“That’s how that moment felt to me: like I was above the clouds finally, and the sun was on my skin again,” Aaliyah Bilal, author of Temple Folk, says of learning her manuscript had been acquired. That debut short story collection, now a finalist for the National Book Awards, depicts Black Muslim lives in the 1970s as followers of the Nation of Islam and the generations that came after, looking back on that time in an exploration of faith and liberation. During an early afternoon Zoom call with sunlight dappled on her skin, Bilal smiles at the memory. The story of Temple Folk’s acquisition is one she’s told many times before, yet it has lost none of its luster. She had been in a “gloomy” place in her personal life and likened this moment to a plane cresting over a blanket of clouds. This is one of Bilal’s skills: bringing the light of our very human moments to the forefront, letting the audience—in this case, me—share in its glow. 

Bilal’s sister originally came across the announcement that Yahdon Israel had been hired as senior editor at Simon & Schuster and would be accepting unagented submissions. “‘You have to submit, put something together and send it to this guy,’” Bilal remembers her sister telling her. 

Israel, then mere days into his role, whose previous experience was outside of the publishing industry, didn’t have the same network of connections as his colleagues. He mirrored Bilal who was a self-taught fiction writer, not having gone through an MFA program and without an agent. Israel coming across the Temple Folk manuscript was an answered invocation—his initial call for submissions had yielded a substantial volume of responses but not specifically the sorts of work he wanted. “I realized I did not give people a framework for the things I was looking for,” Israel explained over the phone. “So I got what I asked for. I literally got people submitting. So I did the video as a revision: Let me lay out what it is I’m looking for. But more importantly, here’s what the work that I want to acquire has to do. Here’s what the stakes are.”

Just as Israel was thinking the chances of getting a first acquisition for something he wanted in an industry run on connections were slim (“I would be competing with people who are just far more established,” Israel said), Bilal was sending “a little manuscript” of 27,000 words. “That’s all I had,” Bilal admitted. “That was worth sharing, I should say.” It was an effort to appease her sister. “I sent it off and knew I’m never gonna hear from this guy. But at least if my sister asked me, I’ll be able to say, ‘I did it.’” But the submission struck Israel, even from the title page which featured Gordon Parks’s 1963 portrait of Ethel Sharrieff flanked in a pyramid formation by other Black Muslim women. 

“She understands what it means to use fiction as a tool to get us to think about the interior lives of people we’ve come to understand through, at this point, a sociological lens,” Israel said. “And this was her using the imagination to get at: ‘What does it mean to be human through this particular circumstance of being Black and Muslim in a predominantly white and Christian society?’” 

Perhaps given Bilal’s proximity to the collection’s subject, she regularly emphasizes the fact that Temple Folk is a work of fiction and not based on her life. She is third-generation Muslim. Her grandparents converted in the years of Malcolm X and then her parents were raised in the Nation of Islam and, like the characters of her stories, have their own critiques of the experience. That natural wellspring of inspiration to write from lends a depth of complexity to her characters that may translate to confusion: art imitating life so acutely it is mistaken for, well, memoir. 

“We encounter short stories, the way we encounter stories in real life,” she said. 

Here, Bilal speaks with Vanity Fair about what short stories impose on their writers, reverence for the reader and her humorous alter ego. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: How do you see the audience engaging with these texts and these characters?

Aaliyah Bilal: I think there’s so many layers to the stories, and they are constructed in a way that one needn’t be at all familiar with the specifics of this history to take some degree of pleasure. Obviously this is my own assessment and I’m biased but the characters themselves are faced with dilemmas, situations that are universal that we all whether or not we believe in anything, whether or not we are African American or from any kind of ethnic or racial background, we can all relate to the situations that these characters find themselves in. I think there is an added layer of pleasure one can derive from being familiar with the specifics, but in terms of my own reading life, I don’t like it when authors take the time to go into detail. I just like it when an author can respect my intelligence enough to know that I will do the labor of going back. I basically was trying to write within that same frame of mind. Of respecting the smartest reader. 

I really don’t know how the book is being received because I haven’t had the pleasure of interacting with readers as much as I would like. I’ve also done very well avoiding online commentary because I’m very, very sensitive to reactions in that way. I am someone that brings reverence to the work and a reverence to the reader. If I feel like I have disappointed a reader, I take it very personally because again, I don’t do this work to flatter my sense of my intelligence. I know that I can deliver for a certain kind of reader. It feels like being a parent and having someone in your care tell you that you disappointed them or done something wrong: as the parent you feel an incredible burden. 

With making the National Book Awards short list, what has your own experience been seeing the book in the world over time?

I got home from the gym and I was sure to put my phone on ring—my phone is always on silent. So I get out of the shower and I’m not even dry yet. I’m like dripping. The phone is ringing. So I rush to put something around me. And it’s my editor and he’s like, “Girl, you got the long list,” and I scream. He told me in a later conversation, “You screamed like I killed your mother.” Okay, maybe I did. But the short list was more dramatic than that. I’m someone that has a hard time crying. Like crying is something I do very, very rarely. It may happen once or twice a year. But when I got the short list, I cried because like I was telling you all the memories of the trauma I had been through came back to me in that moment. And it was this amazing juxtaposition of being in a situation where you are made to feel one way and then this body of this very important organization telling you that in their assessment, you’ve written a very important and valuable book. The contrast of that I felt it so acutely I just cried, cried, cried. So it’s been a wonderful testament to the power of trying to navigate life’s difficulties leaning on beauty. We can go through trauma, but we can convert our trauma into good: We don’t have to pour our trauma back into the world. We can find a way of harnessing it, turning it into something beautiful. And watch how that beauty can just spread. So I’m very proud of myself in the way that I handled that situation and the confirmation from the National Book foundation just lets me know that I healed the right way.

When you started writing these stories did you always see them as a collection? 

I originally had this ambition when I first started teaching myself how to write. And I am a self-taught writer—I guess most people are and even if you have an MFA, you’re self-taught, right? But I started teaching myself how to write and at the time, being very new to writing I just didn’t feel capable of doing something epic. I thought let me try something petite. The model that I had of what I wanted to do was Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks, a novella that’s made up of 30-some odd vignettes of this woman, Maud Martha, her growing up in Chicago as a Black woman and all these domestic encounters she has. It’s such a beautiful book. And Gwendolyn Brooks is this masterful poet, she’s able to distill this woman’s life into these 300-word chapters; each chapter is like three to 500 words. And just so poetically done. I thought, Okay, I’m going to try to do that—something in the style of House on Mango Street, right? They’re very similar books. And then quickly realized that because a work of art is petite does not mean that it is easy. 

And so I realized, let me reformulate this. I’m already thinking separates, right? Then I encountered Edward P. Jones, and immediately fell in love with his writing. I had always been someone very compelled by the short story form. They are mathematical. They have to be efficient and they have to work. Whereas a lot of novels can be meandering and wasteful. I just feel like you can bring a kind of expectation to a short story, and you can derive a lot of nourishment from short stories, whereas novels can sort of leave you hanging. The novel in terms of form is always remaking itself. So I think novelists can get away with things that short story writers cannot get away with. I think there are more rules. There’s a lot of freedom that you can have in short story form. There are many schools of thought, but at the same time there are more structures. In a way I feel like the reader can bring a more robust critique to the short story and I just felt really up to the challenge of meeting the needs of a very sophisticated reader of short stories.

How did you choose to weave in levity—you captured the moments of humor despite weightier scenes and subjects.

I don’t know that it was deliberate except on this level. When I was conceptualizing the collection, by the time I knew that I had a collection on my hands—that was maybe five or six years ago—I felt like there are some themes of experience that are showing themselves in this body of work I’m building. But one of the things that was very important to me was the folksiness of it because I knew I was trying to make an aesthetic argument. Which was to say that these people belong, these characters belong to an American landscape in a way that’s not hyphenated. It’s just culturally distinct, but very American. And how do I make this seamless? How do I make this a convincing point? I thought it was just so important to show these people outside of crisis. Outside of an excess of moments where the politics are very obvious. How do we show them living their quotidian lives? But within this very serious historical context. As they pursue their lives and serious things unfold for them personally I just think it’s an aspect of reality, that we all balance those things: where there’s humor, but life is serious. 

But the important role, I think, that humor plays in the book, it’s just demonstrating that it wasn’t exclusively, this movement, is not exclusively about Black people being mad at the system, at white supremacy. It was about Black people trying to live. Trying to live! And that’s just a part of life. This is part of my personality: I’m not gonna put myself down but I am a very serious person interpersonally. I’m very, very serious. But humor, the only place where I’m really able to, where it really translates for me is on the page. And so to me it’s like this weird skill I have like, “How is it you’re so serious in real life but on the page you have this capacity to be funny?” 

If I could choose a career I would probably want to be a stand-up comedian but I will never be that so I write funny things sometimes. 

There was also the recurring image of fleeing.

That is the central point of the book. Basically, what I’m trying to convey with this book, and it’s an observation I think can be made about many religious experiences. A lot of people arrive in a religion and they’re very happy there, but oftentimes people, especially when we’re looking at the generational scale, are moving through religion. They’re moving through these traditions. In my life, growing up my family always put it to me that Allah has given us the opportunity to return to our original religion. The math I think is something like 30% of Africans who were brought to North America were Muslim became Christianized. And, much later in the 20th century, we are able to find our path back to Islam, a pathway back to the religion that our ancestors practiced. Now that I know a little bit more of history and the way that Islam arrived in West Africa: It’s a curious claim to me. It's a little strange. Obviously, we have Islam in Africa during the lifetime of Muhammad, but Islam does not become a popular religion in West Africa until centuries later. 

But also, it just didn’t make sense to me that this is a return. It seemed to me that Islam in the African American experience really is one point on a longer trajectory of African American engagement with these grand ontological questions. And so at various points in history, we’ve found different ways of articulating our condition, our ontological assessment. And Islam is not satisfactory to everybody. I mean, a lot of my peers, the kids I grew up with, we’re in our 40s now and Islam is somewhere deep here in our hearts, but visibly you would never know. They no longer cover. Our politics are more progressive than the kinds of things that we were taught to believe in our masjid. In many ways, I would still consider myself to be Muslim in terms of a faith orientation, but in many other ways I’m not really there in a standard sense. The politics around gender, the politics around sexuality—I don’t see myself reflected in those spaces. That’s part of why I felt it was so important to indicate movement in the stories, because again, we as a culture, we’re really moving through the tradition.

“New Mexico” features an interesting figure, the Swan. I’m wondering what was the draw to include that kind of presence within the larger collection?

I wanted to tell a story where we could see the con playing out. How these movements really give cover to shucksters. They allow these duplicitous people to hide in plain sight. So you get her in Chicago, and she would be the typical presenting Nation woman. But you find her in a faraway place like New Mexico, where she’s far away from the gaze of the average parishioner, and she can be her own fantasy. She can be who she really wants to be. And so in a way she’s still coveting a kind of power, but she’s bending to the very notion she claims to be fighting against in those Nation spaces. I just thought it would be a unique angle to look at the duplicitousness of the leaders of these kinds of organizations. 

I like the atmosphere of that story. I think it’s a story that for some readers would translate better visually. 

What was it like meeting the characters of “Due North” and working through the narrative? It was the longest of the bunch.

I think it’s technically novella length. That’s a really big math problem, that story. It’s doing so much. In terms of Taqwa’s dilemma—provided you being yourself is not something that will bring harm to other people—it’s a shame when we go through life and fail to become ourselves. You can follow a dogma so closely you fail to become yourself and to me that is one of the biggest tragedies that can happen. And that’s her dilemma. The moment with the father walking away—I love that moment. Him being an Imam he could not be the father she needed in life because he has this ideological read of what it means to be who she is. But in death, he could be the father that she needed. 

She’s assuming that nobody knows, nobody can tell. And because of her own practice, she is so intoxicated with this ecstasy of religious practice that she doesn’t have to focus on her own interests, the way her affections are set up with other human beings. Also, thinking about the readership, it would be a way of introducing this topic to a Muslim audience that wouldn’t be terribly jarring. I don’t want to alienate readers. But at the same time, I want to challenge people. There are a lot of queer Muslims and we need to have a conversation about how uncomfortable people feel being themselves in our spaces. I love her story. She’s lost her parents, but she’s gaining her brother, and she’s gaining the opportunity to look forward in her own life to maybe having love one day. So I thought, why not end on a happy note.