In Brown Boy: A Memoir (Scribner, Apr.), Pakistani Canadian writer Aziz questions concepts of identity and success.
What do Americans get wrong about Canada?
Many Americans view Canada as a liberal multiracial utopia where everyone is respected, yet there’s racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment. In this book, I tried to show a picture often not shown at all.
You were an indifferent student until you were struck by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. Why does representation matter?
Any teacher can lecture about diversity; until you see someone who resembles you and has done something significant, only then can you be awakened. America electing its first Black president was a watershed moment. Obama’s internationalism spoke to me—he’d lived in Indonesia, his father was Kenyan, his college roommate was Pakistani. He received a lot of racial abuse and Islamophobic abuse. Some even asked, “Where was he really from?” That otherness was instigated.
What would failure have looked like to you?
Ending up where I started without any intellectual development. This book isn’t just this gliding journey upwards. Meritocracy impacts the psychology and health of minorities in particular. It’s this Faustian bargain: here’s all this prestige, yet we’ll take something from you. Failure would have been being condemned in perpetuity to the same spot.
You write, “I boomeranged between invisibility and presence, between misrepresentation and clarified reality.... I had become a hyphenated man; no, I was the hyphen.” What is the “hyphen”?
You have this self-image of the identity you’re building, yet the white majority perceives you in a very specific way. To change that, you educate yourself, get a good job, dress well, and move up the economic ladder. But some perceptions don’t change, or if they do it’s conditional if you get out of line or raise your voice. It’s like walking a tightrope with a blindfold. W.E.B. Du Bois called it a double consciousness. I wanted to capture both sides of the hyphen.
What advice do you have for BIPOC readers who are charting their own route?
Develop the intellectual and verbal tools to understand what the system is, and how it has impacted you and your ancestors. The system wasn’t made for us. I didn’t let the system break my spirit; I didn’t succumb to my rage. Maybe those who read this book will see themselves in it and come away with their world expanded slightly more. That would be success to me.
