Bushra Rehman’s novel Is a coming-of-age gem about growing up queer and Muslim in America

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Michael Collina: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible Editor Michael Collina, and I'm excited to be speaking with writer, speaker, and activist Bushra Rehman about her novel Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion. Welcome, Bushra.

Bushra Rehman: Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me.

MC: Thank you so much for joining us. So, this novel follows Razia, a young Pakistani American girl growing up in New York City in the 1980s. It chronicles her childhood in Corona, Queens, and then the rebellion of her adolescence as she discovers who she is and where she belongs in the world as a queer brown girl. So I wanted to ask, how has your work as an activist and some of your experience as a co-editor of Colonize This!, an anthology of feminist essays from women of color, informed your fiction writing?

BR: That is a great question. So, I came up in the spoken word poetry scene in New York City, in which we all began to realize that if we just got up on the mic, whether that was a mic not being recorded or on a mic in an anthology or in a book, that it was just so important to tell our stories because our lives are valid. Our lives are important and we refuse to be made invisible or forgotten anymore. And there was just so much power in those spoken word poetry gatherings, and just so much community that was being created simply by sharing our art. And that was how I actually met Daisy Hernandez, who I co-edited Colonize This! with. We wanted to reach out and hear stories by women and nonbinary writers about their experiences and their feminism and to let it be a teaching tool in academic settings, because Daisy and I went to an amazing women's college, which no longer exists. Daisy also studied women's studies and neither of us had read work by women of color as much; we found it after we graduated, after we took our women's studies classes. So, we wanted to make a book.

After working with all those amazing writers in Colonize This! on their life stories, I started to think that maybe I want to tell my own story or a story similar to my story outside of the world of poetry and into the world of fiction, because I love reading fiction. So that's how Corona, my first book, came about. And now this book is an expansion of Corona. It's the stories I wasn't able to tell 20 years ago that I'm finally ready to tell now, which are the stories of my Muslim community and leaving that Muslim community. And that I'm back in it again.

MC: Yeah, first I want to say thank you for telling those stories. I was also a women's and gender studies major in college, so it is near and dear to my heart. And those are stories that really need to be told and it's stories we need to hear and we really need to work into feminist theory and critical thought as a whole. So, thank you. I am so glad that you were one of those voices contributing to all of those stories and experiences because they need to be heard and studied.

BR: Thank you. The early consciousness-raising groups were simply people sitting around and telling their stories. This is how movements happen and this is how revolution happens, and more importantly, this is how we make chosen family, because many of us, for a variety of reasons, may have to break from our bio families in order to find those chosen families. We need storytelling spaces. That's what so much of my activism is about, and my writing.

MC: Absolutely. So, you also have this other novel, Corona, that also follows the main character, Razia. How does that story fit together with Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion? Is that a sequel? Or how do they work together? Do you think there's going to be future expansions in the series in the future, and do you think we'll get Corona in audio?

BR: My idea of how it's going to fit is someone who's going to read Roses, and then Corona is now out of print and they're going to find it in a used bookstore and be like, "Oh my God, what is this?" So that's my big plan. Corona, it's a little evolution from a poet to a fiction novel writer. And Corona was the in-between, because it's vignettes, it's short stories. Some of them are really short. Corona was the beginning of me grappling with writing fiction inspired by my life, and it spans Razia's childhood all the way up to when she's 35. The black hole around which all of the action of Corona spirals is being disowned from her family and community.

So, for those listeners who don't know, Corona jumps between Razia Mirza's childhood in Corona, Queens, and her adventures on the road. Whether she's working at a Puritan living history museum or going to Bhangra parties, there's always this reference that keeps being made to the point of departure, and I think I was too young to write that story. And now I'm going right into that point of departure. Basically, the missing heart of Corona is Roses, in the Mouth of the Lion. And I think that people can start with Roses for sure, and then Corona will actually make more sense when they find it in the Strand Book Store or wherever [laughs].

MC: Do you think we're going to get more from Razia in the future?

BR: Oh, definitely. Everyone who's already read it has said, "Wait, what happens next?" I am working on the sequels slowly but surely. At the end of Roses, she leaves Queens, and in the beginning of the new book, she actually comes back to New York City and gets the job at the Strand. The year is 1989, and I realized that's also the year Satanic Verses came out. And so Razia is working at the Strand Book Store when Satanic Verses comes out and people don't see her as Muslim because she's got a shaved head and piercings and tattoos, and people don't read her as Muslim. And so people say all kinds of Islamophobic things around her and she gets involved with these different artists who are not just taking an easy answer of “We believe in censorship” or “We believe that it's okay to say Islamophobic things,” but finding these BIPOC collectives of artists that can hold space for much more than a binary idea of a book like Satanic Verses.

So, I'm excited to write that book. And I think that, ultimately, in a hero's journey, she does come back home. So this book is kind of the half of that circle of the hero's journey and then the other half will be what she learns and how she comes back home.

MC: I'm so excited to hear that, as the ending of this novel took my breath away, and I loved that final scene so much. I was one of those people who wanted to hear what else was in store. So, I'm so looking forward to that next novel. I also wanted to touch on some of your other background. You're also the founder and facilitator of Two Truths and a Lie, which is a community-based workshop series that focuses on writing memoir and autobiographical fiction. How does that work into that experience? Is this novel based on your own experiences growing up in Corona? Tell me about how those two work together.

BR: I was born in Brooklyn, and then I lived in Corona from when I was 2 to 16. And Corona is still home for me. That workshop that I teach, Two Truths and a Lie, I feel like I'm the luckiest person in the world because it's a workshop for queer BIPOC writers and allies in New York City. And I basically teach the tools that I had to learn in order to write Corona, in order to write Roses, which so many of those tools are overcoming our inner obstacles, our fears of airing dirty laundry, as they say, whenever you were from a community of color.

One of the things that I had to learn was that the reason my community was afraid of airing dirty laundry was because of the intense way that Muslims are treated in this country. I lived through 9/11 and there was such fear that the men in our family would just get taken away, detained without having done anything. And they were coming for people in our community, and they were coming for the characters who are in the book. There's such a fear that comes about telling these stories that's not only tied to necessarily our home cultures, but about the politics of this country.

"The reason my community was afraid of airing dirty laundry was because of the intense way that Muslims are treated in this country."

And what I've always found is that we're stronger together, and so these writing workshops that I've been doing now for over a decade, are community spaces where we meet and we tell our stories together, and I often write with the students and [do] all the exercises. So, many of the chapters were written in the workshops. And the exercises that we're doing, I need as well. And they're not all emerging writers. There's famous journalists, there's amazing musicians. There's just all kinds of people who take that workshop.

Both of these books, they are autofiction, they are not memoir. I should make that very clear. They're not memoir. Someone asked me who Angela was based on and I said, "Angela is based on four different women." I have lots of siblings, and there's only one in the book. There’s just so many things I had to change, and also just to let my imagination take over. That's the fun part of fiction. It's not a memoir, but it's definitely inspired by true stories.

MC: You also narrate the story. So, I wanted to ask, why did you want to perform this story and what was it like performing your own writing for the audiobook?

BR: It was such an experience, Michael. From spoken word, so much of workshopping to me is performing. I would get up in front of audiences and read stories, and based on audience response I would make changes or edit. So much of reading things out loud is part of my editing process. But once I got into the booth, I didn't realize that I'd have to act, and I have no experience with acting at all. And so Jennifer Blom, who's [an] amazing director at Macmillan, was very patient, and I think once I realized the difference between—like, I have a nine-year-old and I read her bedtime stories. And I'm usually speeding through them because I want to go to sleep. But I was like, "Oh, I have to slow this down in order for it to be narration and not speed reading.”

It was definitely a learning experience, and I actually can't wait to hear how it turned out. I wanted it to be in my specific Queens Pakistani accent, which does come out at times throughout the book. There's so many other languages in the book. I also wanted to speak those languages and share the pronunciation. And so I had to audition. I worked really hard on my audition tape because I was like, "I have to be the one who tells the story." Ultimately, I'm really happy with it.

MC: I am also really happy you ultimately perform the story because it's fantastic. Was there anything you learned about yourself throughout the process of recording the audiobook?

BR: It's something I would recommend to all writers. One of the things I tell my students is read all your work out loud. You have to hear how it sounds. And so it was such a deeply immersive experience because for five days I'm just reading my own book. So, it was a gift to me. It also was a really emotional experience. All these times when I would cry and Jennifer was like, "This is normal," I was like, "How is this normal?" There were a number of people who passed away who are in the book. Whenever I would get to stories about them, I would get very emotional. And so there was grief processing happening that I didn't even realize was going to be part of the process. Jennifer was like, "Is this therapy or is this recording? I don't know what this is." But I think, ultimately, for me, it was a form of therapy as well as a recording.

MC: That's awesome. I'm glad this was the opportunity for that, and it really shows the power of audio and audiobooks in general.

BR: There're parts when you hear me get really choked up. When they called me back for the pickups, I was just like, "Oh God, is it all the times that I cried that I'm going to have to redo?"

MC: You said you're a listener yourself, right?

BR: Oh, God, yes.

MC: What do you typically gravitate towards if you're listening?

BR: Oh my god. All the books I want to read and don't have time to read [laughs]. Because of the grief, I've just been listening to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. I also got Angie Cruz's book. I do love listening to Eckhart Tolle. During the pandemic, I spent days just walking and walking and listening to audiobooks. They were really amazing.

MC: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I don't know what I would do without audiobooks, particularly over the past couple of years. They've been a lifesaver.

BR: Yeah.

MC: So, returning to the novel itself, throughout the story, the neighborhoods of New York kind of take on their own unique rhythm, feel, and personality. And that's always really integral to the story. How did you flesh out these neighborhoods and make them feel so real and almost like characters in their own right?

BR: Well, I spent so much time doing “research”—those are air quotes happening, people—where I would just ride the 7 Train all day. There's a moment where Razia and Angela are on the 7 Train and it curves around this bend and every single time feels like the 7 Train is going to fall off the track. It did when I was a child and they haven't fixed it. So, I would ride the trains. I spent a lot of time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where some scenes happen, which is one of my favorite places in New York City. I spent a lot of time taking pictures, writing in these spaces. I've lived the majority of my life in the city and anytime I try to leave, I just always want to come back home, because I just think it's such an amazing place.

And as a person of color, I never felt this pressure to assimilate. I always felt like everyone's culture was valid. Even if I was a minority, I was a minority among minorities, so there was always this way that I feel that I wasn't scarred as other people of color are in this country. But then for Queens residents, you also, like, don't leave Queens. The first time I left Queens, I think I was 15 or 16. So going into the big city is still a thing. And sometimes when I would go to places like Central Park to research this book, I would remember that feeling I had when I went for the first time and was like, "Wow, this is the big city." So even though I'm a New Yorker, Manhattan still has that "wow" feeling for me.

MC: This novel really is a love letter to New York. That's so apparent. But that's pretty fun research, I'm not gonna lie.

BR: It was fun research and I listened to a lot of '80s music and I rewatched Family Ties and Three's Company. The research part was really fun.

MC: Speaking of the '80s, you also incorporate a lot of major events and cultural moments of the time. You touch on the star power of George Michael and Paul Simon, but you also refer to the horror of the AIDS crisis and the murders of the Zodiac Killer. How did you decide which of these moments and references to include, and why were those, in particular, so important to the story?

BR: In the '90s, I befriended one of my queer mentors, Ben McFall, who passed away last December. And he was a literary icon. He lived through the AIDS crisis. He lost the love of his life, Tom, to the AIDS crisis, and he would just tell me stories of what it was like at the time. It brought up memories for me. There's a really bizarre documentary they showed children to instill fear in them. That really happened, and sometimes I think about it, like, why did they show us that and then give us no information? It's very gruesome portraits of men dying in the hospital. When I choose things to write about, they very much come more like the way poetry comes up, where an image will just come to mind and a feeling will just come to mind, then I'll start to explore it.

I was obsessed with George Michael, and the comedian Bill Hicks says, "If you like George Michael, you're a lesbian." I remember hearing that later on, I was just like, "Oh, okay." I've been doing this work for decades and speaking in front of people about being queer and Muslim, and people will often use it as a way to fuel their own Islamophobia or their assumptions about Muslim culture. But what I really want to get across is, like, even George Michael was in the closet. Whitney Houston was in the closet. It was a really strange time. It was a really horrible time, and I think that this pandemic right now has given people even the tiniest taste of what it felt like for people back then. Just how terrible it was and how homophobic the politics were and how painful it was.

And I really appreciate my editor encouraging me to dig deeper into news stories and documentaries of the time. So, I did that. For even the shortest chapter, there's actually so much research that went into it. But to me, the point of writing is learning, so I was really glad to do that research. And Ben has passed away but I've been talking to a lot of his friends and hearing more stories of that time. These things are just really important. And George Michael, listening to him was one of my first rebellions. I felt a connection to him that I didn't understand what it was. And I didn't know this until later, too—he was a second-generation immigrant. And where he grew up, he was teased, he was bullied, he was seen as other, he was seen as ugly. He was actually bringing all this to his music. George Michael passed away on Christmas and me and my friends, I think we cried for weeks. He really was important. There's so much to love about George Michael, things we knew and didn't know.

And I think that's so much of what I was trying to explore: What does it feel like to be queer when there's no language for it? Where there's no role models and just feeling a difference? I do feel that being queer is about being able to see through the matrix, you know, that there's a different lens on the world and I wanted to capture what that felt like even before she realized it, that she always has a different lens on the world.

MC: I love that and I think you nailed it. With everything else we've been chatting about with the story, it's so apparent how much effort and thought and emotion and yourself that you put into this story, and it makes it so wonderful and that much better.

BR: And that's why it takes me decades to write a book [laughs].

MC: And the structure of the story is also really unique. I know we chatted about Corona being told in vignettes, and the beginning of Roses feels like short vignettes that offer these really brief glimpses into her life. But then as the story progresses and we watch her grow into a teenager, your writing and Razia's perception really deepens and grows heavier with detail, imagery, and emotion. So I wanted to ask what inspired that format?

BR: I think it was just that I was learning how to write fiction as I kept writing. The early stories were written a long time ago, so I was still this baby poet trying to learn how to write fiction. And so the vignette was this in-between form that I was using, and then once my skills grew—and I tell this to my students all the time, that the way to become a writer who can write more and longer is just like running a marathon: You have to train. And so the more I wrote, the more I learned about how to tell a story, how to take a scene and really expand it, how to write dialogue. So, I was actually learning as I was writing, and I think it shows. And so it's interesting that the form alters as I alter.

"I was learning how to write fiction as I kept writing."

I did want this story to be less experimental. Corona jumps around in time in a way, and I wanted to just write a chronological story. So that was a real challenge for me. It wasn't written in chronological order, but as the stories came out, they came out in chronological order. The story started downloading faster and faster, the more time I put into the book. And once I had time to work on the book and not do 20 million other things, I had the chance to sit down and really be a writer, which is the dream.

MC: It's so interesting to hear that that structure just came out of your skills as a writer, because it really does feel so intentional.

BR: What we don't intend can end up being part of the art.

MC: I also wanted to chat about roses a bit because roses are also very important to the story. They make their way into the title, they're on the cover, and they show up through almost every point in Razia's life. We see the rose garden. We see the wild roses. We get whiffs of the scent of rose perfume and rosewater. Did you always plan for roses to be a motif in the story or is that something that evolved naturally as you were writing?

BR: In all traditions, roses are a motif, but they're really important in Muslim culture. We add rosewater to our desserts, the smell of roses in perfume, we put on rose oil. When it came to the title, I did struggle with it for some time because I had wanted Corona to be in the title but then the pandemic happened and it was like, "No, it's very confusing." The title just came to me and it was a working title. And then we kept it and I realized that when I think of Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion, I think that in a way, that is a metaphor for what it feels like being a Muslim girl growing up in Queens in the United States. Living basically in the mouth of a lion, but you're this rose, you're tough, you're thorny, you're beautiful. I think the reason roses have always been a motif in so many cultures is the duality of something so beautiful and something so dangerous, something that can hurt you. And yet I think that's the thing about roses, why they've evolved to have thorns because they are so beautiful and they have to protect themselves. Growing up as I did in Queens, you have to be thorny, you have to be strong, and you have to be as dangerous as the world around you so that you can survive.

"Growing up as I did in Queens, you have to be thorny, you have to be strong."

MC: That is the most powerful answer I could have ever expected. What are you working on now? What can we expect to see from you in the future? I know you said there's a sequel that will be coming at some point. But is there anything else that you're working on you can share with us?

BR: I'll try to say it without crying. So, I am working on the sequel. I'm excited about the sequel. And my father just passed away 42 days ago. It's horrible. It's the most horrible thing in the world. The father in Roses is inspired by him. I was going to write an article to come along with the book coming out about what it was like to be working on the book while he was dying. And it was supposed to be a 1,500-word article, and it's just not being met. And I think I've learned to let the writing lead me where it needs to lead me. I'm not going to write an article, but I think it's going to become either a book of prose poems or it's going to become a whole novella about him because there's just so much to say about him and who he was.

I think that there aren't a lot of portrayals of gentle, funny, sweet, spiritual Muslim men in American literature. And so even if, though he didn't necessarily approve of me being a writer, I feel that since he's passed away, we've been having these conversations. Who knows, maybe it's just my imagination. People often see Muslims as the harmers but really in this country, we experience so much harm. My intention is definitely to make life better for queer Muslim people and all queer people to share a story in which they might feel seen. So, that's kind of what I'm working on. I just decided yesterday that I'm not going to write an article. I'm going to just start writing these prose poems, and some of them are funny, some of them are sad.

MC: Well, thank you so much for sharing that. That's such a beautiful way to memorialize your father too. It's just such a perfect way to encapsulate that love and to process that. Well, that actually wraps up all of our questions today. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us, Bushra. This has been a fantastic conversation.

BR: Thank you so much. I loved talking to you.

MC: And listeners, you can find Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion on Audible now.