Hey everyone, I'm Amadal Yuckber, and this is See Something, Say Something.

Today we're talking to writer, professor, an award-winning novelist, Ronda Girard.

Rhonda writes really honestly about growing up Arab, sexuality, and bodies,

so we decided we'd have an honest conversation with me.

If you see something, you better, you better say something, nothing at all, nothing at all.

So growing up in a Pakistani-American household and Muslim community, things like drugs and sex were taboo topics that we just pretended like didn't really exist for the most part.

Or if they existed, they existed out there and not in our communities.

And one of the things I really like about Randa's work is that she grapples with these things through the lens of diaspora and in the context of Muslim communities.

Welcome, Rhonda.

Hi.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for coming on.

You often admit, like, I'm a bad Muslim in your pieces, like in one of your BuzzFeed pieces, like in the title it says,

being a bad Muslim, help me get out of a bad marriage. And I think that's like kind of amazing

also to like own that because I think it's so difficult for people to own. Like I was looking

in the comments and there's this debate back and forth about like, we like the honesty versus

like it's reinforcing this dichotomy.

I was just curious like how you think through that.

So I think like with that essay, I think the title was a little tongue in cheek because it's actually all the exploration I did of, you know, Islamic law and the Quran and Hadith that made me realize

that actually my husband wasn't being a good Muslim because he

wasn't having sex with me.

Right, right.

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