Interview with Author Alia Ai-Ming Shahzad

In “Parts and Halves” by Alia Ai-Ming Shahzad, people who can afford it can exchange their body parts with those of others through body-fixing shops. The narrator works with her mother and grandmother at a part-swapper stall, where they harvest body parts and facilitate trades for clients of the nearby body-fixers. But one day she is convinced to trade away one of her own eyes, and discovers that now she can see things she couldn’t before, such as the deepest desires of people, and the parts of themselves they usually keep hidden.

Alia Ai-Ming Shahzad (she/they) is an author of the Chinese-Malaysian and Pakistani diasporas who writes speculative fiction and essays. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago’s Creative Writing Program and the Chicago Asian Writers’ Workshop. Find their work, including dispatches from their 2023 thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, here.

* * *

Marissa van Uden: Thanks for sitting down with us today to talk about your story! I’d love to start by talking about that perspective shift the narrator experiences. I thought it was fascinating that she gains this deeper perspective on the world not by gaining an eye but losing one—almost as if that eye had been acting as some kind of veil before. What do you see as being removed from her when she loses that eye?

Alia Ai-Ming Shahzad: I’m grateful for the invitation and for your insightful questions! 

A former professor of mine said in a critique workshop that Parts reminded him of the horrible things we do to each other and to ourselves, much of which we accept under the “veil of normalcy.” For the narrator, the loss of her eye is the start of that veil’s unraveling.

I’d just finished The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin when I wrote the first draft of this story. There’s this moment when a young James Baldwin realizes that the God in which he has come to believe is, in fact, white, and that a Black boy like himself is outside this white god’s sphere of protection. It’s a liberatory epiphany that leads him to truthful reckoning with his reality. But I found myself intrigued, too, by what that child lost—his belief in a power that could prevail over evil, his sense of personal security—to gain genuine insight into his material and spiritual conditions.

Likewise, the narrator loses her naivete about her world and the illusory faith that her family can protect her from its harms in exchange for a realer perspective: her worth is a direct function of her body’s market value, and her family in some way enables that exploitation. 

MVU: Even when the family is given the “opportunity” to sacrifice something in order to move up a level, their higher earnings came with higher costs and increased work hours, leaving them perhaps worse off than they were before. It’s not until they begin to disobey the rules that they can expand their business and potentially free themselves from this trap. Could you talk a little about this theme in the story? 

AAS: In hindsight, by writing this story I was articulating my struggle with capitalism’s exploitative logic and imagining a resolution. I’m not sure I succeeded, but I think it’s important to try!

I was in my last year of college when I wrote the first draft, and I’d just started to send job applications out into the ether. Older adults would often tell me some version of “Enjoy this last shout of freedom, because you’re going to be working the rest of your life ‘till you retire or die, whichever comes first, pretty much.” 

Their comments brought into sharp relief an instinctive alienation I’d felt even before I started the job search or read Marx. I’d never bought the standard narrative fed to kids of immigrants that the only way to reproduce the hard-earned security our parents gifted us was by pursuing one of three careers (you know which ones) and selling our labor-power to share-holders of corporations. This skepticism may have emerged from my father’s cautionary tales about the ’08 finance industry, which conjured images of shareholder as a man with dollar signs for eyes like Mr. Krabs. 

I mention this backstory because it helped me arrive at the narrator’s own changed perspective, and I mean both the literal and figurative, following her sacrifice. She might lack the words to describe her alienation as such, but she’s still somewhat conscious that no amount of profit is going to make up for her loss. That shift opens her to accepting the Hustler’s illicit business proposal. But breaking the rules to make more dough doesn’t free the family from the trap. Their supposed upward mobility ends up costing more labor and heartache without yielding more freedom.  

It’s only towards the end of the story that the characters start to find genuine relief. The Hustler chooses to leave the world point blank, and even though the narrator turns down their invitation to follow, she still learns something about the possibility of escape. Leaving a system of unequal exchange becomes possible when someone else illuminates its precarity for us, I think. Maybe it’s the closing scene, when the three generations sit down and stop laboring, when the family gains true freedom.  

MVU: The narrator is one in a line of women that stretches out into her past and future, with each woman laboring to build security for the daughters to follow, but each without much hope of escaping the intergenerational poverty trap. What do you hope readers take away when they see how this matriarchal lineage plays out in the story?

AAS: I love this question. For all the complications in their relational dynamics, the women in the story share a resilience and fierce love for one another (mirroring the chain of don’t-fuck-with-us women I’m fortunate to have descended from). And that love in its various expressions is the driving force of the story, from its instigating event to its last lines. 

Right before this piece, I’d written a collection of myths for a feminist utopia inspired by Sarah Ahmed’s idea of snap, which she outlines in her blog feministkilljoys. The idea is that we are expected, as girls, to adhere to certain cultural traditions and ways of being, and at a certain point these archetypes may not fit us anymore. What to do? We snap by severing ourselves entirely from what came before us. Or maybe, we snap by “rearranging the text in a different way,” as Ahmed writes.

The latter, I believe, is what the narrator chooses. She inherits her grandmother’s discernment of the world’s absurdities, amplifies it, and turns it into something more than her grandmother’s one-line snarks. She exploits the cracks in the system and ultimately leaves it. And she enacts this resistance for herself but also out of love for her family, a desire to carve a home where they can be safe and free. The Palestinian artist Areej Kaoud expresses it most plainly: Resistance is the deepest form of love. If readers take anything away, I hope it’s that.

MVU: Beautifully said. I loved the final scene, which is such a profound moment of spontaneous wildness, confrontational honesty, and change for the character. Did the image for this scene come to you early on, or was it a place the story led you to organically? 

AAS: That’s kind! The story took me there organically. For context, I wrote the first scene of the piece for a flash fiction assignment in a creative writing class on the uncanny. I rocked with the conceit and reaped everything I could out of its world for months after. The longest draft ended up being 5,000 words, nearly double the length of the final version, and it was basically a word vomit of these vivid images and scenes that kept appearing in my head almost somatically. I felt a bit disoriented while I was writing the final scene, like it was happening to my own body.

When I first brought the piece to workshop—I think it went through three workshops in total—a classmate asked for clarification on the logic of the piece’s magic, which was a generously-phrased question because I’m not sure there was a logic to speak of. I basically had to excavate out a plot, and that took four years of distance and a subsequence massacre of many darlings. There was also a whole mess of inchoate themes from disability justice to the surveillance state that I had to axe because I was just trying to do too much. But I knew as soon as I’d written that last scene it was staying alive and intact, that it was the lodestar of the story.   

MVU: I also really appreciated the relationship between the narrator and the Hustler. It came across as so genuine and caring, and we see an act of true love when the narrator lets her friend go without complaint, even though she’d rather that they stayed forever. What does this friendship symbolize for you in the story?

AAS: The catalytic capacity of love! Each character senses and encourages the potential in the other. The Hustler sees they might broaden the narrator’s understanding of their world and opens new realms for them to explore together. The narrator sees the Hustler’s secret self and supports their genuine self-expression. 

In my view, that might be one of the best parts of true love. Being in relationship with someone who accepts you as you are and sees who you could be, who walks with you as long as they can in that direction. And when it comes time to part ways, you can let go of each other gracefully. As a child of diaspora—my mom left her island home and extended kinship network to live on the opposite side of the world when she was 17 years old, a decision, like the narrator, made for herself but also for love of her family—I’m cognizant of that relinquishing component.

MVU: What does your writing routine look like? Do you find it difficult to carve out writing time, and do you have set routines and habits?

AAS: For better or worse, I don’t have a consistent routine. I go through spells of writing and not writing. The most generative periods often share two aspects: being in community with other creative folks and having a clearly established deadline. 

Shutting off distracting tech and internet access is the closest I have to a starting ritual. Earlier this year I was a visiting writer at an art school, and I had a strict no-phone and wi-fi in the studio policy. I put out more work in those three months than the whole three years prior—it’s when I rewrote the bulk of this piece!

My ideal writing position is facing a blank wall—the interplay of light and shadow is distraction enough for me! Anything more will pull me out of the reverie.

MVU: I saw that you hiked the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) and wrote about your journey along the way! Can you tell us a little about that adventure. What were the biggest things you took away from the experience, and did your journaling impact how you write or think about writing?

AAS: This might be my favorite thing to write about, so thanks for the question! In no particular order: My sense of what I consider to be alive and very conception of time expanded. I jumped into many bone-chilling soul-cleansing glacial alpine lakes, and every time, a wash of awe would come over me with the water. Tens of thousands of years ago bodies of ice crawled across the earth and their vestiges became baptismal pools for our human bodies. That insight expanded into an awareness of a power greater than myself that operated on the scale of geological time. I consider such belief as practical as it is meaningful—I mean, just look to our classic literary heroes, from the Monkey King to Odysseus, who dropped their hubris for fruitful questing.

I also came to viscerally understand the cost of the industrial world’s lie that maintaining a responsible relationship with the land has no bearing on our day-to-day lives. When you’re sleeping in swathes of black earth scorched by wildfire, when you drink from a river you later discover was polluted by literal human shit upstream, it becomes harder to separate yourself from the earth. 

How the PCT affected my writing is an interesting question! I kept a daily journal throughout the trip that I’d often address to some unnamed divine. It would sometimes be the only witness to all the beauty and terror I’d encounter during a day alone in the backcountry. That’s when I started to see writing as a practice of faith, which I maintain today via a writing-channeling practice called Two-Way Prayer. 

Prior to the PCT, I rarely shared my creative writing outside of a small network of friends and classmates. But on trail, I felt compelled to compile my experiences and post them online when I had the opportunity. I felt I was encountering something I couldn’t not share. That practice helped me feel more comfortable with the idea of submissions, which I’d up to that point largely avoided, and from there I can draw a straight line to “Parts” publication—my first ever accepted short story! 

MVU: Amazing. It sounds like such an amazing experience, and I love that it eventually led to this first publication! What else do you do to fill the creative well? Do you have any hobbies or interests that put you in a great headspace for making art or coming up with story ideas?

AAS: I read almost every night. Every few months I do a write up on what I’ve enjoyed reading that helps me figure out what to borrow and, OK, maybe steal, for my own work. For this story I consumed widely in the vague field of strange media. Carmen Maria Machado. Natusko Imamura. Everything by Han Kang and George Saunders. Freud’s essay on the uncanny. A Wrinkle in Time and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The 2019 Cats movie. The more diverse and weirder the influences, the deeper the well. 

After that, I free associate, maybe during a long-but-not-too-challenging hike, to dig for story-seeds in my subconscious. I also find being in conversation with other art and artists of all mediums helps me sharpen fuzzy pre-verbal ideas. The act of writing may be a solitary activity, but for me, its roots and cultivation can be communal.

I made this artwork, entitled and again into softness, in early spring. The leaf-strands hung beside my desk until they met the maws of our robot-vacuum last week. I like having a completed piece nearby to remind me what an idea might become if I keep tending to it.

MVU: We love to share important charities or causes that authors care about, to help raise awareness. Could you share a charity or cause that’s important to you at the moment, and tell us a bit about it?

AAS: I’m always stoked on hyper-local organizing and movement-building like mutual-aid funds, tenant-organizing groups and community gardens. Urbanseed does neat produce donations and community education in Metro Detroit, but I’d suggest finding active projects in your area. Facebook is a good starting point or even better showing up at your neighborhood community garden over a weekend!

MVU: Love these ideas! Thank you again for joining us today. Before we go, do you have any other stories coming out soon that readers should look out for, or are you working on anything exciting at the moment?

AAS: I have a few pieces of short speculative fiction, among other genres (currently, art-writing and poetry) that are in different stages of life from embryonic to out in the querying-world. Readers will find links to new drops on my blog, inshallah.

Thank you again for your thoughtful engagement with my work!