Mina Sharif’s Story of Belonging and Meaning
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/15
Mina Sharif is an Afghan Canadian writer and cultural advocate whose work explores identity, exile, and belonging through the lens of everyday life in Afghanistan and the diaspora. Educated in Canada and active in Kabul for over a decade, she has worked with youth and women through storytelling and humanitarian projects. Her writing bridges Afghan oral traditions with contemporary global sensibilities, blending lyrical realism and social reflection. Sharif continues to write and speak internationally on the transformative role of art as a medium of reconstruction, memory, and moral imagination in societies navigating conflict and cultural renewal.
In this conversation, Mina Sharif speaks with Scott Douglas Jacobsen about You Are What You Love, her reflective collection exploring identity, exile, and affection amid social upheaval. Sharif discusses how limited narratives about Afghanistan inspired her to write beyond statistics and geopolitics, portraying the nuanced realities of daily life. She reflects on living between cultures, embracing both Afghan and Canadian identities, and shaping a “third culture” rooted in balance rather than division. Through her discussion of language, love, and nuance, Sharif emphasizes art’s power to reconstruct memory, resist oversimplification, and humanize the complexities of belonging.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The book under discussion today is You Are What You Love—a reflective, narrative-driven exploration of identity, loss, and the power of affection amid social upheaval. What inspired you not just to write the story, but to write it now?
Mina Sharif: The collection of stories I wrote was a direct response to the conversations about Afghanistan I was invited to join. In my opinion—or rather, in my feeling—those conversations didn’t seek to capture a fuller picture of Afghanistan. The questions I was asked felt flat and outside of what I wanted to discuss, which was the nuance of everyday life in Afghanistan. The questions were always limited to statistics, war, and geopolitics—consistently cast in a negative light—and didn’t offer me the opportunity to share the daily life that I felt so strongly about. For that reason, I started to write about what I wasn’t being asked.
Jacobsen: Do you feel exile is a fragmented experience?
Sharif: Absolutely. Exile is living more than one life at the same time. You are maintaining a connection to a place where you no longer live and trying to build that part of your identity from fragments—stories, headlines, books—all while developing your identity in what you might call your equally substantial host country. You don’t really have anyone to compare that to. So yes, it’s fragmented in both of your worlds—assuming you only have two main ones. Some people have even more than that.
Jacobsen: Do you think people who live that dual-cultural experience are more likely, once they find an integration point between cultures, to become more individuated in their opinions of either culture?
Sharif: I think there’s pressure for people in a diaspora situation to define themselves clearly as one over the other. That’s their central conundrum, more so than developing distinct opinions about either side. It’s more about not feeling entirely accepted or complete in either identity. They’re constantly negotiating which identity defines them more, rather than accepting that both can contribute equally to who they are.
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Jacobsen: How would you frame this lyrical battle within yourself? How do you use words and inner dialogue to make things fit so that you feel at peace with yourself?
Sharif: My process came through what I would describe as an epiphany. I don’t even have a definitive way to tell that moment. It came when I returned to Canada and realized that I didn’t want to be angry at one part of the world or the other for why I was in exile, or why I could never stay in any place by choice—whether it was being unable to live in Afghanistan because of the security situation, which I was often tempted to blame, or struggling to find where I belonged. I finally stepped away from that pattern.
I realized that I sincerely loved both parts of my identity and that I didn’t have to choose. That realization gave me a kind of bird’s-eye view—the very perspective I was always asked to take in the first place: “Which one are you more?” And I reached the point where I could finally say…
I’m neither more Canadian nor more Afghan. I am as wholly Canadian as I choose to be, and as entirely Afghan. And I really took that pressure off my own shoulders.
Jacobsen: What throughlines did you find? Was there no need for integration because they were already present in both Afghanistan and Canada, or at least between the areas of Afghanistan you’re from and the areas of Canada you came to? What were the more incongruous parts of culture that may have taken a little more time?
Sharif: I think the standard cultural customs were easy because they’re really welcomed in Canada, even outside of the home. They’re also easy to transfer from one geography to another—the music we listened to, the food we ate, the clothing, and a fundamental knowledge of history. I felt really secure about those things in both places regarding Afghanistan.
It was more a question of: what does daily life look like in a collective that you can’t fully understand until you live in it? I don’t think anyone can tell you enough stories for you to feel connected until you experience those small nuances—how things are done differently in the mundane sense of life, not just in the significant events. Celebrations, weddings—those traditions were passed on to me, and I recognized them even if I hadn’t experienced them firsthand. But it’s the everyday—the small, unremarkable rhythms—that are difficult to grasp without lived experience.
Jacobsen: In Canada and internationally, indigeneity is a vast topic. In the 1970s, indigeneity was federally codified in Canada—not by the first peoples who came across the Bering land bridge, like the Dene or the Inuit—but under three recognized categories: First Nations, Métis, and Inuit.
The Métis are an example of cross-cultural integration. You have people who fall under what might be called a mixed-ethnic background, and over a couple of centuries, they developed their own language—Michif—their own aesthetic, and their own syncretic traditions. It’s an admixture and an evolution of the cultures they came from.
For individuals like you, what are the “third culture” evolutions that have emerged from that process of integration?
Sharif: I think we’re really in the process of developing that. We’re still so fresh from the first-generation experience that those of us who are elder millennials or Gen X were probably still in survival mode—carrying that forward from our parents, who either arrived here or were recent arrivals.
We weren’t stopping to think about where we fit in at all. We were focused on adapting and building stability. But now, as we confront that conversation, and because the generations after us have had the peace and stability to live without that same sense of urgency, they can focus on identity. They understand that they come from more than one place.
Between us—the first generation—and those after us, I think we’re literally at the point of cultivating what that “third culture” means, what this new category represents. Whether we embrace that it includes more than one identity or more than one background, or whether, as I’ve often seen, people feel pressured to choose one side to fit into predefined categories—that’s the crossroads we’re at now.
Jacobsen: What is the importance to you of a grounded sense of sentiment and love, in some ways as an opposition to sentimentality or nostalgia? How do you characterize this throughout your writing?
Sharif: Nuance is my favourite word in the world. It applies here as well. It’s always a disservice to a memory, to a culture, or to an identity to paint it with a single stroke of colour. I’m always looking for the opposite of any given point…
Our culture is rigorous—it is. But I like to look for the parts of it that aren’t. Our culture is celebratory—it is. Let’s look for the parts that aren’t. That’s how I approach my own learning of who I am, both in my Canadian background and my Afghan one. I want that to translate into my writing as well, because I want Afghanistan to be approached with that kind of sentiment. You may not be wrong about what you’ve heard—or haven’t heard—but you should also assume that the opposite of it is always present.
Jacobsen: Are there any pieces of literature that have been translated from Farsi to English British or American—that you think do justice to the original intent of the work? Something essential to read, whether for its moral insight, cultural character, or simply for telling a great story?
Sharif: I wouldn’t say that I’ve come across that, but I think it’s important to note that the language we learn often shapes what we’re trying to learn. When something is translated from Farsi, I always view that work as originally intended for an audience with that cultural upbringing.
Where I find my space—or rather, the gap I’m trying to fill—is in writing about Afghanistan in a way that connects readers to the country through a Western lens. That’s where I saw there was room for me. I’m sure there’s plenty of Farsi literature that’s been translated—some wonderfully, some poorly—but it won’t resonate with me in the same way as something written by someone raised in the West.
I exist in between: someone with lived experience in Afghanistan, but who also speaks from a Western perspective. My writing is meant to resonate with that Western-raised lens. There are really two different audiences’ people are writing for, and the same work won’t have the same effect on both.
Jacobsen: Mina, thank you for your time today. I appreciate it.
Sharif: Thank you.
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