An Interview with Reema Faris, of the M.A. Faris Foundation

The Carol Shields Prize Foundation is deeply grateful to the M.A. Faris Foundation for supporting The Carol Shields Prize Foundation Fellowship at Diaspora Dialogues, supporting the inaugural 2023 Fellow, Sana’a Jaber. We sat down with Reema Faris of the Faris family to talk more about their longtime commitment to literature.

What initially drew your family to the Carol Shields Prize Foundation's mission and programs?

As a family, we’ve been closely affiliated with the Vancouver Writers Fest for many years now. We’re a part of the festival’s world in a sense, especially through our connection with its founder, Alma Lee.

Alma was working on behalf of the Carol Shields Prize when they were laying the groundwork for the Prize. She approached us to ask if we would consider lending our support to it, and after meeting with Alma, asking a few questions, and reviewing the documentation, we felt that we would like to do so because the Prize aligned with several of our values.

First of all, the Faris family—our family—is very much invested in the value of education, the value of reading, the value of art, and for my sisters and me, three very strong-headed women, anything that advances opportunities for women and non-binary folk is important. That sense of fairness and equal opportunity is a value that my father has always upheld as did my mother. She passed away many years ago, but so much of what we do is inspired by her legacy. She is never not with us.

Regarding the Carol Shields Prize, it felt like the Prize was addressing issues and concerns we believed in and that our support could make a difference. We did our due diligence, and after thinking it through, we decided, “Absolutely! We would love to support this initiative.”

We're very happy we did.

My sister Ramona and I were able to go to Nashville for the inaugural awarding of the Prize this past May. It was a thrill to be there. It was a thrill to see it come together and to know that we played a role in making the dream come true.

What role has literature played in all of your lives at a personal level?

Thanks for that question. We're a family of readers.

I’m also an educator, and I have a picture that I sometimes use in my slideshow presentations. It’s from a family holiday we were on. We all had our books with us at dinner and I don't know whose idea it was, but we piled all the books on the table and took a picture of the stack. Now I have a picture from maybe 10 years ago of the family’s reading and it's hilarious to look at that photo now, look at the spines, and see the range of books we were reading at the time.

Reading has always been a part of our family life. We're very fortunate that we’ve all had access to education as well as post-secondary education, and reading comes attached to these experiences, those phases in life when you're a student. For my sisters and me, reading started with our mom reading stories to us when we were little.

And the three of us, with our own children, made reading a big part of our daily routines. I used to read to my son every night.

Then there's a part where it's the joy of reading and a part where it's about making connections. Reading and art are ways we can all connect with experiences that are beyond our own, right?

When you understand that the world is bigger than you and your immediate circles or even your wider circles—that's when you start to build ideas of empathy and compassion and care.

Reading has served that function for all of us in the family, and it continues to do so.

If I have one bad habit, it's buying books. I cannot resist buying books. I can't read all the books I buy. But I can't not buy a book. I can't speak for the family, but my happy places are bookstores and libraries.

That’s certainly a sentiment many could relate to! The M.A. Faris Foundation supports many incredible literary causes, including the Carol Shields Prize Foundation Fellowship at Diaspora Dialogues. This fellowship provides financial support to a woman or non-binary BIPOC writer who is a refugee or new immigrant to Canada. Do you have any words you'd like to share with either the current fellow, Sana’a Jaber, or future fellows who are provided this support?

To Sana’a herself, I just want to say, “Thank you.” Thank you for finding your way to having a voice and for sharing that voice. By sharing your voice, you are sharing experiences with others who may not know your world and may not understand the identities that you embody and embrace.

That would be my message to Sana’a and to all the fellows to come.

I would also want to say that the reason the work they do is so important is because it presents new ways of being. Writing and reading elevates horizons. These writers will show possibilities and potential. They show the abundance of humanity. They show that there are different paths forward, and that there are different ways to be. That is so important to do because with all the sadness and chaos that we have in the world, it's very hard to hold on to hope.

But hope is the only thing that ever has really resulted in change: that belief in better, that belief in different. I think fiction and nonfiction, really any kind of writing, is what moves us forward on that path.

One of the things I often grapple with is getting caught up in the misery of the news. I ask myself, “How do I as an educator, as a parent, as just another older human being with life experience, avoid being so cynical that I shut down the hope that young people have?”

It's a very hard balance to find. We operate on the basis that the young people are our future, but they cannot hold on to a future or the idea of a future if they don't have hope. I just think it’s a really hard task to be attuned to what’s going on in the world and yet to nurture and sustain hope.

I find that writers, authors, artists, content creators—their artistry, their creativity, their craft—is what helps people hold on to hope, to hold on to what it truly means to be human, and to share that humanity with others. I have always been humbled by authors and what they're able to bring to the world.

Thank you so much for those insights. Could you speak a bit more about why it has been important to support immigrant and refugee writers in your family’s philanthropic pursuits?

The easy answer, of course, is because we're a family of immigrants. My parents came to Montreal in the 1950s to attend McGill University: my father from Lebanon, my mother from Jamaica, although her father was also Lebanese. [McGill was] where they met.

But our extended family’s history as immigrants to Canada goes well beyond that, to the early twentieth century. We have relatives in many of the provinces and our family has been here a long time.

Being able to support immigrant writers is very important to us because it's part of our lived experience and our family history. While we ourselves are not refugees, we know people who have been refugees.

I think once you understand what it means to be a refugee and how difficult that process is and what's entailed in finding your way to a life of stability and security, it creates a lens of familiarity. You get to know what's involved.

The more complicated answer is that my family's history is tangled up in settler stories. Whereas I’ve always known that my family has had this immigration experience, it’s only with time and through learning that I’ve come to recognize it's also a settler experience.

It's taken me a long time to learn that, and it's taken a lot of change in society for me to grasp that, so I think writers like Sana’a and the others to come [through the Carol Shields Prize Foundation Fellowship at Diaspora Dialogues] will be able to explore these tensions more fully, to shed light on the questions we need to keep asking, and to show us the work we need to do.

It's going to be an important feature of their work: speaking to that immigrant/refugee experience, and speaking to the conditions faced by marginalized folk and folks who live with these long legacies of colonialism and imperialism.

These writers have the opportunity to examine the tensions between immigrant/refugee experiences and settler experiences, and to help explain why we must negotiate what that means in terms of being a part of Canada, what Canada is, and so on.

That's the more nuanced aspect of our family’s support for this program. I think Indigenous ways of knowing, for example, show us that it is through storytelling that we understand the world. That’s where these writers, the ones the fellowship supports, will be able to tell their stories. To contribute to the dialogues and discourses that will pave the way towards understanding each other better, to seeing the humanity in each one of us, and to helping us all fashion a better world.