Shamim Sarif is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter and director for film and TV. As she approached the publication of her new book, The Athena Protocol — an all-female action thriller, released by HarperCollins, and the first in a Young Adult series —

Sarif was faced with an unexpected sentiment: the idea that "otherness," a topic she has actively and passionately written about with nuance throughout her career, is simply a trend in our current culture. As a gay Muslim woman, Sarif, obviously thinks otherwise and, here, she describes her experience as an author and filmmaker, relating what she's learned along the way in ensuring that diversity, otherness, and inclusion never cease to exist in her writing and the world at large.

I was born in London, of South African, Indian, and Muslim heritage. It became clear to me by my mid-teens that I was gay — and I really didn’t want to be. Not only was it unacceptable within the cultural and religious world I was raised, but at that time, the prevalent attitude generally was that being gay was a hard life to “choose;” promiscuous, a bit shameful, and not truly compatible with religious or family values.

I’ve been with my wife, Hanan, for over 23 years and we have two sons that we chose to have together. It was tough in the early years — our families were not supportive. There was no legal framework for us to be married or in any kind of civil partnership, and we had to use legal work-arounds to ensure we had proper parental rights over our kids.

We chose our friends — our new “family” — on values that we had learned, through experience, to prize: integrity, honesty, a desire to contribute. We didn’t choose through the lens of gender, sexuality or color. Nevertheless, our way of life and our friends have always looked “diverse.” My wife and I each have a rich cultural heritage (hers is Palestinian, with schooling in Switzerland, the U.S., Japan and France) and we know people from all over the world, in all sorts of careers.

So when I wrote my fourth book, The Athena Protocol, about a rogue agency run by six women, it felt very real to me that these women included an African-American diplomat, a Chinese tech tycoon, and a British music star. I wrote those characters because that’s what my life looks like.

The Athena Protocol is a thriller. And the first in a series. Which meant that I had written something with commercial potential in Hollywood. And it’s come as something of a surprise to me that the story is being embraced so readily.

Courtesy of MB Communications

I’m not a stranger to film and television. Apart from being a novelist, I’m also a screenwriter and the director of three features, all based on my earlier novels. These books were also diverse, also led by female protagonists; but how different my experience was ten or twelve years ago, when I wanted to turn those books into films. If I’d had ten dollars for every time I heard one of these questions, they could have been financed easily:

"Could you make one of them a man?"

"Could you make one of them white?"

"Does she have to be gay?"

My first book, The World Unseen, won prestigious prizes in the U.K., and it was set in the Indian community in apartheid South Africa. I Can’t Think Straight was a romantic comedy about two women that I wrote around the same time. The film industry liked the originality of the scripts, but they wanted well-known actors (therefore, white actors). As far as the rom-com went, gay was niche, heterosexual would be mainstream. The mainstream industry wanted safety, something to hang the numbers on.

So I faced a choice: Literally whitewash my work and sanitize it to match the prevailing wisdom, and possibly get a decent budget and distribution; or go it alone and make the films in a highly independent way, without knowing if they’d ever be seen. Writing a novel was one thing, but now I faced the uphill task of trying to raise a huge amount of money to make a proper feature film.

I asked my wife what to do, with an idea brewing in my mind. My wife is an entrepreneur and she loved my work. In my eyes that made her perfectly suited to produce films for me. The fact that neither of us knew anything much about the industry didn’t faze us, and in hindsight, probably helped, because we had no idea that this much diversity wasn’t seen as a strength, but a hindrance.

Shamim Sarif (left) and her wife, Hanan Kattan (right) David M. Benett Getty Images

Within the industry, we didn’t find the investment we needed for the early films. I Can’t Think Straight was backed by a private “investor” who turned out not to be paying the bills at all, leaving us thrown out of locations, losing crew members who hadn’t been paid, and with our lead actresses and their luggage left unceremoniously on the steps of their hotel.

Somehow, we made it to the end of the shoot. And then, by the time we had most of the footage in the can, the sound had disappeared, we were financially strapped with two young kids, and I was creatively heartbroken. I was ready to throw in the towel. But Hanan pursued the case all the way to the British high courts and won the film back.

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I’m glad she did. It’s been eleven years since I Can’t Think Straight released, and I still get a message about it on social media or by email almost every day. From women who saw, often for the first time, a happy ending for lesbians of color, for a Muslim-born gay character, and an Arab one. I’ve had letters from women who escaped arranged marriages because they finally believed that it was possible to be themselves. I’ve met women who unveiled, who stood up to their parents, who felt empowered to start LGBTQ support groups amongst the “untouchable” caste in India. And all of them told me that seeing characters they could identify with in a story that moved them, was inspiring.

What this told me is that stories have a primal power that we often underestimate, even while we spend so much of our leisure time reading, going to the movies, or bingeing TV shows.

In a way, stories become a powerful roadmap for being human. We turn to stories to help us navigate our growth and the choices we have. To make sense of the angst and uncertainty and challenges that life presents us with.

We are at our best as human beings when we live with the spirit of inclusion.

On top of that, today we live in a world where the news media and politics encourages ever more division and polarization; in the U.K., it’s clear to see the way Brexit has pulled apart families and communities. In the U.S. political system, a similar ideological battle is in progress. For me, putting diverse characters out there is not a trend but a reflection of the way many of us have lived all our lives. And for places that are just not that diverse or where polarization continues to seed distrust of the “other,” maybe it’s a way to use storytelling to stretch the imagination, to think that maybe there is a way for us to get along despite external differences.

We are at our best as human beings when we live with the spirit of inclusion. And that’s why I don’t believe exclusion, of women, or people of color, or diverse sexuality, has any place on screen. The world of TV has made a huge difference in this in recent years, and I think the film world is starting to catch up. Because there’s no way back. Exclusion creates a sense of superiority in those doing the excluding, and it suggests, even subliminally, that those excluded are unworthy. On that basis, why should we be excluding anyone from screen representation based on their inherent traits?

Now, when I meet with executives in the TV and film business, nobody asks me to make my characters white, or male or to “de-gay” them (I had that one too!) Initially, I approached this new openness with a touch of cynicism, wondering if it was the success of Black Panther or Wonder Woman that was driving this enthusiasm. But that wariness that has slowly turned to deep relief, and now to a sense of certainty. Whatever happens next, I think we will find there is no going back on inclusion when it comes to stories in every medium. And that matters, because it’s not just writers who create stories. Every one of us creates, every day, the stories that shape who we are. Those stories have sometimes limited us in the past — now is a great time to make sure that they can also inspire us — all of us.

The Athena Protocol is currently being developed for the screen. Shamim Sarif is donating a portion of the proceeds from her book to Headwaters Relief Organization’s comprehensive awareness programs to build awareness and combat human trafficking. To order a copy, click here.



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