ON September 15, at the launch of Granta's Pakistan-themed issue at Asia House in London, short story virtuoso Daniyal Mueenuddin wasn't reading from a piece about religion or violence or politics. Editor John Freeman had discovered another talent of his, and he read out unpublished poems about a girlfriend's visit, his childhood fascination with a mysterious black box, and the dynamics of his extended family. After a slideshow of largely political Pakistani art and a discussion about a story on female infanticide in the country, it felt, suddenly, as if one had more room to breathe.
'In Pakistan, as all around the world,' Kamila Shamsie ends her essay in the issue, 'what we most crave from our musicians is music.' She is questioning the political and religious mantles adopted by some Pakistani pop stars, and her comment is more about their lives than their work, but the thought is not dissimilar to one raised by Granta 112 itself.
When one of the world's most prestigious literary magazines devotes an issue to the country, it becomes a place people will go to for more than good writing; they'll be looking for clues about what our writers are offering to a conflicted, struggling Pakistani readership and, separately, the country's significant international audience. Do we crave political analysis, bombs and fundamentalists?
Of the 14 prose works in Granta 112 Pakistan — a roughly even mix of short stories, reportage, and memoir — all but two pieces (both by expatriate Pakistanis and set outside the country) contain Islamist militancy, religious fundamentalism or extreme violence. Almost all of them have one or more of these themes as a core concern.
Reading the issue can feel like sitting through a particularly well-produced but violent BBC special on the history and politics of Pakistan, a point that came up often in conversations with authors and Granta staff at the readings and panel discussions that launched the book in London.
Yet in presenting these stories as a collection, Granta has done a valuable service it challenges our comfortable complaint that the country's international image is a skewed, partial slice of reality for which the western media is responsible. While there are a handful of foreign writers here, the majority of them are Pakistani. When asked to submit material, Freeman explained, this is what they sent in.
Barring a deeply cynical explanation that they are all pandering to the interests of western markets, this collection throws up a conclusion it would be foolish for us as a country to ignore we are a nation exhausted of our tortuous history and politics, terrified of the intolerant forms Islam has morphed into on our soil, and physically defeated by the extreme violence that haunts us every day. Our creative output cannot — and, perhaps, should not — ignore this state of mind.
But the collection as a whole leaves a stronger impression than do many of the individual pieces, whose uneven quality suggests that Pakistan's condition is perhaps more suited to literal truth-telling than creative writing.
Reportage here outshines fiction, and the best example of it is Guardian correspondent Declan Walsh's piece on a Pakhtoon tribal leader from Lakki Marwat and his struggle with the Taliban. It has all the narrative force of a gripping novel and the word craft of a beautifully written one, but is based on Walsh's own visits to the area and the relationship he develops with this complex individual.
New York Times correspondent Jane Perlez offers an essay on what one's favourite Jinnah portrait says about how religious or secular one wants to interpret him to be. While she could have offered more depth and nuance, the descriptive power of her writing makes the idea worth revisiting.
Kashmiri author and journalist Basharat Peer weaves deep humanity into reporting about young boys fighting for independence in India-controlled Kashmir. But while pieces on the Sheedis of Mangho Pir and the Faisal Shahzad trial also highlight discrimination, they fall short of the same literary standard.
The finest piece in the issue, one that overcomes you most powerfully, lingers the longest and makes you wonder how language so simple can convey grief so restrained and yet so profound, is also the only prose in translation.
Veteran Pakistani writer Intizar Hussain's 'The House by the Gallows', originally written in Urdu and translated by Peer, is a memoir that captures in four pages and painfully bare, direct prose a writer's deep mourning for a Pakistan he is losing as he watches it slip into the Ziaul Haq era.
Hussain achieves more than some of the fiction does, which also tries to mourn for Pakistan but doesn't quite manage the sense of authenticity he does. Perhaps the country's very real violence is simply too strange even for the imagination, not as convincingly conveyed when told in tales.
Nadeem Aslam again offers the impressive descriptive powers we have come to expect of him, his poetic prose transporting you to a time and place that seem the stuff of legend despite being rooted in the present. But the line between magic realism and social commentary is dangerously blurred by the extreme violence inflicted on a woman who cannot bear sons.
Mohsin Hamid's piece about a writer's kidnapping forgoes restraint for an almost sensationalist fear and brutality that flatten his character and only cloud our ability to feel the man's pain.
But Mohammed Hanif's 'Butt and Bhatti', about a hospital romance gone terribly wrong, captures the absurdity of Karachi's neverending, unpredictable violence. And Jamil Ahmed, a civil servant almost in his 80s but never published before, suspends time with compassionate prose that describes a timid yet brave couple celebrating their love on a windswept no-man's-land while on the run from her tribal family and its thirst for heartless honour.
Celebration in the face of violence the spirit also behind the exuberant truck art specially commissioned for the cover against the more serious (and largely political) Pakistani contemporary art that Granta has showcased inside the issue. Instead of the usual photo essay, artistic director Michael Salu worked with gallery Green Cardamom to curate works that preface the prose pieces or are part of a collection that tries to capture an uncertain moment in Pakistan's national narrative.
Green Cardamom's bias is clearly contemporary, and Granta 112, which includes names such as Rashid Rana, Bani Abidi, Naiza Khan, Muhammad Zeeshan and Hamra Abbas, turns out to be a platform for some of the most thought provoking installations, performed art, digital media work and contemporary miniatures being produced in the country today.
At the end of this rich, absorbing journey, the issue does leave behind a lingering desire for more creative output that takes the risk of talking about what are no longer the most obvious facets of human life in Pakistan. Aside from Hussain's jewel of a memoir and Walsh's report, it is Mueenuddin's poem about a Pakistani farmer living off his crops in Europe ('along these fields, maturing silver trees / become lunch one afternoon in Rome'), remembering younger days and lost loves, that stays with you long after it is read, not only for its skill but also for the essential nature of its yearnings.
It reinforces that while the loss of those who die and the mistreatment of those who have managed to survive are issues we have a moral and creative imperative to write of; there is also room, now more than ever, to talk about what makes us more human than Pakistani.
