Happy Asian American Pacific Islander month!

The AAPI designation was coined in 1968 as a political coalition, but Native Hawaiians have long contested it. They are not immigrants like most other Asian American communities; they are the Indigenous people of a sovereign nation overthrown by a U.S.-backed coup in 1893. Today, widespread economic displacement means a majority of Native Hawaiians actually live outside of Hawaiʻi—a crisis recently compounded by the devastating 2023 Maui wildfires and the aggressive land speculation that followed.

Author and journalist Sara Kehaulani Goo explores this ongoing struggle in her memoir, Kuleana: A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawaii, which centers on her family’s fight to hold onto ancestral land on an island the rest of the world treats as paradise. I first met Goo at an Asian American Journalists Association conference and was struck by the reality of her experience.

Read our conversation below.

What is your port of entry?

My family’s story began in Hawaii—which was not part of the United States. It was its own independent nation. And so even our immigration story began in a kingdom that was overthrown and forcefully absorbed into the U.S., not by the Hawaiian people’s choice. That experience has never really been reflected in what we call the “American experience.” As a kid, it was strange to have people look at my face and immediately assume so much about where I came from. I needed to share a different story.

Within the AAPI umbrella, so many communities get flattened or lost. What has it been like navigating that, especially as someone with mixed ancestry?

Context is everything. I’m a fourth-generation Asian American, so even among other Asian Americans I don’t quite fit—the languages people expect me to speak, the immigration experiences they assume my family had. But the thing people of color often have in common is that others perceive us to be a certain way when we’re actually quite different. The shared experience isn’t a specific history. It’s being misread.

The book is called Kuleana. Walk us through that word.

Kuleana means responsibility but not responsibility in the American sense, which often suggests something you have to do that you maybe don’t want to. It means responsibility with pride, with honor. What I came to understand through this whole process is that kuleana is the thing you are called to do, not just obligated to do. The book is really asking: what do we owe those who came before us, and those who come after? That kuleana is being passed to my children now. It’s not about an asset. It’s about the honor of holding a piece of something that was once part of a kingdom—and keeping that connection to the ʻāina alive.

How did your concept of inheritance shift through this process?

I still think in my Western brain about inheritance as something tangible. But kuleana feels more like a blessing I’m charged with carrying. It made me take stock of my own life. When the generation before you starts to pass away and you realize you’re the adult in the room — you have to take the torch. And out here on the East Coast, raising my children, I started asking: what connection are they going to have to our family’s history? If you come from somewhere, if a culture matters to you, you have to be very intentional about passing it on.

You originally wanted to write a history book. What changed?

I wanted readers to care about Hawaii’s history the way I had come to. But then a crisis happened within our family — a real, concrete fight to save ancestral land and I realized the personal story was inseparable from the historical one. Our family’s situation was emblematic of what so many Hawaiian families are going through or have gone through. Since the book came out, I’ve heard from so many people who’ve said: this happened to my family. This is happening right now. Most Americans don’t realize how much land loss has already occurred. And it’s not a finished story.

Writing about your own family means making choices about how to portray real people. Were there difficult negotiations?

I was upfront from the very beginning. Everyone knew I was working on this, and I asked questions of anyone who would spend time with me. When I had to write about my great-uncle — why he decided to sell his portion of the land — I tried to honor the economics of his life. He didn’t have the same economic cushion we did. Not everyone has the luxury of continuing to pay taxes on land that isn’t generating income. That is just the truth of how many people’s lives work. I gave everyone a full draft before publication. No surprises. And my great-uncle ended up being among my biggest fans.

To most Americans, Hawaii exists as a dream destination, somehow outside of political reality. How do you write into that without losing people?

My goal was never to make people feel guilty for going to Hawaii or for loving it. Hawaii still needs tourism—responsible tourism. And it genuinely is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. What I wanted was for people to understand the context when they visit. Hawaii has a rich culture that is struggling to survive, and significant consequences of colonialism that are still being lived. Both things are true. I wanted to hold both.

Land as a theme resonates across so many diaspora communities. Did you feel that resonance while writing?

Deeply. There’s this idea in a lot of communities where a family spends money to hold onto land that may never give them anything back financially — and it doesn’t matter. Because it’s a piece of us. For Indigenous people especially, the connection to land is about something else entirely. It’s about who you are and where you came from. Once you lose that connection, it’s very hard to come back. We wanted to keep that thread alive even when we couldn’t physically be there. Just to hold the place.

The Hawaiian language revival is one of the most remarkable stories in the book.

Hawaiian was almost gone. In the 1970s, only around 2,000 people were still speaking it—including my great-grandmother, who was one of the last native speakers of her era. The language had been suppressed, used to make Hawaiian people feel ashamed of who they were. Children were punished for speaking it. And now there are 20,000 speakers. Children are learning it in immersion schools. Someone told me once that when a culture loses its language, it loses everything else very quickly after. The Hawaiians came so close to that edge. The fact that they’ve pulled back is extraordinary.

What does the Hawaiian language contain that English can’t hold?

Precision about the natural world that reflects how people actually lived in it. In Hawaiian, there are dozens of different words for rain—a light drizzle, a short burst, a thunderstorm. Same for wind, same for surf. Why? Because when you live your life on an ocean, the specific conditions of weather and sea determine whether you can fish, whether it’s safe to go out. Of course you need precise language for that, it’s a matter of survival. Whereas in English we just say: it’s raining. I started learning Hawaiian while writing the book, and it opened things up that research alone never could have.

You write about raising your children on the East Coast and the work of keeping culture alive across distance.

It requires intention. Left to its own devices, American culture fills every available space —and it’s not that it’s bad, it’s just the default. If you want your children to know who they also are, you have to actively create space for it. I wrote this book for my kids, for my nieces and nephews, for all my cousins and their children. Not as a lecture — as a record of who we are and where we came from. A story they can hold.

What do you hope diaspora and immigrant readers specifically take away?

This book is for anyone interested in generational connection. How do we find our way back to the thread between ourselves and our parents and grandparents, and how do we carry it forward? If you’ve ever felt the pull of a place your family came from, if you’ve found yourself not quite fitting any one category, if you’re a parent wondering how to give your children a sense of something beyond the immediate — I think it will speak to you. Knowing our own stories helps us navigate the world better. That’s what a port of entry really is: the particular place and history through which each of us arrived. It’s what makes us different. And it’s what we share.

For decades, Muslim American stories have followed a familiar script: explain, defend, humanize, repeat. In the long shadow of 9/11, Muslim writers have been expected to soothe Islamophobia rather than tell the truth of their lives. Aymann Ismail, a journalist and son of Egyptian immigrants, tears up that script in his debut memoir, Becoming Baba.

His coming-of-age story moves from gender-segregated Islamic school classrooms in New Jersey to getting high and praying with his wife after their second child is born—embracing the contradictions many Muslim writers have been afraid to voice publicly.

In our conversation, Ismail was as candid as his prose, bracing for the criticism he knows is coming both from within his own community and the usual suspects outside of it.

I read your book in a day and a half, which, as a parent, is saying something. What I loved most was how messy it is, how you don’t try to tie everything together neatly. Throughout all these different chapters of your life, there’s this central question: what kind of Muslim am I supposed to be?

Aymann Ismail: You’re on the money. When I first sat down to write the book proposal, my first draft was all about the trauma—here’s why I blame the world for who I am. When I read it back, I felt disgusted with how little I appreciated the experience. I started thinking about who was telling our stories as a community and what they were prioritizing.

As Muslims, we spend so much time trying to explain our humanity that we’re stuck having the same conversation over and over. What people were saying in defense of ourselves after 9/11 are the same things you’ll hear someone say 25 years later. We’re constantly trying to meet people where they are rather than being honest about what we’re actually experiencing.

But, I thought what’s more valuable than rehashing trauma? Celebrating the love stories. Understanding your parents better than you could when you were younger. Finding the joy. The way I approached the book totally changed—it wasn’t about the biggest factors in how I thought about Islam or identity. It was about these unbelievable stories, these strange vignettes in the life of an ordinary kid who just wants to do better because his parents set the bar somewhere, and he wants to reach it.

Let’s talk about Islamic school, which you first went to and then transferred to public school later on. There’s a moment in the book where your friend says, “Everybody who goes to Islamic school comes out so messed up.”

It’s not one-size-fits-all—it depends on your lifestyle at home and what your parents’ tolerance is for reinforcing those values. In my case, it was extremely enforced. One day, you’re in a class full of boys and girls, and the next day, you’re in third grade, and you’re separated. The idea is you’re very different from each other, you have different needs and talents, and that’s it.

For me, that was the first crack in my faith journey because I knew it was bullshit. You don’t have to be older to know this doesn’t make sense—that they’re projecting these false ideas where if you put two third graders in a room, they’ll end up having sex. It was the first time I doubted that Islam made sense to me. It almost felt like this was just a way to tell us what to do all the time.

You spend five or six years totally separated from girls, so you lose the ability to talk to them and see them as just like you. I needed to relearn that later in life.

But you’re considering Islamic school for your own kids?

I want to put them in an Islamic school, and the reason I’m not so afraid of the gender stuff is that if you’re at home giving them opportunities to interact with girls in a way that they see the humanity in each other, that could make a world of difference.

Then you get to college and try to join the Muslim Students Association.

I was excited about making new Muslim friends. In public school, I was the only Muslim kid—everybody expected me to explain everything about Islam. I missed just being one of many Aymanns. But what I got at MSA was really different. It almost felt like everybody in charge was a proxy for my parents.

They wanted to gender segregate the spaces so women were sitting in the back and men in the front. We weren’t praying—we were just talking, organizing, wanting to have events. All you’re saying is you’re relegated to the back of the room because of who you are, and there’s no choice. I didn’t agree with that.

I felt like I’d seen too much of the world to ever go back and live that kind of life. But then I started making Muslim friends outside of MSA who shared the same frustrations. One friend, Haniya, was a Muslim girl who wanted to find a husband so she could get out of her parents’ house. I couldn’t believe it—you’re so young, we’re still kids. That really helped me understand that my slice of Islam was small.

I found your friend Haniya’s storyline interesting in contrast to yours. You guys meet in college and she’s super concentrated on finding a husband in between studies, while you’re just trying to figure out life. I appreciated seeing her story from the perspective of a Muslim male writer.

Male writers often write women who just exist for something to happen to them. I did a pass after the first draft to make sure all the women in the book didn’t just exist for something to happen and then move on. I wanted to make sure she came back.

My sister also comes up a lot. For a book about masculinity, there are more female characters than male—there’s only one consistent male friend. All the women taught me how to be a man.

Let’s talk about meeting Mira, your wife. You come from very different backgrounds, even though to the outside world you’re both Muslim.

When I met Mira, she encouraged me to go and find answers for myself for the first time. That goes against everything I learned about how to be a Muslim. My mom would say: there are scholars who do this, neither of us have the expertise to interpret this stuff, we have to rely on the scholars, don’t inflate yourself.

What makes Mira different is her whole interpretation—going back to her family, how she grew up with Islam in Kentucky—really came down to one’s personal relationship to their faith. All of her siblings pray religiously. They’re the kind to sit around in the evening and just open the Quran and read it for fun. I’ve never seen that in my generation of Islamic school kids.

I didn’t grow up with that curiosity. I grew up with the intent to follow rules because they were already packaged and delivered to us—they wanted us so badly to be good Muslims that they invested everything in muscle memory.

There’s a powerful passage where you struggle with the Quranic verse that is commonly interpreted as men being allowed to hit their wives and Mira helps you think about it differently.

I came across that verse and had a crisis. I was like, this doesn’t make sense—why would God want you to be merciful and loving, but then if your wife disagrees with you, one of the steps is to hit her? If I hit my wife, she’ll beat my ass.

Mira challenged me. Are you going to assume that because it’s in the Quran there’s only one way to interpret everything? If God is infinite and Islam is for all people of all time, wouldn’t it make more sense if there were infinite ways to interpret everything?

She asked me to think about how the word “daraba” appears in other verses. In another context, it’s translated as “to run away,” “to hit the ground running.” She gave me the example of hijab—how it’s used several times in the Quran, and in one verse it’s a literal sheet separating rooms to give women privacy.

Even in the process of having those conversations, I felt closer to Islam than any time I got up and prayed.

You write that after meeting Mira, you “actually became Muslim for the first time.” That’s a bold statement.

Her understanding is that it’s all about being a seeker yourself and finding the knowledge. It’s not that you’re going to find the answers right away—the process of going and looking for answers is what makes you a Muslim. If we’re going to be judged for our understanding and there’s no pope, no imam giving you permission to go into heaven, you’re going to be there alone with God. It would make sense that your life should be dedicated to forging that connection.

Let’s talk about raising kids in Newark, where you grew up. When you found out you were having a child, you questioned whether to stay.

It really feels like everything is at stake, like every little move will alter their chances at succeeding. I know we’re self-inflating our worth as parents, but when you first become a parent, you feel like one move could be the difference between a full ride to Harvard or community college.

Living in Newark, where the pollution is so bad we have the highest rates of asthma in the world, people come from Finland in hazmat suits to collect our soil. There’s so many times—you remember we used to have a pool here, then it shut down because they found crazy toxins. They used to manufacture Agent Orange there.

The question is: do I stay and roll the dice again? Do my kids deserve better?

But you stayed. In fact, you make the argument that “the suburbs are haram.”

I feel like the suburbs create a hierarchy based on how far you can travel and the size of your house. Whereas in the city, even if you have a lot of money or you don’t, you’re all going to the same place. We’re all going to meet up where our friend got the new video game.

People in the suburbs want to collect everything—the biggest TVs, a bowling alley, a pool—rather than just going to those places. In the city, I don’t buy more than one loaf of bread at a time because I can walk three doors down and grab it from the bodega.

When you go up to pray, to your left is the janitor and to your right is the CEO. The person doing the call to prayer has been Muslim for six months and the imam has been Muslim his whole life—it doesn’t matter. We’re all just going to the same place to do the same thing. That’s why I feel like the suburbs are haram.

There’s a scene near the end where you and Mira get high after her breastmilk dries up, and you pray together. That’s already stirred up some controversy among your Muslim readers.

When my wife’s milk dried up, I realized this means she has her body back. We used to get high together before we became parents. It felt like the perfect way to reconnect.

She prays because she’s a real Muslim, and she invited me to pray even though we were still high. In the back of my mind I’m thinking, in the Quran it explicitly says you need to come to prayer with a clear mind. But I see the person who’s actually religious, who doesn’t miss a prayer, who really loves Islam, not be so concerned by it. That gave me the bravery.

Then our kid joins us to pray for the first time. As any Muslim parent will tell you, it’s a big feeling. No matter how much I complain about my mom thinking passing down Islam is tied to her success as a parent, it’s intrinsically true of me, too. That’s a moment where I’m becoming my parents.

I know this is a line for some Muslims. What I don’t want you to think is that I think it’s okay. I just want you to give me the space to tell my story as I experienced it.

You also write about returning to Egypt as a journalist and getting attacked by a mob.

I got beat up. I got headbutted in the face by a grown man who took my camera—a brand new full-frame 6D with a 24-70 Canon L series lens. It was all of my money. When somebody took it, I was not about to just let it go. So I chased after him.

But I wouldn’t want my kids in that situation. I do want them to go back to their homeland. That’s the primary reason I’m putting them in Islamic school—so they can learn Arabic and communicate with their family back home. That fear of them being tourists in Egypt terrifies me.

Your book comes at a time when the stakes feel incredibly high for Muslim representation. You must have anticipated backlash.

The stakes are so high through no fault of our own—we’re in this position where we need to be perfect all the time.

Of all the suffering Palestinians have been through, there are still people falling in love, grandparents hugging their grandkids. There’s love. It’s really worth it for us as young families to not forget we have a responsibility to ourselves to not be in defense mode forever.

Final question: What do you want readers to take away from this book?

Be open-minded, be generous. Give me an opportunity to tell my story the way that I remember it, the way I feel it’s valuable. You’re not going to agree with everything. This is not a book where the Muslim character is always doing the Muslim thing.

But I feel like it’s valuable because it’s part of our story, part of our heritage. It’s one of the first chapters in this next iteration of what Islam is becoming in America. What I want is for people to read it and get a sense for their place in the broader American Muslim story. It’s a history that deserves its own narrators.

And we’re doing the thing our parents couldn’t do—being human for our kids.

I found my answer in her new memoir, Pieces You’ll Never Get Back, released earlier this year. While her first book was fiction drawn from her own young marriage, this memoir is a raw, unflinching account of the catastrophic medical crisis she faced after giving birth to her son. Ali developed HELLP syndrome, a deadly pregnancy complication, and twenty minutes after delivery suffered a grand mal seizure that cut off oxygen to her brain. She fell into a coma, her brain swelling, and doctors doubted she would survive. When she awoke days later, they called her “Miracle Girl”—but she didn’t recognize her husband, know she was in a hospital, or remember giving birth. In spare, lyrical chapters, Ali chronicles her painstaking journey to rebuild a fractured identity as a mother living with brain damage.

In this week’s Diaspora Dialogue, I talk with Ali about faith, identity, and growing up Muslim and South Asian in the U.S., the pull of family and tradition, and the ongoing challenges of anti-Muslim sentiment in the diaspora.

You grew up between India and the U.S., constantly navigating cultures. How did that shape the way you understood Islam?

Samina: My parents emigrated from Hyderabad in the early ’70s. They were very traditional Muslims, but their version of Islam had already absorbed centuries of Indian influence—Hindu rituals, local customs. In India, brides wear red, the wedding lasts days, each day with its own color. All of that comes from Hindu culture. In contrast, in the Middle East, brides often wear white.

When my parents brought this Indian Islam to Minnesota, they were terrified we’d become “too American”—stop fasting, stop praying, marry outside the community. So every year my father sent me back to India. I grew up bicultural, with one foot in Catholic school here, one foot in Islamic schools there. That gave me a deep awareness that Islam is not one monolith.

Growing up Muslim and South Asian, I also felt that dual pull. So much of Hindu culture seeped into our everyday lives—food, rituals, language—yet at home my family was always saying, we don’t do that because we’re not Hindu. Now I see something different happening: what I call “Arabization” in South Asian Muslim communities where we are beginning to reject our cultural roots. Do you notice that?

Samina: Absolutely. It’s complicated because Muslims are minorities in both countries. In India, Muslims face increasing discrimination under Modi. In the U.S., we’re celebrated as the “model minority” when we’re Indian professionals—but as Muslims, especially since 9/11, we face hostility.

I dislike the word Islamophobia. It sounds like arachnophobia, like people are just “afraid.” What we’re really facing is systemic discrimination and violence. Antisemitism is a powerful, precise word. We need something like that for Muslims too.

At the same time, yes—there’s pressure in diaspora toward a singular, “authentic” Arab Islam. But historically, Islam has thrived because it adapted. Indian Islam looks different from Indonesian or Chinese Islam. That diversity is its richness.

Before 9/11, the slurs I got in school were “Hindu” or “bindi”—it didn’t even make sense. After 9/11, suddenly, I was claimed as part of the Muslim community, even by those who had once othered me. That was disorienting. And then reading your new book—I was floored by how you opened it, with your son, and the Biblical and Quranic story of Abraham sacrificing his first born. It felt like such a powerful invocation of lineage and faith. What made you start there?

Samina: The book is about medical neglect, yes, but underneath it’s about connection. When my brain ruptured, I had to piece myself back together. And in that process I realized: what matters most isn’t identity labels—Muslim, Indian, American—but being human, being connected. Opening with lineage was intentional. It situates the story in something larger than myself.

As I was reading, I kept thinking that this book is as much about motherhood and creativity as it is about survival.

Samina: Exactly. A lot of coverage reduces it to “medical trauma.” But I wanted readers to see how creativity, faith, and motherhood intersect. When you’ve had one foot in the grave and you come back, your priorities shift. The question becomes: how do you live fully again?

You describe how in South Asian culture, if we drop a pen or book, we kiss it. That sense that knowledge itself is sacred.

Samina: Yes. And in our communities, debate itself is sacred. We grow up arguing back to scripture, analyzing, interpreting. That training is a kind of intellectual rigor we carry into our art.

Your writing has always been unapologetically specific—whether about sexuality in your first book, or the intimate details of your recovery now. How do you fight the pressure to generalize, especially as a Muslim writer in America?

Samina: It’s a constant tension. The more specific I am, the more universal it becomes. But because I’m Muslim in post-9/11 America, specificity also matters for another reason. If I’m not clear that I’m speaking for myself, people assume I’m speaking for all Muslims. And within the Muslim community, too, there’s scrutiny—constant watching of what others say.

That’s why I remind myself. This is memoir. It’s not a journalistic report. I’m not writing about you, I’m writing about me.

Memory is central to your book. But you were writing about a time when your memory itself was fractured. How did you approach that?

Samina: I interviewed doctors, combed through medical records, asked family to fill in gaps. Brain trauma is strange: you don’t know how impaired you are, because your brain protects you. What lingers are emotional flashes—fear, shame, rejection. That’s why so many of us carry negative self-stories. The work is to recognize them and rewire the brain toward new ones.

Your book also touches on divorce. That felt revolutionary—because in South Asian communities, it’s so stigmatized. As I went through my own divorce, I found those chapters both painful and affirming.

Samina: It was terrifying at first. My mother was devastated; she couldn’t accept it. My father, though, told me, “You need a fresh start. I support you.” Once I finally left, I felt relief within days.

A therapist once told me divorce is like undoing a quilt—every date, every memory, every shared moment is a stitch. You have to unravel them one by one. It takes time, but eventually the fabric comes apart and you can start anew.

That metaphor captures it so well. And it circles back to something we’ve been circling in this whole conversation: how do we live, create, and love within communities that silence parts of us?

Samina: By telling the truth of our own lives. Even if people don’t like it. Even if they push back. That’s the work.

Order Pieces You’ll Never Get Back here.

Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

One of the disorienting truths of diaspora life is how easily histories are lost—through war, migration, colonization, or silence at home. Many of us grow up knowing little about where we come from, or about other immigrant communities navigating similar paths. Diaspora Dialogues is a small course correction—a space where we sit down with the thinkers, creators, and cultural workers who help us understand what diaspora life really looks like. Whether they’re writing books, preserving histories, building businesses, or creating community spaces, these are the people exploring what it means to build a life, hold onto memory, and find belonging when home spans borders and generations.

When Bangladeshi American home cook and blogger Anika Chowdhury launched Kitchen Gatherings, it wasn’t for clicks or clout. It was an act of preservation. In the wake of losing both of her parents, Anika turned to the kitchen—not only as a space of mourning, but as a way to carry forward the legacy of generosity, storytelling, and deep-rooted cultural memory they left behind. Dishes that once filled a Dhaka kitchen with warmth during monsoon season became a way to reconnect with history, navigate the ruptures of diaspora life, and document a culinary tradition too often left out of the mainstream conversation. Now featured on The Great American Recipe(streaming on PBS), Anika is bringing Bangladeshi flavors—and the stories behind them—to a wider audience, one recipe at a time.

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How did your blog, Kitchen Gatherings, get started?

Anika. I was very close to my parents—my entire family, really. I’m the eldest of three; my sister is a primatologist, and my brother works for the United Nations and has lived in Switzerland for much of his career. We’re close, but not always physically together.

At the time my mom was diagnosed with cancer, my sister was living in Cape Town in South Africa. She moved back immediately. We were all very involved in caregiving—taking turns cooking, supporting each other, going to chemo. I had left my job to be there full-time. We were hopeful, but she passed away. And a year later, my dad was diagnosed with cancer. He passed two years after her.

That’s heartbreaking. I’m so sorry.

Anika: Thank you. It was a double blow. I was devastated and very depressed. My husband and I don’t have children, so I kept thinking, Who do I pass on their legacy to? That was the hardest part—grieving while holding the weight of that loss.

And so the blog was born from that space. My parents lived with so much generosity, a very Bangali kind of hospitality. If you grew up in Bangladesh—or even just visited—you know this: people will share what little they have. Even if it’s just dal-bhaat (lentils and rice), they’ll invite you in.

That spirit—that’s what my parents lived by. I thought: I want to share that. And food was the way to do it. They were amazing cooks. I still have recipe books handwritten by my nani and my mom. My dad once went to Bangladesh while my mom was in treatment, and the only thing I asked him to bring back were those recipe books.

Those family recipes of my grandmother’s and my mom’s (that included dishes that people don’t even make any more) were more precious to me than any material inheritance. So I started a blog—not just to archive recipes, but to tell the stories around them. The blog became a place to honor my parents, to talk about Bangladesh, our culture, our food traditions. I didn’t expect anyone to find it. It wasn’t even under my name—just Kitchen Gatherings. I only added my name just before the announcement of the PBS show.

Wait—PBS just found you?

Anika: Yes! One day, I got an email from someone at PBS. Honestly, I thought it was a scam. I didn’t even have my email address listed publicly. But my sister and husband said, “At least reply and find out.” I did some Googling, realized the name checked out, and finally responded.

Turns out they had read everything on the blog. They told me they loved my writing, the stories, the way I honored my family and culture through food. It was surreal.

That’s incredible. And so well-deserved.

Anika: Thank you. What’s wild is that they found me through Instagram—probably through a hashtag like #homecooking or something. I’m not a content creator in the traditional sense. I post when I feel moved to share something. I put a lot of care into making sure the recipes are replicable. Bangladeshi food is all about technique, and I want people to taste it the way it’s meant to be tasted.

I’m so glad they found you. Bangladeshi food is so underrepresented. Even in New York or London, where most “Indian” restaurants are actually run by Bangladeshis—you don’t see Bangladeshi food on the menu.

Anika: Exactly. I’ve asked so many restaurant owners over the years, “Why not include even one Bangladeshi dish?” And they always say, “If we put Bangladeshi on the sign, no one will come.” That’s the mindset. So I hope things like this— seeing Bangladeshi food on PBS—will help change that. Maybe more Bangladeshis will feel encouraged to proudly name and serve our food.

How do you explain Bangladeshi food to someone who’s never had it?

Anika: I usually say: it shares a spice palette with North Indian cuisine, but the dishes are quite different. What people know of Indian food is often restaurant food—rich, thick sauces. Bangladeshi dishes tend to have lighter gravies. There’s also a huge emphasis on vegetables. We have so many varieties of greens—shak—which are cooked in ways that preserve their texture and flavor. Think of spinach: in sag paneer, it becomes a paste. But in our cooking, you can still see and taste the leaves of the spinach.

And of course, we’re a country of rivers. Fish is huge. We have an enormous range of fish dishes, though it’s harder to find those fish here. Regionally, there’s so much variation too—like Sylhet which has its own identity and even its own dialect, and the food is tangy and totally distinct. I don’t think most people—even many Bangladeshis—realize how diverse our food culture is.

I was actually browsing your blog while we were chatting and saw the paturi recipe—chicken parcels wrapped in bottle gourd leaves. I laughed thinking: 12-year-old me would’ve refused to eat that.

The paturi recipe is stunning—not just the food, but the way you laid it out, the storytelling. I could see that dish in a restaurant.

Anika: That’s from my mom’s side. We’d always make it during the monsoon, when the gourd leaves were in season. It was a family event—everyone helping prep the immensely bony hilsa fish that the leaves would be wrapped around . I didn’t cook as a child, but I participated in the steps. Even making chapatis for my dad, who ate them every night. Preparing food was often a collective activity, and of course no one ate food alone by themselves – we always ate together.

Your cooking clearly reflects a wide range of influences. Can you talk about that history?

Anika: My mom’s side came from an old zamindari family, and both sides of her family married widely—even across borders. Some of the women came from North India, like the Muslim Surat region, so there’s a mix of Bengali,,, and more farflung culinary influences. Her dad’s side lost property during Partition; some of it was on the Indian side of the border in Malda. So I grew up with this expansive idea of what “Bengali food” could be—yogurt-based sauces, Mughal milk dishes, and lots of coconut milk from the southeastern side

.That makes so much sense. It reminds me of how strategic Bengal was historically—there’s that stat floating around that Bengal once held 12% of the world’s GDP.

Anika: Exactly. Bengal was central to British colonial revenue and global trade. That’s why our food is so diverse. The Portuguese, for example, left a major imprint. There are Bangla words like chabi (key), which mirrors the Portuguese chave, and janala (window), similar to janela.

That’s incredible. It reminds me of when I walked into a random Burmese restaurant in San Francisco and had the best chicken curry. I remember thinking, “Why does this taste so familiar?” It turns out, of course, there’s deep historical connection between Chittagong and Myanmar.

Anika: One of my grandmother’s specialties was a Burmese dish. She’d throw khao soi parties—noodle dishes that tasted both foreign and familiar. It all connects back to that fluid border culture.

It’s wild how connected everything is. One challenge with Bangladeshi food is that it’s hearty and homestyle, so it doesn’t always “plate pretty.” But you’ve cracked that.

Anika: Bangladeshi food isn’t always visually striking—it can be brown, blended, textured. But I want young diaspora kids or non-Bengalis to look at my photos and feel curious, even hungry. That’s how we keep the food—and the stories—alive.

If someone unfamiliar with Bangladeshi food came over, what three dishes would you serve to introduce them to our cuisine?

Definitely Bangladeshi chicken roast—familiar, comforting, but still distinct from Indian-style roast. If they like seafood, chingri malai curry—shrimp in coconut milk, rich and aromatic. And for a side, misti kumra with shrimp—sauteed pumpkin, sweet and savory.

But if I could sneak in a fourth, I’d serve biron polao—a Sylheti sticky rice dish we used to have at family brunches in Dhaka that my Dadi used to make, with potatoes and a rich egg curry on the side. It’s not well-known, even among many Bangladeshis, but it tastes like home to me.

That’s the beauty of your work—you’re documenting not just recipes but regional, personal histories that would otherwise get lost.

Anika: That’s exactly why I do it. Food is memory. And when we lose our elders, we risk losing those memories too. So I write, I cook, and I share. Because even if the audience doesn’t know what paturi or pishpash is, maybe they’ll taste the love behind it—and start asking questions.

One of the most quietly disorienting parts of being part of a diaspora is how little we often know about the places we come from. War, migration, colonization—and even silence within our own families—can interrupt or erase those histories. Add to that the lack of education about other immigrant communities and their homelands, and it’s easy to feel unmoored or alone.

Diaspora Dialogues is a course correction.

This Q&A series from Port of Entry will feature conversations with thinkers, creators, and cultural workers navigating life between worlds. Together, we explore what it means to build, remember, and belong when “home” isn’t just one place—and when the past still echoes in the present.

We talk about the hard stuff: displacement, loss, identity, assimilation.
But we also make space for joy, creativity, and resilience—what emerges when people live at the intersections of culture and memory.

A Homeland Denied: Unpacking Kashmir's Long Struggle for Self-Determination

On April 22, 2025, a brutal attack near Pahalgam—a popular tourist destination in Kashmir—took the lives of twenty-six people. The incident—the deadliest in the region in twenty-five years—prompted India to shut its border with Pakistan and reignited international attention on a conflict that has simmered for decades.

Kashmir has been a disputed region between India and Pakistan since both nations gained independence in 1947. When British colonial rule ended, Kashmir's status was left unclear. Each country controls different parts of Kashmir, but both claim the entire territory. For decades, this region has been caught between competing claims and broken promises—a place where colonial history continues to shape present-day realities.

Kashmir sits at the intersection of three nuclear-armed powers—India, Pakistan, and China—making it one of the world's most geopolitically important locations. Kashmir is also strategically crucial because it controls the headwaters of rivers that supply about sixty-five percent of Pakistan's territory, giving India significant leverage over Pakistan's water security. The region also provides access to Central Asian trade routes and natural resources, while serving as a gateway for major connectivity projects like China's Belt and Road Initiative. Both India and Pakistan view control of Kashmir as essential to their national security and regional influence, which is why neither will compromise on their territorial claims.

For the first edition of Diaspora Dialogues, I spoke with historian and scholar Dr. Hafsa Kanjwal to understand something often missing from discussions about Kashmir: what Kashmiris themselves actually want.

Hafsa Kanjwal is an associate professor of South Asian history at Lafayette College, and her work centers on modern Kashmiri history—a subject that’s deeply personal to her. She was born in Kashmir and came to the U.S. in the early 1990s with her family, during the height of the armed rebellion and heavy militarization in the region. Growing up in a politically aware household that supported the Kashmiri freedom movement, she always had a strong sense of connection to what was happening back home.

Even though she was raised in the U.S., Hafsa often traveled back to Kashmir, especially during her college years, driven by a desire to better understand the place she came from. But when she turned to books and academic research to learn more, she was struck by how little of it reflected the lived experiences of Kashmiris. Most of the scholarship she found was written by Indian authors—and occasionally Pakistani ones—and it often framed the conflict through the lens of terrorism or separatism. There was very little that spoke to the realities of life under occupation or represented the voices of Kashmiris themselves.

That disconnect pushed her to pursue history, specifically Kashmir’s history, so she could help fill that gap. When she first started, there weren’t many Kashmiri scholars in the field, but over time she connected with others who were also working to challenge dominant, often nationalist and Islamophobic narratives about the region. Together, they’ve helped shape a new wave of scholarship that centers Kashmiri perspectives and tells the story of Kashmir on its own terms.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length*

A lot of people tend to start Kashmir’s story in 1947 during the independence of India and Pakistan and the partition of the two nations. But you argue that it’s important to go back a bit further. Why is that?

Dr. Kanjwal: 1947 is a critical year, but to really understand Kashmir today, we have to go back earlier, to the time of British colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent. Kashmir wasn’t directly ruled by the British—it was a princely state. That means it was semi-autonomous, ruled by local monarchs who pledged loyalty to the British Crown.

What’s important here is that the British essentially sold Kashmir to a dynasty called the Dogras—upper-caste Hindus from the Jammu region. They expanded their control militarily to form what became the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir.

So the idea of Kashmir as a unified “state” is relatively new?

Dr. K: Exactly. The princely state was an artificial construct. It pulled together multiple regions–the Kashmir Valley, Jammu, Poonch, Ladakh, Gilgit-Baltistan–that didn’t necessarily share a long-standing, cohesive identity. This becomes important later when people talk about “what Kashmiris want.” The identity of the state itself was imposed from above.

What was the mood in Kashmir around the time of Partition?

Dr. K: At the time of Partition in 1947, Kashmir was a Muslim-majority society. Most people assumed that Kashmir would go to Pakistan—because of religious identity and also because of cultural and economic ties. People from the Valley, for example, had stronger connections to Lahore than to Delhi— through trade, travel, education. What became Pakistan was simply closer to their imaginary and daily lives.

But that’s not what happened.

Dr. K: No, it isn’t. One major complicating factor was Sheikh Abdullah, a Muslim leader from the Valley who had gained prominence. He grew close to India’s Congress Party, especially to Jawaharlal Nehru [India’s first prime minister], who promised him that if Kashmir acceded to India, it would enjoy maximum autonomy. Abdullah would be Prime Minister, Kashmir would have its own constitution and assembly, and its relationship to India would be restricted to defense and foreign affairs. India also ensured, especially when drawing the boundary lines at the time of Partition, that the J&K state could easily accede to India, and placed pressure on both Abdullah and the last Dogra ruler to do so.

And India didn’t uphold those promises?

Dr. K: Correct. Over time, India backtracked. It tried to further integrate Kashmir, despite those early assurances. Sheikh Abdullah resisted—and that’s a story in itself.

How did these early dynamics impact communal divisions within Kashmir?

Dr. K: The Dogra rulers had already created deep divisions. For example, Kashmiri Pandits—the Hindu minority—received significant patronage and held elite positions. So they were more inclined to align with India to preserve their status. In contrast, many Kashmiri Muslims had already experienced what Hindu majoritarian rule looked like under the Dogras—and were deeply skeptical of India’s promises about secularism. Divisions in Kashmir didn’t erupt out of nowhere–they were built into the class and caste based foundations of the Dogra state.

There's a dominant narrative that the Pandits were targeted by Muslim insurgents which led to a mass exodus of that community in the 1990s. How do you see that story functioning in the broader Indian imagination? What gets lost when that's the only version people hear?

Dr. K: One of the classic strategies of colonial powers is that they create divide and rule policies between different communities on the ground. The tragedy of the Kashmiri Pandits—a vast majority of whom left Kashmir in the 1990s (although a small minority remained)—has been weaponized by various constituencies to paint the Kashmir freedom struggle as communal, anti-Hindu, extremist, and justify continued Indian colonization of Kashmir. What gets lost is the deeply contested narratives about what actually happened that led to this and the role of the state in exacerbating the fears—and as many argue, facilitating the departure of—a community that had previously enjoyed significant privileges in Kashmiri society as political and economic elites under Indian colonization, and were now faced with a massive political uprising against that rule.

What also gets lost is that pro-freedom Kashmiri groups have always called for the return of Kashmiri Pandits and stated that they are an important fabric of Kashmiri society. They have also demanded a neutral investigation into what is called the Pandit 'exodus', in addition to a neutral investigation of all the massacres, killings, and human rights violations that have occured in Kashmir. These demands have been rejected by the Indian state.

To be sure, this tragedy—like all tragedies in Kashmir in the past 75+ years—needs to be addressed. But it cannot be addressed by only treating the pain and trauma of Kashmiri Pandits as the singular pain in this whole history, and nor can it be addressed by denying Kashmiri Muslims their place in Kashmir by only speaking of Kashmiri Pandits as "indigenous" to the region.

So during those early decades, what did self-determination actually mean to most Kashmiris?

Dr. K: Initially, many saw self-determination as a choice between joining India or Pakistan, in line with UN resolutions. Beginning in 1948, the first of many UN resolutions called for the right of self-determination for the people of Jammu and Kashmir through a free and impartial plebiscite or vote. Through the ’50s, ’60s, and even into the ’70s, there was a stronger pro-Pakistan sentiment, especially since that was the only other option provided in the UN resolution. In the parts of Kashmir under Pakistani administration, some Kashmiris who were organizing on that side felt that the Pakistan state—not the people—was not honoring its promises. The idea of an independent state emerged, particularly amongst the Azad Kashmir diaspora in the United Kingdom. This eventually led to the formation of the main group that led the armed rebellion, the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) which became active in the Valley as well.

So today, when we talk about Kashmiri self-determination, there are generally two main strands: one pushing for full independence, and the other for accession to Pakistan. What’s clear, though, is that the overwhelming majority have never identified as Indian. This sentiment peaked in the 1990s with an armed movement and popular mass uprising — a moment of clarity for many Kashmiris.

And yet, support for Pakistan has often been criminalized in Kashmir, right?

Dr. K: Absolutely. Since 1947, any pro-Pakistan sentiment has been met with arrest, exile, or worse. When the armed rebellion began in the 1990s, Kashmiris turned to Pakistan for support—both symbolically and materially. Pakistan at this stage was willing to do so. That allowed India to dismiss the entire uprising as a proxy war, erasing Kashmiri agency. The narrative became, “This isn’t a real local movement — it’s Pakistan-backed.”

But for most Kashmiris, the distinction is clear: India is the occupier. Pakistan is a state they have expectations of—and many times even disappointments with—but it’s not seen as the same kind of aggressor. That’s a nuance often lost in mainstream conversations.

And Article 370? There’s so much confusion around what it actually did and why it was revoked. [Editor’s note: Article 370 was a provision in India's constitution that gave the state of Jammu and Kashmir special autonomous status—essentially allowing it to have its own constitution and make its own laws on most matters, while still being part of India. Only defense, foreign affairs, and communications remained under federal control.]

Dr. K: Some people think Article 370 was this great safeguard of Kashmiri autonomy. But many of us argue that it was actually a tool of containment. It was never meant to be permanent. For Indian leaders like Nehru, it was a way to get Sheikh Abdullah on board with the Maharaja’s contested accession to India.

Yes, it granted Kashmir its own constitution, assembly, even its own flag. But through presidential orders and legal loopholes, India continuously eroded those powers. When Sheikh Abdullah resisted, he was jailed in 1953 and replaced by a more compliant regime.

By 2019, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government formally revoked Article 370, it had already become largely symbolic. But it still held significance because of an associated provision —Article 35A —which gave the state power to define “permanent residents.” That affected who could buy land, vote, or get government jobs.

And removing that opened the floodgates?

Dr. K: Exactly. Since the revocation, India has made it far easier for outsiders to acquire land and settle in Kashmir. Over 80,000 domicile certificates were issued within just a few years. This is demographic engineering—what we would describe as settler colonialism.

Some argue that 2019 marked the beginning of settler colonialism in Kashmir. I would say it’s been there since the start—but now it’s more visible, more aggressive. Earlier governments tried to assimilate Kashmiris into Indian identity. That didn’t work. So now, the approach is: replace them, marginalize them, make it hard for them to stay.

So when you say "settler colonialism," it’s not just about land rights. It’s about a whole system?

Dr. K: Yes, it’s about erasure. You control not just the territory but the narrative. That’s why you see India targeting Kashmiri journalists, clamping down on human rights documentation and scholarship, enforcing Hindi as a language of instruction. Everything is surveilled—mosques, schools, social media. The goal is to make Kashmiris feel like strangers in their own land.

And meanwhile, the international community largely turns a blind eye?

Dr. K: Yes. India has positioned itself as the world’s largest democracy and a global economic player. Western governments, especially, are unwilling to jeopardize those alliances. So Kashmir is dismissed as an “internal matter.” That silence is devastating—and strategic.

But Kashmiris continue to document, resist, and dream. They preserve memory. They push back against erasure. That’s why it's so important that their voices be heard and centered in every conversation about this “conflict.”

For those of us in the diaspora or outside the region, where do we begin?

Dr. K: First, we listen—really listen—to Kashmiri voices. Read their histories. Support grassroots efforts. Second, be willing to confront the discomfort. Solidarity means speaking up even when it's inconvenient. And finally, understand that solidarity isn’t about saviorism—it’s about standing alongside people who are demanding freedom.

RESOURCES TO LEARN MORE:

Stand with Kashmir

Kashmir Law & Justice Project

Kashmir-Scholars