ELLE.IN 79 JULY
One sunny spring afternoon, we had
a chance to catch up in person in
Tribeca over Greek coffee:
Anjali Kumar: When Zia was born,
I realised one day she would ask me
all sorts of existential questions that I
didn’t have the answers to. And so, I
went on a spiritual journey to try and
figure out the answers. While your
book is rooted in questions from your
son too, I think the ones he asked you
were even harder to answer. Tell me,
how did the book come about?
Mira Jacob: It started because my
son was obsessed with Michael
Jackson and would ask me a
thousand questions about him.
I originally thought about doing
it as an essay, but then I thought
about the comments section that
would accompany it (because that
is what happens with essays...),
and considering these were my
son’s questions, it made me feel
vulnerable.
So, out of frustration, I drew us
on printer paper and cut us out, and
put our conversations in bubbles
above us. And that became the first
piece I did [for BuzzFeed, which
went viral] and it felt really good,
because suddenly, I wasn’t trying
to convince a country of my racial
pain. America is funny that way. It
demands you talk about your racial
pain so that a good portion of the
population can tell you that it isn’t
true and that they don’t believe you.
And I didn’t want to get into that.
When I did
the cutouts, I
felt like I wasn’t
asking anyone for
permission. My son and
I were having a conversation.
If you wanted to eavesdrop on us,
you could go ahead, but I wasn’t
begging you to care. That changed
the equation dramatically—it gave
me the headspace to be vulnerable,
which was really hard to do after
2016 as we [the US] ramped up to
becoming this place of complete
intolerance.
For the book,
I decided to draw
people as forward
facing paper dolls.
The only time I broke
that rule was on the
night of the election
results, when I
drew my son and I
facing each other
instead, with our
foreheads touching.
We were so sad. He
was so bewildered;
I didn’t know how
to make sense of it
for him. You get the
idea that you know
what it is like to be
disillusioned with your country,
and you realise you’ve just been
in a lullaby.AK: Yes, the backdrop of Trump’s
victory in 2016 plays heavily into the
narrative of the book. And it has had
a deep impact on all of us living here,
including South Asian Americans who
have typically played into the “model
minority” myth and kept our heads
down for years.
MJ: Those of us,
especially Indians
who have bought
into that myth
and who benefit
from the system,
had many reasons
to keep our heads
down. But now, we
are all implicated,
and we have to ask
ourselves: at whose
expense was that?
It’s a brutal question.
Unpacking it has
been really painful,
and has also shown
me the privilege I’ve
had, to not have to
feel this level of disillusion and
attack by my government until now,
unlike others, like black Americans
and Mexican Americans, have felt
from day one. ›“America is funny
that way. It demands
you talk about your
racial pain so that a
good portion of the
population can tell
you that it isn’t true
and that they don’t
believe you”
Mira Jacob