Kamal Al-Solaylee

Nia King: So firstly, I just wanna say thank you for making time to do this. I'm very
excited. This is very cool for me. [laughs]

Kamal Al-Solaylee: My pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you for the kind words about the
book.

Nia: Oh, of course. I really, really enjoyed it. And I'm so glad I happened to see it on the
shelf when I was at Glad Day, because I live here in California and

Kamal: Yeah.

Nia: I was there for Naked Heart in November, and of course the title called out to me.
Did you choose the title yourself?

Kamal: I did. Yes. A starting point for me was the title, Brown. Now unfortunately, after I
chose the title and wrote the book proposal, I discovered that there is a Richard
Rodriguez book called Brown. But it's a memoir, so I feltand I spoke to my editor, and
they said it's a common enough word that I don't think it'sI shouldn't have to change
my title, because I wanted something very simple and direct, with a long subtitle that then
explains the book.

Nia: And you chose the subtitle as well?

Kamal: Pretty much everything. Yes. I mean, I don't know what's your experience of
publishing, but I love my editor. He was very supportive of this book but I did whatever I
wanted to do with this book.

Nia: That's great.

Kamal: I chose the countries I wanted to go to. I chose what to talk about in each one. I
chose the mix of stories. He just edited stuff, you know, this is not very clear or can
you make this better, I'm confused a little bit here. But, pretty much, these all, sort of
non-fiction books are one-person shows ultimately and it's your book.

Nia: I would love to talk about the title. It's so... I want to say grandiose? [laughter]

Kamal: The title or the subtitle?

Nia: The subtitle, because I think both are what got mebut especially the subtitle. I was
like, "Yes! I want to know what it means to be brown in today's world." [laughs] But then
in parenthesis at the end it says "to everyone." And that's such an ambitious project to
undertake
Kamal: Yes.

Nia: Do you feel like you accomplished that? [laughs]

Kamal: Did I? Well, of course...I mean, no. I don't think that I have accomplished that
necessarily in the sense that I didn't speak about every single brown experience in the
world. I did not speak about being brown in relation to say being in the South Pacific, or
something. But I tried my best to be as representative as possible. And toit's not very
often that you go to ten different countries to interview people on a book that you're not
even paid the cost of maybe two or three trips. I did a lot of this book based fromI
mean, I'm a university professor and I did a lot of university grants toto be able to do
some of the reporting. Put some of my own money into it.

So, I tried to be ambitious. This book has been in development for two years before I
even got a book contract for it. And, that's the one thing I never changedis that it
always had this really big, ambitious, scale to it. Even when my editor was sayingsorry
my agent was saying, "You know maybe you should just scale it down a little bit." And I
said, "This book is either going to be very big or it's not going to be the book I want to
write." Did I accomplish everything? No, in fact, there were destinations I would have
loved to go, like Brazil and South Africa. But there was no time or money for either.

Nia: Yeah. I mean it's certainly a huge... you know, you did go to a number of different
countries and talked to a lot of different people. I wasn't at all trying to

Kamal: Mmhmm.

Nia: Put down the book. [laughs]

Kamal: No, no. I didn't get that.

Nia: There's so many things I want to ask you, but I'm going to try and start at the
beginning. Could you talk a little bit about how, for the purpose of this book, you defined
"brown?" How you decide who is and isn't brown.

Kamal: The first definition for me was... people who don't identify as white or Black, to
begin with. By excluding people who identify even politically as Black, because I justI
knew there was another realm of experience and another sort of, another category there
we often talk about, but we don't necessarily know how to talk about it. There are a lot of
books about whiteness, about defining whiteness. And there's also no shortage of books
about being Black, both in a sort of African-American sense or in a sort of purely African
Black, or Caribbean Black. I thought there was this middle ground that is missing here.

My definition of brown actually came from some of the racialist science of the 19th
Century that I referred to in the book. That was just the starting point; who was
considered brown. And if you combine all those books and writers that I referred to in
that chapter of the book, you'll see that there is certain regions of the world that are
unapologetically brown, like South Asia for example. But, I have not called any group of
people brown, unless there was enough evidence in the literature of that group of
people, and in the political resistance, and the sort of the political movements of these
people, that identified themselves as "brown." So the one that I was nervous about was
Mexicans.

Nia: Hmm.

Kamal: Just because the range of skin colors in Mexico is so huge.

Nia: Do you think that's more true than in the Middle East or in South Asia?

Kamal: Certainly not the same as South Asia. I would say, Middle East and Mexico, yes
maybe. We can, we can sort ofbut The Middle East has always beenin the US, the
region called The Middle East has not actually been called "brown" necessarily, but it has
become brown after 9/11. In fact, on the US Census, up until now, if you are from The
Middle East, you can identify as white. It's not seen as a racial group. It's part of the white
continuum.

But back to Mexico, I have, only when I have seen with my own eyes enough references
among people who fight for undocumented workers in US, and people who have crossed
the border into the US, or through Mexico, or from Mexico. And I've seen enough
evidence that they call themselves brown. In fact, President Obama, on his farewell
speech from Chicago, referred to brown kids, pretty much talking about the Dream Act
and the amnesty for children who were born in the US to undocumented immigrants. So I
generally used the term "brown" to refer to groups of peopleparticularly after I've seen
that people from those communities actually refer to themselves as brown, as well.

Nia: Yeah, I thoughtpart of why the book is so interesting, and the title was so
compelling to me is because "brown" means so many different things to so many
different people.

Kamal: Mmhmm.

Nia: I feel like in the US, "brown" is sometimes used as shorthand for all people of color.
But I think more often, when you say brown, people think Latino or Latina.

Kamal: Hmm.

Nia: And I think, my experience, just briefly being in Toronto, is that when people there
said "brown," they were usually referring to South Asians. And actually, when I wrote my
most recent book, my co-editor and I had a talk about if we were gonnayou know
recently, since the Black Lives Matter movement, there's been a move to capitalize the
"b" in Black.

Kamal: Right.
Nia: And so, we were trying to decidewe knew we were going to capitalize the "b" in
Black, but we weren't sure if we were going to capitalize the "b" in brown. And, we
ended up deciding not to, because my logic was that I felt like Black referred to
something more specific, whereas "brown" can refer to any number of different things.

Kamal: Yeah, if I were your editor I would probably agree with that
decision. [laughter] Yes. And, you know the thing about brown, is that the difference is
that Black has also acquired a kind of political gravitas, and a political history and
movements. Whereas "brown" is still a very nascent movement, it's still, it has not really
established itself. In fact, when Obama said brown kids in his farewell speech, there were
tweets that said, "What does that even mean?" Because there were a lot of people that
were not sure what does brown mean. And when this book came out, the first question
is what is brown? Never heard of it. Or I've never even thought of it.

Nia: Huh. Well, I definitely feel like you answer the question in your book. I mean you
do, and you don'tright? I feel like you offer up two definitions: one is to be not white,
not Black, and not East Asian.

Kamal: Mmhmm.

Nia: And then the other is to be a migrant or an immigrant.

Kamal: Right.

Nia: And so, I think I came into the book thinking it would be a lot more about race and
colorism, and less aboutI feel like it's really a book about migration and labor and
economics.

Kamal: Yes. Okay. I know the book that you were expecting.

Nia: [laughter]

Kamal: I know that book. I've seen those books. And I know that book really well, and
it's not a book that I could have written, because actually I am an immigrant. And, in the
sense that I went to the UK to study when I was 24 years old, and then from there came
to Canada. I didn't have that experience of growing up in a society that is white, and my
experience of growing up in the suburb of Toronto as a brown kid. And I felt that those
books and those stories have been told so well by so many other writers; probably the
ones that you've anthologized in your two books. Those stories have been told really well,
and they're very visceral and they're important.

And, I wanted to do a book of reporting. I wanted to do a book of, you know, that refers
to this sociological and economic and political experiences of being brown. And I felt
that the migrant labor thing is the one thing that unites South Asians, North Africans,
Hispanics, Middle Easternis that we have become the color of cheap labor. And I felt
that that is one the most important sort of contributions that I can make to expanding the
definition of brown.

For example, an earlier draft of the proposal had chapters like The Rise of Bollywood and
Aziz Ansari and Mindy Kaling, and you know, brown comedy. And as I was working on
the book, I stepped away from all that and I realized that, even though I'm actuallymy
experience is as an arts journalist. I was a theatre critic for the national paper here in
Canada, and I wanted to avoid the pop culture or the growing up brown in a suburb
narrative, because other people were doing it and were doing it so much better than me.
What I could offer was actually a book where I used my skills as a journalist talking to
other people, and used my skill as a researcher to condense a lot of complex research into
something that is much moreI don't want to say accessible, but I think it's certainly
more accessible to me, anyway. I've heard, some of my own friends find it very difficult
to read, in the sense that it's a lot of numbers, and studies, and research. And they felt
they got in the way of the stories. But yeah, I wanted this book to steer clear from pop
culture and some narratives that I've seen a lot in print already, and I felt that this would
be kind of a different take on that.

Nia: Yeah. If I can push back just a little? [laughs]

Kamal: Sure. No, no.

Nia: I don't think the book I was looking for was a book about pop culture, or a book
about growing up brown in a white suburb, I think actuallylike I mentioned the
book Coal to Cream [by Eugene Robinson].

Kamal: Yes.

Nia: Which is sort of an international look at Blackness, and it's not as comprehensive.
Like he doesn't go to as many countries as you went to. But it talks about what it means
to be Black in different parts of the world. And your book is about what it means to be
brown in different parts of the world. But it's alsoI'm gonna backtrack a little bit, so I
majored in ethnic studies, I studied race and racism in college. And one of the things I'm
really interested in is how race is constructed differently in different countries, and how
racism operates differently in different places, and the similarities and differences
between the way that those things exist in different places.

Kamal: Yeah.

Nia: You know, for example, you could be white in Cuba and Latino in the United States.

Kamal: Oh yeah.

Nia: That's just one basic example. And so, I think that's what I thought the book was
going to be, and so the framing around labor and around migration was really interesting.
My question was about whylike obviously you have to choose a scope for this project
which is

Kamal: Right.

Nia: Doable.

Kamal: Yes.

Nia: And so that was sort of the framework that you chose. And I guess my question was,
why? Like why not include for example, Indigenous people of the US and Canada?
Would you like to elaborate at all?

Kamal: Yeah. I know. The Indigenous issue has come up in other interviews as well. And
on some level, it would've have fit the model of immigration in the sense that these are
people who lost their homes, because other people immigrated to it. But Iby focusing
on people who actually uprooting themselves and moved, I felt that a chapter on
Indigenous issue would be an outlier in this book, because I would have to really twist
the argument to say, while the previous ten chapters were about people who moved, this
final chapter is going to be about people who were moved, to whose lands people moved
to.

Nia: Uh huh.

Kamal: And I want to be sort of practical and say that the chapter in Canada, which is at
the very end, was actually supposed to be a chapter about migrant labor, you know, here
temporary foreign workers as we call them. But I just could not crack through to that
world, because so many of them were not willing to be interviewed on the record. And,
the clock was ticking. I was on sabbatical for a year to do this book, and, I just ran out of
time. And I knew either I will just kind of wait a whole year, till the summerdo two
months of intensive reporting. Or do a chapter about the Canadian election, which I have
a lot of contacts.

And then, this way also, sort of putthere are three chapters in the UK, France, and here,
that sort of focused more on what it's like to be a Muslim in those sort of Western
societies; and to sort of beef up that argument of the book. So I mean some of it was
practical thinking, deadlines. This is Harper Collins as well. The book was in the catalog
for the spring of 2016, it would be really difficult to suddenly kind of pull out of it and
say, "I want another year." Some aspects of publishing are just practicalities. And frankly,
I actually ran out of money completely, I went into debt, [laughs] to pay for some of that
travel.

Nia: It seems like it's been a very expensive book to write.

Kamal: It's a very expensive book and I needed to submit the book and get the advance,
so I can pay off my debts. And, not the most sort of highbrow you were
expecting [laughing], I'm sorry.

Nia: No. That is super real. [laughing]

Kamal: To be honest, this is in relationship to the migrant workers. The Indigenous

thing, it just wasn't going to fit into the theme the way the book took the structure of
migrants; there wasn't a space that the Native issue could have fit in easily. And I was
asked here at an event in Toronto by a woman saying, "Did you know that before migrant
workers come, people were taken out of reserves to go and pick up fruit and vegetables in
Ontario farms? We were the first migrant workers." So, and I felt thatyes. If I ever do
revisit the themes in this book, there may be an added chapter or section about that.

Nia: Yeah. II mean I think focusing on migrant labor I think what I'm really trying to
get at, is how you came to define "brown" as migrant?

Kamal: Mm hmm.

Nia: You know, because you talk about Sri Lanka a lot. There's a chapter there, but there
are people there that stay there. Even though a lot of people leave

Kamal: Yes.

Nia: You chose to focus on people that are on the move.

Kamal: Yes.

Nia: And, how...how did that come to be your definition of "brown."

Kamal: Because II wanted to see them both on their home turf before they left. That's
why I sort of paired Sri Lanka and Qatar, Philippines and Hong Kong. I wanted to see
them at home and then when they traveled. So, the choice of Sri Lanka isis basically I
had contacts in Sri Lanka that I didn't really have in say, Bangladesh, for example. And
then, I actually did somewhen I was researching sort of, Dubai and Qatar, the number
of Sri Lankan workers is increasing every year, despite the fact that the economy and the
political situation in Sri Lanka has settled down. The civil war ended 2009, and yet that
has stopped people from leaving.

So the end of political unrest does not necessarily mean prosperity and people want to
stay behind. So that was interesting for me to see, why they would leave, despite the fact
that, you knowwar is over, so why would you want to leave? It'sSri Lanka was to
me, a place I could go, meet a lot of people, and you know compared to Bangladesh,
which is not particularly safe for journalists, where as Sri Lanka is much more... I mean,
it wasn't safe. But you know, it was not dangerous either. It was a reasonable risk to go to
Sri Lanka, sort of undercover, and you know, pretend to be a tourist but then to do work
while I'm there.

Nia: Speaking of Sri Lanka, there was a cosmetic surgeon you talked to there, who said
that colorism in Sri Lanka pre-dates British colonial contact?

Kamal: Mmhmm.

Nia: Was that something that you were able to find other evidence of while you were
there?

Kamal: There was actually. There were, in studies of Hindu culture, there were lots of
references to caste and place in society, based on lineage but also based on the darkness
or lightness of skin. And I did look at that statement kind of skeptically, and I've asked
other... I looked around, and I think, I felt confident leaving that one in, because there so
much of traditionalit's not just in sort of Hindu culture, but on the level of myth and
basic storytelling, you do have always stories where the fairy princess, the very fair
skinned princessand the handsomelet's put it this way, we always associate lightness,
and light, with goodness, and darkness, and dark people with nefariousness.

Nia: And do you think that's universal across the world?

Kamal: I thinkhere is something I can't prove obviously. I haven't read every and each

Nia: Well, I mean, across the countries that you went to.

Kamal: Across the countries that I went to, yes. I would say that there was always a pop
culturala cultural aspect that associated lightness of skin with privilege, with more
economic clout, with better breeding, or better manners. And whiteness is aspirational in
a lot of these societies. The one society I can speak to almost definitively is Egypt, and
the Middle East, where I grew up, where to this day, when I watch old Egyptian movies,
and old Egyptian sort of pop songs, or whatever. There is almost always a recognition
that class and that refinement is something that you associate with whiteness. In Arabic,
which is my native language, the term for someone who is very well educated and very
well spoken in Arabic is called white Arabic because it was assumed that if you're
going to reach that level of refinement of how you speak the language, you'd have to be
lighter in skin. So you're white, basically.

Nia: Sorry. I had a question ready and then I got wrapped up in what you were
saying. [laughing]

Kamal: It's all right. Tell metell me before we continue, what is your background. I'm
curious.

Nia: Oh, like ethnically?

Kamal: Yeah.

Nia: My mom is Hungarian and Lebanese. My dad is Black.

Kamal: Uh huh. Hungarian, Lebanese and Black. Wow. [laughs] And how do you
identify?

Nia: I identify as Black, and as a person of color. But I also recognize that I pass as
white, and there's a lot of privilege that comes with that.

Kamal: Right. Well, that's interesting. Yeah. And I mean, another thing that stayed away
from, well not stayed away necessarily but I decided it's not gonna be the book that I
write, is people of mixed race. And especially sort of Black and white, and then their kids
come out kind of brown, [laughs] or somewhere in the middle. Or, you know, brown and
white or whatever. And, I also wanted to kind ofmaybe people who have that
experience will be the best people to talk about their brownness, or their in-between
world, or whatever they want to identify as.

Nia: That's interesting. I actually feel like it makes a lot of sense not to include [laughs]
folks that are mixed, Black and white in the book

Kamal: Right.

Nia: Because the book's all about trying to get away from the Black and white racial
paradigm.

Kamal: Right. Yes. Well, I mean that was at the earlier, very earlier stages of
development. I mean this book goes back to 2012, like the first kind of draft or proposal
for it. So then, in the earlier stage, as I mentioned, there were chapters about Bollywood
and comedy and then, you know, people of mixed-race. How do they fit? But all of that
stuff got whittled down.

Nia: I want to not harp too much on how you define brown [Kamal laughs] because
we've already talked about it for a half hour, but you said the one that was sort of an
outlier for you was Mexico. For me, I was surprised to find the Philippines, a chapter on
the Philippines in your book because I feel like in the US at least, Filipinos are usually
thought of as East Asian or Pacific Islanders?

Kamal: Mmm.

Nia: I feel like I rarely hear them referred to as brown, except in the all POC are brown
type of shorthand.

Kamal: Mmhmm. Oh you want me to address that? [laughter]

Nia: I realize that I didn't frame that as a question.

Kamal: Really. No? Oh my God. No. The Philippines was actually the starting point of
this book, because the first idea for this bookthe first inkling for there might be a book
here was actually in 2011 when I was in Hong Kong and I saw this sort of sea of
hundreds or thousands of Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers on their day off. And
what happens, and if you ever go to Hong Kong on a Sunday, it's something you should
really seebecause on Sunday, it's the one day of the week that they get off, and they
congregate in the downtown core. And they basically take over the city.

Imagine if you were in New York and all of Times Square is just taken over by domestic
workers. And every corner and every side street, they're having street parties or street sort
of gatherings. That happens actually in Hong Kong. It wasn't my first time in Hong Kong,
but it was the first time I noticed that, and I thought, "Wow." I mean the one thing that all
these people have is that they are domestic workers. They come from extremely different
backgrounds and extremely different religions sometimes; there are some Muslim
Filipinos, most of them are Catholic. And then Indonesians, which are by and large
Muslim. And the one thing they have is that they are cheap labor, you know. They work
for $400 a month.

So that was actually the starting point and the starting point of importing labor, for me,
started with the Philippines. It's funny. I would have never done this book if the
Philippines was not the spark for it. And speaking with at least one of my Filipino friends
here, and if you see the acknowledgment, Roberto put me in touch with a lot of people.
There was never any doubt that in the Philippines there are sort of two major ethnic
groups: the Malay and the Chinese. And the Chinese tend to be the market-dominant
ethnic group. It's a smaller group but they're the ones that own businesses. And there's a
lot of resentment towards them by the Malay Filipino, the brown, the ones that look more
South Asian, and there's kind of resentment or kind of a divide that runs along racial
lines.

And the majority of the brown Filipino are the poor, are the ones who end up traveling
and working abroad. And the reason that there are so many of them in Hong Kong, is the
Hong Kong government in the 70s, when they started importing domestic workers
because women joined the workplace and they needed someone to look after the kids,
clean the house, look after the elderly. They preferred Filipino workers, not just because
of the language, but their darker skin, their brown skin, actually will set them apart from
Chinese workers. Because you could have, in Hong Kong, you could have brought in
people from mainland China to be nannies. They didn't. They actually didn't. They were
afraid they would bring in some of their communist ideology with them. So they
preferred brown, Filipino, because not only are they stand out, because this way you can
monitor them more. And you can monitor them more easily because they stand out
because of their brown skin.

Nia: Yeah. That was a theme that I think recurred, inI want to say, the Qatar chapter?

Kamal: Mmhmm.
Nia: About wanting to import people to work that couldn't just pass as part of the local
population.

Kamal: Right. Yeah.

Nia: So that they would be easy to monitor. I thought that was really interesting.

Kamal: Yeah. I knew about the relation, in relation to Asia but I wasn't sure that was how
the Gulf country, that one of the priorities of the Gulf country. However, it is actually
true, that it is actually still cheaper. Here's the thing that I find about the book, is that
human life has price, has varying prices. You know. We're not all equal, we're notwe all
think that every life is precious or important, but there's actually a price tag that goes with
each life. And the sheer number of South Asian and sort of brown workers from South
Asia, makes them...disposable in a way.

You know, you bring in ten thousand, and if like a couple hundred of them die in
accidents, you send them home in body bags and you bring in two more to fill in for
[each of]those two hundred. And it's just thatthese are no longer workers and people,
these are kind of like these products, these are products that countries that have the
resources like Qatar, and United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, simply importsI
mean, I say it facetiously but I actually mean it, it's not unlike importing wine or cheese
from France or something. These are products that you import. The fact that they're
humans with feelings and lives and dreams, almost comes kind ofit's a byproduct or
something that when they...

Nia: It's secondary.

Kamal: Yeah. It's secondary. So, I kind ofyou import this sort of mass [of] dark brown
people from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and Nepal and Pakistan, and they're...really sort
of importing...wholesale. That's what I'm trying to say... Let's get those dark brown
people here so that we can keep an eye on them.

That said, actually, the one thing I noticed in Qatar, is how a large number of people from
Africa are now competing for those jobs, with sort of brown people. And, I don't think it's
in the book necessarily because I just, it was just largely anecdotal. They're actually even
cheaper than brown people.

Nia: Yeah. That sort of comes up in the Trinidad chapter, a little bit. I mean the sort of
Black-brown tension around labor and the availability of cheap labor, in terms of... I don't
know, I just reread that chapter and it was so interesting to me. Partially because I didn't
realize that Trinidad is pretty much half and half, like Black and Indian.

Kamal: Right.

Nia: I didn't realize that it was that Indian. [laughs]

Kamal: You wouldn't because it's not the image that they project to the world. The image
that they project is of a Black country, because it was largely, after independence it was
mainly like a Black narrative that was the dominant narrative.

Nia: Yeah, there wasI don't know if I'm going to be able to find it, in like an amount of
time that won't keep you waiting. But there was a sentence I really liked about howyou
know, neither the Black people nor the brown people there are Indigenous to that place;
they were brought there by the British, and then you said, sort of like left to duke it out.

Kamal: Right. Yes. Not just the British, also the French, and a lot of Black... neither are
Indigenous populations. I mean the Black people are descendants of slavery and the
brown people of indentured labor. That's who lives there.

Nia: Right. So there's this question of whose place is it really?

Kamal: Right.

Nia: And there's no easy answer.

Kamal: Well, it depends on whose in charge on a government level. It's more Black
when there's a Black president and it's a bit browner when there is you know, a brown
president. But the fact that they compete, it's almost like they compete for the soul of the
country. And it's the nature of that countrythat one has to be dominant over the other,
and it's not like they can share or sort of co-exist.

Nia: Why do you say that?

Kamal: It's just based on all the research. Everything that I've read has always
constructedit's because I think the parties are divided, not strictly along racial line, but
the one party tends to be predominantly supported by the Black population. And the other
one, which is currently in opposition, is mixedyou know, has Black and brown. Think
of them like Democrats and Republicans. Republican is predominantly white and the
other party is white and has a better representation from other races.

Nia: [laughs] So in this case, you're saying the Black party is the Republicans?

Kamal: [laughs] Well, no. I guess the Black party is much more homogenous.

Nia: Okay.

Kamal: And I'm sorry, I now forget the names of the parties, but it has always existed by
each party has always sort of claimed power or sustained power by playing off racial
divisions. For example, whether it's in East Africa because there was a large Ismaili
Muslim community there that was kicked out in the 70s. The main thingthe main
narrative is that these brown people Muhindis they used to call them, kind of exploiting
and sucking resources out of the country; and the masses are poor. So the only way the
masses can rise, is to rise against these brown communities that are much more market
dominant. So in Trinidad, the brown communities tend to be more entrepreneurial. I mean
they live in ghettoes basically that are sort of enclaves, I should say, like really gated
communities to keep them away from the mass of the poor Black people. One way, the
other party plays against the other, is that, who's being victimized and who's being taken
advantage of.

Nia: Yeah. I think your book does a good job of capturing the complexity of that
situation.

Kamal: Right.

Nia: Becauseit talks about how Idi Amin expelled South Asians from Uganda while he
was in power, which I feel kind of relates back to that theme of Black-brown economic
tension and nationalism. And it'sI think as a like mixed Black person, I sometimes feel
unclear about where my loyalties lie... I mean I can understand why people who have
been there longer feel resentful of imported labor, especially when those people are given
sort of a higher place in the colonial system. And at the same time, it's really the
colonizers that are at fault, and not the people that were brought there by the colonizers.
[laughs]

Kamal: I mean they were brought in to be a wedge issue, like particularly to distract
Black populations from rebellion. You know, to have an enemy they can focus on instead
of theinstead of the colonial enemy. They have this sort of group of people they can
focus all their energy on. And therefore, the colonialists can sit back and watch brown
and Black people fight it out.

Nia: Right. But you also talk about anti-Black racism within brown communities and
within Indian communities in Trinidad.

Kamal: That was in

Nia: Sorry, go ahead.

Kamal: No, no. That was a very important part of the book for me, is to kind of show
that there'sbrownness is premised on reverence for whiteness and a kind of fear of
Blackness.

Nia: Yeah. I had a really hard time with the idea of honorary whites, which I know was
not your concept.

Kamal: No, thank God. [both laugh]

Nia: But I[laughs] What do you think of that framework?

Kamal: I actually I do think that it is extremely realistic. And I can only answer this
question very anecdotally because in my experience ofI know you said you're
Lebanese, [laughs] and I lived in Lebanon, so I feel I can say that. In my experience of
Lebanese friends, if you told them they were brown, they would be quite upset. Or they
would not take that as a compliment, or they would say, no I'm not, I'm Phoenician or I'm
European. If you look at my DNA, I've got largely European blood in me, and to some
extent, Syrian. And my former partner was Syrian, and he was white, and green eyed, and
very light hair. And when we were together, I think I mentioned that in the book, or
maybe in my previous book, we looked like a mixed-race couple; even though we both
from the Middle East.

And, the fear of being seen as dark skinned is something that is, sort of essential to the
number of groups in the Middle East. My neighbor in another building was from Iran,
and she never missed and opportunity to dye her hair blonde, but then you always see her
eyebrows, which were kind of darker than the rest of the hair. And it's because whiteness
is aspirational. Everyone wants a slice of that whiteness. It means privilege. It means
power. It means passing.

So the concept of honorary white is not, you are not technically white, but youeither
through economic status, or through just sheer genetic lottery that you can pass, you're
light-skinned, so you can sort of up the ante, and go even lighter and lighter, until you can
pass. It'sit betrays a fear not just of being brown, but to be seen as part of the larger sort
of brown and Black masses. The thing about the honorary white is that goes to show, that
thewhen the 19th century racialist science divided people according to their skin color,
they may have all been bullshit in the sense that there is no scientific basis to any of that.
But there is a lot of psychological basis to that thinking

Nia: But basically

Kamal: You're giving a lot of complaints about this conversation. [both laugh]

Nia: Why do you say that?

Kamal: [laughs] Oh because, I mean some of these things are not very comfortable facts
for people to hear.

Nia: Sure. [laughs]

Kamal: Nobody wants to know that Blackness is something that a lot of brown
people...with the exception of those who have really worked hard at their politics and
consciousness, is that Blackness is something that isthat stillglobally remains at the
bottom of racial preferences. And that is something that kind of rattlesI mean, that is
something that is depressing to have to even to admit, that there are a lot of people that
think that way.
One of the people in Trinidad said to me that one of the most common phrases they use
there for brown people, they say, it'sthey always have bad necks. And then you ask
why, I say, because my neck hurts from looking up to white people and looking down at
Black people. And that's anecdotally, obviously. I mean, there's no scientific valueis
that kind of experience that sadly I actually discovered as I travelled around the world.
That theres still a reverence and an aspiration to whiteness and lightness of skin, and a
fear that you're going to be part of a really dark and therefore Black underclass.

Nia: Yeah. I mean, I feel like in communities I'm part of that's kind of widely known and
agreed upon. Especially amongI mean, Black people know that. [laughs]

Kamal: Right. Of course, yes. Especiallyyou have a different context in the US

altogether. Yes.

Nia: Yeah. Absolutely. But I think you bring up a really interesting point. And you know
we sort of talked about a little already about how terms for race and racial constructions
are always changing. I think in the US, in communities of color, activist communities of
color recently, there's been a lot of talk about anti-Blackness within POC communities,
and people wanting to differentiate between Black and non-Black people of color because
of the anti-Blackness that's sometimes perpetuated in POC communities

Kamal: Mmhmm.

Nia: And the first time I ever heard the term BIPOC for Black and Indigenous POC, was
in Canada. And I still feel like you don't hear it that much in the US, but it's really
interesting to me that folks there, some folks there have chosen to break out Black and
Indigenous from other people of color.

Kamal: A criticism of this book has been that you know, brownness really implies anti-
Blackness. That the prevalence of the term "brown" is really because of people like me,
who write about it, and in order for us not to be lumped in with a Black continuum or
with a Black masses or somethingthat it's brownness iswhy couldn't we all just be
Black?

Nia: [laughs] I strongly disagree with that.

Kamal: Oh no, I disagree with that as well. I mean, there's room for more than one
identity, there's room for the specifics of each identity. The racialization experience of
Black and brown people is completely different. How we interact with the law for
example, is completely different. And II say it in the book, I don't have any fear when
I'm dealing with the police in Canada, you know. I'm a middle-class university professor.
I'mthe way I dress, the way I talk. I justthat hasn'tso far, there hasn't been an issue.

But I dread crossing borders through the US, or something. I just, I'm alwaysI have an
Arab, Muslim name. You know, nothing could be a more sort of signaling trouble
crossing borders, the waylike having that combination. So our experience of
racialization under authority and power are completely different and they may some
overlaps, because you know, if you're in the suburbs of Toronto where Black and brown
kids are both targeted by the police, that would be something completely different. I don't
live in the suburbs of Toronto. I live in the downtown. I work in a downtown university.
And justthis hasn't beenand also, I'm getting old. So I'm no longer mistaken for a
undesirable criminal, because I'm fifty three. So I'm not in the youth interaction with the
police.

Nia: Yeah. There's a sentence in your book I think; that terrorism is a young man's game.
[laughs]

Kamal: That's right. You have read the book very carefully. [both laugh] I'm very
impressed!

Nia: Thank you! Basically saying that you're no longer perceived as a threat as you get
older, because terrorists are young men?

Kamal: Well, yes. I mean, the bulkI mean when you hearI mean, ISIS is not in the
business of recruiting men in their 50s and 60s. Isis recruiters have no chance with me
whatsoever.

Nia: [laughs] I don't think that's only because of your age, but we can move on. [both
laugh] So when we chatted briefly on Facebook, you said that you decided not to include
Israel and South Africa, because it would have taken the book in a different direction?

Kamal: Mm hmm.

Nia: What did you mean by that?

Kamal: And Brazil as well. So these are the three countries that IIto be perfectly
honest, Israel wasn't on the radar. Just because going there as a journalist, even though
I'm Canadian of Arab background, would have been really difficult. So, I just knew that
would be extremely difficult. But I would have loved to do something between Ashkenazi
and Sephardic experience. Im originally from Yemen, so there's a huge Yemeni Jewish
community in Israelas there are Moroccan and Iraqiit would have been wonderful to
kind of talk about the experience of being Israeli between being white and being brown
Ashkenazi. But I justI knew that would have been a very difficult thing to pull off. For
the same reason, I kind ofgoing to Israel as a reporter now, and just being constantly
followed by intelligence or whatever, would have been really difficult to operate, you
know, to report the book, necessarily.

Nia: Sorry. When you said brown Ashkenazi, did you mean...brown Sephardic?

Kamal: Sephardic, Sephardic. I'm sorry. Did I say that? I meant just between Ashkenazi
and Sephardic.
Nia: Right, right.

Kamal: And, so that was one thing. And thenthe same obviously. The hundreds of skin
color and categories of race according to skin color, in Brazil, which I called my
colleagues, my former colleague Stephanie Nolen from the Globe and Mail talking about
that. And then there's the whole South Africa, you know, before the abolition of apartheid,
between white, colored, Black and you know, I think there was a category for Indian. If I
may speak just for Brazil and South Africa, these countries are worth writing a separate
book on, because these countries are about colorism. You know, how you fare in those
countries will very much depend on your skin color; it's been ingrained into the political
system in South Africa. And it's just naturalized into the social and economic system of
Brazil. Those countriesactually, what I meant, it will tellthey will dominate the book
so much that all the other stories willwill not fade by comparison, willall the other
stories will become secondary, and I felt that those two countries will tilt the book into a
book about colorism, as opposed to migration.

Nia: Which is what I thought it was to begin with. [laughs]

Kamal: Yeah. [laughs] And, I figured that, after doing the researchand I had really
excellent contacts in Brazil because of my colleague who is the national papers
correspondent in Brazil, so I would have had door open to me right, left, and center.
There was no issue of contacts. And that's, sort ofif I may harp on this point one more
time, the destinations I chose were largely where I felt I could get a lot of material in
short periods of time. The only place I lived in extensively was Hong Kong. The rest
were largely two to three week visits, so there was not a lot of timethere was no room
for error. You had to go there, interview a lot of people and then get the best stories that
you want to focus on. So a lot of timeso why for example Trinidad and not British
Guiana? I didn't know anyone in British Guiana. So, Trinidad it is. So, why Sri Lanka and
not Bangladesh? Because I knew somebody from Sri Lanka who could put me in touch
with other people.

Nia: Yeah, okay. The last question

Kamal: Sure.

Nia: Is that you mentioned that your publisher has been having a really difficult time
getting people of color to buy this book. [laughs]

Kamal: Yes.

Nia: Why do you think that is? What's that about?

Kamal: Because you know, Canadian publishing, isthe readership isdespite the
ethnic, this country is very ethnically mixed. And, lots of people of color or multicultural
in everything, but the reading public remains largely white.
Nia: Do you think that's as true as publishers think it is?

Kamal: I am with Harper Collins, which is a sort of global multi-national subsidiary of

Fox News. [laughs]

Nia: Oh really? I didn't know that.

Kamal: Penguin and Random House, they're all big corporate, and I think a book like
this is a bit of a challenge for a big publisher that doesn't have a relationship with ethnic
communities, necessarily. They do publish people of color. I'm not saying that they don't.
But they market it largely for a white audience, or a white readership. So when I asked
theI work with a fantastic publicist and director of marketing there, and I asked them,
"Do you have a media list ofsort of ethnic media in Toronto that we could just go to?
He wasn't really sure, because they have never had to do that before. Oh, they have done
it once, many, many years ago. So this is a book that I haveI've done a lot of
interviews, because it was pretty well received in Canada. And I'm reasonably well
established as a writer, so on the CBC, on national broadcasters, on CTV, like morning
talk shows, and radio, and television, and sort of interviews with newspapers and
everything. Not one of them was an ethnic media, or an ethnicso let alone South Asian,
or anyanyI think you're the first media outlet that identifies [Nia laughs] as
something of interest to people of color

Nia: I'm so sorry to hear that. [laughs]

Kamal: Well, I'm glad somebody paid attention to this book. But interestingly, this book
was reviewed by fiveI got five or six reviewscan't remember the number, maybe five
or six in Canada. And all the editors that assigned it, but one, were white men. And all the
reviewers were brown women.

Nia: Oh, interesting.

Kamal: Because I think they felt that it would be safeit would be better if a book
called Brown is reviewed by someone of his or her peer. And I actually was not entirely
happy about that, because just because someone is brown is not enough to speak about
the issues in the book, like migration and labor. And I would have loved to see someone
who knows the issues in the book a little bit more kind of deal with that. So one of the
downsides of the fact that mainly, sort ofor maybe one of the upsides, is that mainly
brown women reviewed it, is that it got through to other brown readers, because a lot of
these brown women have Twitter followers or Facebook presence that is populated by
brown, you know, followers, whatever. Having said that, I just realized that I did speak to
a brown woman on the radio once.

Nia: Yay... [laughs]

Kamal: So, sorry. You're the first in the US, how's that? I forgot one in Vancouver. But
anyway, it's really interesting that tooI think that the point that Michael Ericson was
telling you, compared to my first book [Intolerable], this has been a very difficult to find
the right sort of way to describe it, and to sell it to a public, whereas my first book was
easier to do.

Nia: Yeah, I have questions about that that I'm trying to figure out how to frame. I haven't
read your first book.

Kamal: Right.

Nia: And my understanding is that the first book, like you said, was a much easier sell. It
did

Kamal: It was a memoir. It was a memoir. So growing up gay in The Middle East. So, it
was ait was a straightforward story. You know, grew up gay in The Middle East
wasn't very good. I came to the West. I find freedoms, so. So it was an easy narrative to
sell.

Nia: Yeah. That was what I was thinking but didn't want to say. [laughs]

Kamal: No, no. I think that was what Michael was implying.

Nia: And I wonder how much that has to do with the title as well. Because I feel like, the
title put me off a little bit. Because it sounds like a narrative about how much better it is
for gays in the West.

Kamal: It is that. I meanit's what I felt. And what I still feel. Is that being a gay man in
the Middle East was not going to end well for me. And we're talking about the eighties
here, this is pre your generation, like pre social media, pre all this stuff. And it's true to
my feelings at the time I wrote it, and probably now. So, yeah. The title is a downer to be
honest. [Nia laughs] It's yeahnone of my books have really kind of sexy titles. And
you know, it didn't stop it from being actually a much more successful book than Brown,
because it was nominated and won a major award here in Toronto. It was nominated for
four, and won one of them. And we have something called Canada Reads here, which is,
the CBC, our national broadcast chooses five books that the whole nation reads, and it
was one of them. So its success was phenomenal in many ways. But I highly doubt they'll
choose this one anytime soon because it's aI don't want to flatter myself, it's just a
much more complicated book. And that the fact that I hesitated answering some of your
questions, and or had to think really hardyou're a tough interviewer to begin with, but
also because those questions, I'm still thinking about them.

Nia: Yeah.

Kamal: And I don't have a definitive answer for them yet.

Nia: Well, I think all people of color should read Brown. [laughs] I think everyone
should read Brown. And it is available in the US, correct?
Kamal: It is available online as an e-book in the US. And you could order it on Amazon.
But it will not be actually available in the US formally until the late spring, early
summer.

Nia: Okay, well I'm glad it's coming at least. I brought back all these amazing books by
LGBTQ artists of color, or writers of color that were published in Canada, that you can't
find in the States. And it's making me so frustrated. [laughing]

Kamal: Well, like who? Maybe some people I know?

Nia: Well, Farzana Doctor.

Kamal: Farzana, yes, yes. She's great.

Nia: I guess the Six Metres of Pavement is available in the US, but All Inclusive is not?

Kamal: Right. But Six Metres of Pavement is actually lovely, and I think I would start
with that one.

Nia: Well, they're both great.

Kamal: They're both great, yeah. It's one of my favorite books.

Nia: Thank you so much for

Kamal: Thank you. I really appreciate it. And I really appreciate how closely you read
the book. [laughter]

Nia: Yeah. I really loved it. And yeah, I was really intimidated coming into this interview
because I really admire you and hope to someday be able to write a book like this.
[laughs] But also because I'm a journalist whose self-published and you're a respected
journalism professor, and established author. So thanks for letting me talk to you like an
equal. [laughs]

Kamal: Oh please, oh come on! [Nia laughs] I'm honored that you feel interested in this
book and you've actually asked all the right questions, and they were actually kind of
tough questions so

Nia: Thank you, that means a lot to me. [Kamal laughs] Well, I'm looking forward to
reading your other book, and to staying in touch in the future.

Kamal: Yes, please do.

Nia: All right. Take care.

Transcribed by Amir Rabiyah