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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Review |
Naïfs at Home
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| A juicy spread in which reportage outclasses fiction |
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Published : 1 November 2010 |
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N CHOOSING WRITING from and about Pakistan as
its theme, the latest edition of the prestigious Granta
magazine encourages readers to look to the country for
more than violence, religious extremism and abject desolation.
It chooses to do this with a collection dominated by
pieces about violence, religious extremism and abject desolation.
That said, Granta |
112: Pakistan is a pleasantly juicy edition of a franchise that has given us, this year, an unfulfilling Work issue (Granta 109) and a distinctly flaccid Sex issue (Granta 110). Granta tends towards its best when casting its eye further afield; of the contemporary writing featured in Going Back Home (Granta 111), the strongest was perhaps Janine di Giovanni’s essay on returning to Bosnia.
Granta: Pakistan too owes much of its vigour to the selection
of non-fiction seen here. Guardian correspondent
Declan Walsh’s ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ leads him to
a grisly statistic—8,500 people lost to violent deaths in the
Northwest Frontier Province in the past year—a figure of
which he attempts to make some sense. In doing so, Walsh
provides a thoroughly lucid history of the Pakistani Taliban,
the oft demonised (and as oft romanticised) customs and
traditions of the Pashtuns, and the distinct differences between
the two, which are all too often presented as oh so
much mayhem by lesser journalists. Walsh’s ability to humanise
without sentimentalising comes not just from his
research, which is very much in evidence, but from his own
point of view, which is never lost nor diluted. It’s an interesting
voice, never detached, often slightly bewildered, like
a well-informed naïf abroad.
The truth is that many, many Pakistani writers writing in English are also naïfs abroad in their own country; only
since they cannot quite acknowledge this, their writing often
finds itself both stating the obvious and jumping to conclusions
with the misplaced authority provided by a sense of
cultural entitlement. The vastness of Walsh’s canvas means
that the piece does a great deal more than merely steer the
reader through a political imbroglio. This writing never
allows itself the lazy luxury of generalisation. Observing
social and sexual mores with lashings of humour and the
robust tone of a rollicking adventure novel, Walsh not only
gives you, in flesh and blood, the central player whom he
trails—Anwar Kamal, “lawyer and chieftain, landlord and
warlord,” Walsh’s idea of a Pakistani Flashman—but he also
hangs out getting drunk and stoned (and being hit on) by
Peshawar’s young urban professionals. The seeming paradoxes
in Pashtun society, be they between tradition and rebellion,
religiosity and hypocrisy or tribal law and central
governance, are made, if not less paradoxical, then at least
all too human.
In an entirely different tone from Walsh’s quippy, anecdotal
romp is author and journalist Basharat Peer’s heartbreaking
‘Kashmir’s Forever War.’ He employs a stark, spare
prose when describing the horror, which speaks for itself,
and a sort of romantic lyricism when describing the land; this combination of blank devastation and love is itself the
story of Kashmir that has yielded Yeats’ “terrible beauty.”
Ultimately, it is Peer’s remarkable restraint and his ability
to approach this most emotionally inflammatory issue with
a steady hand that makes him such a unique writer, and one
whose voice is so very essential. In aiming to calmly narrate
a story rather than setting out to rouse and provoke the
reader, he succeeds in doing both.
 |
Basharat Peer: the author who brought Kashmir to the West. |
Basharat Peer’s name pops up again further on, this time
as translator of what is easily the finest piece in this anthology,
‘The House by the Gallows,’ by veteran Urdu writer
Intizar Hussain. Writing about the onset of General Zia’s era,
it takes Hussain one four-page essay to say more or less everything
that needs to be said about the events that rerouted
Pakistan onto its current downward trajectory, a subject
entire novels and lengthy history tomes attempt to tackle
without coming close to Hussain’s simplicity and unruffled
elegance. “The madman stood with a razor on our necks,”
he writes. “Rumour had it that two lists were being made:
those who prayed regularly would be considered for promotions;
those who didn’t …” Along with the conspicuous piety,
the essay succinctly describes the suffocation of culture—
the tie that binds—with the arts, the performing arts in
particular, approaching a death that they are nowhere near
recovering from despite the recent laughable international
insistence on the alleged renaissance of Pakistani writing
based on works by a few members of the elite, read by a
few more members of the same. Hussain’s easy intimacy
with his subject and his medium shows up the yawning
chasm between writer and subject and the subsequent selfconsciousness
seen in far too much Pakistani writing of recent
years.
With a keen eye for absurdity—the only literary inheritor
of which, in Pakistani English writing, has hence far been
novelist and journalist Mohammed Hanif—Hussain writes
of the rabidly nationalistic paranoia which gripped the nation in the Zia days. This leads him to not, for example, be
able to refer to the Taj Mahal as a superlative example of
Islamic architecture due to its being located in India. When
all else fails, and here it does, there is nothing left to do but
laugh. Despite Zia’s death, he is unkillable and looms large
from beyond the grave. “The bureaucrats, who had been
raised under General Zia’s martial law, had become so sensitive
to any hint of offence or dissent that they outdid the
censors with their own self-censorship.” This might be the
saddest thing I have ever read in my life. All that we have
had taken away from us, and all that we have let slip through
our fingers, is here in black and white and it hurts in just
the way that utterly vital writing should. It is nothing short
of disgraceful that international column inches are devoted
solely to Pakistani writers who write in English, who have
been educated abroad and who are strangers to this country,
and not to Urdu grandmasters like Intizar Hussain,
who aren’t geared towards the international market.
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Kamila Shamshie: well regarded for her fiction, her essay on Pakistani pop music also reveals a talented essayist. |
Hari Kunzru’s essay ‘High Noon’ addresses the shockingly
commonplace form of racism which demands that nonwhite
writers and artists, in an age which is simultaneously
global and also, allegedly, celebratory of the value of the local,
discuss their cultural identity. (I distinctly recall Kiran
Desai being asked on BBC HardTalk, post her Booker-win,
what her novel tried to convey of her cultural identity.)
Wouldn’t it have been nice if all these years of post-colonial
theory courses had led to something a bit more far-reaching
than Golliwogs being expunged from Enid Blyton books? If you are not white, the expectation remains that you cannot
take your identity for granted. Only as a white artist are you
allowed the luxury of discussing your themes of interest but
outside of that Gentleman’s Club, it is obligatory to market
your cultural identity. It is the most polite way of saying,
“So, how do you cope with the insecurity of not being one
of us?” Unfortunately, the keen expectation of a continuous
internal struggle with one’s cultural identity has become a
self-fulfilling prophecy, in that once a market is created, it
takes enormous will to not wish to cash in on it.
And so hardly a year goes by without this hackneyed issue
rearing its non-white head in both fiction and non-fiction,
certainly in writing from Britain, to no doubt mollify the
British conscience whilst perpetuating just those stereotypes
that need so desperately to be abandoned. This year, it
is Tishani Doshi’s The Pleasure Seekers; a decade ago it was
Zadie Smith’s White Teeth—if you can spot a fundamental difference between the two, please write to this publication
asking for my phone number. The token victim of culture
clash in this issue of Granta is Sarfraz Manzoor, with his
essay bearing the culturally nuanced title, ‘White Girls.’ It
is a shameful testament to the insecurities of multicultural
Cool Britannia that 20 years after Hanif Kureishi hit the
nail on the head in The Buddha of Suburbia, discourse on
the integration of British Asians into mainstream British
society has regressed rather than progressed.
Other essays include Fatima Bhutto’s fairly prosaic account
of her trip to the Sufi shrine at Mangho Pir and Jane
Perlez’s thoroughly poised account of Mohammed Ali
Jinnah’s shifting identity, which is also the story of how
Pakistan has been anything but a case of ‘founders keepers.’
It is, mercifully, not another tiresome Jinnah piece about
how he became and remains one of the subcontinent’s most
contentious figures, though, naturally this cannot be avoided entirely. Nor is it merely about Jinnah’s own transition
from suits to sherwanis to reap the benefits of popularity
offered by flirting with religious factions, but more about
the different versions of Jinnah found in Pakistan today, in
portraiture, history texts and the popular imagination, and
how they serve as a reliable indicator of the country’s political
and moral mood. It makes the uncomfortable point that
the creator of Pakistan teeters on the brink of redundancy
for an increasingly large swath of the population in a way
that would be unimaginable of, say, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
and Turkey. Jinnah’s Pakistan was first hijacked by religion
until no need remained to hijack something you could simply
have outright instead. A militant maulana, asked for
his thoughts on the founder of the nation, baldly replies,
“God made Pakistan, not Jinnah.” While the essay is a brisk
read and fairly convincing overall, one can’t help but feel
that Perlez invests perhaps a little too much importance in
Jinnah as a symbol and that this work, in its weaker moments,
leans on the Chicken Little approach to journalism;
in spite of her restrained prose, she comes perilously close
to descending into needless hyperbole towards the end.
Kamila Shamsie’s insightful, personal and often hilarious
account of the genesis of Pakistani pop is, on the other
hand, outrageously good throughout. Though religion and
the capriciousness of the state make an appearance early
on, from among the assortment of non-fiction, this is the
closest this issue of Granta comes to a semblance of normalcy,
a piece which we are allowed to value not solely because
at some point al-Qaeda is going to get a shout out. Though
well-regarded for her fiction, this nostalgia-inducing tour
de force tracing societal trends through the rise, the fall
and on occasion, the mutation of Pakistani pop stars might
be Shamsie’s most nimble prose yet and I, for one, hope to
see plenty more from her in terms of essay-writing.
Breaking this up is the Pakistani visual art featured in
this issue, showcasing an artform more evolved, more varied,
more experimental and frankly more impressive than
the limited scope of current Pakistani English writing. All
of which raises the question of what exactly possessed
Granta, given the sophistication and range of contemporary
Pakistani art on hand and Granta’s established knack
for choosing interesting visuals, to choose truck art for
the cover. While the execution is perfectly competent, as a
concept it’s so utterly passé, so depressingly out of step and
so deeply dull that it doesn’t even hold much novelty value
abroad any longer, having dutifully been trotted out for exhibitions
around the world for several years now. That the
folks at Granta felt that Pakistan as a country had to be sold
to a larger public on the basis of being quaintly backward,
simple and strange was a peculiar misstep. Is one to now
expect a Granta: Australia edition with a kangaroo and a
didgeridoo on the cover?
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(From left) Mohsin Hamid, Daniyal Mueenuddin and Mohammed Hanif have caused much excitement in global literary circles. |
While it is fiction that has been the focus of much of the
hype surrounding Pakistani culture in recent years, which
has led, in turn, to this collection, the fiction presented
here is uneven and by and large can’t hold a candle to the
reportage. This is not to say it’s not without its merits.
Mohammed Hanif’s ‘Butt & Bhatti,’ for example, features many examples of Hanif’s trademark wit—often with dashes
of ribaldry. An amusing and strangely touching tale of
love and heavy artillery in modern-day Karachi, extracted
from his forthcoming novel, its greatest flaw lies in hurtling
towards an ending which reads more like journalism than
fiction. ‘B&B’ is a fine Cabernet poured and drunk in great
haste, which will hopefully receive more room to breathe
in its final, longer form.
Mohsin Hamid’s very short short story, ‘The Beheading,’
is a taut, tense work of psychological horror written in his
clean, spare prose that I have always delighted in. Hamid’s
prose is trailblazing when it comes to the genesis of modern
English writing from Pakistan. Other than its stark narrative
skill, it provides such a pleasant antidote to the wordy,
purple lyricism that writers from this part of the world are
oddly keen on. That the content is blazingly sensationalist
is unfortunate. While I vehemently disapprove of the idea
of art as public relations, the shock value, in this case, overshadows
the skill of the writing itself. It is perhaps more
the fault of the reader than the writer that had Hamid’s
tale of terror been set anywhere else in the world, it would
be given more credence as fiction, whereas from Pakistan,
given all the prejudices at play, it will simply be received as
reaffirmation, with all notions of artistry forgotten.
A newcomer to fiction at the age of 79, Jamil Ahmad’s
‘The Sins of the Mother’ is an extract from a novel to be published next year; it too deals with content that one would
expect to see from this part of the world—warring tribal
factions and honour killing—though it is perhaps the first
widely published work about Baluchistan. Ahmad handles
it with such unusual sensitivity that even with its imperfections,
the piece retains a haunting and surprising beauty. It
is the finest piece of fiction published in this collection, and
from an author discovered through a local short story competition.
Nadeem Aslam’s ‘Leila in the Wilderness’ is the
longest piece in the collection but not quite long enough to
fulfil Aslam’s ambitions. In his attempts at spanning folklore,
magic realism, terrorism, the rights of women and the
flagrant and commonplace exploitation of Islam, the end
result is the servant with too many masters. Sadly, lacking
restraint in both content and language, it is gaudily overwritten
to boot.
Daniyal Mueenuddin’s contribution is his first published
poem. ‘Trying Tripe’ is sexy and elegant, and like the short
story collection which catapulted him to fame, it is a pleasure
to read a piece of Pakistani writing not hinged on terrorism,
violence, disaster or imminent catastrophe. Whether
the pieces selected by Granta: Pakistan reflect the desire of
the Pakistani writer to willingly heave about the burden of
representation or Granta’s deliberate marginalisation of a
life more ordinary than it hoped to find in this country is
anyone’s guess.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Tara G
22 November 2010
03:48 PM
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A very fine review, from a reliably excellent author. Just one quibble, I would really like her phone number as I do think there is a big fat world of a difference between The Pleasure Seekers and White Teeth. Bad call, Ms Khan!
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Enjum Hamid
2 November 2010
09:55 AM
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This is such a superb, sophisticated review that it merits a place by itself in something similar to Granta's Pakistan issue as a piece of outstanding Pakistani prose in English.
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AS
30 October 2010
07:34 PM
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Well-paced, illuminating, opinionated - everything a good review should be.
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