IN CHOOSING WRITING from and about Pakistan as its theme, the latest edition of the prestigious Granta magazine encourages readers to look to the country for more than violence, religious extremism and abject desolation. It chooses to do this with a collection dominated by pieces about violence, religious extremism and abject desolation. That said, Granta 112: Pakistan is a pleasantly juicy edition of a franchise that has given us, this year, an unfulfilling Work issue (Granta 109) and a distinctly flaccid Sex issue (Granta 110). Granta tends towards its best when casting its eye further afield; of the contemporary writing featured in Going Back Home (Granta 111), the strongest was perhaps Janine di Giovanni’s essay on returning to Bosnia.
Granta: Pakistan too owes much of its vigour to the selection of non-fiction seen here. Guardian correspondent Declan Walsh’s ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ leads him to a grisly statistic—8,500 people lost to violent deaths in the Northwest Frontier Province in the past year—a figure of which he attempts to make some sense. In doing so, Walsh provides a thoroughly lucid history of the Pakistani Taliban, the oft demonised (and as oft romanticised) customs and traditions of the Pashtuns, and the distinct differences between the two, which are all too often presented as oh so much mayhem by lesser journalists. Walsh’s ability to humanise without sentimentalising comes not just from his research, which is very much in evidence, but from his own point of view, which is never lost nor diluted. It’s an interesting voice, never detached, often slightly bewildered, like a well-informed naïf abroad.
The truth is that many, many Pakistani writers writing in English are also naïfs abroad in their own country; only since they cannot quite acknowledge this, their writing often finds itself both stating the obvious and jumping to conclusions with the misplaced authority provided by a sense of cultural entitlement. The vastness of Walsh’s canvas means that the piece does a great deal more than merely steer the reader through a political imbroglio. This writing never allows itself the lazy luxury of generalisation. Observing social and sexual mores with lashings of humour and the robust tone of a rollicking adventure novel, Walsh not only gives you, in flesh and blood, the central player whom he trails—Anwar Kamal, “lawyer and chieftain, landlord and warlord,” Walsh’s idea of a Pakistani Flashman—but he also hangs out getting drunk and stoned (and being hit on) by Peshawar’s young urban professionals. The seeming paradoxes in Pashtun society, be they between tradition and rebellion, religiosity and hypocrisy or tribal law and central governance, are made, if not less paradoxical, then at least all too human.
In an entirely different tone from Walsh’s quippy, anecdotal romp is author and journalist Basharat Peer’s heartbreaking ‘Kashmir’s Forever War.’ He employs a stark, spare prose when describing the horror, which speaks for itself, and a sort of romantic lyricism when describing the land; this combination of blank devastation and love is itself the story of Kashmir that has yielded Yeats’ “terrible beauty.” Ultimately, it is Peer’s remarkable restraint and his ability to approach this most emotionally inflammatory issue with a steady hand that makes him such a unique writer, and one whose voice is so very essential. In aiming to calmly narrate a story rather than setting out to rouse and provoke the reader, he succeeds in doing both.
Basharat Peer’s name pops up again further on, this time as translator of what is easily the finest piece in this anthology, ‘The House by the Gallows,’ by veteran Urdu writer Intizar Hussain. Writing about the onset of General Zia’s era, it takes Hussain one four-page essay to say more or less everything that needs to be said about the events that rerouted Pakistan onto its current downward trajectory, a subject entire novels and lengthy history tomes attempt to tackle without coming close to Hussain’s simplicity and unruffled elegance. “The madman stood with a razor on our necks,” he writes. “Rumour had it that two lists were being made: those who prayed regularly would be considered for promotions; those who didn’t …” Along with the conspicuous piety, the essay succinctly describes the suffocation of culture—the tie that binds—with the arts, the performing arts in particular, approaching a death that they are nowhere near recovering from despite the recent laughable international insistence on the alleged renaissance of Pakistani writing based on works by a few members of the elite, read by a
few more members of the same. Hussain’s easy intimacy with his subject and his medium shows up the yawning chasm between writer and subject and the subsequent self-consciousness seen in far too much Pakistani writing of recent years.
With a keen eye for absurdity—the only literary inheritor of which, in Pakistani English writing, has hence far been novelist and journalist Mohammed Hanif—Hussain writes of the rabidly nationalistic paranoia which gripped the nation in the Zia days. This leads him to not, for example, be able to refer to the Taj Mahal as a superlative example of Islamic architecture due to its being located in India. When all else fails, and here it does, there is nothing left to do but laugh. Despite Zia’s death, he is unkillable and looms large from beyond the grave. “The bureaucrats, who had been raised under General Zia’s martial law, had become so sensitive to any hint of offence or dissent that they outdid the censors with their own self-censorship.” This might be the saddest thing I have ever read in my life. All that we have had taken away from us, and all that we have let slip through our fingers, is here in black and white and it hurts in just the way that utterly vital writing should. It is nothing short of disgraceful that international column inches are devoted solely to Pakistani writers who write in English, who have been educated abroad and who are strangers to this country, and not to Urdu grandmasters like Intizar Hussain, who aren’t geared towards the international market.
Hari Kunzru’s essay ‘High Noon’ addresses the shockingly commonplace form of racism which demands that non-white writers and artists, in an age which is simultaneously global and also, allegedly, celebratory of the value of the local, discuss their cultural identity. (I distinctly recall Kiran Desai being asked on BBC HardTalk, post her Booker-win, what her novel tried to convey of her cultural identity.) Wouldn’t it have been nice if all these years of post-colonial theory courses had led to something a bit more far-reaching than Golliwogs being expunged from Enid Blyton books? If you are not white, the expectation remains that you cannot take your identity for granted. Only as a white artist are you allowed the luxury of discussing your themes of interest but outside of that Gentleman’s Club, it is obligatory to market your cultural identity. It is the most polite way of saying, “So, how do you cope with the insecurity of not being one of us?” Unfortunately, the keen expectation of a continuous internal struggle with one’s cultural identity has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that once a market is created, it takes enormous will to not wish to cash in on it.
And so hardly a year goes by without this hackneyed issue rearing its non-white head in both fiction and non-fiction, certainly in writing from Britain, to no doubt mollify the British conscience whilst perpetuating just those stereotypes that need so desperately to be abandoned. This year, it is Tishani Doshi’s The Pleasure Seekers; a decade ago it was Zadie Smith’s White Teeth—if you can spot a fundamental difference between the two, please write to this publication asking for my phone number. The token victim of culture clash in this issue of Granta is Sarfraz Manzoor, with his essay bearing the culturally nuanced title, ‘White Girls.’ It is a shameful testament to the insecurities of multicultural Cool Britannia that 20 years after Hanif Kureishi hit the nail on the head in The Buddha of Suburbia, discourse on the integration of British Asians into mainstream British society has regressed rather than progressed.
Other essays include Fatima Bhutto’s fairly prosaic account of her trip to the Sufi shrine at Mangho Pir and Jane Perlez’s thoroughly poised account of Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s shifting identity, which is also the story of how Pakistan has been anything but a case of ‘founders keepers.’ It is, mercifully, not another tiresome Jinnah piece about how he became and remains one of the subcontinent’s most contentious figures, though, naturally this cannot be avoided entirely. Nor is it merely about Jinnah’s own transition from suits to sherwanis to reap the benefits of popularity offered by flirting with religious factions, but more about the different versions of Jinnah found in Pakistan today, in portraiture, history texts and the popular imagination, and how they serve as a reliable indicator of the country’s political and moral mood. It makes the uncomfortable point that the creator of Pakistan teeters on the brink of redundancy for an increasingly large swath of the population in a way that would be unimaginable of, say, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Turkey. Jinnah’s Pakistan was first hijacked by religion until no need remained to hijack something you could simply have outright instead. A militant maulana, asked for his thoughts on the founder of the nation, baldly replies, “God made Pakistan, not Jinnah.” While the essay is a brisk read and fairly convincing overall, one can’t help but feel that Perlez invests perhaps a little too much importance in Jinnah as a symbol and that this work, in its weaker moments, leans on the Chicken Little approach to journalism; in spite of her restrained prose, she comes perilously close to descending into needless hyperbole towards the end.
Kamila Shamsie’s insightful, personal and often hilarious account of the genesis of Pakistani pop is, on the other hand, outrageously good throughout. Though religion and the capriciousness of the state make an appearance early on, from among the assortment of non-fiction, this is the closest this issue of Granta comes to a semblance of normalcy, a piece which we are allowed to value not solely because at some point al-Qaeda is going to get a shout out. Though well-regarded for her fiction, this nostalgia-inducing tour de force tracing societal trends through the rise, the fall and on occasion, the mutation of Pakistani pop stars might be Shamsie’s most nimble prose yet and I, for one, hope to see plenty more from her in terms of essay-writing.
Breaking this up is the Pakistani visual art featured in this issue, showcasing an artform more evolved, more varied, more experimental and frankly more impressive than the limited scope of current Pakistani English writing. All of which raises the question of what exactly possessed Granta, given the sophistication and range of contemporary Pakistani art on hand and Granta’s established knack for choosing interesting visuals, to choose truck art for the cover. While the execution is perfectly competent, as a concept it’s so utterly passé, so depressingly out of step and so deeply dull that it doesn’t even hold much novelty value abroad any longer, having dutifully been trotted out for exhibitions around the world for several years now. That the folks at Granta felt that Pakistan as a country had to be sold to a larger public on the basis of being quaintly backward, simple and strange was a peculiar misstep. Is one to now expect a Granta:Australia edition with a kangaroo and a didgeridoo on the cover?
While it is fiction that has been the focus of much of the hype surrounding Pakistani culture in recent years, which has led, in turn, to this collection, the fiction presented here is uneven and by and large can’t hold a candle to the reportage. This is not to say it’s not without its merits. Mohammed Hanif’s ‘Butt & Bhatti,’ for example, features many examples of Hanif’s trademark wit—often with dashes of ribaldry. An amusing and strangely touching tale of love and heavy artillery in modern-day Karachi, extracted from his forthcoming novel, its greatest flaw lies in hurtling towards an ending which reads more like journalism than fiction. ‘B&B’ is a fine Cabernet poured and drunk in great haste, which will hopefully receive more room to breathe in its final, longer form.
Mohsin Hamid’s very short short story, ‘The Beheading,’ is a taut, tense work of psychological horror written in his clean, spare prose that I have always delighted in. Hamid’s prose is trailblazing when it comes to the genesis of modern English writing from Pakistan. Other than its stark narrative skill, it provides such a pleasant antidote to the wordy, purple lyricism that writers from this part of the world are oddly keen on. That the content is blazingly sensationalist is unfortunate. While I vehemently disapprove of the idea of art as public relations, the shock value, in this case, overshadows the skill of the writing itself. It is perhaps more the fault of the reader than the writer that had Hamid’s tale of terror been set anywhere else in the world, it would be given more credence as fiction, whereas from Pakistan, given all the prejudices at play, it will simply be received as reaffirmation, with all notions of artistry forgotten.
A newcomer to fiction at the age of 79, Jamil Ahmad’s ‘The Sins of the Mother’ is an extract from a novel to be published next year; it too deals with content that one would expect to see from this part of the world—warring tribal factions and honour killing—though it is perhaps the first widely published work about Baluchistan. Ahmad handles it with such unusual sensitivity that even with its imperfections, the piece retains a haunting and surprising beauty. It is the finest piece of fiction published in this collection, and from an author discovered through a local short story competition. Nadeem Aslam’s ‘Leila in the Wilderness’ is the longest piece in the collection but not quite long enough to fulfil Aslam’s ambitions. In his attempts at spanning folklore, magic realism, terrorism, the rights of women and the flagrant and commonplace exploitation of Islam, the end result is the servant with too many masters. Sadly, lacking restraint in both content and language, it is gaudily overwritten to boot.
Daniyal Mueenuddin’s contribution is his first published poem. ‘Trying Tripe’ is sexy and elegant, and like the short story collection which catapulted him to fame, it is a pleasure to read a piece of Pakistani writing not hinged on terrorism, violence, disaster or imminent catastrophe. Whether the pieces selected by Granta: Pakistan reflect the desire of the Pakistani writer to willingly heave about the burden of representation or Granta’s deliberate marginalisation of a life more ordinary than it hoped to find in this country is anyone’s guess.