.Samina Ali overcomes trauma, finds new voice

Bay Area-based author Samina Ali has twice lost her identity. The first time, during her childhood, involved a blend of beliefs and misplaced paperwork. Growing up as the middle of three children and the only daughter of immigrant Indian parents, Ali lived alternately in Minneapolis and Hyderabad, India. Her mother and father, convinced by an Iman she was born under unfortunate stars, hid and ultimately lost her birth documents. Ali’s best guess at her age is 55.

The second time, at approximately 29 years of age, almost every trace of Ali’s memory and imprint on the world vanished due to medical negligence and gender and racial bias. The losses included her ability to move, speak, think, recognize close family members, know her past, understand the present and, especially, imagine having a future.

Pregnant with her first child, Ali writes in a harrowing new memoir, Pieces You’ll Never Get Back (Catapult), about already knowing something was wrong during a first trimester routine sonogram at UCSF-Stanford Hospital. Appearing as a smudge the size of a Cheerio, her baby was well-positioned, but the pain in her head and chest that later became debilitating pulsed just as fervently as her son’s tiny, determined heart.

During delivery, after doctors had for months repeatedly dismissed her questions about symptoms related to what was in fact preeclampsia, Ali suffered a massive, grand-mal seizure, multiple strokes, a likely heart attack, organ failures and more.

Waking up from a medically induced coma days later, Ali could not recall giving birth to Ishmael, her baby. Her memoir chronicles the riveting, unfathomable story of her journey as she and her son, now 25, formed new brain neurons and discovered who they are individually and in relationship to each other.

Most remarkably, and during which she earned from her parents and medical team a name she at first hated but now accepts, “Miracle Girl,” the path to healing came via a startling “medicine.” It was her return to writing that created, sculpted and established the “new, forever missing pieces” Ali.

“For many years, I stopped writing,” she said, in a phone interview. “I’ve actually never read Madras on Rainy Days, my novel that went out [during the arduous recovery years]. When people tell me they’ve bought it, I have to stop my response, which is to say, ‘Don’t read it!’ Because I’m seeing those days working on the computer when I’d have to turn, spin in the chair, fall to the ground, curl up and hold my head. I couldn’t be in that space with writing again until I was pregnant with my daughter, Zaara, who’s now 16.”

Ali remembers her second pregnancy as being “like a ticking time bomb.” No longer 29, her body had been felled, almost killed, by devastating physical trauma. “I started journaling in order to leave something for my son if I didn’t survive,” she said. “Ten years later, I took those stories and turned them into a memoir.”

While writing her novel she had heard the narrative voice in Urdu, her first language. For multiple reasons she decided the memoir had to be heard and written in English. Regardless, it required navigating a steep learning curve.

“You know, there’s no true ‘recovery’ from brain damage,” Ali said. “Those neurons are dead. I still have aphasia and will not see I’m writing wrong words. It’s not until I go back to re-read and come across words [that] I’m like, wait, where did that come from? I also have experiences of not remembering an event or reaching for a word where it’s black. I stare into a field of darkness. It’s only neurological plasticity and new connections that define recovery.”

Which in no way means Ali is incapable of deep thought and writing with intensity and truth about complex themes such as inequities in healthcare for women, especially brown and Black women. In the book, she also extrapolates connections between cultures, specifically American and Muslim, finding common characteristics in Christian and Muslim religious concepts, emphasizing the importance of surrendering control, living with memory loss, and addressing how names given to children and communities reflect history.

“Take memory, which has many forms,” Ali said. “The way we all make sense of these disparate experiences is to create a story. Sometimes the stories we create about ourselves aren’t positive. It will have an imprint of loss, of ‘that always happens to me, I’ll never get what I want in life, no one will ever love me.’

“These stories we often take for fact, because our brains are telling them to us and we always believe our brains,” Ali continued. “But memories are unreliable. Shedding those negative stories, knowing they’re just neural pathways, we have to go back over and over and create new, more positive stories. I know loss, but I’m no longer sad about that. I recognized I was creating a scarcity story and stopped imprinting negative emotions on lost memories.”

Even so, negative facts about contemporary life’s brutal realities are not denied. For example, a report by the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals states that over the past 50 years, Black women giving birth in the U.S. were approximately four times as likely to die as white women. A brown woman’s wealth and education doesn’t matter; a reality Ali discovered when her preeclampsia was overlooked and her pain intentionally dismissed.

“The ignorance is shocking, astounding and really sad,” she said. “Even in reviews and articles about the book, it was mentioned I had a ‘rare complication.’ But preeclampsia is the most common complication of pregnancy. If we start to accept pregnancy and delivery don’t always go the way we think, we’ll recognize women have been dying throughout history.”

Ali said that when people enter the hospital they’re at the mercy of the doctors on their case. “Some listen, but the majority rush and dismiss you,” she said. “We’re told to be our own advocates, but even that doesn’t mean you get what you deserve. I shouldn’t have been fighting about my health.

“There was a sense that as a brown woman, I should be able to bear more pain,” Ali added. “What was shocking was that I wasn’t complaining about labor pains—it was immense pain in my head and chest. They thought their medical knowledge was more solid than my knowledge.”

Instead of sliding into resentment and a divisive mindset, Ali made the deliberate decision to choose surrender, trust, connections and unification. Her son’s name, Ishmael, represents and unifies his full identity as the child of an Indian mother and a white father.

“For me, the name expresses Islam’s inclusivity,” Ali said. “People today think Islam is intolerant, fanatic. But when you look at the faith itself, the Holy Book says Muslims aren’t the only believers. Christians and Jews are people of the book. Similarly, Zaara’s name reaches to her father’s Eastern heritage and European roots.”

Ali believes the book’s main theme is important in this time when the current administration is getting rid of words like “woman” and “female.” “We need these differences of gender, race, beliefs while still being able to see we’re unified, connected,” she said. “We have to create circles of solace and community, and hold onto that.”

Surrendering control opens the window to experiencing awe without denying actual life losses—illness, divorce, unemployment, lost histories and abilities, and more. Learning to move to “the other side” of loss with confidence requires constantly “digging in, holding on and finding resilience in even the darkest hours.” 

Ali’s third act will likely be a return to fiction, but for now, she graciously accepts the “miracle” moniker and feels tremendous gratitude every year when she and her son together celebrate their “birthday.”