Today Pakistan is at the centre of geopolitical conflict and has been overtaken by increasing violence and religious extremism. At the same time, it has witnessed a great flourishing of new cultural expressions in music, art and literature. This is particularly evident in the increasing number of English‐language writers of Pakistani origin to receive critical acclaim in recent years.
Pakistani English literature shares with other South Asian English literatures a regional dynamic as well as a long colonial history, but the Pakistani imagination is also linked to the wider Islamic world. This multi‐layered heritage is embodied by Pakistan’s geography: a long contiguous territory alongside the river Indus, with Afghanistan and Iran to its west and India to its east. In her essay here, Claire Chambers points out that “Pakistani and other writers of Muslim background draw upon, return to, and build on a canon of largely Muslim writing and art from the subcontinent and Middle East”. Taking a broad overview, she explores and compares the treatment of ancient Islamic myths, Muslim festivals and today’s conflicts including 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, in the work of Pakistani writers with the English fiction of Abdulrazak Gurnah (Zanzibar), Robin Yassin‐Kassab (Syria), Tahmima Anam (Bangladesh) and Ahdaf Soueif (Egypt), among others.
Chambers’ essay, like this special Pakistan issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing, focuses largely on the writing of a younger generation of Pakistanis, which comments on current events, and also illuminates the diversity of Pakistani life. Peter Morey’s essay on Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) refers to the rhetoric of western commentators and politico‐religious extremists who perceive “cultural differences” as a justification for violence. Morey sees Hamid’s novel against this backdrop as “a sly intervention” which employs “the hoax confessional and dramatic monologue forms” that “effectively parodies cultural certainties” and demands a “deterritorialized” reading.
The melding of the public and the personal runs through Bruce King’s essay on the five novels of Kamila Shamsie, of which four are set in Karachi and the fifth, Burnt Shadows, takes in a grand sweep of history from the Second World War to Guantanamo Bay. Describing Shamsie as a “writer of political fiction” he provides an overview of her themes, including a backdrop of political events ranging from Partition, the ethnic conflicts of 1971 and 1990, to the Women’s Movement against Zia‐ul‐Haq’s laws discriminating against women.
King points out that a central theme in Shamsie’s novels is the need to look unflinchingly at the past to understand the present. This has particular relevance to Caroline Herbert’s essay on Shamsie’s novel Kartography. Herbert examines Pakistan’s narratives of nationhood, identity and belonging against Shamsie’s juxtaposition of Karachi’s ethnic riots of 1991 with the events of 1971, that fateful year when military action in East Pakistan led to the loss of that province, which became an independent Bangladesh. The analysis has particular relevance owing to the fact that Pakistani officialdom has treated 1971 with a stunning silence, to the extent that Cara Cilano’s pioneering book reviewed here – National Identities in Pakistan: The 1971 War in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction – looks to literary texts for answers.
The need for Pakistan to find a new post‐1971 identity, which links the nation to its current geography and its ancient past, rather than the new, fanatical and transnational “Islamism” encouraged by the Zia regime of the 1980s, runs through Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s study of the fiction of Uzma Aslam Khan. Kabir focuses largely on Khan’s second novel The Geometry of God, which revolves around the trial of an elderly palaeontologist, under new blasphemy laws, because he teaches the theory of evolution.
Iman Qureshi’s interview with Mohammed Hanif provides many insights into the author and his novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes, a political satire on geopolitics and fanaticism during Zia’s era. In marked contrast, my own interview with the British Pakistani poet Moniza Alvi explores issues of gender, cultural duality, war and violence which link mythology and legend with contemporary times.
Each of the three memoirs included in this issue differs from the others and supplements both the fiction and the non‐fiction. Aamer Hussein’s “Mother Tongue, Father Tongue” provides a criss‐crossing of cultures, literatures and linguistic traditions to tell of his privileged Karachi childhood, an experience of India, Britain and Europe and the many influences which forged his career as a writer. The Syrian‐British novelist Robin Yassin‐Kassab, who spent two years in Pakistan during the 1980s, presents an unusual view of Pakistan: he found himself treated sometimes as British and foreign, and at other times as a fellow Muslim. In her memoir, Humera Afridi, who now lives in New York but grew up in the United Arab Emirates, recalls the changing face of her family village, Babri Banda in Kohat, which she loved to visit as a child and which is now the epicentre of extremism and war in the Pakistan–Afghan borders.
Almost all the writers and critics discussed so far live in the diaspora or divide their time between Pakistan and the West, but in this issue a deliberate attempt has been made to provide a platform for “homegrown” fiction and poetry by resident Pakistanis who are producing quality work which remains little known. Irshad Abdul Kadir’s story “Clifton Bridge” tells of desperation, despair and religion in a family of beggars, living on the edges of Karachi’s most exclusive locality. Sidrah Haque’s story “Wild Thing” is a work of particular interest because it engages with, and provides an alternative version to, Ahmed Nadeem Qasimi’s famous Urdu story “Wild Creature”, which describes the turmoil of a poor, proud and unknown woman on a bus. Haque gives the woman a name and an identity and turns this into a tale of motherhood, albeit one written in a different tongue – English.
The poetry included here ranges from Adrian Husain’s elegies to Benazir Bhutto and Iris Murdoch, and Salman Tarik Kureshi’s “Death of a Leading Citizen”, to Dohra Ahmad’s contemplation of language in “Conjunctions” and Shadab Zeest Hashmi’s comment on a dual linguistic inheritance in “Bilingual”. Shireen Haroun’s “Christmas Eve” reveals a different dimension of Pakistan’s varied cultural fabric; Sadaf Halai’s “Daylight” and Moeen Faruqi’s “Photographs” are a chilling reminder of senseless violence; Ilona Yusuf’s narrative poem captures the violence of recent events in the idyllic valley of Swat.
These texts are supplemented by some of the Pakistan‐related books reviewed in this issue including Daniyal Mueenuddin’s award‐winning story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and Masood Ashraf Raja’s Constructing Pakistan: Foundational Texts and the Rise of Muslim National Identity 1857–1947 – a study of the pre‐Partition literary narratives of Urdu which led to the idea of Muslim statehood and Pakistan. Hopefully this special issue will generate a meaningful dialogue which will lead to a greater insight into Pakistan, its complexities, culture and conflicts, as well as into a vital and lively body of work that has a distinct voice and place in contemporary postcolonial literature.
Notes on contributor
Muneeza Shamsie is the Regional Chairperson (Europe and South Asia) of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2010 and 2011. She is on the editorial board of Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies, and contributes to the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and other scholarly publications as well as to the Pakistani press. She is the editor of three pioneering anthologies of Pakistani English Literature, including the award‐winning And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women (2005). She is Managing Editor of The Oxford Companion to the Literatures of Pakistan (forthcoming).