5 Questions with Sarah Malik

 

Sarah Malik is a Walkley-award winning Australian investigative journalist, author and television presenter. She currently works as a presenter and writer for SBS Voices. Her work focuses on asylum, surveillance, technology and its intersection with gender and race – most notably examining domestic violence, gender inequality and migration.

Her debut memoir, Desi Girl, was published by the University of Queensland Press in 2022. Her second book, Safar: Muslim Women’s Stories of Travel and Transformation, is published by Hardie Grant.

 

No.1

In the introduction to Safar, you write that you “received a brief for this book”. How did Safar come to life as a book in the form that we see how?

Safar is part of a collection of travel books (Black Girls Take World by Georgina Lawton, Asian Girls are Going Places by Michelle Law and Anxious Girls Do It Better By Bunny Banyai). I was asked by Hardie Grant if I’d like to do a Muslim women’s version.

Immediately I was intrigued because I did something that a lot of working-class immigrant kids do when I was growing up. You become a chameleon, and you live vicariously through [literary] worlds that are different to you, yet [you are] trying to imbibe the emotional registers that relate. I remember reading Muhammad Asad’s Road to Mecca, George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road [and] Thoreau’s Walden—all these stories of adventure and travel and seeing the world. But they were all stories of men and white men. I was living vicariously through these people, but also registering at some point that their experiences or their ways of moving through the world were not the same as mine. It’s an impression that stays with you, especially once you acquire the tools that allows you to interrogate that.

‘Safar’ is the Urdu and Arabic word for ‘journey’. I chose the title to open the ambit beyond travel to the idea of journeying and discovering yourself—whether that’s spiritual, emotional or psychological. I wanted to create a book that allows other people to see themselves in these journeys, and that it is also possible for them to make these leaps, because while I was younger, I could not imagine climbing Mt. Kinabalu or going to Japan or interviewing a civil rights leader. I want this book to be a guide for other women; for them to see possibilities for themselves and to feel like they can be the hero of their own lives and not necessarily the sidekick in the rom-com (for e.g.). A lot of my journalism work has looked at immigration, economic and forced migration and the refugee experience.

When you’re a Muslim woman, you feel shrouded in a certain kind of heaviness, particularly of feeling politicised and surveilled in the world. Safar is something a bit different—just striking that off and feeling a sense of freedom to be your full self and not be solely defined by any one aspect of yourself—to claim the right to luxury, to pleasure and to enjoyment. It’s not just about claiming the right, but also about claiming the space and doing it hopefully in a different way—in a decolonial, respectful way while honouring sovereignty and sustainability, and with respect for others.

No.2

In your journalism career, you’ve travelled to many places, some of which include Turkey, Palestine, India, Malaysia and much of Europe, amongst many more. What are some challenges you’ve faced on the road as a Muslim woman traveller? And what were some pleasant surprises?

I share a lot of my travel stories in the book—climbing mountains, travelling to Japan, Jordan, the desert, the beach and back to my parent’s homeland. When I went back to Pakistan as an adult for the first time by myself in 2015, it was an intense experience because I was thinking a lot about my family and my own place in the world, while also trying to uncover my own parents’ journey. A lot of the things that went unsaid in terms of their own life experiences and discovering where they grew up and how that informed who they were which in turn informed me as well. When you’re a child of migrants, you often feel this sense of where do I belong? Do I belong here, or do I belong there? Or am I something in between? And you are this kind of third-culture kid, a hybrid of all your cultural experiences. [In Pakistan] I went to the house and museum of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. That was a very meaningful experience—he was someone who, in his own journey, in terms of his identity and the way he inhabited the world, reflected a lot of the crises I had in my own life around belonging and the tension between East and West.

No.3 

The stories and interviews in Safar are so heartfelt and full of warmth. How did you decide whose voices to include in the end? And what was it like collaborating with illustrator Amani Haydar?

One thing I loved about this book was being given the freedom to collaborate with and form a team of almost all Muslim women, and being given so much editorial autonomy by Hardie Grant. I chose Amani Haydar as an illustrator because I love her work and the bold colours she uses, and I knew her art would complement the story in a way that was loving and authentic. And the cover really is magnificent and joyful without being political, [even though] Safar is political because people inhabit spaces differently, whether that’s because of their passport privilege or their financial privilege.

I deliberately wanted to feature women who came from working-class backgrounds, women from histories of dispossessed apartheid societies, and showcase a variety of people: different genders, races, abilities, and locations. There’s First Nations Pakistani medical doctor Dr. Umber Rind whose cameleer ancestors fled Australia because they feared their children being taken during the time of the Stolen Generation. There’s African-American activist Aisha Al-Adawiya, who is in her seventies, and who grew up in the segregationist American south. After high school she decided to go to Greenwich Village in New York City in the swinging sixties. There she encounters Malcolm X and her life changes forever. She converts to Islam and becomes a civil rights and women’s rights leader. Then there’s Zenith Irfan, a woman who is the first to motorbike the mountainous region of Pakistan at age 20.

I think we can learn so much about other people through the journeys they’ve undertaken. And this is what I hope to do with this book—you kind of walk in these women’s shoes and you understand them, and journey through their challenges, but also with their joys while understanding that they’re not being defined by their challenges. In my memoir Desi Girl, a lot of it was about being a young woman of colour in a particular context in a particular world as I was trying to find myself. It was about the ways in which the world received me and that quest for self-actualization, [whereas] Safar focuses on the joy.

No.4

There’s a large online community now where Muslim women come together to share tips and tell their stories on what it’s like travelling solo. How do you think Safar adds to the burgeoning collection of resources in this regard?

Yes, so many women from Muslim backgrounds are now embracing journeying. So many of these women are also going back to their parents’ homeland and rediscovering roots, rediscovering family, rediscovering themselves in terms of coming from this hybrid identity, being children of migrants, being westerners who are not white. What does that mean when you’re moving around the world, when people are like, ‘where are you from?’ That can be such a loaded question.

I think Safar is special because it not only gives women practical advice but also emotional advice. There’s a whole chapter on the ‘where are you from?’ question, which can be so discombobulating when you’re like, ‘well, am I from this place? Or am I from this place?’ It has been my experience because you can have this really romanticised idea of your parents’ homeland, where you’re thinking, I’m going to go back to my parents’ homeland and I’m going to find myself and discover myself and all the questions, all the fear or the worries, all the gaps that I felt in my own life, they’re going to be resolved. I think that is not realistic.

Experiences are a combination of positive and negative. I think that that’s something that all these women [in the book] experienced in their journeys. That there were times when things were rough, times when things weren’t working out. There were times when they weren’t having a good time, or times when they felt lonely. I think that depicting that complexity relieves pressure both for ourselves and others like us.

No.5

What are some tips you’d give Muslim women who are thinking of travelling solo for the first time in their lives?

This book isn’t just for Muslim women; it’s for anyone who wants to journey in a thoughtful way. It’s about taking that space for yourself which can be so transformative and powerful. There’s a book I’m reading called Rest is Resistance [by Tricia Hersey]. It’s about how radical it can be to claim the space to rest, to claim the space to be in the present moment when capitalism and racism are just forcing you to be on this hamster wheel constantly. And you’re running and you’re running and you’re running; it’s designed to do that. It’s designed to exhaust you, to extract things from you. And so, to be able to extricate yourself from that, that’s not easy—it’s something that’s almost subversive.

That’s really the approach that I wanted to take with Safar. To be able to extract yourself from the hamster wheel and remind yourself that you are a soul. You’re not just a body that is worked and serving everybody else; that you can also serve yourself and nourish yourself and that [in turn] nourishes everyone around you.

 
 

Safar: Muslim Women's Stories of Travel and Transformation is a beautifully illustrated gift book that explores the emotional and spiritual aspects of journeying. Through a series of interviews with Muslim women from diverse backgrounds, Australian journalist Sarah Malik considers personal growth and self-knowledge in the context of travel.

Safar is the Urdu and Arabic word for ‘journey’. Whether it be travelling to a new country or a new locale, or how these experiences affect the way Muslim women perceive and understand the world, Sarah weaves together her own experiences of travel with the thoughts and feelings of women who share their own adventures and challenges. There are fascinating stories of love and friendship, as well as stories of how travel connects to roots, spirituality, confidence, identity, privilege and inspiration.

Featuring stunning illustrations by Amani Haydar, this is an important and loving book that centres the experiences and perspectives of Muslim women, offering insights for readers from all backgrounds.

Get it from Hardie Grant here, or at all good bookstores.

Cher Tan