Appraisal
Pakistan's writers: living in a minefield
Lyric poetry has long been the most popular literary form in South Asia and the Middle East; poets rather than novelists became the unacknowledged legislators of the new nations that emerged after the breakup of European empires in the mid-20th century.
As late as the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of people would attend mushairas, public recitals of Urdu poetry, in North Indian towns. At my provincial university, I knew many connoisseurs of literature who rarely read novels but knew by heart the poems (in Hindi or Urdu translation) of Pablo Neruda, Nazim Hikmet, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
The most famous member of this socialist Literary International was Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose centenary falls this year. Faiz's more romantic Urdu poems were set to music by some of South Asia's most gifted classical singers. It didn't bother his Indian admirers that he was a citizen of Pakistan, with which India had fought three wars since 1947.
Faiz, a journalist and newspaper editor as well as poet, had emerged from the cosmopolitan 1930s of undivided India the time when many writers vigorously campaigned for freedom from colonial rule even as they embraced the modern literary forms of Europe. In the 1980s, Faiz's elegiac cadences recalled the idealism once shared by people on both sides of the border between India and Pakistan.
Shortly before unfurling the Indian flag on August 15, 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, spoke grandiloquently of India awakening, "when the world sleeps," to "life and freedom" and moving to its "tryst with destiny." These were hollow words to the partition's many victims. Faiz expressed a widespread bewilderment and outrage over the official mood of celebration.
Faiz never found the promised dawn. Pakistan's founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, died before he could build a civilian and secular democracy in what had been India's most feudal regions. Faiz's advocacy of a socialist society exposed him to the malevolence of both secular feudal and military elites and religious fundamentalists. Imprisoned in the 1950s for allegedly conspiring against the state, Faiz, like many Pakistani writers, chose exile when General Zia-ul-Haq staged a coup in 1977 and began to speedily "Islamize" Pakistan an effort aided both by Saudi Arabian Wahhabis and by the CIA after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Perennially embattled against his country's self-serving political and landowning classes, Islamic fundamentalists, and military despots, Faiz died in 1984. Six decades later, Faiz's promised dawn is still elusive. Pakistan remains an unrealized ideal in the works of its most contemporary generation of international writers in English an incoherent nation rife with the oppressions of class, religion, and gender, and full, too, of shameful silences.
Pakistani writers in English now drawn more to fiction than to lyric poetry assume the burden of representing their country to the world at a very difficult time in its history. As a fickle ally in the "war on terror," and apparently holding the key to Western security and dignity in Afghanistan, Pakistan has seemed ominously inscrutable since September 11, 2001; and many Pakistani fiction writers in English now find themselves catapulted into the noisy confluence of geopolitics and literature.
Short-listed for the Man Booker and Dublin's Impac prizes, Mohsin Hamid's second novel, "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," which describes the political radicalization of a Princeton-educated Pakistani, is an international best seller. The three novels of Pakistan-born Nadeem Aslam, whom Colm ToibÃn and A.S. Byatt praise as one of Britain's finest writers, seem to trace an ever-expanding arc of extremism from small-town Pakistan to the metropolitan West. Mohammed Hanif's first novel, "A Case of Exploding Mangoes," revolves around the mysterious death in 1988 of Zia-ul-Haq and the American ambassador to Pakistan in a plane crash.
Daniyal Mueenuddin's short fiction In "Other Rooms, Other Wonders," describing a harsh rural world in which the powerful relentlessly prey upon the weak, has been widely praised as giving a telling picture of Pakistan, not least by the late Richard Holbrooke, who recommended it to Barack Obama. The fall 2010 issue of Granta, devoted entirely to Pakistan, with articles on Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, and Jinnah as well as new Pakistani fiction, seemed to respond to the same nervous Western curiosity about the country's complexities.
Suddenly, Pakistani writers appear to be globally omnipresent, at book readings, conferences, literary festivals, and on Op-Ed pages where they frequently take on the delicate task of clarifying ideas and prejudices about Pakistan, Muslims, and the larger world of Islam to their British and American readers. But what is their position within Pakistan itself a country where very few people read fiction in English, and which, furthermore, is a place of unending mayhem and tragedy?
Mueenuddin lives part of the year on a mango farm in Southern Punjab, whose overwhelmingly poor and religious population is particularly vulnerable to fundamentalists vending instant social and economic justice.
Mueenuddin's American mother, a writer and journalist, had built the estate's main house in the 1960s, incorporating a gigantic rock into the living room; some of that decade's literary taste and intellectual curiosity seemed to have been embalmed in the dark wood-paneled library with books by Robert Lowell, C. Wright Mills, John K. Galbraith, and Paul Goodman. From the house's verandah the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi on the plains seemed lost in mist. But Pakistan's ongoing ordeals were never far from our conversation. Mueenuddin said, "I have lost my confidence. I don't know what is going on around me, and I worry about the day when the Taliban will knock on my door."
Living in Lahore, Mohsin Hamid tries, as he wrote recently, "not to think too much about the snipers on the rooftops of primary schools and the steel barricades at their gates, telling myself my daughter still has some years left before she has to enroll."
"I am hoping," Mohammed Hanif told me in 2009, "the Taliban will take a long time to get to Karachi." Hanif laughed, but he was being quite serious. After a decade working for the BBC's Urdu service in London, he had moved back with his wife and 10-year-old son to Karachi in 2008. Recently in Swat he had visited the infamous town square, renamed locally as "Slaughterhouse Square," where the Taliban had hung blood-dripping bodies of their enemies. He told me he was finding it hard to work on his second novel in the midst of the general alarm. But Hanif is hardly alone in this regard. More than most postcolonial peoples, the lives of Pakistanis remain subject to external events: the cold war, and now the war on terror.
Remarking on this latest blowback from the war on terror, Nadeem Aslam told me of a recent and his first trip to Washington, D.C., which made him freshly marvel at how his biography and work had been affected by vast historical forces ranging across several continents. Like many Pakistanis educated in modern institutions, Aslam's father and uncles were left-wing secularists with aspirations to dismantle Pakistan's feudal hierarchies and build a welfare state. But their position, besieged at the best of times, quickly became untenable after Zia-ul-Haq, emboldened by American and Saudi support in the global jihad against Soviet communism, imposed a harsh regime of "Islamization." In 1981, after an uncle was tortured in prison, Aslam's father migrated with his family to Britain, part of the general exodus of Pakistan's small, progressive middle class.
Nadeem Aslam, who belongs, unusually for a South Asia writer in English, to his country's less affluent class, now lives in North England, an unexpected new epicenter of radical Islamism: young British Muslims of Pakistani parentage from the Yorkshire town of Dewsbury set off the bombs that killed more than fifty people in London in July 2005. Aslam was visiting Pakistan to research a trilogy of novels set against the country's recent traumas. One morning I traveled with him from Lahore to the neighborhood in the Punjab town of Gujranwala where he spent his first fourteen years.
On the way, Aslam told me about his old neighborhood mosque, whose rabble-rousing mullahs have sent scores of young men to jihad and martyrdom in Indian-held Kashmir and Afghanistan. He remembered how the local mullah during his childhood, whom he later put in his first novel, Season of the Rainbirds, used to confiscate and destroy children's toys, deeming them un-Islamic.
None of Pakistan's many traumas in the past military coups, ethnic unrest, genocide by Pakistani forces in East Pakistan followed by the secession of Bengali-speaking Muslims in 1971 left its writers unaffected. Aslam understandably resists the notion that the delicate art form of the novel cannot withstand and so should not even attempt to evoke the pressures of politics and ideology in contemporary life. This prejudice, he suggests, can only exist in powerful imperial societies that have been shielded from the harshest consequences of their political decisions. The cold war, he writes in "The Wasted Vigil," a novel set in war-torn Afghanistan, "was cold for only the rich and privileged places of the planet."
Actually, like their peers writing in Urdu, Pakistani writers in English take a much harsher view of corrupt Pakistani elites than of their cynical Western enablers. Set in Lahore's upper-middle-class milieu, Mohsin Hamid's first novel, "Moth Smoke," probed what Jhumpa Lahiri has described as "the vulgarity and violence that lurk beneath a surface of affluence and ease." And like writers in many other "failed" states, Pakistani novelists in English know, too, that human life goes on with its small joys and sorrows amid the severest political crises. Almost all of Kamila Shamsie's novels describe a Karachi that can be loved locally for its passion for cricket and conversation even if foreigners know the city mainly for its sectarian and religious violence.
Novels such as Mohammed Hanif's "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" continue a long literary tradition in South Asia of interrogating and mocking pious and sanctimonious figures. But writers in English today have bewilderingly mixed and often fiercely partisan global audiences. This exposes them, in these volatile times, to more than just some tendentious lit-crit in Pakistan.
Pakistani writers who live in the West, or have European or American nationality, may be seen there as Pakistani and Muslim (even when they follow no religion), with all the complex emotions of fear, rage, bewilderment, curiosity and sympathy that their country and religion provoke today. In Pakistan, however, they are likely to be identified with their country's Westernized upper-middle classes: an apparently atheistic and dissolute transnational minority that regards itself as above the faith and beliefs of ordinary people.
Shortly after I left Lahore, Nadeem Aslam wrote to say that while appearing before a literary-minded audience at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) he had been accused by a young woman, a doctoral student of literature, of vilifying Islam. According to her, Aslam had grossly misrepresented the Koran in "The Wasted Vigil" by quoting some of its verses about jihad out of context.
Her intervention caused a brief commotion. Aslam tried to explain that his book was a novel, and that the distorted view of Islam existed in the mind of one of his characters, a jihadi Afghan boy. His critic insisted on distributing a pamphlet that insinuated, among other things, that Aslam could not be trusted because he had accepted money from Britain's Royal Literary Fund.
A few days later Aslam's detractor published an article in The News, one of Pakistan's leading English-language dailies, describing the scene from her own perspective. "Discomfort," she claimed, "was writ large on the faces of much of the uber-liberal audience" as she sought to question Aslam about his depiction of the Koran. "Given," she added, "the way Muslims are perceived all over the world and how some Muslims perceive themselves, it is not fair of someone to perpetuate the stereotype in such an irresponsible manner."
Living in a fragile nation-state, Pakistani writers cannot avoid a fact that still only occasionally troubles practitioners of the novel in more secure and self-contained societies: that many private lives today are increasingly shaped by such global forces as religious extremism and political and economic upheavals. Under such stresses, the self becomes ever more ambiguous and unknowable an insight that renders the best of Pakistani writing in English more than just topical, and may help it last long after the geopolitical dramas of our time have been forgotten. (Abridged)
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