CENTRETOWN SCRIBE
Saleema Nawaz mixes bits of real life into her first novel
Saleema Nawaz was a Grade 1 student in Ottawa when she decided to become a writer. Her first novel, Bone & Bread, is creating a buzz.
Almost 30 years ago, a little Grade 1 student was reading Anne of Green Gables and dreaming of becoming a writer. Today that little girl is a charming, confident, 34-year-old woman who has just published her first novel. Bone & Bread is the title and it was named by the National Post as one of the 13 books of 2013 to watch.
Saleema Nawaz now lives in Montreal, where she is comfortably ensconced in McGill University’s philosophy department. Any other time of the day, she lives the writer’s life. And in that existence she has detected that there is more attention to a novel than short stories. In other words, there is buzz about her book.
Her fiction has been published in literary journals from Prairie Fire to the The New Quarterly. Her short stories have won awards including the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Journey Prize for her short story My Three Girls. Her short story collection Mother Superior was published to acclaim by Freehand Books in 2008.
Bone & Bread continues the story of Beena and Sadhana that was first introduced in a short story called Bloodlines. Nawaz started writing the novel in 2007 when she was attending a workshop at Banff, Alta., but other things intervened, including the need to finish off her collection of short stories. She finally finished it last fall. She has other projects on the go, including about 100 pages of a second novel, a Young Adult project and a collection of short stories. She is a fan of Alice Munro and the British crime writer Kate Atkinson.
Over the phone from her home in NDG, where she is married and the stepmom of an 11-year-old, Nawaz has a soft, high voice that still has a childlike quality. But what she says and what she writes about is mature, occasionally difficult and clear-eyed.
In Bone & Bread, Nawaz tells the story of two sisters born of a mixed-race couple (he South Asian Sikh, she a red-haired, yoga-teaching, ex-hippie, Irish-born Canadian) living above the family bagel business in Montreal. Early on, we learn of the death of the father; the women are left to learn about love and life without him. Along the way a child is born outside marriage. They face overt racism, mental illness and the troubled death of one of the sisters who is anorexic.
Nawaz’s own life has some of the signposts the reader will find in the novel. She has studied yoga, for instance.
But there is more to it than that. She was born in Ottawa and lived in Centretown. She went to Lisgar High School and later to Carleton University, where she studied the humanities, and to the University of Manitoba for a master’s degree where she was taught not to use adverbs (that ban has not lasted). She is the product of a mixed-race couple (father South Asian and mom strict Catholic Nova Scotian “with a military bent”). Her father did not die, but he went ahead with an arranged marriage and left Saleema and her mother to find their way in the world. She knows who her father is and where he is. She just doesn’t speak to him because, as she says, there is no point. She has also turned away from the Catholic Church.
It would be surprising if such a beginning did not inform one’s future writing, and so it does inform her novel.
“You are right, there are these autobiographical elements that creep into the book. The character of Quinn (who is the pragmatic and realistic only child of Beena, one of the sisters). He lives with his mom in Ottawa. And there are some other elements, for example, I lived next door to a bagel shop in (Montreal).”
She pulls on these real-life threads to build the framework of a story. However there are great differences between fact and fiction, as she points out.
The book delves deeply into the relationships between sisters and mothers and daughters and sons.
“I think that these primary relationships, like parents and children and sisters and brothers, they seem like blueprints for what comes later (in life). They just seem to hold so much power.
“You always hear about people going to therapy and it’s always about their childhood and they are unpacking these things that happened before.”
The umbilical cord is never fully severed, no matter how desperately we all might try to run away from our families. That tension, which produces guilt and love and longing for the comfort of home at the same time, is at the heart of this novel. It is embodied in Quinn’s search for his father.
The title of the book reflects this interest in the tangle that is the family. She chose Bone & Bread because it sounded like Born and Bred.
“It also has that idea of feast or famine and it represents each of the sisters.”
Her Ottawa years are still a major part of her life. When she was a young reader, the books were always about some other place until, at Carleton, she read André Alexis’s novel Childhood, which is set in Centretown. “That was interesting to me.” It showed, perhaps, that she could write about where she came from. But there was also another life lesson.
“If you grow up in Ottawa, you kind of absorb all these great things about Canada — the idea of nationalism in its pristine, theoretical sense and all the stories about Canada being a beautiful bilingual mosaic.”
When she left Ottawa, she found that it was a protective bubble. She has experienced racism in her life. Most of it has been the ignorant racism of many well-meaning Canadians who see her and immediately ask, “Where did you come from?” For someone born in Ottawa, that rankles. But there is also experience of the more direct racism that confronts a person of colour.
“When you live in Ottawa you can really think that racism is over. Because you never experienced, because everything is so politically correct and because you really believe it. And you don’t realize that the world is not like that.”