“To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.” — Martin Amis

IF bad times indeed produce good books, it’s no surprise that literature from Pakistan looks to be in better shape by the day.

It’s also attracted quite a crowd, including some who seem less interested in the individual books than in the phenomenon of ‘new Pakistani writing’ — as if we’re witnessing the birth of a new species — and are only as a result devoting attention to the people involved in its delivery, rather than the other way around.

The first reaction, when asked about how it feels to be a part of this ‘boom’, is to downplay it, or distance oneself from it, because there is a hint of insult in the suggestion that one is part of a phenomenon. It seems to suggest that you owe your success as much to a historical moment as to individual talent.

But there may be some truth to this. Pakistan is a hot story, after all. But if the immediate questions are about how this ‘boom’ relates to the times, a more important concern is whether the books written from and about the Pakistani experience will still be of interest when Pakistan is no longer daily news. This, I believe, is the challenge Pakistani writers will have to rise to.

So my main sentiment now is curiosity: where do we go from here? What kind of books are we likely to see? Will there be great books of protest and moral outrage like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple? Or even, given the circumstances, a big war novel like Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five or A Farewell to Arms?

Will there be attempts at the Great Pakistani Novel in the way that there have been stabs at the Great American Novel and even the Great Indian Novel?

By this I mean a single novel that shows Pakistan to itself, unflinchingly, in the way that Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March or Don Dellilo’s Underworld attempted to show America to itself, in the way that The Tin Drum did with Germany and Midnight’s Children and A Fine Balance did with India.

There needn’t be any of these. A great Pakistani novel doesn’t have to be The Great Pakistani Novel. But the mere possibility of the question is exciting enough. The joy of a robust literary life, and a robust national literature, is that it builds a vocabulary and body of knowledge that honours the ambiguities of life, language, human relations, motives.

And indeed, the greatest joy of having written a novel is hearing readers argue not about whether they liked or disliked it, but about whether the protagonist is likeable or a monster, whether it’s the men or the women who are the more commanding in the novel’s power dynamics, whether when a particular character said X he actually meant Y.

I am, of course, confining my discussion to Pakistani English-language literature. But that’s no small thing, because even within this tiny universe, there is much scope for regeneration — and much need for it, too. Despite all the discussion about the elitism of our English-speaking class, it’s not as if English here is in the best health.

Dictatorship and bureaucracy, including the international bureaucracies operating in Pakistan, have, among other things, chained the English-speaking tongue.

Perhaps my feelings are especially strong because I live in Islamabad, the bureaucratic centre, where terms like ‘ground realities’, ‘good governance‘ and ‘conditionalities‘ and arguments over whether a particular conflict is an ‘issue’ or a ‘dispute’, or whether a particular ill exists at the ‘society level’ or the ‘official level’, have put the vernacular in a state of disrepair.

Like all official languages, ours makes a false claim to certainty, seeking to frame or shape the ‘reality’ of Pakistan.

A healthy literary life will peel away these layers of dead language — or, to use yet another metaphor, make us spit out the official marbles in our mouths so we can speak and think a little clearer and reach for flexibility rather than certainty.

We shouldn’t expect, or want, a national literature to congeal around any lucid sense of national identity. What it can provide, however, are the tools for a more versatile way of examining Pakistan and the Pakistani experience.

A robust national literature will also expand the writer’s authority in Pakistan. How writers exercise that authority will be critical. As we’re often reminded, we face severe limitations on freedom of expression. But this is not tsarist or Soviet Russia or post-1968 Czechoslovakia, where writers were broadly deemed enemies of the state. If there is to be any restraint or censorship, it’s more likely to be self-restraint and self-censorship.

It used to be said that after the publication of Midnight’s Children in 1981, South Asian writers wrote in Salman Rushdie’s shadow. We’re now probably past that point: both stylistically and thematically, the latest work coming out of the Pakistani experience just as often reflects Manto, Faiz, Chughtai and Sidhwa, among others.

But we may well be writing in the shadow of the Rushdie Affair, where to avoid the writer’s fate, all too well known — not to mention the deaths and near-deaths of others involved in the publication of The Satanic Verses — we consider some things too holy or sensitive to explore, question and experiment with.

That would be the death of our literature.

The writer’s first novel, Invitation, was published in India last month.?