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Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s new book Son of Elsewhere is about struggling to find a place between two worlds: his birthplace of Sudan and his home in Canada. He talks to AR about what it was like to show up in an Ontario town as an African pre-teen who spoke no English; how WWE wrestling gave him an entrypoint to Canadian society; and why he wants his daughter to grow up with the burden of having roots "elsewhere."
Elamin Abdelmahmoud is a culture writer for BuzzFeed News and hosts the CBC podcast Pop Chat. His new book is called Son of Elsewhere.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Welcome to This Being Human…I’m your host Abdul Rehman-Malik. On this podcast from the Aga Khan Museum, I talk to extraordinary people from all over the world whose life, ideas and art are shaped by Muslim culture.
NADIR NAHDI:
There's a new generation that has a very unique perspective to how they see themselves as young Muslims in the modern world.
TANYA MUNEERA WILLIAMS:
I am this wide-eyed girl. I'm like, I want it all, I want to experience it all.
GINELLA MASSA:
Everyone has a story. Sometimes you just have to find out what it is.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Like the poem that inspires this podcast, The Guest House, by Sufi poet Jallaludin Rumi, we’re talking to people who seek meaning and joy in work and life…regardless of what the day brings. Today, culture writer Elamin Abdelmahmoud wrestles with the past.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
You want to reserve the right to retain your complexity. It all kind of becomes like a part of this great kind of balancing act. And there's no winning. There's just like every day you lose a little bit less, hopefully.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s new book, Son of Elsewhere, is a lot of things. It’s a personal narrative about immigrating to Canada at the age of 12 and learning about race. It’s a meditation on travel. And in many ways, it’s an exploration of how personal memoir, world events and popular culture are deeply intertwined. In the book, Elamin lays out what sitcoms Americans were watching the night their government bombed his hometown of Khartoum, the TV show he was watching when his Dad found out his business was being shut down for political purposes; and how he used wrestling fandom as a tool to gain entry to Canadian society. These days, Elamin hosts the CBC podcast Pop Chat and works as a culture writer for BuzzFeed News. On top of that, he’s written essays for Rolling Stone, Macleans, and can sometimes be seen on TV giving political analysis. And did I mention, he also has a young daughter.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Elamin, how do you have time for all this stuff? How do you do it? What's the secret?
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
The short answer is not well. Like, I don't know if I do it well. I think there's a real sense that every time that I'm doing one thing, I'm like, oh, I should be thinking about all these other things, and it kind of leaves your attention divided. I sure would like to maybe ease into -- my birthday's this week, and I'd like to maybe ease into the next year by maybe starting to fragment myself a little bit less than I do now. So not well is the short answer. The long answer is like, I don't know, man, working on it. We're all working on it, you know?
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Elamin, you wrote this book Son of Elsewhere about existing between places. In this case between two countries Canada, where you live in Sudan, the country you left when you were 12. How often do you think about the Sudan? And maybe a better question is even how do you think about the Sudan?
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
How often is: every day. How I think about it changes from day to day. There are times when you know, I'm just walking down the street and I smell incense and I go, oh, this feels familiar. This feels familiar because I sort of like, you know, this was something that I grew up around. Or there's times when I see the number of missed calls from my mom. So far today, it's two. I've got to call her back right after we're done this. And then that also makes me think about Sudan and the ways it sort of, you know, Canada enables me distance in a way that I would not have had when I was living in Sudan from my parents and like how that makes me different from my cousins, for example. I'm an only child. And so for me, I was sort of, you know, rooted from a world where I had roughly, I would say, half a million cousins give or take, and all of them were around all the time. And there was a lot of joy, a lot of community and the moments that I'm most aware of the fact that I’m an only child also make me think about Sudan. I talk about politics for a living, and part of that means thinking about global geopolitics in general, but also where Sudan has sort of been transitioning itself in the last few years, because A) a dictator was toppled, but it was replaced by a government that a lot of people were not happy with. There is a sort of transitional right transitional process is going on right now, and there are a lot of protests that are going on in Sudan. Occasionally, they turn deadly. I think about where I would be in relationship to those protests. So, it enters my mind all the time without permission. It's not something I have to sort of like actively invite. It just kind of happens to me, you know? And yeah, I sort of think of myself as sort of occupying this in-between space quite frequently.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
You know, you talk about coming to Canada, and I wonder, given this kind of deep relationship that you have just described, that you describe in your book with the Sudan and with the culture there and your family there in this incredibly nurturing environment that you describe. What brought your family to Canada?
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
Well, my understanding of it when I was younger, of course, has changed a lot. But the basic story is, my dad used to run a sort of a publishing company, and he published a bunch of magazines and among those magazines was this one specific magazine that was basically the magazine of the official opposition party in Sudan, who at the time were exiled outside of the country. But they could certainly get their message across through this magazine. And my dad ran this publishing place. And they, you know, after Bashir came into government, they sort of let him keep running the publishing company for a little while and then eventually they said, OK, you've got to just like, shut this down, it's done. And what I've gathered from my parents is that they said, You know what? We don't want our son to grow up in this environment like this is not a comfortable environment to grow up in. So my dad left first. He left in 1996, and then immediately went to Switzerland, where he tried to claim refugee status, and he was not successful in doing that. And then he came to Canada, and then we joined him here four years, five years after he left the country. So, he left and then we joined him in the year 2000.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Elamin, there's a really kind of emotive, powerful and compelling passage that appears right at the beginning of your book. I wonder if you could read it for us.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
Oh gosh, I would love to. Okay. It took two stopovers and 19 hours of total flying time for me to become Black. I left Khartoum as a popular, charming and modest pre-teen, and I landed in Canada with two new identities: immigrant and Black. When the friendly customs agent stamped my passport and said, Welcome to Canada, he left out the “Also, you're Black now. Figure it out” part. In retrospect, it would have been immensely helpful. Having lived 12 years as a not Black person, which is to say a person entirely unconcerned with his skin color, you can imagine it was a jarring transition to make. Without an instruction manual, I was left to my own devices to figure this whole race thing out. And luckily, I had one thing going for me. The place I just moved to was one of the whitest cities in Canada. This was going to be great.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
Look, Kingston is not the largest town in the world -- and it's a pretty predominately white town. But also, the necessary context to understand me trying to navigate this world in the year 2000 was I didn't speak English. I came here and I was like, OK, I have to learn this language. I have to learn how to speak like these people do in order for me to start blending again. And so, from the moment that I arrived, it was kind of like being thrown in a swimming pool when you don't really know how to swim, so it's like, OK, figure it out, go and survive what this looks like. And I sort of, you know, early on, I had to understand how I was being perceived because again, I had no context for race, even. I had only grown up around other Sudanese people. And then here, I sort of like understood that we're black in Canada, and I was like, wait a minute, no no no no, I don't know – I don’t understand what that means, and I want no part in this. And so I would say that, like pre-teen to teen Elamin was very concerned with fitting in and with as much as possible, like, not arising any kind of suspicion or even just like doubt that I belong in this space. And like with a name like Elamin Abdelmahmoud is like woof, we’re starting on the back foot here. And so I would say that I was grasping at whatever made me feel invisible in a sense. Whatever ways I could be invisible or whatever ways I could be very visibly someone who belonged.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
One of the main tools that Elamin used to fit in was popular culture. And it all started with professional wrestling. WWE wrestling was something that he understood – and he used that to make his first Canadian friends.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
I mean, there's a beautiful simplicity to wrestling. It really doesn't ask a lot of you. It doesn't ask that you are familiar with, like Hulk Hogan's rants of like, here's what I'm going to do, brother like that doesn't- It's actually not important in order for you to understand what's going on because the crowd gives you how to feel, right? Like the crowd is communicating to you your position in relationship to these figures. And by the way, it's a moral position, like wrestling is regularly asking you to say, this guy's the villain and this guy's a good guy, and I'm going to be squarely in this good camp. Which is to say that like, it's the battle of good and evil distilled into matches that last about eight minutes. You know? And it's kind of satisfying, the theatrics are great. Someone described it as like Shakespeare, but with bodies, you know? Which I think is like, I think that's a good way to describe it, right? It's like, cut out all the explanatory stuff in Shakespeare. We just get to just the action. There’s joy in that, there's in that when like the person that you want wins. And there's even like a great catharsis when someone who's been defeated comes back to sort of mount that comeback. There's a universality to it that doesn't quite translate to a lot of other even distinctly American art forms because you don't have to communicate a whole lot. A lot of other exports of America, quite frankly, are just like bizarre to me, like please for the love of God, no one explain baseball to me because I don't understand it and I don't want to. No one explain football to me. I’m like, they do what? And then what happens? However, like wrestling, I'm on board. And I think so are a lot of people. I was familiar with wrestling being on TV, just kind of in the background when I was in Sudan, like, when I would go to friends’ houses who had a satellite dish and they'd be like, Oh, they were just like, sometimes watch it. But then I came here, and I was like, Oh, I'm going to hitch my wagon to those people, the people who like wrestling, they're going to be my people because then someone will think I'm cool and that's helpful to me.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Now you got into writing fan fiction about professional wrestling, didn't you?
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
I sure did. I sure did. I wrote thousands and thousands of words of online fan fiction. I was into this universe called the role-playing Universe, the R.P. Universe, and it's essentially where you pretend that you are a certain character and you sort of begin to write as though you are that character. And two people are pitted against each other. And it's like the quality of the writing is what determines who between you wins. As you get deeper into it, you stop trying to be like Chris Jericho or like, you know, Edge or one of the established wrestlers, and you invent your own characters. And what you would do is like, say, we were against one another and we would have a limit of 4000 words each, okay. And then you would invent basically a day in the life of your character. And I would do the same. And it would sort of involve like what, how they're preparing to think about this match that's coming up. And then a judge, a neutral judge would read what you wrote and would read what I wrote and then be like, This one's better so this one wins the match. And I did this every day for like two years. I mean, this was a central part of my life.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Elamin, of course, graduated to other kinds of writing. His essays have been widely shared, he has hosted multiple podcasts, and now there’s his book. But despite all of it, he’s still uncomfortable thinking of himself as a writer.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
I mean, I'm someone who writes. I think writer is maybe a label that I'm not willing to give myself yet. I don't know what bar I have to clear for that to happen. I write for a living. I write for a living but I'm not a writer. Writer sounds too singular. You know, too, I don't know, too elevated in a sense. Whereas for me, like this doesn't feel like an elevated process, it feels like a really messy one. I'm just working through a bunch of things and I'm putting them out there and I'm like, Oh God, I hope I have something here. And, you know, with any luck, it hasn't completely changed by the time that it goes out to print. So, I would say that I'm a writer in progress. And then maybe one day after I'm not here anymore, someone else can call me a writer.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
There's a moment in your book when you talk about the bombing by the United States of a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
Yes.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
And you contrast the terror of that moment in your own life to what was going on in American pop culture at the time. Why did you decide to think about that terrifying moment in that way? And why did you decide to write it the way you did?
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
The moment you're talking about is the bombing of Al-Shifa Factory in August of 1998. I was 10 years old when that happened. And the Clinton administration bombed the factory, which made just like a lot of pharmaceuticals for Sudan under the guise that it's sort of, you know, to makes chemical weapons, which -- the evidence for that is quite shaky. I was trying to think about the impact of that chapter, trying to communicate like here's what life was like for me at 10 years old when this happens, you know, when this sort of seismic event happens, and the factory is really not that far from where I lived. It was close enough that the skies were sort of lit up in flames. And I was trying to think about why this isn't seismic in other people's lives, because that's what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to sort of communicate a feeling that I felt in my body and then trying to figure out what's preventing you from having that feeling, and sometimes like it is like a genuine puzzle to me, like, well, why don't you see it the way that I see it? Maybe the conclusion that I arrived to, maybe it's glib, I don't know, but maybe it's a useful device to think about. Well, what else were you thinking about at the time? I'm not the first person to use this particular device. You know, a movie like The Big Short did it really well, which is like as we were escalating towards the financial crisis of 2008, you sort of saw these like short clippings of like a Ludicrous song, you know? And it was like, Oh yeah, I was like, enjoying that Ludicrous song Shake Your Moneymaker, A classic, as the world was kind of like melting down, approaching financial collapse. And I was trying to revisit what else would America have been thinking about, you know, in the summer of 1998. And it was---it just so happens to be the summer after Ross on Friends said the wrong name at the altar when he was about to marry someone who was not Rachel and he said, I take thee Rachel -- and then there was that cliffhanger. It was a cliffhanger, and it was like a whole summer to just think about that. Like, this is like, okay, when Friends comes back, we got a lot of stuff to resolve. And I was like, they must have been thinking about that. Like, they must have been thinking about these big pop culture moments, you know, the guests who were on Jay Leno that night, the movies that were in the box office, the number one song in America, which at the time was Monica and Brandi’s The Boy Is Mine, which is a classic. I'm like, Listen, if I was thinking about the boy Is Mine, I for sure you wouldn't have had time to think about whether Bill Clinton did a thing or not, you know, the guy would be I would be preoccupied with this magnificent, magnificent song. And I thought it was necessary, just like as a counterweight, as a counterweight to say, I understand that you were distracted. These were the things that were happening. And these were the avenues of attention that were available to you because I think that a lot of us are in a weird way, and I don't say this as a good thing or a bad thing, but we are kind of a byproduct of the avenues of attention that are available to us. And if something doesn't come your way, there's no good reason for you to know about it. And I just thought it was it would be a useful context for someone who's reading the book to try to say, I don't remember anything about this bombing. I don't remember anything about Christopher Hitchens writing about this and criticizing the Clinton administration. I barely remember this period of time in the Lewinsky investigation, which was a period of time right after the star inquiry decided that they were going to interview Monica Lewinsky. And it just so happens that that week was the week that Bill Clinton bombed the factory in Sudan. And so, I think I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that somebody else's attention would have been preoccupied with something else. And maybe that grounds you in it a little bit. It's my Ludicrous moment. It's like, Oh yeah, I was listening to Ludicrous. Oh yeah, you were thinking about Friends. That's that must have been where you've been.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Elamin, you write in your book about the struggle, about what it means and what it looks like and what it feels like to be addressing a white audience. And now that you've written this book and reflected on it and are beginning to talk about it with all kinds of audiences, where do you feel that you stand now? Who are you speaking to and who do you think is listening to you?
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
This book is shaped a lot by growing up in Kingston and feeling like I'm speaking to a white audience in that way. I am deeply aware that one of the main tensions of the book is like, who is this book for? And I think there's a good phrase for this called the explanatory comma. I don't know if you're familiar with the explanatory comma. Yeah. You strike me as someone who's familiar with explanatory comma.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
I love the idea of the explanatory comma.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
Yeah! And this whole book, is an explanatory comma.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Allow me to offer an explanatory comma about the explanatory comma. The term refers to a moment, often in a piece of journalism, when you offer an aside – like I’m doing now – to explain an idea or a reference to your audience. And it's specifically used in the context of something that a minority might understand, being explained to a majority. Now let’s get back to Elamin talking about why his book is one big explanatory comma.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
There's a real sense of like this book is an attempt at translating. It’s an attempt to actually saying, like, I live in this space, but actually come from this place, like this book was born out of an anxiety more than anything else. It was sort of like realizing in my late 20s that I'd spent probably about 15 years or so trying to -- trying my best to suppress a bunch of different pieces of my identity, trying to suppress the fact that I'm Muslim, trying to suppress the fact that I'm Black, even though I'm quite obviously Black, um trying to suppress the fact that I'm an immigrant, trying to make sure that those are the least noticeable things about me. But in the process of suppressing identities, I think you also kind of make them in a way your copilots. And so, this book was an attempt at reconciling the person that I am now with the person who tried to suppress those identities, I think in order to have a closer proximity to whiteness, right, to have a closer proximity to or at least what I perceived as neutrality as like having no facets of your personality or person questioned because your number one struggle is to, is to fit in. So, this book is an attempt to kind of walking the fine line of saying, Who was I when I decided that these identities need to be sort of put on the backburner? And also, what are these identities owed? Because I think I owe them something. If not an apology, then an explanation for why I sort of lived life that way. And so, this book is in essence, an explanatory comma to myself, but also to an audience that I'm really familiar with speaking with, who has never had to question certain parts of my identity because I never made them question it before. And I put it all in one book. I was like, okay, you're going to have to deal with it for like 288 pages and then you'll be free. Then we don't have to talk about this anymore, but for these pages, we got to explore what I owe these identities.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
There's a passage in the book that I found both moving and deeply familiar.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
Mm.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
You talk about first melodies, the first melodies a child hears when they come into this world and for you, like me, that first melody was the adhan, the call to prayer whispered by our fathers in our ears. And given the way you so honestly wrestled with your Muslim-ness, your faith and racial identities, you in the end chose to do the same for your daughter as I did for my son. Why was it important for your daughter, Amna, to hear those words first, to hear the call to prayer as the first melody she heard as she entered the Earth?
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
That's a heavy question. So, her name is Amna Elliot Abdelmahmoud, and there was a lot of you know that you have to imagine with me, like a great giant, big scale. And there's a lot of balancing that has to be done in order to get to a name like Amna Eliot Abdelmahmoud. And one of the balancing elements is that I was thinking about the fact that she's going to have her whole life in Canada. You know, for her, like, this is the natural state, like, this is the place she will have grown up her whole sort of adult life. And I was thinking about that in the context of what kind of name you should have that reminds you that a part of you doesn't come from here, at least a part of you. Not all of you, but a part of you doesn't come from here, which is why me and my wife sort of chose this calibration of her name of her first name is Amna, because there's no -- it's like a Sudanese name. You know, it's an Arabic name. I think it's a really beautiful name. It means safe and sound. My wife picked it and I was like, Yeah, that's the one that's exactly the right one. But Elliot is sort of like hedging. It's like maybe Amna will be a really heavy name to carry across this land with you. So, there's Elliot as a sort of backup plan. You know, if Amna is like, woof, I don't want to keep expanding Amna to people, which by the way, she does, she loves telling people her name. It's my favorite thing about her. But so there's Elliot, but there is no failsafe for the last name. Like, Abdelmahmoud is just a name she has to carry around with her. And that's great. That's great for me. It's going to take her a long time to learn to spell it. It's going to take a long time to fill out those little test bubbles that you got to fill out. It's like 14 letters. It'll take her eight days just, you know, to do one. It's going to be amazing. I can't wait for that to happen. And part of that is the calibration really like being like, OK, the name is going to do the work of reminding you that a part of you doesn't come from here. People will ask questions, and then you'll have to explain yourself and in explaining yourself, you'll have to remind yourself of the explanation and remember that there's a part of me that's missing that doesn't come from here. So, for her to hear the adhan as the first melody that graces your ears, for her to carry a name like Amna Abdelmahmoud, all of those are… hopefully they're breadcrumbs. Hopefully, they're breadcrumbs that lead to whenever she's ready, remembering that like a part of her doesn't come from here. And then she has to think through what she owes that part, because I always say that I'm going to teach her Arabic. She's about to turn five in a month, and I've done a terrible job of teaching her any Arabic. She does not have a particularly well-developed understanding of Islam because she's five and like, you know, because who does at that age? But there's something about the fact that if everything else fails, there is the name. If everything else fails, there's the history. And then she has to do the work of figuring out what that means for her. To me, that's exciting. To her, I think it's going to be difficult. I'm really excited about that. The fact that it’s difficult. I think that's good.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
The terrifying burdens we place on our children.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
I mean, yeah.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
It's not dissimilar to the terrifying burdens that were placed on us, to be honest.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
Exactly that.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Yeah. I love the way you speak about the Egyptian soccer phenomenon, Mohamed Salah, Mo Salah.Mo Salah is in your vision, larger than a sports character. He's changed the way people see Muslims in a city like Liverpool, where with to which I have a connection with because my, my aunt and my uncle settled there in the 1960s and my cousins grew up there and faced a lot of violent racism. A city like Liverpool now sings songs about going to the mosque because Mo Salah goes to the mosque. And if it's good enough for Mo, it's good enough for me. And you express a lot of hope about this, that Amna and kids like her or like my son will have a different set of people, a different set of icons who call themselves Muslim to inspire them. And while I celebrate that, I also kind of take a step back and think to myself, and ask myself and ask you, is representation enough? Is it enough that there's these representative characters, icons and figures out there?
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
Uh, no. I don't think representation's enough, but I think representation is oxygen. In the sense that I think without it, you're choking a little bit, like you're completely untethered, you know, like when you begin to see yourself represented, that's when you begin to sort of craft your identity. Even as light as a counterweight, you know, look at that and be like, I'm specifically not that and I don't want to be that. That is something that is helpful. Without it I think you're a little bit rudderless. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's everything, but it's where you begin. Seeing yourself represented and seeing yourself represented in that light, I think, is something that is deeply -- To me, it's something that's deeply meaningful and I am so jealous. I mean, I am really so jealous of a generation of young Muslims who have a figure as ubiquitous as Mo Salah is because he's kind of everywhere, you know, and the fact that he’s everywhere is incredible to me and the fact that these like teens, you know, these like British teens are singing about sitting in the mosque is where I want to be. To me, it's like unfathomable. I'm like, No, no, no, no, no. Like 15 years ago, those are the people I was worried about were doing hate crimes. And the fact that he's able to in a single generation recalibrate that I think is like, it's no small thing, you know? The fact that he managed to do it while also spearheading the greatest attack on the greatest football club in the history of the Earth, well that's just that's just a bonus.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Elamin, elsewhere, you've described yourself as, as Muslim-ish.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
Yeah.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
What does it mean to be Muslim-ish?
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
I think it means to be measuring yourself against an impossible standard and then feeling and watching yourself fall short of that standard all the time. And for me, that standard was shaped by the fact that I grew up in Sudan. You know, where praying didn't have to be a decision because it was a decision made for me by the people around me all the time? Right? Like the fact that the Azan was something that I heard five times a day while just playing video games. I mean, just like playing a Nintendo and then like, you just hear it coming through the window and then like someone in the house, doesn't matter who, but someone in the house would go like okay, we got to go pray. And then you find yourself kind of going in that direction. And it's impossible to communicate the loss of just like that natural state of being steeped in that culture all the time, because as it turns out without it being Muslim is a lot of inner work, like it's a lot of just like inner motivation to be like, let me go in that direction again without props, without reminders. Ummm, I think like, for me, faith is something that I return to a lot as a question mark and a question mark of being like, Well, if I'm not practicing. And by that, I mean, if I'm not praying regularly, then am I still Muslim? And then that's where that question of that like impossible standard arises. And I go, well against this standard that I'm imagining, I'm definitely not, you know? And it's a struggle for me, but it's also, I think I like that it's an open question. You know, I like something that I can return to and recalibrate often. And from time to time, you know, drive myself into an existential crisis about. It’s great. I highly recommend it, highly, highly recommend it.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
So, I actually feel great resonance with that term because I love the way you describe it. You describe it as a process. And I also think it's one of the things that often gets sort of, I guess almost whitewashed when we talk about faith identity. Faith identity always seems to have a kind of a singularity to it, a two dimensionality to it when in fact, it's the most…In some ways, the most complex thing because you are actively contending with the big questions of being human.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
Exactly, I mean, it's exactly right, like you want to reserve the right to retain your complexity, right? Like you want to reserve your right to be like, I have a different relationship with it today than I did yesterday. So, it's like, it's really not enough for me to just like, use the word, because then you will have a different idea of my relationship to it than I do, and I don't want that. And so, it all kind of becomes like a part of this great kind of balancing act. And there's no winning. There's just like every day you lose a little bit less, hopefully.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Before we wrap up, Elamin, I've been told by my producer that I have to ask you.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
Oh boy.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
How is your next book going?
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
[laughs] Please tell your producer that he's a villain and I refuse to even engage in next book speculation. I'm not writing another word, and I'm talking no emails or text messages for like a year after this. No, I'm joking. There certainly are people who are like, hey, man, what's your next book going to be about? And I very dutifully just delete those emails and then try to pretend like I don't see them. It's great. I highly recommend that as a coping strategy. If you don't want to deal with the thing, then just delete it away.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Man, we all got to do what we got to do to kind of exist and survive. Elamin, who or what would you like to welcome into your guest house?
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
Hmm. Yeah, I…I think the idea of doubt is something that I would like to welcome more of into my house. I think I spent a long time having an antagonistic relationship with doubt. I think I spent a long time fearing it because, you know, I think sometimes we can maybe associate it with unpleasant feelings, of uncertainty, of unmooredness, you know, those things that are not especially great to exist in. But I think I've learned a lot from my moments of doubt for the last couple of years. So, I would like to invite that into This Being Human. I think that would be a bit more welcome.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Elamin Abdelmahmoud, what a joy and a pleasure this has been. Thank you for joining me on This Being Human.
ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD:
My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. This has been so wonderful. Thank you so much.
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
Thanks for listening to This Being Human. You can find links to some of Elamin’s work in the show notes. This Being Human is produced by Antica Productions in partnership with TVO. Our Senior Producer is Kevin Sexton, with production assistance from Abhi Raheja. Our Executive Producer is Lisa Gabriele. Mixing and sound design by Phil Wilson. Original music by Boombox Sound. Stuart Coxe is the president of Antica Productions. Katie O’Connor is TVO’s senior producer of podcasts. Laurie Few is the executive for digital at TVO. This Being Human is generously supported by the Aga Khan Museum, one of the world’s leading institutions that explores the artistic, intellectual and scientific heritage of Muslim civilizations around the world. For more information about the museum go to www.agakhanmuseum.org. The Museum wishes to thank Nadir and Shabin Mohamed for their philanthropic support to develop and produce This Being Human.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s new book Son of Elsewhere is about struggling to find a place between two worlds: his birthplace of Sudan and his home in Canada. He talks to AR about what it was like to show up in an Ontario town as an African pre-teen who spoke no English; how WWE wrestling gave him an entrypoint to Canadian society; and why he wants his daughter to grow up with the burden of having roots "elsewhere."
Elamin Abdelmahmoud is a culture writer for BuzzFeed News and hosts the CBC podcast Pop Chat. His new book is called Son of Elsewhere.
In this episode, Elamin talks about:
Quotes:
“A lot of us are, in a weird way…a biproduct of the avenues of attention that are available to us.” Elamin Abdelmahmoud, 17:43
“I think representation is oxygen in the sense that without it, you’re choking a little bit.” - Elamin Abdelmahmoud, 28:25
“Faith is something that I return to a lot as a question mark…it’s a struggle for me, but I like that it’s an open question.” - Elamin Abdelmahmoud, 31:05
To learn more about this conversation, AR recommends:
