In her new young adult novel, “All My Rage,” author Sabaa Tahir tells a story of cultural identity and growing up through the eyes of two teenage best friends. Noor and Salahudin are both Pakistani American, living in the small fictional town of Juniper, in California’s Mojave Desert. Noor wants nothing more than to go away to college and leave behind their rural town.
Tahir is the bestselling author of the young adult fantasy series “An Ember in the Ashes,” which features a young woman of color as the hero fighting back against an oppressive empire. In contrast to her fantasy novels, Tahir mines her own experiences in her most recent book. Like her main character, Salahudin, she is the child of Pakistani immigrants who grew up in a rural town in the Mojave Desert, in her parents’ 18-room motel.
Tahir recently spoke with The California Report Magazine’s Sasha Khokha.
(Excerpts of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.)
On being shaped by the experience of growing up in her family’s motel
I think the thing that I remember the most are all the different types of people who would come through. Everything I learned, from how to curse, to the different ways that people expressed kindness. We had a tenant once who paid us with a bird because I think he didn’t have enough money to make rent. But he had all these birds that he loved, that he kept in the room. We had a tenant once who [damaged] the room, [making] a hole in the wall or something, and he left without saying anything about it. But my parents found money in the room, and they assumed that that was his way of saying, “Hey, sorry about this. I hope this will pay for it.”
