Tasneem Jamal was born in Uganda and immigrated to Canada with her family in 1975. She has worked as a journalist, editor, writer and writing coach. Her debut novel, Where the Air is Sweet, is informed by historical events and real experiences of members of her family. Jamal says of the novel, “It is, at its simplest, a story of movement and longing.” Jamal now lives in Kitchener, Ontario. She is an editor of The New Quarterly literary magazine.
Fiction
I Never Said That I Was Brave
Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2024.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Set between the 1970s and 2010, I Never Said That I Was Brave examines the complicated relationship between two women as they navigate a culture vastly different from their parents’. Motivated by guilt and confusion, the unnamed narrator recounts the shifting dynamics of her lifelong friendship with Miriam, a charismatic astrophysicist who focuses on dark matter. As childhood immigrants to Canada from Uganda, the girls are able to assimilate (though not always easily). In adulthood, they chafe against the deeply held traditions and expectations of their South Asian community and their own internalized beliefs about women.
As the narrator follows her memories on their unpredictable and unreliable paths, the reader is taken along on a devastating journey, one which blurs distinctions between right and wrong, victim and manipulator, life and death.
Fiction
Where the Air is Sweet
Toronto: HarperCollins Publisher, 2014.
PS8619 .A42 W44 2014
Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)
In 1972, dictator Idi Amin expelled 80,000 South Asians from Uganda. Though many had lived in East Africa for generations, they were forced to flee in ninety days as their country descended into a surreal vortex of chaos and murder.
Spanning the years between 1921 and 1975, Where the Air Is Sweet tells the story of Raju, a young Indian man drawn to Africa by the human impulse to seek a better life, and three generations of his family, who carve a life for themselves in a racially stratified colonial and post-colonial society. Where the Air Is Sweet is the story of a family: their loves, their griefs and, finally, their sudden expulsion at the hands of one of the world’s most terrifying tyrants.