Internment

Ahmed was born in Bombay, India, but she immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was a baby. Though she was an avid reader as a child and a young adult, she didn’t pick up writing professionally until much later. She studied English at the University of Chicago and then earned a teaching degree, working for a while as a high-school English teacher after graduation. Following this, she worked for several New York state education nonprofits. Alongside her teaching and advocacy work, Ahmed continued to write poetry and short stories, some of which was published. She has been politically active since her teen years—in high school, she organized a protest in support of her local striking teacher’s union. Both of these passions finally came together when she published her first novel, Love, Hate, and Other Filters, in 2018. Like Internment, all of Ahmed’s novels feature Muslim American characters, many of whom experience bigotry or political situations. She’s said that she believes it’s important to continue writing books about Muslim characters standing up for themselves and their rights, given how often books by minority authors, particularly Muslim authors, are banned or challenged.

While Internment is a work of speculative fiction, it draws on various historical events to both create and justify its world, most notably the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the historical internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt forcibly incarcerated thousands of Japanese Americans in camps throughout the United States (Internment mentions California’s Manzanar by name), despite there being no evidence that any Japanese Americans were conspiring against the country. The court case that allowed for this, Korematsu v. United States, has still not yet been officially overturned. In Internment, Layla notes that in her world, the courts have resurrected this case to justify incarcerating Muslim Americans. Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in 2016, and much of his rhetoric and policies were nationalistic and targeted minorities and immigrants, most notably immigrants from Mexico and Muslims. This resulted in the family separation policies at the U.S.-Mexico border that author Samira Ahmed cites as inspiration for Internment, as well as the so-called Muslim travel ban (which were actually a series of executive orders passed primarily in 2017 limiting immigration to the United States from Muslim-majority countries). Ahmed also cites the 2018 March For Our Lives protests as inspiration for the novel. Following the deadly school shooting at Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School on February 14, 2018, high school students created the organization March For Our Lives to protest and advocate for firearms regulations.

All of Samira Ahmed’s young adult books feature Muslim American protagonists, many of whom engage in some form of protest or standing up for their rights. Hollow Fires follows a young woman covering a student’s death in her school’s newspaper, while Love, Hate, and Other Filters follows a teenager struggling with rampant Islamophobia while trying to plan her future studying film. Novels and memoirs that tackle the historical internment of Japanese Americans during World War II include When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka, Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, and They Called Us Enemy by George Takei. In They Called Us Enemy, Takei explicitly says that his goal with the graphic memoir is to make people aware of what happened so that the U.S. is less likely to repeat the mistakes of its past, an idea that Layla considers often in Internment. Layla also thinks about the Nazi concentration camps from World War II, which novels like Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, Once by Morris Gleitzman, and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief portray. Within the novel itself, Layla and her friends reference a variety of classic novels, plays, and poems, from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Shakespeare’s play Macbeth to Emily Dickinson’s poems (specifically “Hope is the thing with feathers”) and Persuasion by Jane Austen.