An Afternoon at the Asia House: Part II
Four simple chairs draw closer in a semi-circle on the dais and bodies seat themselves. The lead speaker, a patron of the Cultural Committee, focuses on Asia House's achievements, and gives special thanks to the United States Embassy for bringing Daniyal Mueenuddin to the UK. I wonder if Daniyal had been CIA-rendered, kidnapped, locked and unfed, inside a CIA-C-40 container to the UK! The US Embassy website exudes teen gush: "Sometimes this job totally rocks. This week we've taken Daniyal Mueenuddin from his day job..." After a short introduction Tahmima Anam (her A Golden Age won the 2008 Commonwealth Overall Best First Book Award) is handed the mike. Daniyal, shod in trainers and shirttails hanging out of his jeans, reflects hard work, mixed heritage, and the slightly ginger-colored hair of rural Pakistan. He appears to be the Irish of Punjab, expressing himself clearly in an either/or manner ("I like to do this" or "I do not believe in this"). Small gestures had large meanings - one sees why the short stories are brilliantly strung together in his In Other Rooms, Other Worlds. Kamila Shamsie, seated between the two men, wears a dark Pakistani dress with a wide band of flowers at the neck contrasting with her fair looks. Cool, confident, the epitome of the South Asian convent-educated girl gifted with exceptional literary genes - her mother, Muneeza Shamsie, published the pioneering anthology of Pakistani English writing A Dragonfly in the Sun, while a great-aunt, Attia Hussain, penned Sunlight on a Broken Column in the 1930s. Kamila is supremely articulate, each reply honed to razor sharpness. Her novelistic ambit has expanded with each book: From the local (Karachi, in The City by the Sea, Kartography) to national (India, Pakistan and the Partition, Salt and Saffron), to the universal (Burnt Shadows starts with Nagasaki and ends at Guantanamo). Nadeem Aslam is a humble, accommodating, engaging, self-absorbed and self-deprecating persona, mixing patience, persistence and a certain poetic stubbornness. To explore was the thing. Being wrong and being right could co-exist as long as art was the final judge. He searches for precise words (his book Maps for Lost Lovers took 11 years to write, as he rigorously revised every line, taking five years or so to get the opening chapter right - out of the first 70 pages he wrote he retained only one sentence in the final book). The questions, gently started by Tahmima, begin routinely enough, and then continue on to the "What do you think of the crisis in Pakistan?" The common reply goes something like, "Yes, there is a crisis, there is corruption but the people are trying hard and we feel hopeful." Similarly, on questions of the country's image, the collective response is, "Where does the image come from? It comes from the Western media, while the same media carries reports that most people think America has the worst terrorism record and yet they like to think that Pakistan's condition is worse." Kamila is the most strident and the least apologetic - like sunshine in England, apology is a word that would rarely cross her mind. To me it seems as if they're ducking the issue: Pakistan's intelligence services have the dubious distinction of having never solved a single act of terrorism, from the assassination of Benazir to the Lahore attack on Sri Lanka cricketers (over 400 incidents in the past three years, according to agency reports - all unsolved!) So, why do they write in English? To Nadeem it is "the water of the pool that I swim in." To Daniyal it is the language he has studied in, is comfortable in. For Kamila it is a complex inheritance, to be claimed in reverse by Pakistanis like her. Issues of Urdu translations come up, with all having failed to find good translators - except for Nadeem, whose father is undertaking the effort ("Will he do mine?" is asked by the others). Thus their books and voices remain within the world of their choice, but not of their upbringing. 9/11 is central to their work, especially that of Nadeem and Kamila. Their books have been inspired by the tragedy, and characters and events in their books are transformed into a pre- and post-September 2001 setting. Pakistan and Afghanistan, if not the Muslim world, has been irremediably altered and the writers have responded. Nadeem's novel The Wasted Vigil is set in Afghanistan, a country whose agonies seem endlessly repeated. Kamila's Burnt Shadows is a political thriller that moves from the bombing of Nagasaki in 1945 to the 2001 World Trade Centre attacks. "The book would be an allegory in some way," she says. More questions are asked, but nothing that the trio have not faced before. A question not asked - either by the audience or by Tahmima Anam - is about 1971, when the Pakistan regime unleashed a most brutal genocide upon its own citizens under the garb of protecting the country's unity. The brutal assault tore apart the country. And yet, such a tumultuous and tragic national trauma has never been adequately explored or treated by its literati. In fact, that same behaviour, i.e., military rule, contempt for civilian government, religious fronts, and a perpetual belligerence, continues to this day. While 9/11 inspires spirited artistic responses, why has their own national crime and a greater tragedy been not truly addressed by Pakistan's best and the brightest, like the ones seated before me, is a question that remains. Shouldn't they be taking a hard look at their own national crimes rather then only swim in the misdeeds of others? The allotted time is strictly followed; the crowd mills around for the wine. I pick up Nadeem's book and he autographs it - 'Love and Solidarity,' he writes. Yes, of course, but as I step out of the Asia House I feel I had expected more, a little more.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments