Meet-the-Author Recording with Salima Alikhan
I Can Be All Three |
Salima Alikhan introduces and shares some of the backstory for creating I Can Be All Three.
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Salima Alikhan: Hi, my name is Salima Alikhan, and I'm the author of I Can Be All Three, which is illustrated by Noor Sofi. So, I'm mixed race, and my father's from India, my mother's from Germany. And then I was raised in the United States. So, like many mixed race kids, I just sort of had a sense of where do I really belong and who am I? And I definitely felt very different from classmates who were really sure of their identities. I didn't grow up in a very diverse area. I grew up in the Washington DC suburbs, like Northern Virginia. So, I didn't have many brown classmates really. So, I just always felt like a bit of a fish out of water.
When I started writing this book, I was actually thinking more about what it felt to me, how it felt to me as a child, which is that I had these images and impressions, and I know this is very sort of abstract, but sort of sensory things from both India and Germany and America. So, you know, I had from India, like the foods and the smell of the foods and the stories and the visual, like the pictures of the mythology and all of that is really cool and really beautiful and really potent. And then the same thing from Germany. And I grew up going to Germany a lot and speaking German. So, I had all of the impressions from the Black Forest where my mother's from and castles and fairytales and all of that. And they were very opposite in many ways. I mean, they had similarities, but they were very opposite.
So I grew up with all this sort of lore and this sense of, "Okay, those are the things that belong, almost even these colors belong to India and these smells belong to India and these emotions belong to India." And then same with Germany, these colors, these smells, everything. And then I would walk out of my door and it would be America, and it was video games and cheeseburgers and french fries, you know, and TV, and it was just a very different. So, in the middle of all that, I was always like, who am I?
And I wanted to write a book where it portrayed that very common question of, because I was a teacher as well later on, and I saw many children wondering about this also being mixed race and wondering where they belong and how much were they allowed. Like if they were two different identities, were they allowed to be both? That was another big question. And I wanted to write a book where not only does the child question like I did, but finds a way to celebrate all three and is allowed to say, "I'm all three of these things. I'm enough in all three of these spaces." So, that's kind of where it came from.
I would like to tell them that if they're in the position right now where they're not quite sure who they are, for whatever reason, if they feel like maybe they don't belong, they don't fit in, they're not like their classmates, they're not like people they see on TV. I guess the first thing I want to say is there is a place for you. You will get older and you'll be able to find the people that make you feel at home, if you don't right now. I think that's so important to know. And that also, if you are more than one thing, if you belong to more than one culture or more than one family or more than one race, you are enough in all those spaces. You're allowed to be all of those things and claim them as your own. And that that's a beautiful thing.
This Meet-the-Author Recording with Salima Alikhan was exclusively created in June 2023 by TeachingBooks with thanks to Simon & Schuster.