Sarah and I met as high school teachers in Karachi. We were assigned desks in the same office and I mostly encountered her rushing to and from classes, carrying piles of student copies and history textbooks. I don’t think I ever came across her sitting down in the office or the teachers’ lounge: it always felt like she had a very full life that she was juggling efficiently and at speed. Her memoir, Apocalypse Babies (Reverie Publishers, 2023), while ostensibly about child-having and rearing in a time of disaster, captures that sense of wide-ranging interests and activities and preoccupations, all the things that make up a deliberately rich life, and a deliberated-upon life. As I got to know her, I was struck by the urgency and seeming effortlessness of writing she put online, on Facebook, Instagram and eventually Substack, spanning parenting, teaching, the injustices and failures of the education system in Pakistan, daily joy. In 2020, she moved to the United States for graduate studies in child development with her two young children, leaving her husband behind, bound to the vagaries of the American visa system. The observations grew to encompass the challenges of her new life and the processes of making a home away from home in a country as morally fraught as the United States, eventually morphing into a book published by Karachi’s Reverie Publishers. Apocalypse Babies retains the flavor of its origins: the keen eye trained on daily life, a pressing desire to capture and reflect on experience. The writing is lyrical, wry, direct and often angry at the worsening state of the world, but maintains throughout a tenderness and optimism rooted in attempts to ground reflection in action. Our conversation was carried out over email and has been very lightly edited.
ANUM ASI: You write that the book was part of a “prayer” at a time that was full of challenges for you, trying to build a home in a new place and raising two children alone during the pandemic, separated from your husband, working and studying at graduate school. And there’s this wonderful bit where you’re talking about being a little girl playing, getting into trouble: “We had been sent to have balti baths by candlelight after muddying ourselves on the old green swing, or perhaps back then it was still blue. Later, the tube light would come back on, suddenly, interrupting a story about the red-eyed jinn that spied on girls like us. We were joyful and naked and giddy with the certainty that we would grow up to write about our delightful sins.”
Tell us about your relationship with writing. When did you start writing (if you can trace it)? What is writing for? And how has this changed (has it?) in the time since you wrote the book?
SARAH ELAHI: I’ve been writing as long as I can remember. I actually have a clear memory of trying to copy my mother’s cursive on a piece of paper when I was three years old, showing it to my grandfather and telling him it’s “a story about witches”. But truth be told, I’ve always identified more as a reader than a writer. I still struggle to describe myself as a writer, because for most of my life, my writing has been private – part of that prayer. I write for the same reason I read or observe children or watch birds or plant things in my garden: it’s my way of paying attention to the world. Because even though the world is on fire, even though things feel so terrible so much of the time, I can’t help but be fascinated by it all. I think writing is “for” so many things, but ultimately, everything boils down to being in community. Any kind of expression is a bid for connection – with yourself, with the divine, with people you love, with people you hate, with the natural or human-designed world. I think all of us are desperate for community and connection at all times, but especially nowadays, whether we admit it or not.
Having said that, I have struggled – am still struggling – with the idea of writing for an audience. Once you have a platform out there, no matter how small, it is so, so difficult to silence that audience in your head, and that layers the writing process with an unwanted presence. Learning to tune out that noise, and tune into my own ideas, has become part of how my relationship to writing has changed. I’m so turned off by the all-pervasive idea of personal branding – of being Me, Incorporated. This is compounded by the eye-watering speed at which people are embracing AI to communicate the most basic ideas – all of a sudden, everyone sounds like everyone else, and everything is flatter and duller. It’s created a sense of urgency to keep creating in a way that’s true to myself as a writer, and as a human.
AA: I know that this book started as blog and newsletter entries. When did you know that it was a book? How did the book itself come about and what was that journey like, of putting it together for publication?
SE: Am I allowed to be brutally honest here? I still think of Apocalypse Babies as my blog-turned-book. I never intended for it to be a book; the idea hadn’t even crossed my mind while I was writing it. Reverie Publishers reached out to me asking if I would consider turning it into a book, and they were very generous about allowing me to arrange and edit the essays in a way that made sense to me. I feel like I’ve been in a state of pleasant shock since 2022; every time someone I don’t know tells me they read my book, I feel both honored and a bit confused. If I could go back in time and give my thirty-one-year-old self a heads up about how someone will offer me a book deal, I think I would probably use my time to write something very different, because this book is so deeply personal, and I’m not used to feeling this vulnerable. I likened attending my own book launch in Karachi to holding my nose and downing medicine I don’t like, because I believed that baring my soul to so many strangers would leave me feeling naked. But of course – you moderated that event, and it felt so natural and easy, and when people told me that bits of the book resonated with them, it helped me get over some of my stage fright.
The original blog came about organically, with no clear plan. I wanted a place to tie together all the seemingly disparate threads that obsessed me throughout the pandemic: climate change, community, how our world is changing, how it affects the project of raising children. I experimented with different places to put my writing – which is why people will find two abandoned Instagram profiles with my name, and experiments in essaying, journaling, and even poetry on my Substack. I love having a space that feels like it’s mine, which doesn’t give me constant feedback about how many people liked or read my work. If you’re getting a sense that I would be a terrible marketer, you’re right.
AA: A large part of Apocalypse Babies is about your life in Karachi as you reflect on your beginnings, your values, the old life vs the new life you were building in America at the time. How did being away from Karachi impact your writing about it?
SE: I think you’d agree that there’s never been a writer from Karachi who hasn’t felt a pull to write about the city. Whether we love it or hate it or leave or stay, it’s the kind of place that shapes you as a writer, for better or for worse. I knew I had to write about Karachi in the book, but I struggled with the burden of representation. It became even more difficult after I left, because I didn’t want to fall into the trap of writing for the white gaze. The way I ended up writing about the city was intended for an audience familiar with the general chaos and character of a megalopolis in the Global South. The first time I considered doing this it seemed like such low hanging fruit, like of course I would want to connect with readers who “get it” in my first book. At the same time, I found it fun to take the ethnographic lens that’s so often used on Pakistan, and turn it towards preppy New England. It comes back to paying attention – so many interactions I might otherwise take for granted are more interesting when I’m thinking deeply about the culture and values that underpin them.
AA: You studied history and used to be a history teacher. And the book is preoccupied with questions of personal and political history: what we learn from it (or not), how it forms us. In the essay, “Everyone and Their Grandmother”, you write, “The trouble with writing your story is that it begins at least three hundred years before your memories do. The trouble is that the egg from which we came lived inside our mother, and her mother’s mother, and so on. The trouble is that we are never taught how to follow the maternal line.” Such reflection is a monumental task, and you write in that essay about trying to make sense of history for your students as well, trying to grapple with public events and their reverberations in private lives in a way that is true, that captures all the consequences. Do you have any advice or words of encouragement for writers going through the same thing, trying to write with a nuanced historical consciousness?
SE: I don’t know that I have words of advice, but I believe that even thinking about nuanced historical consciousness is probably half the battle. Pakistan is such a nation of drawing room debaters, and everyone believes they have a unique historical or political view. The downside is that this is a kind of hubris, but I’m an optimist, so I will say that for the most part, we are a group of people who are aware of how much history matters. I think it’s very difficult to write about history without sounding contrived or clunky – I’m guilty of this – but it doesn’t make it less important. Writing about history-in-the-making is easier, I think, because the personal is political, and we’re living in a moment in time when this has never been clearer. One of the times I do have the white gaze in mind is when I’m representing political events which seem like they’re unique to South Asia, but really shape our global consciousness in a way that is immediate and powerful. I feel like there’s a responsibility to humanize my people with the reminder that we aren’t one-dimensional tropes; we can be petty and opportunistic and kind and joyful and miserable. It feels really silly to have to even say this, but the longer I live in America, the more I realize that this part of the work continues to be necessary. Which of course, comes back to why we write – to create and be in community with others.
AA: You write about how having and raising children changed the urgency of many issues you cared about: “Altruism alone, at least for the planet, doesn’t translate into action, only the dark side of love-terror does.” And you also write about belonging to a place, how to foster belonging, to care about where you live (the specific place and the earth as a whole). How you can feel like an outsider in a place you lived all your life, but find a way to belong somewhere new. Nearly two years on from when the book came out, and five since you started writing it, how do you feel about these ideas and preoccupations? Do you feel like there’s more writing to be done? What was left unsaid?
SE: I would say there is always more writing to be done, although the angle of my preoccupations has shifted and evolved. A few years ago, I was just beginning to think about how to decolonize our relationship with the earth, as well as with ourselves and with our children. Since then, I have been blessed with the most wonderful community, who I credit with a lot of my growth as a person and a writer. I’m part of a group called Moms for Humanity – we’re a collective of mothers (and others) who first met through our collective despair and organizing around Gaza, and now strive to be a radical intentional community. We have conversations every day about daily actions we can do towards collective liberation, so I’m surrounded by people who are committed to living by their values. This has changed the way I think about belonging, and specifically how I think about care. I now believe we belong to a place when we’re willing to fight for it, in ways both big and small. The greatest change to my paradigm about belonging was shifting from an “I” to a “we” mindset. I didn’t feel like I belonged to Karachi, because I wasn’t intentional about building a values-centered community. That was my failing, but I don’t have regrets; you live, you learn.
I think one of the wonderful things about identifying as a woman is that – unlike our male counterparts – we become more radical with age. The older we get, the more we recognize how much we lose by participating in structures that are calculated to keep us apart and unable to fight together. This has liberated me from the trap of identifying myself by arbitrarily defined state borders. I know I could belong wherever I am part of a collective that reminds me to do my practice, so to speak.
AA: What are you working on now?
SE: I’m now working on the book I’ve always wanted to write, and trying not to wish I had started sooner! Everything in its own time (a motto I repeat often, but fail to truly believe, since I’m as impatient as they come). My first “accidental” book was deeply personal. Now, I’m working on answering some of the bigger questions I raised in Apocalypse Babies – the most important one being “What next?” What could the world be if we were able to liberate ourselves from outdated ways of thinking about giving care, having families, being a human being on a planet struggling to survive? What are people already doing to make it that way?
I’m interviewing the wonderful people I’ve met over the past few years to directly address alternative ways of being; writing about housing co-ops, urban homesteads, unschooling, socialist book clubs…things that I believe (or hope) will define the way we thrive together.
AA: That sounds amazing! Where can we keep up with your writing?
SE: I attempt to update my Substack weekly, God willing: https://sarahelahi.substack.com/.
Anum Asi is a writer from Karachi with a degree in Creative Writing from Cornell University where she served as an Assistant Editor at EPOCH magazine. Her fiction has appeared in publications including Virginia Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Necessary Fiction, and the Aleph Review, won the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Fiction and has been supported by Monson Arts, Banff Center for the Arts and Creativity, the Atlantic Center for the Arts and VONA/ Voices, among others. She is the co-Editor for Fiction at Lakeer Magazine and has taught creative writing at Cornell University and Habib University.