And the World Changed (4 page)

The permeability of languages, countries, and culture runs through the work of several writers represented in this volume. While living in England the expatriate Rukhsana Ahmad was so disturbed by events in Pakistan during the period of martial law under Zia-ul-Haq that she began to write articles protesting conditions in Pakistan for
The Asian Post
in London, thereby launching her writing career. Her story, “Meeting the Sphinx,” questions the certainties of history, words, and narrative in British academia through the relationship between a white, distinguished Egyptologist and a feminist of Asian origin who challenges his assumptions.

Ahmad also published
We Sinful Women
(1991) a collection
of Urdu feminist protest poetry that she translated in English to great acclaim. The volume included the work of Fahmida Riaz, who had authored Pakistan's first book of feminist poetry in 1973, thereby opening a new dimension for women writers. Though Riaz only occasionally writes in English, she wrote “Daughters of Aai” specifically for this volume: It is a haunting tale of innocence, sexual abuse, and the resourcefulness of women in a Pakistani village. She shows that in Pakistan's peasant cultures, women perform hard labor and do not observe
parda
or the veil, unlike “respectable,” wealthy, or urban women.

Tahira Naqvi, who lives in the United States, writes English fiction and, like Ahmad, has also translated Urdu feminist writing, particularly the fiction of Ismat Chughtai, the pioneering and uncompromising pre-Partition writer. Naqvi's translation of Chughtai's 1940 novel
Tehri Lakeer
—later translated into English and published by Women Unlimited in India and The Feminist Press in the United States under the title
The Crooked Line
(2007)—includes an introduction in which Naqvi draws parallels between Chughtai's fearless portrayal of female sexuality and Simone de Beauvoir's pioneering work,
The Second Sex
(1949). The influences of Chughtai and the other Urdu women writers that Naqvi has translated have seeped into Naqvi's English writing. Her story, “A Fair Exchange,” explores with great subtlety the complex psychological and sexual compulsions that impel a well-educated woman in a traditional but professional family to misinterpret her dreams and resort to superstition. Naqvi's use of suggestion to express repressed, unidentified, and chaotic emotions strongly echoes themes in Urdu women's fiction.

Myths and stories are immensely important to gender roles. In the West, the feminist revolution led to the excavation of matriarchal narratives and legends portraying women. In Britain, Shahrukh Husain culled lore about women from the world over for a series of books for adults. In this volume, her story, “Rubies for a Dog,” which belongs to an Islamic tradition,
revolves around a Wazir's daughter who embarks on a long and dangerous quest across distant lands to avenge her father's honor. Husain says:

Fairy tales from the Islamic world are often stories of a quest which entail extraordinary courage, and often also include strong elements of wit and wisdom. The
wazir's
daughter . . . represents redemption or delivery in one way or another. . . . The fairy stories which form such an important part of the heritage of India and Pakistan were shared with Iran and Afghanistan and may include
paris
, jinns . . . or they might simply be about human, though extraordinary, journeys. (Shamsie 2005, xvi)

“Rubies for a Dog” is another example of the crisscrossing of linguistic, geographical, and cultural boundaries that were intrinsic to Islamic culture and are a part of modern Pakistani life.

Interestingly, among the stories submitted for this anthology, only two revolved around arranged marriages, “The Optimist” by Bina Shah, and “A Pair of Jeans” by Qaisra Shahraz. I decided to include both because they complement each other and describe the crisis of immigrant Asian young women who, at the insistence of their parents, assent to this time-honored custom. The stories clearly reveal the conflict between first- and second-generation migrants and the desire of the older generation to cling to age-old traditions in an alien land. In “The Optimist” Bina Shah employs two different narrators, a Pakistani young man and his Pakistani British bride. He decides to marry her because he falls in love with her photograph, without any perception of her as an individual, or her world and her aspirations; she has accepted the marriage, reluctantly, under great moral blackmail.

In “A Pair of Jeans” expatriate Qaisra Shahraz describes a daughter of Pakistani parents in Yorkshire, who, dressed in jeans, runs into her future in-laws: They have seen her only at
social occasions in Pakistani dress. To them her boots and jeans symbolize all that is Western and decadent. Both stories reveal how the system of traditional arranged marriages has evolved and developed huge fissures under the pressures of modernity.

In marked contrast “Runaway Truck Ramp” by Soniah Kamal takes a critical look at American notions of freedom and free choice through the love story of a white American woman and a Pakistani man in the United States. Both are aspiring writers but are so conscious of belonging to different cultures that they cannot look beyond confused notions of sexual mores.

Kamal's story has a very different rhythm to the contemplation of cultural duality and exclusion in “Variations: A Story in Voices” by Hima Raza (1975–2003). She combines poetry and prose to portray the solitude of a woman who reflects upon her thwarted relationships and that of friends and family, across generations, cities, cultures, and countries.

Different cultures coexist with greater ease in
Meatless Days
(1989), a creative memoir by Sara Suleri Goodyear, who teaches at Yale University. She provides a lively insight into her dual inheritance as the daughter of a Pakistani father and a Welsh-born mother and knits together the public and the personal, past and present, across Pakistan, Britain, and the United States. Her first chapter from
Meatless Days
, “Excellent Things in Women,” reprinted here, revolves around the personality of Dadi, her paternal grandmother, but the kernel embedded within is the quiet presence of Suleri Goodyear's mother and the spaces she negotiates. The whole is interwoven with small, telling glimpses of family life, particularly Suleri Goodyear's relationships with her sisters Tillat and Iffat, who act as both foil and echo to her own personality. The unity of sisterhood across the patriarchal structures of family, nation, race, and creed is a familiar theme in women's writing worldwide.

Another U.S.-based academic of Pakistani origin, Fawzia Afzal Khan uses creative prose interspersed with poetry to universalize her experiences in the memoir, “Bloody Monday,”
which contrasts the intense passions and fervor of a Muharram procession in Lahore and a bull-run in Spain with daily domestic life in the United States, but suggests a multitude of subtexts on gender and myth. Her use of poetry and prose creates a multiplicity of images that reflects her desire to cross boundaries and break down barriers.

Maniza Naqvi's story, “Impossible Shade of Home Brew,” is an assertion of diversity as unity. The rich multicultural fabric of Lahore, its street life, old traditional buildings, and colonial monuments provide a vivid contrast with touristy Epheseus in modern Turkey. In both these cities, however, the intermingling of East-West narratives, literature and lore, and the theme of “twins” and duality becomes a metaphor for the narrator's subversion of gender definitions and gender roles.

Talat Abbasi has written many intense, feminist stories set in Pakistan, which have been extensively anthologized and used as texts in the United States. Her poignant and haunting tale of a mother and her handicapped child, “Mirage,” reprinted here, won first prize in a BBC short story competition and explores with great honesty a dimension of pain that is seldom discussed.

In the last decade, Pakistan has been strongly affected by political events in neighboring Muslim lands, including the rise of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the politicization of religion, exacerbated by Western rhetoric of Crusades, and the clash of civilizations. Humera Afridi's story, “The Price of Hubris,” set in New York on 9/11, and Bushra Rehman's, “The Old Italian,” which takes place in Queens, New York, in a working-class, diverse immigrant neighborhood, both touch on ideas of religion, identity, and otherness.

With great clarity, another contributor, Feryal Ali Gauhar, brings to light the disadvantaged lives of the poor in Pakistan, due to powerlessness and an inequitable legal and social system in her poignant story, “Kucha Miran Shah.” She portrays the ancient tribal custom of killing of women in the name of honor,
a victimization sanctioned by a village
jirga
—an informal gathering of village elders (men) who mete out a rough-and-ready punishment—and which exists in rural areas as a parallel system to the laws of the state and its courts of law. Aamina Ahmad further explores the diminished rights of the poor in “Scar,” where a young maidservant is falsely accused of theft and has no recourse to justice.

The works of major novelists such as Sidhwa, Suleri Goodyear, and Kamila Shamsie have created important landmarks in Pakistani English literature, regardless of gender. Sidhwa, who wrote her first two novels in virtual isolation in Pakistan because she had no other contemporary English-language writers there, made an enormous breakthrough with the international recognition her novels have received. Suleri Goodyear's creative memoir, which employed the techniques of a novel and divided chapters according to metaphor, was another milestone, as was the quality of her prose. The thirty-five-year-old Kamila Shamsie has published four critically acclaimed novels of remarkable diversity, breadth, and vision so far; her fifth novel will be published in 2009. Her story, “Surface of Glass,” though an early work, makes an incisive comment on Pakistan's stratified class system and the circumscribed life of a servant woman, who believes her enemy, the cook, has put a curse on her.

Kamila Shamsie speaks for many aspiring young writers in Pakistan when she says that she had great difficulty as a child placing Pakistan within a literary context because at school in Karachi, she had no exposure to English literature beyond that of the United States and England. This changed when she read Suleri Goodyear and then Sidhwa as a teenager, but she had to go all the way to college in the United States to discover the wider world of English writing—and her own voice.

The critical acclaim that Shamsie and another young writer included here, Uzma Aslam Khan, have received, has generated tremendous interest in the possibilities of a literary career
among a younger generation. An increasing number of young, published writers have given readings in schools and colleges, and have conducted creative-writing workshops, which were rare in Pakistan until recently. Aslam Khan, who grew up in Karachi during the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, vividly captures a sense of the city's festering violence in her story “Look, but with Love,” which simmers quietly with an undercurrent of desperation and ethnic tension. Her work also comments on gender roles in Pakistan.

In 2004, the British Council in Pakistan held a nationwide competition for students as part of the “I Belong International Story Chain” project, to select five writers for a creative workshop in Karachi, conducted by Kamila Shamsie. Nayyara Rahman's story, “Clay Fissures,” was one of the winners. Though a student work, it has been included for its originality, its promise, and its vision of the future.

Reflecting on the texts included in this anthology, I have become particularly fascinated by how one story touches upon or fleshes out ideas in another, creating a flow, a unifying cycle that reveals many dimensions of Pakistani life through the perspective of women.

I have found that Sidhwa's description of the Partition riots in her story, “Defend Yourself Against Me,” is reflected in Sorayya Khan's Partition story, “Staying,” and in Rustomji's memoir account, “Watching from the Edges,” which links Partition to the divisions and suffering she has seen across the world. In Uzma Khan's story, “Look, but with Love,” the painting of a voluptuous woman in an all-male subculture has obvious associations with male myths about prostitution and red-light districts, which Feryal Ali Gauhar attacks in her story. The sexual exploitation of women implicit in Ali Gauhar's narrative becomes explicit in Fahmida Riaz's “Daughter of Aai,” while the recourse to magic and superstition in a village finds an echo in very different stories by Kamila Shamsie and Tahira Naqvi. Kamila
Shamsie's and Tahira Naqvi's portrayals of a maidservant and a middle-class woman, respectively, revolve around a crisis of self, as does Humera Afridi's “The Price of Hubris.” My story of a postwar migration to Britain and the intermarriage between an Indian and an Englishwoman in British India provides a contrast with the cultural commingling in Sara Suleri Goodyear's “Excellent Things in Women,” about her Welsh-born mother and Pakistani grandmother, which also contains the composite history of Pakistan within it. The interpretation of history is central to Rukhsana Ahmad's story, “Meeting the Sphinx,” set in multicultural Britain, while Fawzia Afzal Khan's “Bloody Monday” gathers up popular culture and religious ritual across three continents to make a comment on gender and sexuality. Maniza Naqvi takes this a step further in “Impossible Shade of Home Brew” to question gender definitions altogether, and also explores parenthood and loss, themes which are equally central to Talat Abbasi's “Mirage.” Prejudice and division of culture and gender run through two stories that describe the Pakistani experience of “America”: Bushra Rehman's “The Old Italian” and Soniah Kamal's “Runaway Truck Ramp.” On the other hand, “A Pair of Jeans” by Qaisra Shah and “The Optimist” by Bina Shah describe cultural misunderstandings between people ostensibly from the same community. Hima Raza's “A Variation in Voices” describes bridges that cannot be crossed, and the poignant “Scar” by Aamina Ahmad centers on the impermeability of class barriers. The stories of Sehba Sarwar, Sabyn Javeri-Jillani, and Nayyara Rahman reflect a younger generation's desire to think back on historical divisions, nationhood, and identity. I included Shahrukh Husain's mythical “Rubies for a Dog,” about a daughter's determination to prove herself equal to a son, for its transcendent symbolism. The amassed texts also reveal two sets of mothers and daughters: Rukhsana Ahmad and Aamina Ahmad in Britain; myself and Kamila Shamsie in Pakistan.