Narrating Pakistan: An Anthology of Contemporary Creative Writing
Edited by Saeed Ur Rehman and Khadeeja Farooqui
ILQA Publications
ISBN: 978-969-640-275-6
247pp.

It is always promising when the preface of a book has the level of readability most writers would reserve for the actual content.

In their conversation disguised as a foreword, Saeed Ur Rehman and Khadeeja Farooqui, editors of Narrating Pakistan: An Anthology of Contemporary Creative Writing, generously invite readers to join their discussion on everything — from why they decided to create such a book, to Cyril Radcliffe’s fear of 80 million people hunting him down to exact vengeance, to whether their book can “be taught to a class of graduating seniors?”

Interspersing the duo’s reminiscences on how reality bit their grand initial ambitions are observations and opinions on language, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the human psyche, deriving “a strangely perverse pleasure” from rebelling against Western literary impositions, and why writers like to slap on the adjective ‘American’ to the titles of their books.

Rehman and Farooqui let us know that they did not choose any one specific theme for the anthology, because their intent was to “showcase those who write stories about Pakistan or from a Pakistani perspective.” In response to their call for submissions, they received “entries that pulled that title apart in all directions.”

Rehman and Farooqui let us know that they did not choose any one specific theme for the anthology, because their intent was to “showcase those who write stories about Pakistan or from a Pakistani perspective.”

And how! There’s much to unpack in the diversity of subjects tackled by the book’s 19 contributors but, at its heart, Narrating Pakistan is a compendium of the Pakistani experience as expressed through a multitude of avatars, both fictional and non-fictional.

One of these avatars takes the form of the 12-year-old protagonist of Aatif Rashid’s ‘Brown Mirror’. He is shaken by the appearance of a moustache above his lip and is terrorised by a classmate who hates and apes black people with an equal fervour.

Another avatar is the quartet of office drones in Hananah Zaheer’s ‘Fish Tank’. Agitated by their new superior — younger than them, richer than them, female — and unable to articulate their anxiety, they end up directing their frustration at the oblivious inhabitants of a small aquarium, newly installed in the Metro and Waterways Department, Lahore.

In one instance, the narrative reins are handed over to a white foreigner skulking around Lahore, admiring stray dogs and celebrating Christmas in the company of cheerful bootleggers and their smiling sisters. In many more instances, the story is appropriated by desis living in foreign lands.

At its heart, an anthology of creative writing from Pakistan is a compendium of the Pakistani experience, as expressed through a multitude of both fictional and non-fictional avatars

This is actually quite a popular subject in Narrating Pakistan. Wandering the streets of Germany, Australia or, more commonly, America, the narrators muse over home, yet are loath to return, because home offers nothing. The alien land doesn’t appear to offer much either, but the foreign nothingness is somehow better.

Although the editors have done their best to make the book as multifaceted as possible, it must be said that there is a rather tiresome amount of angst in it. A couple of chapters stand out for their insufferable levels of self-absorbed brooding, and this usually happens because writers who like to be seen as dark and disturbed often cannot draw the line between sensitive rumination and just plain narcissism, while readers, for some unfathomable reason, kowtow to the pretentiousness and consequently encourage more of the same.

At such points, I would flip over to Dur e Aziz Amna’s ‘Your Tongue is Still Yours’ — about her efforts to remain in touch with Urdu — and revel in the moment when a level-headed hero comes along, in the shape of her father. Amna asks what he thinks of a film that made her feel quite emotional. “Pathetic,” he replies, and I like to imagine he utters this with substantial force. “What is this angst about home? If you miss home, visit home.”

I will say it again: you, sir, with your zero-tolerance approach to wallowing in overblown angst, are my hero.

Now, this issue might be because of the common, misplaced belief that, if writing isn’t serious, it isn’t serious writing but, sadly, there is nothing in Narrating Pakistan to balance out the angst. Khadeeja Farooqui’s ‘Coughing Up Glass’, about navigating the Covid lockdown Pakistani-style, elicits some wry smiles and Amna Chaudhry’s ‘Cheap Cheap Gaanay [Songs]’, about her mother’s love of, well, cheap songs, is a joyously written exposition on why people are troubled by girls who just wanna have fun, but that’s about it.

The one story that had me thoroughly captivated was Usama Lali’s first person ‘Khicheenk!’, which opens with the most arresting sentence in the whole book. Titled for the sound made by a gate swinging shut and revolving around his parents who come from two different generations and bring two very disparate life experiences to the table, it is a tender story about love and compassion, lost dreams and unsure hopes, constancy and change. It is real and relatable, sweetly amusing and heartbreakingly sad and it is simply beautifully written. The editors could not have chosen a better way to bring the curtain down on their book.

Except they don’t. After the outpourings of human beings who rage and dream and make old grannies cry at the airport because some careless government clerk misspelt their name, Narrating Pakistan ends with ‘Narrating the Cities of Pakistan’, authored by that artificial entity that threw the world into panic for a few minutes last year: ChatGPT.

I have strong — and deeply unpleasant — sentiments about this particular chapter that tries very hard to wax poetic about Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar and Multan, and fails spectacularly.

One of my pet peeves as a reader is unnecessary melodrama around geography and ChatGPT spits out reams of it that read like a mildewed cliché. Karachi is “an ode to futility.” In Lahore, “Time stands still, and yet it marches on, like an old man pacing in circles, never quite reaching his destination.” In Pakistan’s “bleak landscape” the cities are a “reflection of the absurdity that pervades the human experience.”

What is this drivel?

The wise advice is that, if one has nothing good to say, one should not say anything at all. I will ignore this wisdom for now because, while it is correct that artificial intelligence does not create, it only curates, it also has the ability to arrange words and phrases into millions of configurations. With so much power at its disposal, this is what it came up with?

To quote Dur e Aziz Amna’s father, “Pathetic”.

But I’m glad Farooqui and Rehman included the contribution because, while there may not have been much in Narrating Pakistan to laugh ‘with’, thanks to this ridiculous chapter, at least we have something to laugh ‘at’.

The reviewer is a former staffer.

X: @SarwatYAzeem

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 17, 2022