Here we go again!
Themed ‘Tall Tales’, the latest issue of Papercuts pushed writers to the limits of their imaginations. It’s going to delight you with its utter strangeness.
Author Archives: Afia Aslam
KLF 2012 – A Conversation with Hanif Kureishi
Although Shobhaa De’s been affectionately announced as the “Superstar Writer” of the KLF in its programme, literary sorts know that the real celebrity in this year’s event is Hanif Kureishi. And when Kureishi made an appearance in conversation with Muneeza Shamsie at the main garden venue of the Carlton yesterday morning, we were there to cover it.
The session had its highs and lows. Kureishi’s reading from The Buddha of Suburbia was definitely the most engaging part, with the author reciting already witty prose with a wonderfully straight-faced humour, visibly enjoying the audience’s appreciation. His Q&A with Muneeza Shamsie was disappointing, mainly because of the unimaginative way in which Shamsie approached the conversation. When an author has as much to share as Kureishi does, it could be so much more rewarding to really talk to them, letting the conversation take its own path to areas that are of interest to the author and the audience. Instead we heard a pre-decided set of questions that got funny but fairly textbook answers from their respondent. There’s no debating Shamsie’s experience and stature in this field, but in this particular case she missed some opportunities for a more stimulating conversation.
Things got more interesting when questions were opened up to the floor, and that was when we got a more intimate glimpse into the author’s personality as well. Kureishi got a bit more than he’d bargained for when an old lady stood up to ask the first question.
Lady: Hanif, I remember when you visited Pakistan years ago, we met you through your aunt who was a friend of ours. We asked you how you liked Pakistan and you were full of praise for Pakistan and for its people. But when you went back to the UK and you were asked how you found Pakistan, you said you hated it and that the people there were strange. Could you explain why you did that?
She then asked him: I got an impression from reading your books that you have a very low opinion of women. Would you comment on that?
Such questions could make any author quake in his boots but Kureishi, true to his past, did what a typical urban youth in Britain with a survivor’s instinct might do: he went on the offensive. He danced around the first question by stating that as a writer he felt compelled to speak the truth and that it would be ridiculous to expect him to say something he didn’t mean just so that others would think well of Pakistan. This didn’t address her point, of course, but as he said to another audience member later, “I’m not sure if that answered your question but that’s the answer I fancy giving!” (This elicited a good laugh from the audience). He seemed to lose his cool on the old lady’s second criticism, however, and replied only with an, “I don’t know what to say other than that’s a stupid question.” One couldn’t help but feel at that point that the answer wasn’t much better than the question.
At many points during the session, Kureishi’s thoughts were solicited on the issue of identity and it’s not difficult to see why that would be, given his personal history and the themes that he’s written about. In response to a question by Muneeza Shamsie about the link between autobiography and fiction, he half-jokingly referred to the process of ‘reverse colonialism’ in Britain as the South Asian community has established itself there. He too used to grapple with issues of where he belonged until he developed a firmer appreciation of the benefits of nationalism. “People would ask me where I was from,” he said. “I’d say, ‘I live in that house up there,’ but they would say, ‘No, where do you come from?” Then he visited Pakistan and an uncle of his told him, “Your father is Pakistani but where you’re going back to, you’ll always be ‘Paki’.”
That was the turning point for him. England had to change to suit him, he realised, not the other way round. “We’re British, not half English, not mongrel,” Kureishi eloquently put it. He praised how hard England had worked on issues of race. “I don’t think of identity anymore,” he said at one point. “Becoming a writer saved me. Identity is your relationship with yourself, your family and the place you live. The idea of developing an identity is simply to gather more of the world into you than you did before.”
Fortunately, Kureishi was honest about the benefits his race brought for him. His first assignment with Channel 4 came his way because “they were looking for an Asian or black writer and I was the only Asian or black writer they knew of!” And so was born My Beautiful Laundrette and with it, one of modern British literature’s biggest stars.
“I’m fascinated by the desire to speak, to write,” Kureishi said, who was full of praise for the new cadre of Pakistani writers in English making waves around the world. “You’re lucky if you’re an artist and you’re driven to do what you do. It’s a passion, a love. There’s no other way to do it, because the process is chaotic. You just sit in a corner writing until you’ve got blood coming out of your ears! That’s what it is to write.”
We agree.
Book Your Weekend! KLF 2012 is here.
Tomorrow’s a big day for Karachi’s book lovers! The Karachi Literature Festival kicks off at the
Carlton Hotel at 9.30 am on Saturday, 11th February, for the third year in a row.
After the success of last year’s event, there’s an even bigger line-up of drool-inducing writers this time, indicating that the KLF is finally coming into its own. William Dalrymple, acclaimed writer but known best in recent times for founding the enormously successful Jaipur Literature Festival, is flying in for the event – a sure thumbs-up to the KLF organisers’ efforts. Another star to look out for is Hanif Kureishi, British-born but with Pakistani family roots, who was named one of Britain’s top writers since 1945 by The Times in 2008 (a good year for South Asian writing in English in general). Kureishi does not make appearances often in Pakistan, so make sure you attend his session. There are a few Indian writers attending the festival this year, but the one we’re most excited about is the utterly charming Vikram Seth who’s re-entered the writing scene with a bang recently.
A welcome addition to this year’s festival is also Anatol Lieven, a known expert on international conflict and author of the recently released ‘Pakistan: A Hard Country’. His presence ought to help hoist the standard of discussion at current affairs sessions to a higher level. One writer who will be conspicuous in his absence will be late journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad, author of ‘Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11’, the controversial book that many believe he was murdered for. We’re hoping that Shahzad’s a contender for the KLF’s book prize this year, which is awarded for the best non-fiction title of the last twelve months. A book worth dying for is worthy of a prize, or at least a special mention.
One disappointment in this year’s schedule is that, apart from one session featuring Ayesha Jalal, there seems to be no marking as such of 2012 being Manto’s centennial year. With a special theatre performance for Dickens’s 200th birthday, we feel Manto Sahib deserved a bit more attention.
No peeves apart from that; our usual favourites will be present at the KLF, including M. Hanif (who caused near stampedes of admiring female fans at the Jaipur
One of M. Hanif's many adoring fans at Jaipur
Literature Festival), Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid and Bilal Tanweer, among others. We’re particularly looking forward to seeing the screening of Meherjaan, the film that has caused an uproar in Bangladesh for showing a love affair between a Pakistani soldier (played by Omar Rahim) and a Bengali woman during the 1971 war.
Cancel your plans, folks, because that sounds like one helluva weekend.
2012 challenges
We’ve been in a bit of a funk on the blogging end but guess what? We won the Best Literature Blog category at the Pakistan Blog Awards 2011 and we are NOT going to let this blog slide after that amazing achievement! So here we are, kicking off the new year in the DWL way, i.e. full of plans, a little crazy and ALWAYS late.
Two of our team members have set personal literary challenges for this year. Omer Wahaj, Papercuts Articles Editor, was inspired by this book to write a novel composed entirely of tweets. The paradigm changing feature about tweeting a book, of course, is that it’s written in blocks of no more than 140 characters, and each tweet must be able to stand on its own. There is an enormous discipline involved in this style of writing, so we’re excited about seeing where this goes! The first tweet for The Just In Case Files of Shandar Misttry, Inventive Generalist by Omer Wahaj went up on Twitter today, the 1st of February 2012. Follow the author on Twitter (@omerwahaj) if you want to be a part of this awesome project.
The second literary challenge has been taken up by Afia Aslam, Papercuts Editor, and is a little less challenging and a little more cheesy than the one you’ve read about above. (This is where I start talking about myself in the third person.) Fresh from completing Swapna Krishna’s South Asian Challenge in 2011, which involved finishing more than 10 books by desi authors before year end, Afia decided to read at least one book every month in 2012 that would start with the same letter as the month in which it was being read. Thus the progression of books will be J, F, M, A, M, J, J, A, S, O, N, D. The challenge was put up on DWL’s Facebook page and several suggestions came in for titles, which are listed below. You’re welcome to give your own suggestions as well!
1. Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam
2. Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
3. Justice and Remembrance by Reza Shah Kazemi
4. Silas Marner by George Eliot
5. Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder
6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
7. Jo’s Boys by Louisa May Alcott
8. Julius Caesar (play) by William Shakespeare
9. Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot
10. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
11. Snow by Orhan Pamuk
12. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
13. Fools Die by Mario Puzo
14. The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye
15. Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides
Here’s to 2012, then! If you’re inspired to start your own reading challenge, share it here!
The Oral Storyteller: an Evening with Ira Glass
DWL welcomes Fyza Parviz to its ranks as a guest blogger. Fyza will be covering literary events in San Fransisco, California and will also contribute book reviews. This is her first post.
‘This American Life’ is one of my favorite shows on NPR. With a dedicated audience of 1.8 million listeners and 700,000 weekly subscribers to its podcast, this show has become a phenomenon in the US since its inception in 1995. Its premise lies in finding fascinating tales about regular everyday people and reformatting these stories for the radio in such a gripping way that they keep the listening audience absolutely riveted. The radio host creates a world painstakingly – word by word, sentence building on sentence – until he breathes life into scenes and places, people, conversations and things, making this a true form of oral storytelling as art. So it was my luck that Ira Glass, who has made an undying name for being the host and the creator of ‘This American Life’, was in the Bay Area this past month for a live performance.
The Wells Fargo Center of the Arts was the venue for the event, titled An Evening with Ira Glass. ‘This American Life’ is produced by NPR member station WBEZ Chicago but broadcast from New York. In the live performance, without any notes or prompters, Glass eloquently talked about his radio program and how it is put together: what makes a compelling story, where they find the amazing stories for their show, and how he and his staff are trying to push broadcast journalism to do things it doesn’t usually do. Glass mixed stories from the show live onstage, combining his narration with pre-taped quotes and music, recreating the sound of the show as the audience watched. He played funny and memorable moments from previous episodes, and talked about what went on behind the scenes.
Source: pri.org
According to Glass, the format of every gripping tale should be “action, action, action, action… and then the moral”. This journalistic formula, to his own surprise, had also been used by our ancestors way back. The biblical teachings of Moses and Jesus followed the same pattern and to this day the priests conduct their sermons in this method. It visually simulates the person to degrees that images on television have not been able to accomplish. This was very interesting to me as in fiction I only enjoy reading modernist prose where the plot is usually unobtrusive at best. But then I came to realize that creating a page-turner requires a whole lot of creative imagination, something that is found abundantly in the producers of ‘This American Life’, who travel the globe in search of interesting stories.
As an example, Glass played a recording of a show that featured an American military base camp in Iraq. They found a marine whose sole job, i.e. 18 hours a day, was to fill the vending machine on the camp. She even chuckled while explaining how she collected statistics on which candy bars and snacks were more popular than the rest. This was quite opposite to the kind of stories and images that were being featured on the Iraq war by the rest of the media, e.g. CNN showed fighter jets leaving the runway and tanks ready to fire. Even the music featured with these images was taken from the opening credits of the sci-fi show Battle Star Galactica. In reality, on ‘This American Life’, the marines mentioned how they felt very safe in their camp, as the Taliban (lacking an air force, navy and nuclear arsenal) were not as well equipped as US forces. The American soldiers told the producer of the show that they felt as if they were in a huge dormitory rather than a military camp. This story was quite personal and gave the audience a feel of what was really going on rather than what they saw on television. And this is where Ira Glass has been able to transform radio and use its magnetic power to attract audiences from all over the world.
The host closed the show by talking about how narrative can lead us to the inner workings of the person, using one of Scheherazade’s tales from A Thousand and One Nights. “What the story is about, among other things, is what narrative does to us,” he said. “It is a back door to a very deep place in us – a place where reason doesn’t necessarily hold sway. We live in a very odd cultural moment where from the moment we wake up ‘till the moment we go to bed we are bombarded with stories like no one who has ever lived. And I mean everything on the radio, everything on TV, every ad, every billboard, every song, all the little videos on the internet, it’s story, story, story. And for me, the number of stories I encounter over the course of a day, with so many of them it seems like the colors are too bright and the thoughts are partial, and it’s rare that I can imagine what it’d be like if I were in that situation. Stories that are done well enough that we can even empathize, and that touch you, it’s rare still somehow… and we live in such a divided country and world, where we so rarely get inside each others’ lives, especially people who live differently from us, I think anything that helps with that is probably a good thing. Not just the news, or information, but stories that take you inside someone’s experience, because that’s what stories can do like nothing else can. And that’s what we shoot for on the show.”
I was so touched by this that after coming home from the show, my modernist literature loving self picked up a book that I otherwise would have never enjoyed: ‘Luka and the Fire of Life’ by Salman Rushdie. In it, Rushdie writes –
Man is the Storytelling Animal, and in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood. Do rats tell tales? Do porpoises have narrative purposes? Do elephants ele-phantasize? You know as well as I do that they do not. Man alone burns with books.
All that is good and Frere
Life has a way of coming full circle – something to remember in these mad, maddening times. Burdened by the cross of our sins and our fears as a nation, and staggering under the weight of all the things that we know to be true even though we wish they weren’t, many of us feel helpless in Pakistan today; as if we are ineffectively digging our heels into the ground as we get dragged closer and closer to a yawning abyss. Equally the victims and perpetrators of injustice, we throw punches where there is only air and we protest by crying wolf. Our eyes fixed on what we are afraid lies ahead, we fail to look back; but if we did, we might notice that all along the trail of desolation and violence left behind us, life continues to quietly reassert, restructure and rebuild itself. For all the mayhem that people cause, the ability to recover is a fundamental building block of the natural and spiritual world and so, every once so often, life will come full circle. The question is: will you be there to see it when it happens?
This is the sense I had when I visited the Frere Hall book fair in Karachi earlier this summer. I had last been here seven years ago, accompanied by a photographer friend visiting from the US. We had gone to see the historic building on a Sunday morning and had been caught completely by surprise at the sight of a sprawling, tent-covered area lined by tables upon tables layered with books. The hall famous for its ceiling mural by Sadequain was not open to the public at that time, but the caretaker let us in. It was in terrible shape: dark, dusty, unused. The window panels, he said, had been shattered during the bombing at the US consulate two years before. No one had bothered to fix them, but (and at this he pointedly looked at my white American friend) he could take it upon himself to do the job if he had the money for it. The talk of bombing, the smell of decay and the enormous bee hive in one corner of the ceiling was making it was difficult to concentrate on the beauty of the mural. It was as if Frere Hall was still in mourning for what had come to pass in its environs on that day in 2002, when a vehicle full of explosive had blown up outside the consulate and killed over 50 people. We thanked the caretaker and gratefully escaped into the sunlight, where we spent several hours browsing through books and taking photos of the booksellers.
The fair attracts all sorts
I found out later that that was the last year the book fair had been allowed to run in those gardens. As the consulate moved to secure its surrounding areas, Frere Hall and its lawns were closed off to the public entirely. It made me angry to hear this. The presence of those books and those people had signified something critical in our post-9/11 country. I felt that the residents of Karachi had been consistently robbed of such simple pleasures as reading and picnicking at precisely the time when they needed them most and that the closure of Frere Hall was a towering symbol of this. Two years later, there was another bombing at the American consulate and I remember thinking at the time that this building would probably remain closed for good.
Life moved on and in January of 2011, I shifted with my family to Karachi. Five months later, the news came: the book fair at Frere Hall was being resurrected. It would run from 8 am to 7 pm every Sunday. The US consulate had shifted to a new location and in its wake, the revival had already begun. My husband and I went at the first possible opportunity and we were not disappointed. The set-up was on a more modest scale than before, but it was still big enough to keep us busy for far more time than we had to spare with two children in tow. The original sense of being able to find bargains was still very much intact and the fair retained its quirky flavor: we were delighted to find books that were not available in regular bookshops. My husband found the third book in a trilogy that his father had been trying to complete for several years. I found English classics, Tintin comics and a title that was so interesting that it simply had to be purchased, regardless of whether one ever got around to reading it.
Where else would you find this?
What a joy to lug those books home. What a joy to soak in that atmosphere: children playing in the grass, people quietly browsing through book stalls and a steady stream of visitors flowing through the newly renovated, gorgeous Sadequain Art Gallery, now beautifully lit with repaired windows and an exhibition in progress. Frere Hall was reborn and with it, symbolically, so was the cultural heart of an entire city: momentarily arrested, but now beating, alive.
All the lit you'll ever need (click to enlarge)
DWL for Best Literature Blog on the Pakistan Blog Awards 2011
We are so excited to be competing on this year’s Pakistan Blog Awards!
Being a community (instead of an individual) gives us a unique edge over other contestants in the Best Literature Blog category. As a writing forum, literature is what we do. Our members produce original material that we help workshop, edit and publish in our own literary magazine, Papercuts. The magazine also provides a platform for writers looking to get published who are not members of DWL. One of the central functions of the DWL blog, therefore, is to give out updated information on the writing community and the magazine.
But that’s just the start of what this blog covers. We cover literary events (see our blogpost ‘Critical Reading: The Murder of Manto’ for instance, or our coverage of the Karachi Literature Festival 2011). We share writing tips (see Noorulain Noor’s posts on writing techniques as an example). We comment on news in the literary world (see our take on the Greg Mortenson affair). The next step on the cards is to start featuring reviews.
So why should you vote for us? Because if you’re interested in literature, there’s so much you can take away with you from this blog. It’s not just about amateur poetry or the latest book someone’s read; nor is it region specific: it’s about everything to do with literature. And that makes us relevant and different.
Here’s how to vote:
1. Go to http://pakistanblogawards.com/2011/11/17/best-literature-blog-desi-writers-lounge/
2. Scroll down until you see the heading Best Literature Blog: Desi Writers Lounge.
3. You will see five yellow stars underneath that heading. Click on the fifth star on the right to give us a high rating. We’re attaching a picture to make this easy for you.
4. Wonder at how easy it all was. (This step is optional).
A big thank you to everyone who helps us do this!
Click on the yellow stars to vote
We want your photos
Before you start sending us self-portraits, please read on below.
The theme for Papercuts Vol. 8, as you all know, is Forbidden. And we’d like to run a photo essay on that. To complement our cover image, which is of street graffiti, we’d like our readers and supporters to send in photographs of public signs in their cities that stop them from doing something. It could be anything – a poster, a billboard, road signs, something scrawled on a wall – but it must be interesting. An example would be the all-too-familiar advice one sees on walls in Pakistan: Yahan peshaab karna manaa hai (It is forbidden to urinate here). There are loads of other examples as well; once you start looking for them, you’ll be surprised at what you’ll find. Please, please just don’t send us a photo of a stop sign. There are limits to our conceptual patience. Thank you.
Another example of what not to send us
As always, send in your material to editor.papercuts@desiwriterslounge.net. We are extending the deadline to 1st December 2011. If selected, your photograph will be credited with YOUR name and published online as part of a photo essay linked on the Papercuts home page.
If it’s your city, how come there’s so much you can’t do in it? Your camera will help you think that through.
Critical Reading: the Murder of Manto
When Mangoo kochwaan stopped to pick up an Englishman standing next to an electric pole in Saadat Hasan Manto’s story ‘Naya Qanoon’, he was already angry.
“Kahan jaana maangta hai?” he asked sharply.
“Heera mandi,” the Englishman responded.
“That’ll be five rupees,” Mangoo shot back, his moustache bristling.
The reader knows that Mangoo was in the mood for a fight against the imperial oppressor, but who could’ve guessed that the Englishman’s proposed destination would have other moustaches bristling until several decades later, and for entirely different reasons?
In 1993 and 1994, the Sindh Textbook Board carried out some revisions in the Urdu syllabus for Classes 11 and 12. Apart from knocking Premchand (the father of contemporary Urdu fiction) off the reading list, it was decided that Manto’s ‘Naya Qanoon’ would be included, but in an edited form. In the textbook version, when Mangoo demanded to know where the client was going, the Englishman responded only with, “Mandi.” His character thus became more presentable, if a little obscure: he could now equally be going looking for prostitutes, goats or turnips, and that was presumably how the Board was going to ensure that the next generation knew its literature but kept its moral bearings straight.
It was this passage that came to the attention of Ajmal Kamal, Editor of the Karachi-based Urdu literary journal ‘Aaj’, some years ago. Upon investigation, he discovered that this was the smallest revision wrought on the story by the Textbook Board: apart from deleting the word ‘heera’, entire passages had been removed for carrying objectionable material. A revisit of the deleted passages threw up interesting clues as to the politics of the censors. Any reference to communism or ‘the Russian king’ was missing from the printed story; call it a Cold War hangover in a country aligned with the USA. Portions that mentioned Hindu-Muslim riots had been struck off as they placed equal blame on both sides for mob violence (and also because they mentioned that Hindus and Muslims were destined to fight forever due to a saint’s curse, not because – as the Two Nation Theory said – they were practically different species). Even a paragraph on the relationship between Mangoo and his Hindu wife was gone, although there was no telling whether Mangoo himself was Muslim or Hindu.
Kamal published the detailed findings of his content analysis in the Annual of Urdu Studies in 1995 (read the whole paper here http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/10/16censorship.pdf). Last Thursday evening, the topic came alive again as part of a critical reading session he conducted in partnership with T2F (previously The Second Floor), currently Karachi’s most active venue for cultural and literary dialogue. And a dialogue is exactly what Kamal and T2F got. Every person in the compact audience had an opinion and a unique perspective on issues of censorship, education, nationalism and identity; not one person was afraid to voice their views. The result was a rich and layered discussion that added substantially to the speaker’s initial analysis (later, he described the debate as “exciting”).
As one of the audience members pointed out, the extensive revisions to the story begged the question why Manto had to be included in the textbook at all. For someone who had formally been tried in a court of law for promoting obscenity through his work (if you’ve been thinking that censorship and clampdowns on freedom of expression in Pakistan were General Zia-ul-Haq’s domain, think again) he made an unlikely candidate for required reading in government schools. If anything, Manto’s ideas were the exact opposite of what the State might have wanted to promote: he was “neither a moralist nor an ideologue, neither a sermoniser nor a nationalist” (ref. here).
The obvious answer to this would be that Manto’s canonical status amongst Urdu writers was difficult to block out. As another audience member said, Manto was one of the foremost post-colonial writers whose stories held appeal for readers anywhere in the country due to their simplicity and their choice of subject. It made sense for the State to appropriate him, as it were, and show him to be a part of the nationalist project rather than as an inconveniently popular voice of dissent. He was not the first writer to be put through this “posthumous circumcision”, Ajmal Kamal quipped, but given his preference of character-types and plots he was certainly one of the more complicated writers to drag into the fold. And that was where the choice of story became interesting. It occurred to me that from a censor’s point of view, ‘Naya Qanoon’ was the ideal Manto story to pick up. Unlike his other famous stories, which had morally problematic protagonists or references littered throughout, this piece was easily editable. Once the offending passages had been removed, there still remained a coherent narrative with a relatable, respectable hero who voiced choice opinions against the colonial establishment, albeit in a crude way and with very little credible information at hand (as Kamal said, if Mangoo kochwaan had been born today, he would’ve been a TV anchor). Take this paragraph, for instance:
Ustaad Mangoo hated the English; he said because they reigned over his Hindustan and perpetrated every cruelty imaginable. But the biggest reason for his hatred was that the goras from the Cantonment gave him a lot of grief. They would treat him like a lowly cur. Apart from this, he also disliked their colour. Whenever he would see the mottled pink and white complexion of a white man, he would start feeling inexplicably nauseous. He used to say that their red, wrinkled faces reminded him of a flaking corpse.
(Translation is my own; apologies to Manto Sahib if he’s turning in his grave at this moment.)
Mangoo kochwaan, for all his righteous anger, was a racist! Yet the censors did not see fit to remove this passage from the textbook because it suited the picture of the colonial oppressor that students were supposed to internalise. This also raised interesting questions about how concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ were projected by the Sindh Textbook Board censors. One audience member at T2F said that some of the material that had been struck off (for example, the reference to heera mandi or Mangoo’s conversation with his pregnant wife) would have been seen as offensive to middle class sensibilities, particularly when this was supposed to be read in an instructional environment. Not only would the average teacher have been uncomfortable with discussing these things, there would also have been concern about a backlash from parents. This was a valid point. Given that schooling was supposed to have a civilizing effect on the young, it could have been considered inappropriate – even irrational – to reproduce Manto’s work whole scale when he took a distinctly unclean, uncivilized approach to literature. Ajmal Kamal agreed with this, adding that Manto practically had to invent the requisite language to approach the topics he wrote about. Urdu literature actually had very little room for his brand of writing.
One of the women present at the session argued in favour of moderate censorship, citing examples of distorted history in American textbooks in order to create an acceptable narrative at a national level. This led to an animated discussion on how history should be presented in textbooks and curricula, and how such concerns were born out of a deep sense of insecurity in the nationalist camp. The consensus was, however, that such restrictions could not be applied to literature with a clear conscience. If nothing else, a gentleman sitting in the front row said passionately, what had happened with ‘Naya Qanoon’ was straightforward copyright infringement and the matter ought to be taken to the courts.
This need to protect literature from being cropped and pruned at will by the self-appointed gardeners of our youth’s intellectual Eden becomes all the greater when applied to Manto’s writing. This is not light, superficial fiction. As one source puts it most beautifully:
“The best of his partition stories surprise one by bringing together, in darkly illuminating moments of existential understanding, terrible violence and the beauty of the human yearning for sex, children, home and community which refuses to yield its instinctual energy to the death-traps religious fanaticism and extremist politics lay for us. […]his stories […] are constructed out of a complex variety of strong voices — voices of protest and anguish, mockery and nostalgia, mourning and longing — voices which clash against each other and jostle for a hearing.” *
Saadat Hasan Manto, in his short life, wrote with an almost animal urgency about the horror of the world as he saw it. His prose was so steeped in social insight and so intelligently crafted that no passage could really be called spare or dispensable, except perhaps by those who did not want to understand him. To mutilate his work thus was, in fact, criminal. Stripped of some of its most potent passages, only a shell of ‘Naya Qanoon’ remained in the books – one that was capable of communicating very little of what the author intended. In a way, Manto actually never made it to the Urdu syllabus at all.
* Quoted from lecture at Central Institute of Indian Languages, reference as above.
A video recording of the event will be available soon via T2F.
Plath on prose
This was shared recently on the DWL forums by Papercuts Associate Poetry Editor, Hera Naguib. A compelling look at the work of the novelist, written by a formidable adversary.
A COMPARISON
by Sylvia Plath
Essay, 1962
How I envy the novelist!
I imagine him—better say her, for it is the women I look to for a parallel—I imagine her, then pruning a rosebush with a large pair of shears, adjusting her spectacles, shuffling about among the teacups, humming, arranging ashtrays or babies, absorbing a slant of light, a fresh edge to the weather, and piercing, with a kind of modest, beautiful x-ray vision, the psychic interiors of her neighbors—her neighbors on trains, in the dentist waiting room, in the corner teashop. To her, this fortunate one, what is there that isn’t relevant! Old shoes can be used, doorknobs, air letters, flannel nightgowns, cathedrals, nail varnish, jet planes, rose arbors and budgerigars; little mannerisms—the sucking at a tooth, the tugging at a hemline—any weird or warty or fine or despicable thing. Not to mention emotions, motivations—those rumbling, thunderous shapes. Her business is Time, the way it shoots forward, shunts back, blooms, decays and double-exposes itself. Her business is people in Time. And she, it seems to me, has all the time in the world. She can take a century if she likes, a generation, a whole summer.
I can take about a minute.
I’m not talking about epic poems. We all know how long they can take. I’m talking about the smallish, unofficial garden-variety poem. How shall I describe it?—a door opens, a door shuts. In between you have had a glimpse: a garden, a person, a rainstorm, a dragonfly, a heart, a city. I think of those round glass Victorian paperweights which I remember, yet can never find—a far cry from the plastic mass-productions which stud the toy counters in Woolworth’s. This sort of paperweight is a clear globe, self-complete, very pure, with a forest or village or family group within it. You turn it upside down, then back. It snows. Everything is changed in a minute/ it will never be the same in there—not the fir trees, nor the globes, nor the faces.
So a poem takes place.
And there is really so little room! So little time! The poet becomes an expert packer of suitcases:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.
There it is; the beginning and the end in one breath. How would the novelist manage that? In a paragraph?¬ In a page? Mixing it, perhaps, like paint, with a little water, thinning it, spreading it out.
Now I am being smug, I am finding advantages.
If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels.
I have never put a toothbrush in a poem.
I do not like to think of all the things, familiar, useful and worthy things, I have never put into a poem. I did, once, put a yew tree in. and that yew tree began, with astounding egotism, to manage and order the whole affair. It was not a yew tree by a church on a road past a house in a town where a certain woman lived…and so on, as it might have been in a novel. Oh, no. it stood squarely in the middle of my poem, manipulating its dark shades, the voices in the churchyard, the clouds, the birds, the tender melancholy with which I contemplated it—everything! I couldn’t subdue it. And, in the end, my poem was a poem about the yew tree. That yew tree was just too proud to be a passing black mark in a novel.
Perhaps I shall anger some poets by implying that the poem is proud. The poem, too, can include everything, they will tell me. And with far more precision and power than those baggy, disheveled and undiscriminate creatures we call novels. Well, I concede these poets their steamshovels and old trousers. I really don’t think poems should be all that chaste. I would, I think, even concede a toothbrush, if the poem was a real one. But these apparitions, these poetical toothbrushes, are rare. And when they do arrive, they are inclined, like my obstreperous yew tree, to think themselves singles out and rather special.
Not so in novels.
There the toothbrush returns to its rack with beautiful promptitude and is forgot. Time flows, eddies, meanders and people have leisure to and alter before our eyes. The rich junk of like bobs all about us; bureaus, thimbles, cats, the whole much-loved, well-thumbed catalog of the miscellaneous which the novelist wishes us to share. I do not mean that there is no pattern, no discernment, no rigorous ordering here.
I am only suggesting that perhaps the pattern does not insist so much.
The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts.
But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.