KARACHI: The Writers and Readers Café held its weekly session at the Arts Council’s Josh Malihabadi Library with Dr Sadia Abbas, the author of the novel The Empty Room and associate professor of English Literature at Rutgers University, USA.

Answering the first question about the autobiographical elements in the novel at the event, which was moderated by Dr Omair Ahmed Khan and Palvashay Sethi, Dr Abbas said her husband was a westerner who had a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard; they got married in 1996. “It is about as autobiographical as a novel that Virginia Woolf could write.”

Whether she consciously avoided to not to write about herself, the writer replied, “What was more important to me was the UP culture that existed in Nazimabad in the 1970s which was autobiographical in the sense that my whole family settled there [after migration]. My nana used to live in Block F and my dada lived in Federal B Area. So to that extent it is autobiographical. It’s about a neighbourhood and the UP intellectuals that settled in Nazimabad… for me that Karachi was important. Also, the culture of Karachi University, the leftists and the student movement there… was important.”

She said, “I’m a conceptual animal. To me the question was: what is a novel? You could say that The Empty Room is an anti-marriage novel. The marriage plot was one of the forms of the novel in the 18th century and the Urdu novel has come out of that tradition. To some extent I wanted to write against the marriage plot. The second thought was that I did not want to write the standard novel, the bourgeois form which is about the individual’s development. I wanted to write about the world. I wanted to write about Karachi, about Nazimabad. The other thing was: how do you undo the bourgeois novel?”

The Empty Room author Sadia Abbas expresses her fondness for Quratulain Hyder

Responding to a query on the representation of visual art in her novel, something that can also be found in Quratulain Hyder’s writings, Dr Abbas said, “I love the visual. There are two things that I wish I could do: sing and paint. I started to paint to experience the world that Tahira [the protagonist of The Empty Room] was experiencing. What does it feel like to hold the paintbrush? Tahira is an artist, painting is her vocation but (unhappy) marriage halts her painting practice. How do women create [art] in a prison, is actually the big question of the novel.”

She then expressed her fondness for Quratulain Hyder as a writer and a philosopher with reference to her books Aakhir-i-Shab Ke Hamsafar and Aag Ka Darya, and as a visual writer.

Dr Abbas has also authored At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament.

Published in Dawn, April 7th, 2024