Belonging & Citizenship: A Conversation between Sheniz Janmohamed, Taslim Jaffer, and Amyn Sajoo

From civic insight & protest to ecology & spirituality, writers have long shaped our collective and individual identities.

What role can writers play when polarization, intolerance & repression rip into belonging and citizenship?

About the Speakers

Taslim Jaffer is a writer, editor and writing instructor with a special interest in culture, identity and home. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and is working on her memoir-in-essays about life as a first-generation Canadian and parent. She serves on the Board of Directors for Word Vancouver and the Creative Nonfiction Collective Society, and is a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada. Taslim is co-editor of the anthology Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, And Home (Book*hug Press, 2024), a collection of 26 literary travel essays by diasporic writers who travelled back to their motherlands.

Ever since Sheniz Janmohamed was a kid, she’s been in love with stories– telling them, writing them and hearing them. It was because of this love that she began to explore her own story, leading me to develop my own practice as a poet, artist educator and nature artist. She had the luck of being part of the first cohort to graduate from MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, where she learned how to become a more nuanced writer. Since then, she’s published three collections of poetry: Bleeding Light (Mawenzi House, 2010) Firesmoke (Mawenzi House, 2014) and my most recent collection, Reminders on the Path (Mawenzi House, 2021). She’s currently working on my next book, How to Scare the Birds, a collection of creative nonfiction essays exploring the intersections of identity, ecological and personal grief, and the language of place across Kenya and Canada.

Amyn Sajoo is scholar-in-residence and lecturer at Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. His research and teaching is at the interface of citizenship, human rights and identity. Dr. Sajoo was earlier affiliated with Cambridge and McGill universities, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London. Since 2018, he has hosted a public conversations series, sponsored by SFU with civic partners. His guests have included former Supreme Court of Canada chief justice Beverley McLachlin, John Ralston Saul, Indigenous scholar Wenona Hall, and and the writers David Chariandy, Kamal al-Solaylee, Anosh Irani, Janika Oza and Saeed Teebi. Dr. Sajoo has contributed extensively to the newsmedia, including the Guardian, BBC, Open Democracy and the Globe & Mail. His books include Pluralism in Old Societies and New States and Muslim Modernities: Expressions of the Civil Imagination (edited volume, 2008). He is currently working on a collection of essays on diaspora identities and citizenship.