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July 7, 2022
Sofia Ali-Khan's Playlist for Her Memoir "A Good Country"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Sofia Ali-Khan's memoir A Good Country is as poignant as it is informative, a book that melds personal life with history to compelling depths.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"Far from being confined to the pages of history books, American racism is mapped out in our roads, in our churches, and in our cities, schools, and strip malls...Attorney and activist Khan, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants, weaves together her own coming-of-age with the stories of exclusion and violence that created the twelve American towns she has called home...The desire to settle in 'good neighborhoods' speaks to a history of redlining and racial terrorism against Black homeowners; the exclusivity of the Ivy League recalls Princeton’s efforts to preserve American whiteness by resettling Black Americans in Africa; and the suspicious glares Khan receives on bus journeys in the Dakotas are a reminder of the ongoing violence and bigotry against Native people...The past is deeply, sometimes painfully, present in this honest and insightful book."
In her own words, here is Sofia Ali-Khan's Book Notes music playlist for her memoir A Good Country:
A Good Country: My Life in Twelve Towns and the Devastating Battle for a White America is the book that happened when I was at the end of my rope. I had been a social justice activist and lawyer my whole adult life, at least partly driven by gratitude at the life America gave my parents when they migrated from Pakistan, partly by a belief in its ideals, and partly by the belief that realizing those ideals was always just around the bend. I loved folk music, unions, and road trips.
But I’d lived in twelve towns across the country, and I’d seen a lot of things that challenged my optimism. In 2015, I had two sweet preschoolers, Trump was campaigning on the Muslim ban, and my kindergartener got told to not say she was Muslim at school. So, I went back over everywhere I’d been and everything I’d seen, paying special attention to the color lines and how they got there. As I wrote it all down, I found that my country had an unbroken and often unexamined legacy of forcing the migrations of Brown and Black people out of town, across the country, sometimes out of the country altogether. Different groups of people, sometimes pushed out by the state, sometimes by private actors, but a lot of repeating strategies: separating families, banning immigrants, forcing labor, taking people’s land and shutting them away.
Each chapter of the book is set in a different place, telling some about my life there, tripping over the color line, and then diving into the history of how the lines got there. The book is the story of how I found myself in America, why I had to pack up my family and leave anyway, and a little bit about where I’ve landed and what it’s taught me.
O-o-h Child, Beth Orton
This is what I’d sing to my child-self, a Brown kid going to school in a town that was built to be Whites-only, trying to explain my Asian parents to my friends, trying to explain myself to everyone, trying to wrap my head around the disconnect between summers in Hyderbad, Pakistan and a life in Fallsington, Pennsylvania. What a weird, alien thing I thought I was.
Stand By Me, Tracy Chapman
I was always trying to stretch the stories of kids who didn’t look like me to fit because there was zero representation in the books I read, in the shows on TV, in the songs on the radio. There’s a story in the book about being the only kid who had to complete a three-day trial to be accepted into the “Mystery Gang.” The Mystery Gang was made up of all the kids in one of my classes but me. I walked out on day 2 of the trial after I gave a very Hollywood speech about real friends not making their friends audition, and Allison, who’d be my bestie for several more years, followed me.
Holiday, Madonna
This is an excruciating story that didn’t make it into the book. My parents immigrated with two suitcases each from Pakistan when they were barely adults. They didn’t bring any music, and they were too busy trying to survive to really think much about music for a long time. While my classmates were listening to their parents’ records and tapes, I was listening to whatever was on the radio, and not even much of that. One day our third grade teacher had us each, one at a time, tell the class the name of our favorite song. So we went around the whole room, all 30 kids, and every single kid said Holiday by Madonna. Looking back, that makes sense. We were in a homogenous community of 17,000 households all living for a long weekend at the Jersey Shore. The teacher got to me and, because I couldn’t remember the name of the song, belted out “I Can’t Fight This Feeling” by REO Speedwagon. Social suicide; still living it down.
Waiting for the Great Leap Forward, Billy Bragg
Fortunately, I ran around with some people in high school that had excellent taste in music. I was mesmerized by the range of expression—very little of which had a lot to do with me, but which was so exciting anyway. It was a lot of men singing about women, really, but it was also passionate, soulful, playful music, sometimes world music, sometimes protest music, which really turned something on in me. Sometimes, like with Lou Reed, it was lyrics that described an America I’d never seen but was surprisingly close to the destitution and the precarity of life in Hyderabad. It was the first time I’d ever had any way of expressing that experience--and it was an American rock star who gave me that.
Darlin’ Corey, Red Molly
My college life was a romance with folk culture, centered on a relationship with the songbook Rise Up Singing. Also, our campus was full of weird and wonderful sounds: funk, bluegrass, Slavic vocal music. It helped heal the dearth of good music in my childhood. Darlin’ Corey was one we’d belt out, my friends and I, pretty often.
Indian Cars, Jacob Shije
This song is, for me, why music is its own art form. It captures things I won’t try to say here about having to make a life in the margins of one’s own homeland—or outside of it altogether. I didn’t really understand anything about the horror of settler colonialism until I spent time on the Navajo Nation. I hadn’t yet really even understood my own sense of alienation and loss and its roots in the colonization of South Asia. Surviving colonization, the way that experience presses everything important so tightly into a small place in your chest, sounds like this song.
Wade in the Water, Sweet Honey in the Rock
I really met America in Little Rock. Northern suburban segregation, and even coastal Florida segregation makes wide distances between White people and almost everyone else. In Little Rock, segregated spaces were inches apart, often in the same building or on the same street. It was the first time I encountered the sickly sweet, rather than the openly ignorant, version of racism. It sent me reeling. I sometimes say working with the Women’s Project in Little Rock saved me. The Women’s Project was a little oasis with a big reach, a safe place for Black and White and Brown women, for trans women and women in prison, women with disabilities and women with AIDS and all of these women’s children. Staff and leadership were entirely diverse on every rubric, everyone was paid the same based on the principle that an hour of any woman’s time was equal to an hour of any other woman’s time. Sweet Honey in the Rock played pretty regularly at the Women’s Project—there was a sisterhood there. This song, and the tradition of Black gospel music and slavery-era spirituals are an incredible gift to the world. They’re a record of where humans go inside themselves when there is nothing in this world to hold on to. While they are deeply beautiful, they’re also a record of unimaginable brutality and of the things we teach our children when we cannot protect them.
Assalamu Alayka, Maher Zain
Having left home at 17, I spent several years trying to disappear into America. Oddly, it was as a welcome guest in the home of beautiful, peace-church Christians, that I realized I didn’t want to disappear after all. That whatever light shone in me couldn’t find its reflection in an identity that was not really mine. So, this is sort of a redemption song. It’s a modern love song to the Prophet Muhammad and talks about the longing for his city of Medina—something that sounds extreme or even hokey in English but is something you find in every Muslim culture around the world, in a million incredible, ecstatic permutations.
Talk to Me Now, Ani DiFranco
There’s a story in the book about how I figured out I wasn’t safe in my personal life. It was really crazy because I’d fought so hard, against cultural and family expectations. And I’d done so much work on women’s rights—I ran the Take Back the Night event and the Clothesline Project at New College; I’d worked in a domestic violence shelter and was part of a project to get violence against women to be considered a hate crime at the Women’s Project. None of it prepared me for what was coming, but music like this was a beacon.
After All, Dar Williams
There is a point in the book where I began to suspect that life is just going to be a lot of getting knocked down and getting back up—and I’m going to have to get better at forgiving myself and maybe even everyone else. I’d moved out of the apartment I shared with my partner at the time and into an apartment with three women from law school. My closest friends had scattered to different cities and I was in a wear-a-suit-every-day judicial clerkship. It was intensely lonely, but also the first time I felt the romance of being alone. Especially nights when I’d throw a hoodie and boots over my pajamas and tromp through a snowstorm to do laundry in the building next door. For some reason, those nights have this song as a soundtrack in my memory.
Simply Are, Arto Lindsay
There was a long tailspin after that, but I landed on this song. I was figuring out who I was when no one else was around, in spite of my parents’ migration, in spite of how crazy things got after 9/11 for Muslims in America, in spite of having no idea which way was up. It took years, pulling apart threads of myself, rebraiding everything, until I learned how to make dreams that weren’t bent in the shape of what other people wanted, believed, or thought possible.
Whitey on the Moon, Gil Scott-Heron
The lyrics to this song were in an early draft of the book. I was working as a legal aid lawyer in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Philadelphia. Most of my clients were Black, Hispanic, or Asian, and all were several generations into the kind of poverty most people don’t believe exist in America. But I was working with these folks every day—Philly has an incredible rate of deep poverty. A lot of the blocks right around the office were really in a desperate state-windows boarded up, electricity or water out. It was a food desert. My work was mainly to help my clients get access to really basic things—food, shelter, medicine, sometimes case by case and sometimes by changing policy. Later, I worked on helping women build businesses in their homes. My clients were just like me—every one of them. It was such a deep challenge to what I’d been taught about meritocracy and the American dream. Some folks think this song is hyperbole, but it’s just not. It’s a record of the incredible pain of a large proportion of Americans realizing that they are always at the very bottom of our nation’s priorities.
By My Side, Ben Harper
I met and married my husband, Nadeem, in Philly. His name means companion in Arabic. It’s such a bizarre thing to say, but I dreamt about him before my friend Aisha set us up. I kept telling her I wasn’t interested, but she just went on pushing. Nadeem became my best friend pretty much the moment I met him, and he still is.
Imiqtaq, Riit
Inuit throat singing is incredible. One of the most amazing, heartbreaking things about living in Canada after 40 years in the United States is seeing how much First Nations, Inuit, and Metis culture survived the genocide here and is being reconstituted now in astounding ways. It makes me feel hopeful and so happy to see other communities who have survived colonization breathe life back into the threads they have protected and nurtured and cultivated through unimaginable hardship. This is a children’s song, about carrying water. Those of us who have been targets of European colonization have this in common: Even if we find that we can’t bend the arc toward justice the way we’d hoped in our own generation, we keep going to ensure the security of our children.
Saeen, Junoon (Inquilaab)
This is another devotional song, like gospel but Muslim rock n’ roll, so it feels like coming home to me. I have a particular love for this song because I’m Sindhi, from the southern delta of the Indus River. It’s an area that has suffered tremendously in the post-colonial period, from mismanagement and dams upstream on the river turning what used to be abundance into desert, and from the US littering cold war weapons through the port of Karachi. I have a lot of love for my family there, and for that place. Faith is central to the lives of Sindhis, and there’s a very old spiritual tradition of songs and poetry there, in which God is referred to as “sa’een,” pronounced SEYE-ee. It’s an honorific, like sir, but full of affection and adoration, it can’t really be translated, but you can feel it in the music.
Sofia Ali-Khan is a writer and an accomplished public-interest attorney. She has worked for Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, Prairie State Legal Services in Illinois, and the American Bar Association. She became a national leader on the right to language access and also practiced in the areas of welfare law, Medicaid access, immigration, and community economic development. She was a founding board member and activist with the Philadelphia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). A second-generation Pakistani American born and raised in the United States, Ali-Khan now lives in Ontario, Canada, with her family.
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