In her foreword to Mushtaq Bilal’s anthology of interviews with contemporary authors, Professor Susheila Nasta suggests that the fiction written in English by some of Pakistan’s most distinguished names, of whom several remain resident in Pakistan while others have moved abroad, is united by a shared desire to sustain imaginative connection with their home country: “Coupled with a desire to attract an informed readership, an audience driven not by the desire to gain a close and ‘authentic’ glimpse of the post-9/11 Pakistan, but rather, one keen to engage with the diverse fictions of a heterogeneous nation, a world derived from the confluence of a series of cultural, political and religious histories”.

It is to such a readership — which comprises readers both lay and academic; native, foreign and diasporic; and located not only within Pakistan, but also in countries less familiar with its idiosyncrasies such as India, Britain and the US — that Writing Pakistan: Conversations on Identity, Nationhood and Fiction is surely addressed. At a time when, in Bilal’s own estimation, audiences in Pakistan (and beyond) can “tend to assume that Pakistani writers producing English fiction consciously address and/or appease the West in their works and contribute to stereotypical representations”, he sets out to probe what 10 authors have to say about how concerns about representation and cultural translation, postcoloniality and global politics shape the Anglophone literature they create.

Mushtaq Bilal interviews contemporary authors writing in English, probing how their identities as Pakistanis inform the perspectives expressed in their fiction

Bilal, who describes himself as “a student of contemporary literature”, makes a point of noting one particular scholarly precedent before asserting the precedence of his own volume (the first anthology to be published of interviews with Pakistani writers writing in English). He describes British academic Claire Chambers’s book, British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, which contained conversations with three of the authors whom Bilal also interviewed (Aamer Hussein, Kamila Shamsie and Mohsin Hamid), as a contribution to “the same kind of debates carried out under the rubric of postcolonial studies”. However, whereas Chambers’s concern, as Bilal understood it, was to investigate “the sociological relationship between literature and religion”, his own interest, as he asserts, was “in exploring the political undertakings of a particular body of literature” informed by its authors’ identities as citizens of a postcolonial nation state rather than as members of a diasporic Muslim minority.

However, what is striking about the “semi-structured” interviews included in Writing Pakistan, as opposed to those in British Muslim Fictions, is Bilal’s persistence with certain lines of questioning across the interviews he conducted with Bapsi Sidhwa, Musharraf Ali Farooqi, Mohammed Hanif, Uzma Aslam Khan, Bina Shah, Bilal Tanweer and Shehryar Fazli, as well as Hussein, Hamid and Shamsie, authors of diverse interests whose works have been published in several languages and across several decades from the late 1970s onwards. The discussions in Chambers’s volume, primarily focused, in her words, on “the writers’ work, their literary techniques and intertexts”, trespassed gracefully on more potentially contentious concerns leading to eloquent and thoughtful elaborations relating, for example, to “media/literary representations of Muslims” in the context of debates which recur in British multicultural and global Islamophobic contexts.

“When I am writing I don’t really have an agenda. I am not trying to prove anything. I am not trying to create characters in a certain way. I am just trying to feel the story … I am interested in a narrative that is old and in people who have been living on this land peacefully for centuries, and how their life has been threatened by nationalist sentiments … I think there is a part of me that has always felt that I need to question what we are doing here and what our being here has done to those who were here before us, and we need to be more empathetic to their stories and understand that Pakistan didn’t begin with us.” — Uzma Aslam Khan -Excerpt from the book

Bilal’s pre-prepared interview questions are not so rigid as to restrict conversations to generic question-and-answer sessions, and the writers interviewed are constructive enough to sustain, rather than to close down, the discussions he initiated. Yet enquiries which relate to how the writers’ identities as Pakistanis inform the perspectives expressed in their fiction, press authors for their opinions on postcolonial academics’ categories and labels, and query where they stand in relation to a perceived demand to “answer back” to a (neo)imperial West, seem somewhat crude by comparison.

Tensions between interviewer and interviewee, and a sense of intellectual jarring and mismatch between academic and artistic registers, are a significant feature throughout the volume, even as Bilal seeks to tease out how contemporary writers may complicate stereotypical perspectives of Pakistan and address other interlocutors and subjects, including the Pakistani “state, religious institutions and civil society”. A bemused Aslam Khan responds to the question, “To what extent do you think the binary of nationalism/anti-nationalism co-opted by US imperialism is valid in [the] Pakistani cultural context”, for example, with the answer “That didn’t make any sense to me … I don’t think like this … with ‘isms’”.

“I acknowledge that there are more taboos here than there are in other countries where this book has been read. Were I to think of that as an occasion to self-censor, I would then start wondering why I am dealing with literature in the first place, why I am trying to write literature. I think that some of the best literature and some of the best literary periods have been when it has been a dangerous thing, when it has taken on taboos. I like to think of it always as a rebellious act, as the exact opposite of officialdom or of the official narrative or an alternative to that. That is why I think a healthy artistic life for Pakistan is, as it is for any country, a good thing exactly because it gives you alternative ways of interpreting events. Were we to stick to the one narrow concept of what is going on in this country, I think you would have a dead intellectual life. If novelists are to self-censor or if they are to think that they want to take on a subject but they better not because we are not ready to discuss it, I think that would mark the death of literature.”— Shehryar Fazli -Excerpt from the book

This closes down a discussion about her interest in exploring narratives of indigeneity and relationships to land and place which far predate Partition through her sensitive, impassioned fiction — a discussion pertinent to Bilal’s concerns about how contemporary fiction may “write” Pakistan as a nation. Other authors find Bilal’s lines of enquiry reductive: Shah would “prefer to drop the label ‘Pakistani woman writer’ because that implies [her] nationality and [her] gender impose a silence on me”, which she does not recognise; Shamsie sees the same tag as a restriction on her ability to speak as anything additional or other — ‘writer’ or ‘Londoner’, for instance.

The most productive of the exchanges contained in Writing Pakistan are those conducted with writers who are prepared seriously to entertain Bilal’s at times awkwardly posed politicised questions, not just to find ways “to circumnavigat[e] them” — as Nasta shrewdly observes that they do — “drawing attention instead to the personal, autobiographical and literary forces driving their work”. Writer, critic and teacher Hussein’s delicately poised, musing, expansive responses, which place Bilal’s questions into a wide variety of literary-historical, postcolonial and theoretical perspectives, perhaps best illustrate the ways in which such conversations with writers can lead to more nuanced understandings of the desires, dreams, principles and intentions which inform what they write, and offer correctives to assumptions which may limit this literature’s interpretation.

Asked about writers’ responsibility to represent countries such as Pakistan “holistically” to Western audiences, Hussein answered: “I am worried about answering questions. I would like to pose questions and push people into a place where they have to identify or recognise things in spite of themselves. Not just: Aah! This is what I wanted to know; O! Human beings are all the same. What is this sameness? Why do we assume that the experiences of a particular upper class which can speak English and possibly other languages are representative … If something appears to you in a particular way and you can write it very well and you feel it is valid, it will have a strength of its own and I think we should read a text that way … By the way, while words like ‘responsibility’ sound an ominous knell, I love ‘resistance’.”

The picture that ultimately emerges from Bilal’s anthology is of a writing shaped by authorial concerns and judgements which may be ethical and political, but are also personal and aesthetic; by senses of identity not solely informed by (post)colonial, national, and neo-imperial histories of struggle and conflict, but also by connections with “something which comes from elsewhere” (in Hussein’s words); and by a wealth of private preoccupations, not just external demands or pressures. The result is an Anglophone Pakistani fiction open to the unfolding of readers interested in understanding how its individual aspects may or may not combine to present alternative images of Pakistan as a nation, but reluctant to yield to those who approach it with a desire to prove certain theories or pursue particular cultural agendas.

The reviewer is a lecturer at Teesside University, UK. Her monograph, Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective: Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam, Shamsie, was published by Palgrave in 2016.

Writing Pakistan: Conversations on Identity, Nationhood and Fiction
(LITERATURE)
By Mushtaq Bilal
HarperCollins, India
ISBN: 978-9352640140
252pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 30th, 2016