Brown Girls, Grown Up: Stories by Sima Qadeer

“Sex and the City” was the title of Candace Bushnell’s short-lived mid-90s New York newspaper column. By the end of that decade, Darren Star’s hugely popular TV series adaptation with the same name had turned Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda into household names. And types: with people—in my experience, gay men—either self-identifying (“I’m a total Charlotte”) or being typed (“You’re such a Samantha!”) by close friends and work spouses.

Though focused on Muslim Pakistani Canadian women, there’s some DNA of Bushnell/Star in Sima Qadeer’s story collection, Brown Girls, Grown Up. A lightness of touch, for instance, and a generous comic warmth. Plus, an abiding and keen interest in metropolitan living (the GTA, in the case of Qadeer), the travails of (speed) dating and (embittered) matrimony, and women’s steady, if setback-prone, steps toward self-determination and all-over satisfaction.

The nine pieces, “[s]elf-deprecating, neurotic, and just a little bit anxious,” like Leela, the protagonist of inaugural story “Paki Pussy,” often bring to mind ever-provocative Samantha. On the surface, at least.

Mira, in “Gelatin,” gets caught by her husband using a bright pink sex toy. His reaction—“I left you so you could get ready to go to my parents, while I hung out with the kids, and you’re up here getting yourself off?”—doubles as a declaration of the severe anemia of their marriage. Besides Leela’s futile quest for the perfect Brazilian pubic treatment in “Paki Pussy,” Rami in “Squishy Makeover” begins with a post-coital question (“When had sex become a chore?”) and wraps up with a solo trip to Montreal where temptation might also spell marital revitalization. 

An attempt to end gnawing loneliness leads Amira in “Feeling Good Vibrations” to an enclave of WASPy wealth. There, a group of white women appearing to have it all, who are led by a “Paltrow-esque clone,” talk down to her and trot out racist stereotypes. Fed up eventually, Amira seeks justice and has a “glorious release” of a sort rarely printed in polite-to-a-fault Canadian literature. It’s a funny and gross and perfectly apt conclusion to the story. (In “Momxiety,” “popular moms,” a version of those same women, make an appearance.) In “Shaky, Fakey, Okay Lady,” Sabira hears the “taste of your pussy—it’s changed,” which precedes husband Keith’s summary: “we’re no longer a fit.” She soon meets Malik, an agreeable young sexual plaything.

Later in that story, Qadeer gets real, which is to say she shows that the flashy, potty-mouthed Samantha of the stories—the silicone phallus mishap, the bikini wax that “hurt like fucking hell,” the self-assigned hall pass, the boy toy—is undergirded by the reflective writer (Carrie) and the planner (Charlotte) with a picture book relationship in mind. (Careerism, Miranda’s touchstone, isn’t all that prominent in Qadeer’s collection.) 

At a therapist with Keith after the separation, Sabira exclaims, “I went from famine to feast.” She then explains how she’d learned much earlier that she didn’t have a voice as a female and, to survive, needed to be as small as possible. In turn, Keith learns he married the “smallest, most invisible” version of Sabira, who “can’t be small anymore.” 

In Qadeer’s stories the amusing—whether scatological, sexually brazen, or humorously inappropriate—might register as provocation for its own sake. And it may well be. But the high-jinx of the stories is so closely related to the sobering undercurrents—emotional exhaustion, dissatisfaction, loneliness—that the two may well be opposite sides of the same coin. Without the withered marriage and a sexual desert, after all, Mira wouldn’t be pleasuring herself in secret in the first place. Quibbles aside—maybe Qadeer’s stories run past their expiration date, her argumentative dialogue between characters sometimes eclipses plot—Brown Girls, Grown Up catches the eye, elicits a guffaw or two, and stimulates the brain. What more can you ask for from a debut story collection?

Brett Josef Grubisic

Brett Josef Grubisic resides on Salt Spring Island, BC, where he's currently at war with his sixth novel. Previous novels include The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck.