Salma Hussain Interviews Saad T. Farooqi

(Cormorant Books, 2024)

Saad T. Farooqi

I am thrilled to be talking to Saad T. Farooqi about the release of his debut novel White World (Cormorant Books, 2024). Among other rave reviews, his novel received a glowing (and starred!) review from Quill & Quire, with reviewer Manahil Bandukwala stating that this is a “gritty read that shocks, frightens and challenges.”
His debut was action-packed, philosophical and imaginative, and I had so many questions! So much gratitude to Saad Farooqi to carving out the time to answer them.

[Note: this interview took place on a live chat and over email in January 2025.]
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1. You experienced your early childhood years in Pakistan. Though you were born in Saudi Arabia, you moved “back home” to Pakistan shortly afterwards, and there you survived three kidnapping attempts before the age of eight. After this you moved to the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East. You’ve also spent a few years in London, UK where you completed an MFA. Finally, you immigrated to Canada in 2015. What is your relationship to Pakistan today?

My father left Pakistan very reluctantly, and I could always feel how much he longed for his homeland. Even after being in the Middle East for over 25 years, my father would always convert anything he bought to Pakistani rupees. I can’t remember a time when he didn’t miss Pakistan. My mother had a way of describing his feelings that I’ve always loved: Pakistan’s mithi is in his khoon.

That longing was embedded deep in his bones. Growing up, I always expected to feel like my father did.

It never happened.

I never missed Pakistan; even when I visited, I never felt like I belonged there. By the time I was seven, I began speaking in English, and it wasn’t long before I started thinking in English. Even when I met Pakistanis in the Middle East or elsewhere, there was always this misalignment. Whether it was their values against mine or just what I had to say, it never seemed to work out. Walking away from my religion was, in many ways, the final nail in my nomadic coffin.

At the same time, in the Middle East, the first question anyone asks is: where are you from? You are never you. You are always you + the land you come from. Where you come from determines your career trajectory, your pay grade, your social strata, and even your friends. So, even as someone who never belonged to Pakistan, I was forever cast in its shadow. It was like being haunted by a ghost everyone could see but me.

All this has left me with a deep longing for a home. In fact, you can read White World as a story about four people who have lost their home – to violence, to betrayal, to power-lust – and they’re trying to rebuild it or rediscover it.

2. There’s been a wonderful influx of diaspora Pakistani writers on the Canlit scene recently. Some writers set their novels in North America, some in unnamed countries, some in fantasy settings. Why was it important for you to specifically locate your novel within Pakistan and not choose a fictional, made-up setting?

I understand the need to distance yourself from your country for social reasons and even for safety concerns. Initially, I did this myself; for a considerable portion of the manuscript’s life, it was set in a generic Arab-South Asian country.

However, as time went by, I realized I had to be honest. The conversations I wanted to initiate could only happen if I spoke openly and without fear, such as the conversations about the negative impact of regressive interpretations of Islam, about the systemic culture of misogyny, the bigotry faced by ethnic and religious minorities, as well as the hatred and violence aimed at the LGBTQ+ community. These conversations would not happen by merely hinting at the country or by analogy. They needed to happen directly and bluntly.

3. Margaret Atwood has famously said about her writing, “I only write about things that have happened in real life so that people won’t complain ‘that would never happen.’” I see this in your fiction, too.  What kind of future would you like to see for Pakistan? Would you like to see it move away from an “Islamic republic”? Is nation-building on theological grounds always a recipe for disaster?

The founder of Pakistan was a man named Muhammad Ali Jinnah. While his portraits adorn every government building and his legacy is evoked by Pakistan’s leaders and demagogues alike, the reality is that there’s a gulf between who he was and how he has been remembered. He was a secular Shiite who loved women, rich clothes and Scotch; in contrast, his reputation has been distorted to present that of an austere, religious patriarch.

I bring this up because I’ve often wondered what this nation would be like if Pakistanis were honest about their prodigal father. Would we reject dogma as he did? Would we finally walk into the 21st century and leave the 6th behind as he dreamed? Or is Islam’s ossified hold on Pakistani society too strong for such re-imagination? After all, even Jinnah bent the knee to the idea that Pakistan is a ‘country for Muslims by Muslims.’ Is this the sin of the father that we, too, must carry?

I’ve always said that in White World, I am following the idea that ‘Pakistan is for Muslims by Muslims’ to its logical conclusion. The older I get, the harder it is for me to imagine Pakistan as anything but a jingoistic Islamic Republic. And yet, it would be remiss of me to ignore that there is a growing hunger for change and secularism within Pakistanis, especially the younger generation. There’s a reason why “New Pakistan” is mostly a McGuffin in White World: the future is ours to make or break.

4. You completed an MFA in London and studied under such illustrious writers as Elif Shafak and Rachel Cusk. Talk to me about that. What perspectives did they bring to your writing that you had not considered before?

Rachel Cusk and I didn’t see eye-to-eye on many things when I was her student. A lot of that had to do with the fact that I was a twenty-something smartass who thought he knew better than anyone else. At one point, she wanted us to read James Joyce’s The Dead for class. Having read it multiple times in high school and undergrad, I couldn’t stomach going through it again.

Cusk imparted her most important lesson to me: the only way to become a writer worth a damn is by respecting the writers who came before us. The best stories age with us; the older we get, the more they seem to say. As I’ve gotten older, possibly even wiser, I’ve come to recognize the value of that lesson. True to that lesson, one of the chapters in White World is titled “Upon the Living and the Dead” (this is the last line from The Dead). It is my tribute to not just Joyce, but to Cusk as well.

As for Elif Shafak, I only took one course with her, but I walked away with possibly the best compliment I’ve received about my writing. Up until then, I had never written from the female POV because I found it daunting. Very, very daunting. I tried a few times but could never execute to my satisfaction.

Upon reading an early draft of White World, Shafak told me, out of the blue, “You write with a woman’s hand.” She explained that despite the suffering and despair present in my stories, my focus was always on love and feelings. This was incredibly reassuring; for a writer of Shafak’s calibre to say this meant that I did have the tools and ability to write from a female POV.

That said, I would love to say that I began writing in the voices of Red and Doua overnight. That, however, isn’t the reality. The reality is that it still took a long time, many revisions, and lots of reading by female authors to discover Red’s and Doua’s voices. But it’s not an exaggeration to say that this wouldn’t have happened without Shafak. I owe her so much.

5. Who are your mentors and influences within the South Asian literary space (diaspora or otherwise)? And/or which writers, within the Muslim world, have also been interested in exploring apostasy in literature and/or what it means to fight against an oppressive religious system and claim your space for your freedom of thought?

This is a great question, but also one that is hard for me to answer. Let me try to explain why.

There’s a story about how Einstein had virtually no citations when he published his original papers on General Relativity and Special Relativity. Many speculate why, but the one I’m partial to is that he wanted to emphasize that these were his ideas.

Now, to be clear, I am not comparing myself to Einstein. But I can relate to this sentiment. I’ve already highlighted my ambivalent relationship with Pakistan, but my relationship with Pakistanis is just as complicated. For financial reasons, my parents had to send me to Pakistani schools for a few years. I was bullied, ostracized, and even had stones thrown at me for things like drawing female cartoon characters (which was considered sinful), speaking English and wearing jeans (which was considered unpatriotic), questioning religion, drawing temporary tattoos on myself, or just not liking the things they liked. This extended to the teachers, other kids’ parents, and even my extended family. This pattern remained well into my college days and even beyond. What little support I got was tacit and never public.

With White World, it was important for me to capture the dissonance and displacement that I’ve always felt. Above all, I wanted to convey insurmountable isolation. To accomplish this, I felt that I had to write this story entirely on my own with no influence or guidance from anyone else.

6. You’ve written a dystopian novel filled with violence, despair and heartbreak, and yet there’s also a very sentimental and romantic story at its core. Why was this juxtaposition important to you?

For me, violence is not about the shock factor or some perverse gratification. It’s about showcasing its dehumanizing nature – that moment when reason and civility are lost and human beings are made less. Violence dehumanizes both the person who is subjected to it and the one who perpetrates it. This theme of “the fall”, or moral descent, is consistent in White World and violence is how many of the characters denigrate themselves.

If hatred and violence bring about our fall, then it must be contrasted with what elevates us. The only mechanism to elevate ourselves as human beings is love. However, I wanted to explore this from a non-traditional romantic love story and more as a transformative force.

I’ve always been fascinated by the seven stages of love in Arabic literature. Desire leads to attraction and attachment, turns into obsession and worship, becomes madness, and finally, ends in death. I wanted to both reinforce and critique this concept through Avaan and Doua’s relationship. His initial obsession with her, almost sacred in nature, gradually reveals both their defining flaws. And so, his love for her must either transform or perish. It’s up to the reader to decide what their feelings are for each other once the dust settles.

7. What are you reading right now?

Autonomy by Victoria Hetherington. It’s coming a lot slower than I would like because of some health issues that have plagued me for the past few months.

8. You write poetry as well. Tell us a little bit about your favorite poets and/or favorite poem. Any chance we’ll read some of your upcoming poetry soon? And where?

For me, poetry is a much more private affair. With prose, I am meticulous: I read many novels for inspiration, plan out the story and character arcs, use countless literary devices to reinforce themes and motifs, and map out dialogues precisely so readers always know who’s talking. The revisions are endless.

In contrast, my approach to poetry is the opposite. I rarely read or write poems, and when I do, it's on the fly. I usually keep them to myself and have even committed the cardinal sin of deleting some forever. For me, poems are a means of capturing the rawness of a moment – an overflow of emotion or inspiration. I don’t know if I’ll ever publish a book of poetry because, outside of college, I’ve never written poems for anyone but myself. That said, I’m not against the idea either.

Favorite poet? It's a tie between e. e. cummings and Sylvia Plath.

Favorite poem? Probably Ozymandias by Shelley.

9. What are you working on right now?

I’m currently working on my second novel, God of Sand. I’ve always wanted to explore the concept of AI but through the lens of a secular Pakistani woman living in a not-so-secular 2010 United Arab Emirates. It’s really exciting stuff for me!

Thank you so much for your time and contribution to the Canadian literary landscape. We look forward to so much more from you! 

Saad T. Farooqi holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Kingston University London and a BA in English Literature from the American University of Sharjah. His short stories and poems have appeared in various international magazines. His shining moment on stage was accidentally setting his poem on fire by standing too close to a candle. When not writing, Saad enjoys boxing, experimenting in the kitchen to varying levels of success and devouring anything film noir. Saad spent the majority of his life as a Pakistani expat in Dubai. He immigrated to Canada in 2015 and currently resides in London, Ontario.

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Salma Hussain writes poetry and prose. Her fiction has recently appeared in The Humber Literary Review, The Temz Review, Queen’s Quarterly, The Ex-Puritan and Prism International. Her young adult novel, The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan, about a young girl’s immigration and menstruation journey, was published by Penguin Random House in 2022. It was selected for ALA’s Rise: A Feminist Book Project List and shortlisted for the Geoffrey Wilson Historical Fiction prize. A chapbook of her poems from Baseline Press releases this summer 2025. You can find her on Instagram: @salma_h_writes.