10 Questions for Samina Najmi
- By Emily Wojcik
"I called her Amma. It’s an old-fashioned word for “Ammi,” mother, but I called her Amma because that’s what my mother called her. Before she shrank, Amma was five feet tall. She had long, black hair which she pulled into a single braid down her back, eyes that glistened, and teeth so precisely formed, they looked like two rows of pearls when she smiled. I loved her girth, her mellow edges. Amma’s flesh circled her midriff like the clasp of a lover, and when she lay on her side, you could see her stomach in profile, lying next to her." —from “Amma,” from Winter 2018 (Volume 59, Issue 4)
Photograph: Samina Najmi (right) with her sister and Amma in 1994.
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I came to creative writing late. After publishing a humorous essay as an undergraduate about the “Point” buses of Karachi University in the daily Dawn, I devoted my academic and professional energies to the study of American literature rather than the writing of it. It wasn’t until 2011, the year I became a tenured professor at Fresno State, that I took my first creative writing course, a two-week session of CSU Summer Arts, which Fresno State was hosting for the thirteenth (and, as far as we knew, final) year. So one of my very first pieces of creative nonfiction was a micro-essay for the course, titled “Applause.” It’s a broad brushstroke image of my mother, who has made her way through life—from coffee packing in a west London factory to founding a progressive school in Karachi, Pakistan--with only one good hand. Beyond disability, my mother’s hands become a metaphor for her resilience, nonconformity, and joie de vivre. The piece is one of my earliest publications.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I’m influenced more by the texture and cadence of a writer’s words than by the genre in which they write. Many writers come to mind—among them Paule Marshall, N. Scott Momaday, Manuel Muñoz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Ondaatje, Angela Morales, and Naomi Shihab Nye. I also love the power and beauty of the Urdu language, and its poetry in particular. Both my grandfathers were poets and my grandmother--Amma--a memoirist in Urdu. My mother, too, writes exquisite personal essays in her first language, which she has never submitted for publication. But for both better and worse, part of my postcolonial inheritance has been the privileging of English over Urdu in my own career.
What other professions have you worked in?
I have always been an educator—from a family of educators. My father was a physics professor (with a great love of Urdu poetry) who retired as principal of his college; my mother founded a preschool in in our home in Karachi, which grew with my little sister every year until it became a high school. In my teens and early twenties, I had the opportunity to teach English language and literature part-time in my mother’s school, Meadow Secondary, and I knew it was my calling.
What did you want to be when you were young?
As a five- or six-year-old in suburban London, I wanted to be what we called a Lollipop Lady—a crossing guard at an elementary school. To me, these were powerful women who could halt trucks with their “lollipops,” and they were also so glamorous in their white coats, black caps, and knee-high boots. Later on, and for many years, I fantasized about the traveling life of flight attendants and, more seriously, of diplomats in the civil services. But my love of literature derailed me, and, enabled by a fellowship from Tufts, I wound up in graduate school in Boston.
What inspired you to write this piece?
Amma, my grandmother, was one of those presences that I was able to fully see and appreciate only after I had grown up and left home. I needed to make her visible to others, on the page. I see now that in recalling her I was also tracing a writerly genealogy for myself. She had no formal education but left us a spellbinding memoir of a bygone time and way of life. She worked on this “diary” for twenty years and we were oblivious of its worth until its posthumous publication. I also hear in Amma’s writerly voice that same longing for home that I know in myself. Hers was a geographic and psychic severance resulting from the British-authored Partition of India in 1947. For her and for both my parents, Partition meant the loss of home in Patna, India. I have been bounced around on three continents, so Amma’s yearning for place and people resonates deeply with me.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Ah, a fraught question for someone who has just acknowledged an intergenerational yearning for home. Yes, the coastal Pakistani city of Karachi for one. And Greenford (west London) as well as Boston, Massachusetts. Those are the landscapes of memory. But increasingly I find my writing grounded in Fresno, California, that welcomed me so wholeheartedly twelve years ago. Fresno has given me space to flourish and many reasons to feel deeply invested, especially in its young people.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
For a burst of creative energy, I rely on that early morning hour—4:00 or 5:00 am—first of all. I make my coffee in a press and bring it to my writing chair, which faces a window. The writing chair is now about nineteen years old; it’s a Lazy Boy armchair that I purchased in Massachusetts when I was pregnant with my daughter and couldn’t sit or sleep comfortably anywhere else. This chair has seen me through two pregnancies and many a breastfeeding session, and I guess other kinds of gestation continue to happen here.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
It’s typically the women in my family: my mother, my sister, and my teenaged daughter (who also writes).
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
What an interesting question! I look up to painters, musicians, and actors, but if I could work in another art form, it would be sculpture. There’s such wonder in how a sculptor creates form out of the formless—gives it texture and expression. Something that was invisible before suddenly becomes visible, and it matters. That beauty matters. Perhaps that is why I’m so drawn to creative nonfiction: you live your life from day to day, pretty much at random, but when you shape that raw material, suddenly there’s orderliness in the chaos, and you’re able to see people and realities that you may have not have been fully aware of and therefore couldn’t do justice to.
What are you working on currently?
I just completed a memoir of growing up in Karachi in the 1970s and ’80s; “Amma” is part of that book. This fall I have been on sabbatical, working on a new collection of Fresno-based essays.
SAMINA NAJMI is professor of English at California State University, Fresno. Her essays have appeared in World Literature Today, Entropy, The Progressive, and others. Her essay “Abdul” won Map Literary’s 2012 nonfiction prize and “Greenford’s Gift” was selected by Roxane Gay for publication in The Rumpus. A recent Hedgebrook residency allowed her to complete a draft of her memoir-in-essays, Beneath the Dust of Distances: 379-A/1.
