Junot Díaz’s acclaimed novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has been high on my to-read list for a while, but in the meantime I’ve been enjoying his short-story collection Drown, which was published more than a decade earlier. These are spare, slice-of-life stories told in the voice of a young boy named Yunior, and peopled by his family and friends who live in squalid neighborhoods in the Dominican Republic (and later, as immigrants, in New Jersey). Impoverished, dysfunctional families are the norm in this community, as is drug use and sexual promiscuity among 12-year-olds. Youngsters live for the moment, aware at all times that there probably isn’t much to look ahead to: at one point someone likens Yunior and his friends to space shuttles, the majority of which will burn out. (Given that these stories are partly autobiographical, with Yunior a stand-in for the author, it’s safe to say that Díaz himself – now a Pulitzer Prize winner – is one of the shuttles that made it into orbit. More about him here.)
These are interlinked tales, told non-chronologically. In the opening story “Ysrael”, nine-year-old Yunior joins his elder brother Rafa in teasing a boy whose face was torn by a pig when he was an infant. As a young man in “Edison, New Jersey”, Yunior delivers pool tables to people who live in houses with 20-30 rooms, and occasionally filches razor blades and cookies from the premises. “Aguantando” (which means to endure or wait in Spanish) is about the continual absence of his father from his life, a theme that is also touched on in the beautifully paced “Fiesta, 1980”, with its description of the narrator’s struggle with car-sickness in his dad’s Volkswagen van. And the humorous “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” is exactly what the title suggests.
The prose throughout Drown is very informal – with lots of street slang and cuss words like pendejo (“a pussy or a punk”) and come mierda (“a shit-eater”) – but it has a rigour, a rhythmic intensity of its own. It’s particularly effective when the hardened, tough-boy tone of the narrative briefly yields to something more vulnerable. In one of the finest stories, “Boyfriend”, Yunior overhears the weeping of a young woman – dumped by her boyfriend – in the apartment below his and reflects, “It would have broken my heart if it hadn’t been so damn familiar. I guess I’d gotten numb to that sort of thing. I had heart-leather like walruses got blubber.” But we can tell that this is a façade built by someone who’s had to grow up much too fast; a narrator who can artlessly exclaim “Beautiful!” when he sees a mother duck and her three ducklings float downstream “like they’re on the same string”.
The quieter, more tender passages in these stories – such as Yunior recalling a transient moment with his girlfriend Aurora, when “we seemed like we were normal folks. Like maybe everything was better” – are all the more precious for being situated in a larger narrative that’s bleak. Which is not to say that Drown is a depressing book – writing of this quality simply can’t be, no matter how dark the subject matter.
P.S. there’s a glossary for the Spanish words at the end. I kept referring to it, but it isn’t imperative for most of the words: you get the general sense without knowing the exact meanings. However, my respect for the Spanish has been increased by the discovery that they have a single word (fulano) for “Tom, Dick and Harry all balled into one”.
There are few things more annoying than spending the better part of a day (and a Sunday at that, not that there’s anything special about a Sunday if you’re a freelancer) writing a long review of a book, getting set to post it on the blog and then being told at the last possible minute by Mean Publisher Lady that there’s an embargo on reviews until a few weeks later, because she neglected to inform you about launch dates, exclusive arrangements with international media, etc. So it turns out I’m going to have to wait a while before sharing my thoughts about Aatish Taseer’s Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands. Will post it when I get the green light or when I’m sufficiently drunk to want to get Mean Publisher Lady sued by the international publishers.
Meanwhile things have been slow on the work front for various reasons and there's a big backlog of books to get through. Among them: Amit Chaudhuri’s The Immortals, Biman Nath’s Nothing is Blue, Rana Dasgupta’s Solo, Indu Sundaresan’s In the Convent of Little Flowers. Too many books, too little time. Through experience I’ve discovered that the thing to do is such a situation is to put all these books aside and instead direct your attention to something you definitely won’t be asked to review – like Noddy and the Magic Rubber. This is what I’ve successfully done, along with reading a randomly selected chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers(the one about how the high power distance index in countries like Korea is responsible for gruesome plane crashes because the first officer keeps nodding and smiling politely at the captain when he should be saying “You’ve missed the runway by three miles, you dolt!”).
Also, and I’m afraid I can’t provide further details, I woke yesterday morning from uneasy dreams to discover that I had mailed the following paragraph to someone who wanted a short synopsis of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom:
A freelance photographer by day and a murderer of stockinged women by night, Mark’s modus operandi involves photographing his victims at the point of death. Soon we learn that this unusual personality trait developed because when he was a child his domineering father would torment him by dropping lizards on his bed. Not the best way to raise a child, as the grown-up Mark’s victims would no doubt agree, but then why raise a child at all? This film is the best condom ad you could hope for. Even better than Noddy and the Magic Rubber.
Meant to link to this earlier. Read this superb response by Johann Hari to the furore created around his earlier article “Stand up for the right to criticise religion” in Calcutta after it was published in The Statesman. Among other things, the piece addresses the frightening notion that religious beliefs deserve automatic respect, that they mustn’t be criticised or even questioned, and that violence is a fitting response to those who dare to do these things.
Whenever I have reported on immoral acts by religious fanatics – Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim – I am accused of "prejudice", and I am not alone. But my only "prejudice" is in favour of individuals being able to choose to live their lives, their way, without intimidation. That means choosing religion, or rejecting it, as they wish, after hearing an honest, open argument.
A religious idea is just an idea somebody had a long time ago, and claimed to have received from God. It does not have a different status to other ideas; it is not surrounded by an electric fence none of us can pass.
...The protestors said I deliberately set out to "offend" them, and I am supposed to say that, no, no offence was intended. But the honest truth is more complicated. Offending fundamentalists isn't my goal – but if it is an inevitable side-effect of defending human rights, so be it. If fanatics who believe Muslim women should be imprisoned in their homes and gay people should be killed are insulted by my arguments, I don't resile from it. Nothing worth saying is inoffensive to everyone.
Read the full piece. It quotes one of the Islamic fundamentalists who called for the arrest of the newspaper’s editor and publisher as saying he was willing “to lay down his life, if necessary, to protect the honour of the Prophet” and that no one has “the liberty to blaspheme any religion or its icons on grounds of freedom of speech”. The whole mess makes me think of passages in Aatish Taseer’s book Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands, which I finished recently. More on that in a bit.
[A shorter version of this appears in the Sunday Business Standard]
Meta-films – or movies that self-consciously comment on the movie-making process, thus breaking the fourth wall between the film and its audience – date back at least to 1924’s Sherlock Jr, with Buster Keaton as a theatre projectionist who walks right into a film screen and becomes part of the plot. In the decades since, the genre has included abstract movies (such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, about a screenwriter reluctantly bending to the demands of commerce and endangering his marriage in the process) as well as relatively straight narratives about the industry and its denizens (e.g., Billy Wilder’s superbly written and acted Sunset Boulevard, about a once-famous star living with her memories, Miss Havisham-like, in a decrepit mansion).
As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, mainstream Hindi cinema has seen a lot of indulgent self-referencing and in-joking in recent times: rival actors make “friendly appearances” in each other’s films, movies are titled after songs from earlier films, you get the impression that everyone is part of one big happy family that squabbles and makes up with equal aplomb. This reached its high watermark in Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om, which spoofed the phenomenon while simultaneously participating in it (and parts of which were impossible to understand without reference to Shah Rukh Khan’s career), and in the more recent Rab ne Bana Di Jodi, with its refrain made up of movie titles: “Hum Hain Rahi Pyaar Ke, Phir Milenge, Chalte Chalte”.
While this sort of back-patting and nudge-winking can be very enjoyable (especially if you’ve grown up with Bollywood and have a basic affection for it), I never expected that a mainstream film loaded with big-name cameos would attempt to thoughtfully engage with the workings of the industry. So I was pleasantly surprised by Zoya Akhtar’s Luck by Chance, a solidly performed and directed film that uses the intersecting fortunes of two wannabe actors, Sona (Konkana Sensharma) and Vikram (Farhan Akhtar), to examine what it takes to survive in this big bad world if you aren’t to the filmi-khandaan born. (Luck? Talent? A combination of both? In what proportion?)
The cast list includes celebrities in tiny appearances as themselves (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Karan Johar, Kareena Kapoor, Abhishek Bachchan, many others) as well as actors like Hrithik Roshan and Dimple Kapadia in fleshed-out parts, playing...not quite themselves, but people who can, in a certain light, be seen as variations on themselves. (This means that there’s always the danger of reading too much between the lines: in one scene, when Dimple’s character Neena Walia – a still-beautiful former star – seethed about entering the industry at age 16 without any family backing and having to do unsavoury things for producers, I overheard someone in the hall confidently saying, “Yes, that’s her true story – Raj Kapoor exploited her badly.”) There are also hilarious short roles for, among others, Anurag Kashyap, cleverly cast as a writer trying to exceed his brief by incorporating arty “film-festival” bits into a script rather than quietly acquiescing to a commercial-minded producer. All this creates an assortment of scenes where you’re aware that the line between fiction and reality is being blurred, only you’re never quite sure to what extent, and that’s part of the fun. (At times I was reminded of how Silsila – a meta-film of another kind, which played on public perceptions of the Amitabh-Jaya-Rekha relationship - made audiences feel uncomfortable by confronting them directly with their appetite for gossip.)
Luck by Chance could very easily have played it safe. Given the line-up of stars she had at her disposal, how tempting it might have been for Akhtar (and how much more audience-friendly it might have made her film, if the success of Om Shanti Om is anything to go by) to turn this into a hug-fest – a threadbare plot embellished with celebs waving at the viewer, assuring us that all is well in their world. Like the awards-ceremony scene and the “Deewangi” song sequence in OSO. But the best scenes in Luck by Chance – and many of the performances, notably those by Isha Sharvani (as Neena Walia’s bored daughter Nikki, in the grooming to be a starlet), Rishi Kapoor (as a producer named Romy Rolly), Kapadia and Roshan – have an edge to them, a disturbingly off-kilter quality.
A small example of the ambiguities that are set up by this film, and its complex use of self-referencing: when Sona is bluntly told by her producer that she will always be relegated to side roles, that no big hero would want to work opposite her, it’s a commentary on the industry’s attitude to someone who defies the Bollywood standard for what a heroine should look like (as the real-life Konkana Sensharma does), even if she happens to be one of the best actors in the country (as Sensharma is). But what adds irony to this scene is the viewer’s knowledge that Sensharma – Aparna Sen’s daughter – comes from a filmi background in real life, and that this undoubtedly made it easier for her to get that initial footing than it would be for the luckless Sona (and even then, she's basically seen as a non-mainstream actress, though that's mostly by choice).
At any rate, Madhur Bhandarkar no longer need worry about making a movie titled “Film Industry”. It’s been done now, and done with more nuance than he would have managed. Bhandarkar’s “topical” films (at least the ones I’ve seen – Page 3 and Corporate) set up their high-pulpit moralising by drawing a clear line between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, who may as well belong to two different species – so you rarely get a sense of the slow, almost subliminal process by which well-meaning and idealistic people can get corrupted; how you can get subsumed into a system without even realising it. Also, the protagonists in his films – the people who provide an entry point for the viewer – are innocents abroad (the Konkana character in Page 3, the Bipasha character in Corporate) who manage against the odds to retain their integrity, whereas the two leads in Luck by Chance are people who gradually learn about making concessions. Akhtar’s film has a better understanding of the subtly escalating nature of compromise in a world where only the fittest survive. There are few safety nets here and this is a more interesting landscape of people: just when you think you’ve got a “fix” on a character’s greed or hypocrisy, he does something that allows you to see the shades (e.g., Rolly introspecting about the humiliation he puts himself through when he kowtows before the star-sons whom he saw in short pants when they were growing up).
This is not to say Luck by Chance is an unqualified masterpiece – I thought it had many high points and a few low points (such as the scenes depicting the shooting of the movie that Vikram lands the lead role in, and his off-screen romance with Nikki), but the highs are so bloody good that it almost doesn’t matter. Some other things I liked:
– Kapadia’s character Neena is described as “a crocodile in a chiffon sari” at one point, but watching her lord it over her starlet-daughter Nikki, I was reminded more of a large black spider wrapping its victim in a beautiful silk shroud before sucking out its life-juices. (I chuckled at the scene where Neena interrupts her daughter playing Little Miss Muffet alongside a giant spider prop for a photo shoot, and thwacks the unfortunate arachnid away with her hand.) Also enjoyed her foul-mouthed outburst after reading a magazine article about an affair between Vikram and her daughter.
– The lovely little vignette with Zafar Khan (Hrithik Roshan) sitting inside his car, making faces at urchins who are pressed against the window; the pan shot that takes us into the car, removing the children from the frame and leaving us with a Zafar grimacing at his own reflection. (“I think of Zafar Khan as someone other than myself – a persona that I’m responsible for safeguarding,” he says, echoing words that Shah Rukh Khan has apparently used in real-life interviews.) He’s a boy-in-a-bubble here, much like Nikki Walia in her sterilely pretty pink room.
- Some of the fleeting appearances are very effective. I never thought I would apply the word “sinister” to anything involving Karan Johar, but the set-up and composition of the party scene where he appears is just that. Here, Johar looks something like a Dracula figure at a gathering especially held for creatures of the night – very different from the politely effete, eloquent host we know from that well-lit TV talk-show. The scene towards the end where Vikram – on the road to stardom – meets Shah Rukh Khan has a similar effect: on the surface there’s nothing menacing about it (an informal pub setting, SRK in jeans and a loose shirt casually inviting the newcomer over to his table for a chat and some tips, mostly in the form of platitudes about staying grounded) but I felt a brief chill when SRK rolled his eyes and hissed “It’s insane” in response to Vikram wondering what a superstar’s life must be like; for a few seconds, it reminded me of Laurence Olivier’s Crassus, drunk on power, giving political instruction to the youthful Julius Caesar in Spartacus.
Incidentally Shah Rukh tells Vikram never to lose sight of the people who knew him when he was a struggler – “they are the only ones who will always be honest with you”. Now I hear that SRK’s latest film Billu (also known as Billu Barber or Billu Chief Hair Executive Officer, if you prefer) casts him as a superstar who renews acquaintance with a small-town barber who knew him before he was a star. Is this to be the next step in the evolution of the Bollywood meta-movie, I wonder: a film containing a mini-trailer for another film due to be released a few weeks later? And is it ever again going to be possible for Shah Rukh to play a role where the fourth wall is firmly in place?
Slightly atypical post, this, probably best seen as a storehouse. I recently did this story for Business Standard Weekend about the interesting developments in Pakistani Writing in English (PWE) – or Pakistani Anglophone Writing (PAW) if you prefer. But even the generous word-length (1600 words) wasn’t enough to fit in all the responses that came in from the writers I had contacted. So here, by way of supplementing the article, are the full texts of their replies. Am using the questions I asked as anchoring devices and putting the authors’ responses beneath them – apologies if this makes it look like a round-table discussion, which it wasn’t!
There’s been a big buzz around the debuts of Daniyal Mueenuddin and Mohammed Hanif, as well as upcoming titles by Ali Sethi and others. Are we seeing a blossoming of Pakistani writing in English – something similar to what happened in Indian writing in English in the mid-to-late 1980s?
Kamila Shamsie: Yes, and no. A blossoming, yes. But I don't see any particular basis for comparing the trajectory of PAW (Pak Anglophone Writing) to that of IAW. I don't think there's been “the Midnight's Children” moment in quite so dramatic a way. Instead we've had a cluster of writers publishing and being acclaimed within a condensed space of time. Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam and I had our first novels out quite a while ago, and Aamer Hussein's first short-story collection was published in the 1990s. So I think we need to guard against the sense that there was a void until 2-3 years ago which is suddenly crammed full of books that people are talking about. Not only was there not a void, but also we're still at the point where two books of “notable” fiction by Pakistani writers in one year seems momentous. That suggests this “blossoming” still has a very long distance to travel.
Having said that, more is going on with PAW than is often suggested in the various articles about “Moonlight's Children” which tend to trot out the same 4 or 5 names. For instance, last year Shahbano Bilgrami's In Dreams was longlisted for the Man Asia Prize and Shandana Minhas' Tunnel Vision was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers prize. But both these writers were published in India rather than the UK or US and that means they often get left out of the conversation. (Not to be nepotistic, but you might also want to take a look at a book called As The World Changed, edited by Muneeza Shamsie – my mother – and published by Women Unlimited a couple of years ago. It's fiction by Pakistani women and gives a sense of the breadth of PAW as being much wider than often acknowledged.)
Aamer Hussein: I don't read everything that comes out from South Asia and I'm more interested in translations or in Urdu when I do. So I'm wary of talking about blossoming, but it's nice to see how many varieties of fiction are available, and how much attention India seems to give their neighbours' literature, how open they are to our fictions.
Nadeem had a first book out in ’93, Kamila in '97 and Mohsin in '99. Was the boom, then, a question of more titles from them in the 21st century, or more award nominations, or more panels called Pakistani Writing Today (in '97 it was Bapsi Sidhwa, Sara Suleri and me)? They've been writing for a while, and their books haven't really come out in a cluster.
Azhar Abidi: My impression is yes, there is certainly an increasing recognition of Pakistani writing in English as a counterpoint to Indian writing in English but whether that’s a blossoming or not is hard to say. It may just be a temporary phenomenon, but in any event, does it really matter whether the writing is in English, Urdu or Bengali? The writing should be good. It should stand on its own feet no matter what language it appears in. That ought to be the real measure of blossoming, don’t you think? And on that measure, Urdu literature has matured and ripened for over two centuries, but it’s a canon that’s hardly known in the West or even in our own countries for that matter. The two countries have a long and noble literary tradition. It’s not as if there was nothing there before people started writing in English.
Has there been an increase in writing that is chronicling the many faces of modern Pakistan – the different rungs of its society, life in various parts of the country? Have you been following the work of contemporary Pakistani writers?
Kamila Shamsie: The urban centres and the upper-middle class are chronicled to a disproportionate extent because most of the Anglophone writers come from those worlds. (Of course, it is possible to step out of the world you've grown up in). I haven't read all my contemporary writers, but I've certainly read Hanif, Mohsin, Nadeem, Uzma Aslam Khan, Aamer Hussein – am looking forward to Daniyal M's collection (I've read the stories that were in the New Yorker).
Aamer Hussein: Yes; writers like Bina Shah, Shandana Minhas and others are chronicling varied aspects of Pakistani life – and writing for a Pakistani or South Asian readership rather than primarily for publication abroad. Bina, a brave and lovely writer, often sets her work in the less than affluent areas of Karachi, and, in one case, largely in the slums. But most Anglophone Pakistani writers I know of live abroad. I'm no expert, but I feel that in general rural or small town Pakistan doesn't figure largely in English-language fiction. It did, however, in Nadeem Aslam and Moni Mohsin's first novels.
Moni Mohsin: There clearly are more books by Pakistani authors being published in the West now than say ten years ago and yes, most of them are focused on chronicling life as it exists today across a wide spectrum of Pakistani society.
Musharraf Ali Farooqi: I have read Mohammed Hanif's novel and I know that some people criticised it in Pakistan because they felt that it made Zia-ul-Haq less of a villain than he was. But no good writer can write about a character without bringing his own humanity to reflect in his characters. So those who criticize Hanif for making Zia more human are actually complimenting him. I have also read Daniyal Mueenuddin's story "Nawabdin Electrician" and it reminded me of the Urdu writer Abul Fazl Siddiqi, who wrote about these subjects with great mastery. As to the increase in English-language writing that is chronicling modern Pakistan, this may be true at one level but it may not necessarily be a good thing because it reflects poorly on the absence of good Urdu instruction in schools and a general indifference towards our cultural language.
Nadeem Aslam told me that if you come from a country which has a tragic history, and which often finds itself in the news for the wrong reasons, you can't avoid being politically engaged – there's a constant need to explain, to reexamine, to correct misperceptions. Do you share this feeling? Kamila Shamsie: Oh, you can avoid anything! I'm very interested in Pakistan's history and politics, and in exploring that in fiction. So I do. But if you read Aamer Hussein – who I think is an extraordinary writer – you'll see that very often he takes another route, highlighting the quieter domestic lives of characters – often women. In some of his stories the grand politically involved figures are men on the periphery of the story and it's in the internal and domestic sphere that the stories find their charge. And I think that's also a very necessary component of writing.
There's also a very fine writer called Imad Rehman who grew up in Karachi before moving to the US for university, and staying on there; his short story collection I Dream of Microwaves – very funny – is largely about Pakistani migrants to America, and engages with American history – the migrant dream – far more than Pakistan's history.
I think of Pakistanis as my audience as much as any other nation, so I don't think in terms of correcting misperceptions or explaining, as though my audience is the world outside Pakistan (that I save for any journalism that I undertake for papers in the UK or US or Europe). But when I examine Pakistan's history and politics in my writing I know that for some people the effect will be to shatter misperceptions, and that's an outcome I'm very happy with. It's just not the reason why I write what I write.
But when a nation is viewed through as narrow a lens as Pakistan often is these days (terrorist males and oppressed women), then merely chronicling the lives of individuals rather than stereotypes ends up being political, doesn't it, even if that isn't the intention? perhaps the climate makes it impossible for Pakistani writing to be viewed unpolitically from the outside.
Musharraf Ali Farooqi: Political engagement has to be defined by each writer for himself or herself. For me, translation of our literary classics is an act of political engagement to stop what is happening to our language and cultural heritage. I have zero interest in writing about 9/11 or Afghanistan but that does not mean that someone who wants to write about these subjects is indulging in an idle exercise. A good writer can make every subject valid and interesting.
Urdu writing is equally strong, engaged and completely secular, but somehow there is an impression, particularly in the West and now also being spread in India, that those who write in the English language are somehow more engaged and better writers than the Urdu fiction writers or those who write in the regional languages of India. Moni Mohsin: Politics, in my view, is a broad church. Any novel that deals with power structures, however obliquely, is to my mind political. You don’t have to have a terrorist or a prime minister as your protagonist to be politically engaged. And nor do you have to come from a country that has had a turbulent history to write political books. For instance, novels such as The White Tiger and Q&A are unambiguously political.
Although my book, The Diary of a Social Butterfly, appears a light-hearted comedy, its underlying intent is serious: it satirises the insularity, self absorption and frivolity of a privileged stratum of Pakistani society. Even the political disengagement of my subjects is a political statement. But when I write I don’t set out deliberately to challenge my readers’ misconceptions or even explain myself or my society. My starting point is always people – people and stories, which I try and tell as honestly and directly as I can.
Aamer Hussein: As a young writer, I felt compelled to write about Bangladesh, the Gulf War, military rule, the Indian Muslim heritage and partition, albeit obliquely at times. Now, I think that my political engagement is reflected in the ordinary lives and day-to-day activities I write about; but I've become ever more interested in history and its effect on the present. Obviously, I wouldn't want anyone to dictate a political agenda to me, or to feel obligated to let terrorism or fundamentalism hijack my fiction. If I wanted to make overt political statements I'd turn to journalistic pieces, which I rarely write, as I think writers often make asses of themselves when they do. But each one of us his or her own unique way of bearing witness to our times, however small our canvas, whether we use sepia or colour, bold strokes or muted colours.
But I think we should be judged on individual strengths, not necessarily as spokespeople for a 'troubled and misinterpreted' nation. That's like some people who saw Arundhati Roy primarily as a Syrian Christian Malayali voice.
Azhar Abidi: I wouldn’t be surprised if Pakistani writers were getting more political in their writing. A similar thing happened in Latin America, where authors like Fuentes, Manuel Pueg, Bolano and others wrote about the experience of living under dictatorships. Political novels were extremely influential in elevating Latin American literature in the West. It’s quite possible that something similar happens in Pakistan with its unfortunate share of dictators and mullahs.
But I’m afraid I don’t share the view that you can’t avoid political engagement. I don’t want to be the spokesperson for a country, a religion or a people. I have no right to it and I think there is a great risk of misrepresentation.
Have you encountered Indian readers (or readers from any other country) who tell you that your books gave them a new perspective into Pakistani society or the lives of Pakistani people? Do you see literature making a difference in terms of how the international community views Pakistan?
Kamila Shamsie: Yes – both Indian readers and American readers have made that comment on a number of occasions. So literature can play some small part in changing people's views, but it's not going to be more than a small part. Far, far more people get their views from news reports than novels.
Moni Mohsin: The Diary of a Social Butterfly has struck a chord with my Indian readers, not just because they are intrigued to discover that such people exist in Pakistan but how similar they are to ‘drawing room wallahs’ in India. And of course literature, as arguably the most honest and persuasive form of communication that there is, has the capacity to change minds, win hearts and above all, make people understand the complexity of the human condition. I don’t see why Pakistani fiction should be an exception to that general rule.
As a Pakistani author writing in English, is it easier to get published if you're living in the West than if you're in Pakistan? And is that changing now? What is the publishing scene like in Pakistan currently?
Moni Mohsin: I don’t think it is easier to get published in the West than in Pakistan. In my view the competition is much stiffer in the West. Publishing as an industry is not particularly evolved in my country as yet. There are no agents, publishing houses are few, the number of English books published every year is small, sales are tiny and marketing is rudimentary. But then nor do we have masses of submissions.
Musharraf Ali Farooqi: it is perhaps easier to be published as a writer of foreign origin in the US, Canada and UK, and I will explain the reasons in a second. But for every Pakistani or Indian writer writing in English published here, there are hundreds who are rejected. So if you apply the law of averages on the writing population in these western countries you will find out that Pakistani or Indian writers have more or less an equal chance.
But the reason why writers of foreign origin are sought in these markets is that they bring a different kind of story, a different family dynamic, a slightly different voice which maybe exotic but also not monotonous. One has to be a little clear headed about these things. Publishing is an industry in the West. If these stories were not liked and did not sell, the publishers would not give the time of day to any Pakistani or Indian writers. As long as these stories sell and people want to read them, they will be published. Demographics also play a part. South Asians are a growing population group in Canada and they are also a big and growing group in the US and UK. That also creates a market opportunity for a publisher of a South Asian writer. If he or she is successful then there are long term rewards for a publisher.
India has many English language publishers and a growing market in both regional languages and English. I believe there is a lot of interest in books in Pakistan as well but there is no major trade publisher presence. I have heard that Penguin is planning to open up shop in Pakistan so they must have done their numbers and seen a good fat business opportunity. Currently OUP Pakistan is the only game in town who is professionally organised. There are hundreds of smaller publishers who publish but are not well known, not well-distributed and therefore not very successful. Sang-e Meel Publications in Lahore is quite big but they need to organize themselves on a more professional level. There is also Ferozsons who published many of my favourite childhood reads including the "Dastan-e Amir Hamza". I think that as publishers establish themselves in these territories, the other apparatus will follow, including literary agencies, editors and not to forget the creative-writing schools. (May God save us from the devil!)
Kamila Shamsie: I think it's just a fact of logistics that if you're living in a country where there's a dynamic publishing infrastructure it's easier to tap into that than if you're outside it. Of course the Internet does make it much easier for people in Pakistan to look up agents and publishers, make email enquiries etc – but that doesn't compare to the information you get about submitting manuscripts if you're on a creative writing course, or know someone who can suggest how to go about finding an agent, or can go to literary festivals and hear writers and publishers talk about such matters.
The publishing scene in Pakistan for Anglophone fiction is pretty dismal – so actually right now the most promising publishing market for Pakistani writers is in India. A number of very fine Pakistani writers have found publishers there, and I know Indian publishers are on the lookout for Pakistani writing.
Aamer Hussein: I don't know much about the publishing world; I've never been picked up by a commercial press, and have done about five books with Telegram – a small literary imprint – since the late 90s. I think I already answered the publishing question in part. But OUP, Sama and Alhamra in Karachi and Lahore are producing fine new work, often unpublished elsewhere. My own collection Turqoise was actually composed of stories that had come out in Pakistan first, in a volume called Cactus Town; Insomnia was published almost simultaneously here and there.
Are you concerned about the voices that have been calling for the removal of books by Pakistani authors from Indian bookstores? I'm told that in case there's a trade shutdown in the future, there would be serious repercussions for the distribution of books by many Pakistani writers...
Moni Mohsin: I am concerned but I hope better sense will prevail. After all, if Indian readers should know one thing about the Pakistani authors who have made a splash there recently, it is this: all of them condemn extremism and terrorism. Musharraf Ali Farooqi: yes, this is a big worry. Trade-ban threats have been flying and if Pakistan reciprocates and shuts down Indian imports, then book imports will naturally suffer. There was a report about the Karachi Book Fair 2008 published in the Dawn of Dec 27: the Indian books made it there but the Indian publishers couldn't. That was very sad and it happened even without an official bans or anything being publicly declared. If things deteriorate further, even the books might be stopped.
What happens to the Pakistani writers published by Indian publishing houses if the trade stops between India and Pakistan? Wouldn't it be ridiculous that a Pakistani writer's books whose subcontinent rights are held by Random House India or Penguin India are embargoed as Indian goods and cannot be distributed in Pakistan? This is not only a loss to the publisher but also to the Pakistani author who will probably sell more copies in Pakistan.
One possible solution is that Pakistan writers do not sell subcontinent rights to Indian publishers, only Indian rights because today it is Pakistan and India, but tomorrow it could equally be India and Bangladesh, in the same scenario. Another solution is that South Asian publishers should find partner publishers in all countries who can take over publishing of a title in the event of such developments.
Yet another solution is that in the event of an embargo of any kind the rights to a title for the country where it cannot be sold will revert to the author until things normalise.
And some context on the writers above: Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel Burnt Shadows is a multi-generational story that moves from Nagasaki in 1945 to Delhi in 1947 and, over the decades, to Pakistan and New York, examining the turbulence of a century where people have been repeatedly dislocated from their homes and where events from the distant past cast a long shadow over the present. Moni Mohsin’s Diary of a Social Butterfly is a collection of her newspaper columns that playfully expose the workings of Pakistani high society. Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s The Adventures of Amir Hamza, an outstanding 950-page translation of the epic Dastan-e Amir Hamza, was one of the publishing events of 2008, and he’s currently working on a 24-volume translation of the magical fantasy Tilism-e Hoshruba. Aamer Hussein is the author of numerous short-story collections including Turquoise and Insomnia. Azhar Abidi wrote Passarola Rising and has a new book out called Twilight.
(With apologies to John Lennon and this lady. And the usual warning: if you don’t follow tennis, skip this post)
Most news reports and analyses of the Australian Open men's final seem to have missed this, so here goes: All hail Rafa Nadal, the only male tennis player ever to hold Grand Slam titles on three different surfaces at the same time! No one has done this before – not even the great Rod Laver who won all four Slams in a calendar year twice, back in the days when they were played on only two surfaces. How strange to think that Nadal was until very recently disparaged as a clay-court specialist who “couldn’t play” on hard-courts. (Actually, this allegation was ridiculous even back in 2005 – check Nadal’s record on the surface and compare it with that of the “hard-court specialists” like Andy Roddick, James Blake etc – but that never stopped people from making it.)
It’s been hugely rewarding being a Nadal fan over the past year, even better in some ways than being a Sachin fan in 1998. When he was thrashed by Davydenko in the Miami Masters final last April, I wondered if he would ever win another title, and whether the recurring blowouts in hard-court finals might eventually affect his clay-court game as well. But he went from strength to strength as the year progressed, and it was almost too good to believe for a paranoid fan. When he played Djokovic for the number two ranking in Hamburg, I thought it was the beginning of the end – that Rafa’s three-year stint at the number 2 spot would end not with him taking over as number one but with slipping down the rankings, never to go back up. That fear seems almost laughable now.
Very pleased by his performance in the Aus Open final, which I never thought he could win after his 5-hour semi (and this despite having been repeatedly surprised by him over the last year). Also very sorry for Federer – more sorry than I could have imagined being when he last broke down at an Australian Open ceremony three years ago, in very different circumstances (a post about that here).
I still think Roger will break Sampras’s record of 14 Slams, and maybe even get one or two beyond that, but it’s going to be tougher than anyone could have foreseen a year ago. Most of the reports right now are about him – quite understandably, given all the expectations – but I wish more of them had mentioned the uniqueness of Nadal’s three-surface achievement. The announcers at the trophy ceremony really should have brought it up, but it was obvious that they had all expected the story of the night to be Roger’s record-equaling title – hence the line-up of past greats. Pity, but then being the underdog has always served Rafa well.
Junot Díaz’s acclaimed novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has been high on my to-read list for a while, but in the meantime I’ve been enjoying his short-story collection Drown, which was published more than a decade earlier. These are spare, slice-of-life stories told in the voice of a young boy named Yunior, and peopled by his family and friends who live in squalid neighborhoods in the Dominican Republic (and later, as immigrants, in New Jersey). Impoverished, dysfunctional families are the norm in this community, as is drug use and sexual promiscuity among 12-year-olds. Youngsters live for the moment, aware at all times that there probably isn’t much to look ahead to: at one point someone likens Yunior and his friends to space shuttles, the majority of which will burn out. (Given that these stories are partly autobiographical, with Yunior a stand-in for the author, it’s safe to say that Díaz himself – now a Pulitzer Prize winner – is one of the shuttles that made it into orbit. More about him here.)
