Zarqa Nawaz takes a turn to dark comedy
Zarqa Nawaz is the creator of the hit TV series, Little Mosque on the Prairie. Her memoir Laughing All The Way To The Mosque was shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in 2015.
We spoke with her about her first novel, a dark comedy called Jameela Green Ruins Everything.
What are you reading right now? Is it typical of your tastes?
I listen to a lot of audiobooks at night because I suffer from insomnia and it takes me at least two to three hours to fall asleep and this is a great time to catch up on books. And the narrators are incredible. Here are some books that I highly recommended. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang and The Farm by Joanne Ramos.
Were you funny as a kid? Who was your best audience for your humour when you were growing up?
I was shipped off to Muslim summer camp as a child and I put on religiously inappropriate skits for my co-campers. I was tolerated by the counsellors because at least I wasn’t doing drugs.
Do your kids think you’re funny?
When I ask them, they just say ‘You’re adorable,’ pat me on the head and walk away.
Your new book, Jameela Green Ruins Everything is a satire where no good deed goes unpunished. Does that kind of dark comedy come naturally to you as a writer?
The world can be so dark sometimes that I find writing dark comedy helps me process the world and come to terms with it.
Working in TV, there are so many people involved and so much persuasion and consensus-building required to make anything happen—but we have a vision of the lone author whose unadulterated voice comes through on the page. Are you a writer who seeks out feedback or do you relish that independence when it’s just you and the blank page?
This novel was probably the hardest piece of writing that I’ve ever had to do in my career. I had written a memoir before but not a novel, and it definitely was different. But I really believed there was something special about the novel and so began my life of writing and improving it. These days you must hand in a novel that is almost perfect because editors don't have the time to work with authors the way they used to in the past. So I hired freelance editors, and every new editor taught me something different about the craft. Writing a satire about terrorism and American foreign policy in the Muslim world while exploring a protagonist’s emotional pain is not easy. Finally, one editor told me, “That’s enough, this is one of the best pieces of writing I’ve read all year, it’s ready to be published.” I gave it to my agent, and she sold it almost instantly. So I would not say, writing this book was a solitary act. Nobody was collaborating with me the way they do in television, but those editors were my companions on a very long and lonely journey, and with their guidance, I finally made it to the finish line. ◼
Jameela Green Ruins Everything
For fans of My Sister, the Serial Killer; Where’d You Go, Bernadette; and the award-winning TV show Killing Eve, a hilarious satire about a disillusioned American Muslim woman who becomes embroiled in a plot to infiltrate an international terrorist organization and, in the process, reconnects with her loved ones and her faith, from Zarqa Nawaz, the creator of the hit CBC series Little Mosque on the Prairie.
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