Kasim Ali

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Prep for a busy week with Whole Foods Market. Start your day with fully cooked breakfast sausages from Amy Liu, 365 brand frozen waffles with no bleached flours, and of course Whole Foods Market eggs, which are all cage-free or better. In the evening, bring home a build-your-own family meal that feeds four for just$35. Choose one entree and two sides. Shop smarter, not harder at Whole Foods Market.

0:57Headliners with Nihal Arthanaike. British Pakistani males hold cultural values totally at odds with British values. That's what the politician Suela Braverman said to Sky News in 2023. And it is pretty much the opening page of author Qasem Ali's novel, Who Will Remain? What follows, I think, is for you, if you're not British Asian, one of the most revelatory conversations you will listen to about what it feels to be a British Pakistani male. Now, the author Kasim and I cover so much ground, very open, very honest, very provocative conversation, which I think may make you feel uncomfortable at points.

1:57But as Gloria Steinem said, the truth will set you free. But before that, it will piss you off. now what I loved about this conversation was just how honest we could both be with each other and that's what we need to be his story is fiction about a young man called Amir who grew up in the Alam Rock area of Birmingham and Kasim writes about what it's like to be a young British Pakistani in that environment. And if fiction is nothing else, it is an empathy bridge, which allows us to inhabit other people's lived experiences. And through that, have a deeper understanding of the world around us. So listen in.

2:55That is just the way that I grew up, with all these things happening around me all sorts of violence um gang related violence and so now when I'm here in London and I'm listening to people talk about well why do people make these decisions why do they decide to do these things you know oh gosh I don't understand I just think well of course you don't understand because you didn't live it you know to me that's just a way of living that's that's that's just how we lived and it kind of frustrates me that people you know make sort of moral conclusions about others based on their behaviors and they remove all of that context one of the things i wanted to do in this book was talk about the complexity of selling drugs it's not just about money it's not just about power for some people it's how they pay their bills it's how they pay their mortgages it's how they take care of their families and for us with privilege and i include myself as part of that now i work in publishing i have this accent you know i've published a book um i have a car in south london for god's sake i'm privileged but But for us to look at that decision of selling drugs and to just attribute complete immorality to it, that's a failing on our part.

4:03That's a failing of us to not have, you know, a shred of humanity for these people.

4:17Kasim, it's great to have you here. I want to start, and I don't often start a conversation with a Suella Bravman quote, but it is at the beginning of your book. And it is worth really interrogating and investigating how that would make you feel. And Suella Bravman on Sky News in 2023 said, British Pakistani males hold cultural values totally at odds with British values. How did that make you feel? It made me feel very angry when she said that. I first came across the clip on Twitter. I will always call it Twitter. I'm not calling it X. And I just felt very angry. I felt very, very angry at the fact that she had said that.

5:01And I don't believe she got any pushback or not much pushback from the person she was talking to on Sky News. And so this clip went sort of viral on Twitter, but also between me and my friends sort of asking each other, I can't believe she's just said something like this. But then when I sort of, you know, take a step back and I look at the view of the British media landscape, Actually, well, of course you could say something like this and get away with it, right? Because there's so much stuff being said about South Asian people, South Asian men, Muslim men in particular, that is just alongside this rhetoric.

5:33And so it's unsurprising, but like deeply infuriating, because how could you just, how could you, how could you say something like that about a group of, I mean, like I'm a British Pakistani man. My dad is, my brother is. We are three completely different people. I couldn't even say something like that about the three of us who all lived in the same household for such a long time. How could you say something like that about an entire group of people of which there are so many? It just makes me so angry. I'd like you to tell white British people what it feels like to be dehumanised, to hear quotes like that.

6:09And the thing about it is, and what makes, I think, some white British people feel OK about hearing words such as that, is the person delivering it, Suella Braverman, is a woman of colour. Yes. And that almost gives her a licence to say it and for some white British people to go, oh, well, you know, look, she's saying it. Yes, I mean, this leaning that the Conservative Party has done it quite a bit, right? So like when Rishi Sunak becomes prime minister, suddenly we're supposed to have a conversation about how he's the first South Asian person to become prime minister, as opposed to everything else he did.

6:45And it just really detracts from everything. And it sort of, to me, has always felt as if it exposes the hollowness, the hollowness of like identity politics anyway. Because if now what we're doing is concentrating on the color of someone's skin, their race and their religion, their ethnicity, then suddenly we're not talking about what they're actually bringing to the table, what they're actually wanting to do with those positions of power. So to me, what it feels like, I mean, I work in publishing, which is an incredibly insular industry. Everybody knows everybody. It's very small, especially here in Britain.

7:17And it's filled with much like journalism. It's filled with a lot of middle class people who have Oxford and Cambridge educations who all know each other. And, you know, they all sort of boost each other up. And so when I entered there as a working class, you know, very poor person from Alam Rock, Birmingham, them. I felt like I didn't belong at all. And what I also felt was this element of dehumanization that you're talking about, which is they don't look at you as a person. They look at you as a group of people. They look at you as you belong to this sort of person. So I'm going to treat you like this because of what I've learned from people like Suella Bravaman who say things like this.

7:56And it just makes you feel slightly, I used to feel slightly crazy because I would sit in meetings and people would say things and you'd think well how could you say something like that but i can't say anything because i'm so junior and then you'd get ignored if you did say something but then also sort of be vilified if you did and isolated and it just all of these things would happen to you based on the fact that you are not white based on the fact that you are muslim based on the fact that you just don't look like them it's it's it's just it's like a day-to-day thing it happens every single day.

8:32And after a certain point, you just become so numb to it. But it doesn't get any easier, really. And even now, I'm like 31. At the end of August, I've been working in publishing for nearly 10 years at this point. It's still very difficult when you're having those conversations with people and they see you as a Pakistani person. That's what they see you as first. Not the editor who has published this many things. Not the person who has this career. Not an author who has published this book and been at this place and whatever it might be, they see you as Pakistani first. And that is just, yeah, it feels very condescending, makes you feel really small, makes you feel like you're not worthy of being there in the first place.

9:10It's really interesting, right? When you, especially when you're an author and you say certain things and, you know, as a non-white author, I feel as if all I'm trying to do is just represent myself. That's it. That's it. I just want to see myself, you know, I want to see a name like mine. and I want to see characters like me. That's literally it. I want to write about what is important to me just the same way that other literary fiction writers do. But then because you're dealing with race, somehow they come at you because you're not grateful enough. You should be grateful to have the kind of position you have.

9:44And that sort of just removes all of the hard work that you've done to get to that point and suddenly makes it about like, you're not grateful to be here. Well, I am grateful, but also it's hard work and I want to talk about these things and I should be able to the same way that white people get to talk about their things. What's really interesting about publishing specifically, and that's the industry I work in not being an author, is that it's an industry that is overwhelmingly female. There's a lot of women working in publishing. It attracts a lot of women. And so I actually have the opposite to you within this industry, which is whenever I talk about being non-white or Muslim and what that feels like when you're in a room and you're in a meeting or you're trying to buy a book or whatever it might be, I get a lot of women who say to me, but you don't know what it feels like to be a woman, you're a man.

10:32And so suddenly my race becomes a non-entity. Suddenly my race is pushed aside. It's always felt to me that they've never been able to see that. I remember once a senior editor, she and I were having a conversation and she sort of suggested to me, I can get quite impassioned when I'm talking about the books I work on. you know you know you as an editor you feel very impassioned about your authors and it was at a sort of Christmas party and she said to me you know you're quite loud you're quite loud when you talk in meetings and you should be aware of the fact that you talk over women or that you don't allow women to speak up and I took this on and I said you know I'm really sorry it's sort of my my passion you know when I'm talking about an author of my own I can get quite loud I can get quite you know ah and then she sort of said well you know as a woman in this industry it's really difficult when men do that.

11:22And I thought, okay, but I'm going to take a step back here and accept that, but also say to you, have you considered what it's like for me as a Pakistani man, sitting in a room full of white people, men and women, majority women, but men too. And this look of utter, I guess she had an epiphany at that point, just a sudden realization where I think she realized that she was talking to a brown man. She wasn't just talking to a man. And she sort of took this. I felt like she's taking the step back and she said, oh, I'm sorry. I guess I wasn't thinking about that when I was talking to you just now.

11:55And then she like apologized quite a lot. And I had to sort of say, no, no, no, I'm not trying to get you. This isn't a gotcha moment. This is just my sort of questioning. But I will always think about that whenever I'm having a conversation with a white woman in publishing, because I think what they see first is my gender and my sex. They do not see my race, which is also in its way another kind of dehumanization, right? Because now they're not seeing this part of me that is actually a really important part of me. So on one hand, you are in these situations where people just see that you're Pakistani.

12:27And on the other hand, it's something that they don't even want to consider because they just see that you're a man. And then you're like, well, I'm all of these things and I'm complicated, just like you are. And I and it can lead to some. Yeah. I don't know if gaslighting is the right term to be using, because I don't think they're doing it intentionally. But it does feel this kind of double blind situation where you're just you don't know where to be or how to be. But also as well, and this is something that Omar El Akkad said to me, the author of One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

13:00And he said that quite often what they're trying to do is not find commonality. They're just trying to shut you down. They're just trying to keep you quiet. I mean, he puts it in the context of saying he's constantly asked to condemn Hamas. And he would, of course, because he's not for any type of murderous regime, whether that be what the Netanyahu regime has done to tens of thousands of Palestinians. or the terrible, terrible terrorist attack that took place on October the 7th. But his argument is that when he's asked that question, it's not about asking him to condemn. It's about trying to silence him.

13:58It's a distraction too also, right? So now suddenly he's not talking about what Israel is doing. Now he's suddenly having to talk about what Hamas has done and how he condemns them. And it's also, it's that Toni Morrison quote about, you know, I can't, I'm going to ruin her words. I'm going to butcher that quote completely. But something around how being asked to defend yourself is a distraction from the work. If you're constantly having to defend yourself, if you're constantly having to say, but this, but this, but this, well, then we're never going to get to the whole point of the conversation, which is in this very specific case, what Israel is doing.

14:32Instead, now we're talking about Hamas, right? And that is something that happens in publishing quite often. This book is so fascinating and it's so good. It was interesting that when I was on a train, a group of school kids got on and they were getting off at Lancaster to go to school and there were a lot of hijabis. And it was really interesting that to note them, because I had your book on the table unopened at that point, and just them seeing Qasim Ali, you could see that they were, they just were drawn to the name and how much of a difference that makes. How aware are you? Well, of course you're aware because you're a smart guy, but what is your attitude to the fact that having your name in bold, Qasim Ali, has a power, but also as well your concern of being defined by that?

15:33yeah it's um the thing is i read a lot of books and i work in publishing i'm an editor i edit authors i can see on a day-to-day basis how little there is of people like me right so when you're talking about pakistani authors i can think of a handful of names it's and then south asian you can broaden that out a little bit but not too much muslim names maybe you get a little bit more broader but not too much and so i know on a day-to-day basis how few of me there are in the world and so i'm incredibly grateful to be able to have a book that says that says my name's so big i remember when they sent the cover through and i emailed my editor back and i went whoa my name's really big i'll be sure we want to have it that big and she was like yes absolutely we want to have it this big and asimara she is south asian she's fri lankan you know and so there's that element there i may have met her i met her i think at the nibbies oh yes she won an award i think last year or the year before i can't quite remember when she's she's she's a powerhouse and she's south asian she's one of the very visibly non-white people in this industry doing really good work and so yeah having my name big sort of terrified me a little bit um why because well okay yeah let's interrogate so you were just about say because okay but why that's interesting because your name You're proud of it.

16:52You're fiercely, proudly South Asian, Muslim, British Pakistani. Why? For a couple of reasons. One being that I sort of want the work to speak for itself. Right. That's just a very simple answer. I want the work to speak for itself. I'm a big believer of I think it's Roland Barthes who says the author is dead. The author is dead. The book has been written. You read it and you have an experience with it. But I also understand that in today's world and the kind of author I am, the stuff I'm writing about, that's just completely impossible, right? The author is not dead. The author is very much here.

17:30And people are going to want answers from me to the questions that they have. They're going to want me to talk about things. They're going to want me to, you know, speak about why I made certain choices, like the location or the things that happen in the book. And so that is terrifying because I don't want it to feel that I do have the answers. I can only speak to what my intention was. I can't speak to the greatest sensibility of South Asian men across the country. I can't even speak to the sensibility of South Asian men in my own household, like I was saying before. But you are suddenly, because you are part of a minority, expected to represent that entire minority.

18:03And that is terrifying because for two reasons. One, you don't want to say something that the people against your group of people are going to take and run with. Right. You don't want to mess something up and give them ammunition. on the other hand you don't want to say something that your own people are going to say well that's not how i feel so why would you say that in the first place it is impossible to represent these people and it's a with my first book that came out a few years ago it was a really big thing that just kept rearing its head over and over again you know sort of feeling like i had let muslims down i had let pakistani muslims down british pakistani muslims down by saying the wrong thing by saying it a different way, by not giving them the representation they wanted.

18:46And it drove me into a huge existential spiral, where at one point I sort of decided that I wasn't going to be an author anymore before I'd written the second book and sort of wanted to step away from everything. It felt like too much, the burden of this representation. So it is terrifying, but also at the same time, I look at that book and I feel so proud of it. And I think about the fact that, you know, if this, you know, if I was like a 15, 16 year old right now, going to Waterstones to look around and I saw this book on a table or on a shelf and I saw my name on it I would just feel such joy and excitement and be like who is this person they have the same name as me or they have the same name as my dad or my brother or my uncle like I recognize that name I recognize this person who is that and I have goosebumps even just talking about that now because I just hope that that happens for even if it happens for just one person in this country I I would be, that's incredible.

19:39So then let's get specific on why people felt, are you talking about Good Intentions here, your debut novel? Yes, my first book, yes. So specifically, why is it that some people felt that you'd let British Pakistanis down? What was the accusation? I will give you a very specific example from my own family. so I went home for Eid after the book had been announced and we'd sold it and my family are not massive readers but you know they were proud of the book I went to Eid and a sort of distant relative came up to me and said I've heard about this book deal and I was ready to do the whole I know can you believe it it's so crazy and he immediately just said I think it's really disappointing that you would write about us in such a negative way they already have they meaning media they meaning white people they meaning the world they already have so many things that they don't like about us and you've just given them another thing because good intentions is about anti-black racism within the south asian community and then he just walked away he didn't let me answer he didn't let me say anything he just walked away i haven't spoken to him since he's a distant relative we don't really see much of him but i remember standing there in my cousin's house and it's the summer i'm in the garden there are all these kids running around me playing and I don't know what to do with myself.

21:06I'm just stood there and I'm panicking because I'm thinking I've just signed this contract and I thought I was doing a really good thing by talking about a really pernicious issue in the South Asian community. But maybe what I've done is just, I've given white people more ammunition to dislike us. Maybe I've done a really bad thing and that stayed with me for a very long time. And then when the book was published, I received more of that critique, but I also received critique about the way that the Pakistani Muslim characters were portrayed. They weren't very strict with their religion. They were a little looser, the way that I am, the way that friends of mine are, to various degrees, as I think a lot of people are.

21:44There were critiques about these characters having sex before marriage or smoking weed or whatever it might be, or not praying enough or not going to the mosque enough or not reading Quran enough. and it just felt suddenly as if I had done this thing I had worked really hard to get to this point published this book with a really big publisher as well and done the work and thought I was doing a good thing and then was being told by the very people I thought I was writing for that I had let them down a lot which is you know partly why I had that existential spiral I just didn't know what kind of writer I was and I didn't know if I'd done a good thing I thought I'd done a really bad thing.

22:22How did you overcome that if indeed you have? I sorry I'm just laughing because it's um it's been a long time I took a year off essentially um I told my editor I no longer wanted to publish a second book yet took some time spoke to my agent very much said you know I just need the space and then just had a big old conversation myself like what kind of writer do you want to be what is your voice worth in today's world what is it that you You want people to feel when you read, you know, the book, whatever the second book might be. And I sort of realized over much, much thinking, a lot of thinking that I want to write about me.

23:04I want to write about the place I come from, Alamrock, Birmingham. I want to write about the people who look like me, the people who come from that place too. And I'm going to write about things that are really important to me. So the conversations I have with my friends, the worries I have about young men from Alamrock. And so that's where this book came from. And I think that has been my guiding light this entire time, is that whenever I feel the sense of, have I done the right thing? I have to remind myself it's not about doing the right thing, because there is no such thing as doing the right thing.

23:34When you're publishing a work of literary fiction really like this, it's more about, have I stayed true to what my intentions were at the beginning? And am I proud of this book? Can I get to a point where this book is published and I still stand by it? And so far, the answer has been yes to all of those questions, which is good. But that's sort of how I pushed myself through it. I had to give up this worrying about what other people wanted from me and what did I want for myself. And also, you're representing you. You can only ever represent you. I can't be the voice of the entire British Sri Lankan community.

24:15I'll let Ramesh be that. and even he can't and nor would he want to be and I know him well enough to say that

24:33Prep for a busy week with Whole Foods Market Start your day with fully cooked breakfast sausages from Amy Liu 365 brand frozen waffles with no bleached flours and of course Whole Foods Market eggs which are all cage-free or better. In the evening, bring home a build-your-own family meal that feeds four for just$35. Choose one entree and two sides. Shop smarter, not harder, at Whole Foods Market. Get more with BBC Podcasts, wherever you listen. Be the first to listen to your favourite shows like Evil Genius, Good Bad Billionaire, and You're Dead to Me with a subscription to BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts.

25:12You can also enjoy a range of our podcasts ad-free with an Amazon Music subscription.

25:22Allow us to have flaws. Allow us to be imperfect. Allow us to make terrible mistakes that we do. I mean, you'll probably know I hosted a phone-in show for the BBC Asian Network for some years and it was incredible, the conversations that we had about so many of the taboos that exist across the British Asian communities. So alcoholism in the Punjabi communities, caste discrimination in certain communities, colorism, anti-black racism, all of these things that we talked about. Because we have to be confident enough as a community to say we need to sort our own house out. I think the worry is, and here I'll use my mother as an example, actually, because I think this is like maybe the perfect allegory.

26:22Whenever anything went wrong in our family, right? Say, I don't know, some of us had had a fight or something like my brother got detention, something small, something trivial. My mom would pretend to the rest of the family that we were perfect, right? so she so say you know for example her and my dad if i had a massive fight where i eat my dad hasn't turned up because he's really angry at my mom for this stupid fight they've had she would create lies and tell everybody that you know things are perfect he's just somewhere else wherever it might be and i used to say to her like why don't you just tell them the truth why don't you just tell them the truth like you know you've had this argument whatever it's fine don't worry about it he's just off licking his wounds whatever and she would always say to me you're too honest you have to figure out how to lie to people and that has been you know a problem of mine a flaw of mine is that i'm too honest i speak too openly but i think that is kind of the problem with us as a community too if i can be so broad here is that we're so worried about appearing imperfect to everybody else we're so worried about giving them ammunition right so worried about oh we're already being portrayed in this way we should be perfect we should be perfect that actually just means we don't talk about anything we don't talk about anything and we just like get crushed and the pressure of all the weight of these things are unsaid um and then when someone does i feel like the the the feeling is that oh you broke rank you broke loyalty right you've gone over to that side now you hate us too and what i was trying to say with you know the people i spoke to about that first book was it's not that i hate us it's that actually i care so deeply for us that I want us to be able to talk about the things that are flawed within us so then we can heal them.

28:03And maybe that's super naive and maybe it's too, you know, too big a dream. I'm not sure. But that's that's my intention always with the stuff that I write about. Did you keep returning to this idea of Amir, who is, of course, at the heart of who will remain? and his cousin, Succub, his older brother, Bilal, this kind of troubled part of Birmingham, Alan Rock, can be a trouble place, can also be a place of extreme joy. Did you keep circling back to this story, despite perhaps voices in your head saying, don't write about the darkness, don't write about crime, don't write about negativity? Or were you set on a course from the very beginning that you did not waver from?

28:59No, I had a lot of doubts. I wanted to write about young men. I wanted to write about what it felt like to be in Al-Amaroc and the decisions that young men are faced with and the consequences of those. But God, for so long, I was like, am I doing a bad thing here? Am I just outing us? Am I saying that everybody is like this? Am I giving ammunition? Ammunition, I think, is the right word for it. It comes up quite often when I talk about these things. Am I giving ammunition to those who want it, to those who already think a certain way? To the swell of bravaments of this world, right? That's the quote at the front of my book, because I guess I'm trying to say to people, I'm aware of what British Pakistani men, specifically in the instance of this book, are portrayed as, and I'm trying to do something here with that.