, says, “Samina sees very clearly the abyss into which a young girl can fall when she does not receive affirmation and support. She has emerged both strong and ethereal from her own confrontations with the messages that deny girls and women their place as fully empowered human beings.”

A devout Muslim and staunch feminist, Ali has gradually come to appreciate the trappings of her dual cultural identities. The incongruities in her life now enrich her as a writer and a mother. Today, she says she draws freely from a vibrant kaleidoscope of Western instincts and Eastern traditions.

After the dark undertones of her autobiographical debut, Ali intends her second novel to be a lot more fun. But for now, the avid writer, who has been published in everything from Self to the New York Times and has received the Rona Jaffe Foundation and Barbara Deming Memorial awards for fiction, is working on a non-fiction book about what it means to be a Muslim woman and mother post-September 11th.

“I have finally arrived,” says this remarkable woman. And when you hear the calm assertion in her voice, you believe her.

Learn more at www.saminaali.com

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