Here is the direct YouTube link for this event: https://youtu.be/nVTEsYtm08A
Join our host, Ferrukh Faruqui and Zarqa Nawaz, author of the novel Jameela Green Ruins Everything , as we discuss her latest salvos against the still-reverberating fallout of cultural and geographic colonialism.
Zarqa- she’s on the cusp of first name only fame – an award-winning CBC broadcaster and writer - is restless. After her teenage attempts to out-Muslim her immigrant parents fizzled out, she aspired to be a doctor, the safe ambition of good Pakistani children everywhere. When that didn’t pan out, she landed at Ryerson’s School of Journalism, and just like that, she found her groove.
In a sly, comedic, gotcha! kind of style, Nawaz is as subversive as they come. In her debut novel, Jameela Green Ruins Everything (Simon and Schuster), which master satirist Rick Mercer pronounces brilliant and provocative, she introduces an impetuous Pakistani American whose Muslim memoir plunges her into jealousy-fuelled publishing insecurity necessitating some shaky transactions with God. When her spiritual ally, the new imam is whisked off to Syria by the CIA for some routine renditioning, she flies to Raqqa (assassinating a grief-maddened ex-pediatric oncologist terrorist operative along the way) to infiltrate an international Islamic terrorist group as part of a typically Jameela-esque trans-Atlantic rescue manoeuvre. Here she outwits, among others, a cold-blooded, black-mascaraed Louboutin-heeled killer and a suspicious gluten - intolerant bodyguard before smashing the whole cabal while regaining her faith and family. With a deft hand, Nawaz skewers book publishing, global geopolitics and other assorted conceits while slicing apart the neatly false binary of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ Muslims.
Her ground-breaking 2007 CBC television series, Little Mosque on the Prairie electrified viewers – somnolent Canadians who’d hardly noticed their sort of exotic, mostly bland tax-paying neighbors – and Muslims who were either bemused or embarrassed (some reportedly were apoplectic) at being presented as fully human instead of as tired caricatures. Zarqa doesn’t do frothing-mouthed outrage. She does something infinitely harder. By harnessing humour to ambush her audience, she doesn’t need to fire a shot. She lassoes us into a complex world where Muslims aren’t a collective of the devil incarnate, where there are no sneaky fifth columnists intent on sacking Parliament Hill to institute our own version of sharia – whatever that is – based theocracy. In her new CBC comedy ZARQA, she implodes Hollywood tropes by playing a midlife Muslim woman plotting romantic revenge as the eponymous heroine humiliated by her ex-husband’s upcoming nuptials with a fresh white yoga instructor.
Nawaz is a comic genius who has done the impossible in this brilliant fiction debut: Jameela Green Ruins Everything is, all at once, an incisive examination of recent Middle East history, a biting indictment of Western imperialism, and a darkly comic satire on terrorism. Follow Jameela Green, the comic she-ro for our modern times, as she bumbles through the unimaginable on this hilarious whirlwind adventure. I guarantee you will never think about the phrase ‘East meets West’ in quite the same way again. Three cheers for Jameela Green!
Here is the direct YouTube link for this event: https://youtu.be/nVTEsYtm08A
Join our host, Ferrukh Faruqui and Zarqa Nawaz, author of the novel Jameela Green Ruins Everything , as we discuss her latest salvos against the still-reverberating fallout of cultural and geographic colonialism.
Zarqa- she’s on the cusp of first name only fame – an award-winning CBC broadcaster and writer - is restless. After her teenage attempts to out-Muslim her immigrant parents fizzled out, she aspired to be a doctor, the safe ambition of good Pakistani children everywhere. When that didn’t pan out, she landed at Ryerson’s School of Journalism, and just like that, she found her groove.
In a sly, comedic, gotcha! kind of style, Nawaz is as subversive as they come. In her debut novel, Jameela Green Ruins Everything (Simon and Schuster), which master satirist Rick Mercer pronounces brilliant and provocative, she introduces an impetuous Pakistani American whose Muslim memoir plunges her into jealousy-fuelled publishing insecurity necessitating some shaky transactions with God. When her spiritual ally, the new imam is whisked off to Syria by the CIA for some routine renditioning, she flies to Raqqa (assassinating a grief-maddened ex-pediatric oncologist terrorist operative along the way) to infiltrate an international Islamic terrorist group as part of a typically Jameela-esque trans-Atlantic rescue manoeuvre. Here she outwits, among others, a cold-blooded, black-mascaraed Louboutin-heeled killer and a suspicious gluten - intolerant bodyguard before smashing the whole cabal while regaining her faith and family. With a deft hand, Nawaz skewers book publishing, global geopolitics and other assorted conceits while slicing apart the neatly false binary of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ Muslims.
Her ground-breaking 2007 CBC television series, Little Mosque on the Prairie electrified viewers – somnolent Canadians who’d hardly noticed their sort of exotic, mostly bland tax-paying neighbors – and Muslims who were either bemused or embarrassed (some reportedly were apoplectic) at being presented as fully human instead of as tired caricatures. Zarqa doesn’t do frothing-mouthed outrage. She does something infinitely harder. By harnessing humour to ambush her audience, she doesn’t need to fire a shot. She lassoes us into a complex world where Muslims aren’t a collective of the devil incarnate, where there are no sneaky fifth columnists intent on sacking Parliament Hill to institute our own version of sharia – whatever that is – based theocracy. In her new CBC comedy ZARQA, she implodes Hollywood tropes by playing a midlife Muslim woman plotting romantic revenge as the eponymous heroine humiliated by her ex-husband’s upcoming nuptials with a fresh white yoga instructor.
