FROM BAD ADVICE TO GREAT ART
CANADIAN-PAKISTANI ARTIST MARIA QAMAR IS FIGHTING FOR GREATER INCLUSIVITY THROUGH HER DESI CULTURE POP ART-INSPIRED ARTWORK
Maria Qamar, 26, was forced to study business in Class 11, when all she wanted to do was art. At 20, she quit her job at an advertising firm as a copy writer because of her “struggle with authority and policing creativity”. “They would take these ideas and pass them through 15 rounds of meetings where 20,000 white guys would put their stamp on it and go, ‘hmm is this appropriate for society to see?’” But Qamar, whose family moved from Pakistan to Canada in 2000 when she was nine, now lives by herself, is a fiercely funny graphic artist and no amount of policing managed to deter her. One breed of policing, in fact, is what her work is about. Inspired by pop-artist Roy Lichtenstein, Qamar draws quintessential desi aunties and their unsolicited advice to young girls—she covers everything from rotis to haraamis. Her new book, Trust No
Aunties is for desis, by a desi, she says and in it, she teaches young men and women how to deal with this advice.
What is some advice you get from aunties?
When all mothers and fathers and aunties and uncles start treating their child the way you treat every other child, that child is going to grow up with issues. For desi girls that is a very prominent thing. That idea of ‘hey you have your period now, you should get
married. You’re 12 or 13 and you have no idea if you even like boys, but we’ll get you to marry somebody and then become a doctor. Or become a doctor and then get married. Or you can graduate and get married in the same ceremony and then you can have three children and we can die peacefully.’ That’s the timeline of a desi parent and it’s really dated. But in terms of aunties, the advice that I get a lot is to find someone. The idea of codependency is so weird.
I once got advice from aunties like, “Why do they (the women in her illustrations) always have to be saying something? Can’t you take away the speech bubble and draw nice ladies?”
What inspired your illustrations and the style?
A lot of it was inspired by Roy Lichtenstein. I always drew comics growing up. I went to his work and was thinking about what I used to draw as a child. I used to get bullied a lot at school and would draw in my sketch book what happened that day. If someone threw something at me, I would go home and draw the comic of that incident and I would change the last panel of that comic to something positive. It would be me getting revenge or having the last laugh or them falling off a cliff. It was therapeutic for me. After the advertising stint, I thought, ‘let me draw something’. I started drawing one of his (Lichtenstein’s) pieces and doing my own thing with it. And I looked at his work and it was all white women and I looked at mine and the features I had drawn were features like my own—the nose was rounder, the lips were fuller, eyebrows were thicker. I thought, this looks like a desi person. So, I put the jhumkas, the bindi, the nose ring and the speech bubble.
What was it like growing up in Canada as an immigrant?
I always think of those Indian dramas, where the camera zooms in really fast into the woman’s expression—if you take a screenshot of that and you take an old school comic panel—the expression and the way they’re set up are identical. And these are two very different cultures. It perfectly combines to describe what me as a desi living as a diaspora—that’s my personality. It was a process to unhate myself while growing up in Canada. At first, I figured these people were yelling at me because I was doing something wrong. In the media too, we would only see images of beauty as euro-centric. Small lips, thin nose, slim figure, very pale, blonde. And me as a chubby brown girl who’s hairy, and not looking anything like Britney Spears or Christina Aguileira, I can’t ever be that. I’m ugly. I’m wrong. As I grew up, a turning point for me was seeing the trend of butter chicken becoming popular or the “Indian experience” becoming a thing, people wearing bindis at Coachella and henna tattoos. And I was like…well wait a minute didn’t you tell me my lunch was stinky and “what the hell is this henna thing”? And now these are normalised in white culture as a white thing?
Who is your work meant for? And who is this book meant for?
Everyone says, “Oh, it’s not just about South Asians”. No. It is about South Asians. It’s written by South Asians for South Asians. This book is kind of like a survival guide to dodge bad advice of aunties, but also, it’s mostly just a book you can pick up and read and feel comfort in knowing that this person—author aunty as I call myself—went through this. It’s something to be challenged. It’s satire but there are things that are also sharing moments. I don’t care if “Becky” or “Chad” don’t like it, but they have to learn. It’s also how people learn about other cultures. The initial reaction is ‘ooh what is this book, maybe I’ll get my desi friend to explain it to me’. The content of the book is really about the young girl dealing with this advice, written from the perspective of a young desi girl.
Your advice to uncles?
Can you all just respect women? Check your other uncles—if they’re being abusive, don’t just let that slide. Find ways to talk to them or hold them back. Men and boys can do so much. Stop enforcing toxic masculinity. Allow your sons to cry and do things that aren’t confined to a gender.