Author Archives: Afia Aslam

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Back to the Editors’ Desks

Submissions for Papercuts Vol. 9 have closed. It’s past the 15th of October everywhere in the world  😀  What does this mean for us? We withdraw to the confines of our google doc and start shortlisting the material you’ve sent us. If you submitted something for the next issue, we thank you for trusting us with your work and ask you to be patient while the process of shortlisting goes on. You will hear from one of the editors, regardless of whether your submission makes the cut or not.

In other news, the DWL Facebook page has been picking up in activity by leaps and bounds. Instead of just letting you know what we’re doing, we will now actively work towards referencing great articles from other online publications, putting up events from all over the world and generally creating an informative, discursive environment for budding writers. Our FB ‘likes’ have been increasing steadily and we would like the page to grow with its fans! If you’re not a part of the FB community yet, join us!

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Deadline approaching for Papercuts Vol. 9

The deadline for submitting fiction and poetry for Papercuts Vol. 9 is now only a few weeks away! Send us your original material by October 15th, 2011 at editor.papercuts@desiwriterslounge.net. The theme is ‘Tall Tales’. You will find the submission guidelines here.

We are still looking for people to hand out a few more articles to. If you’re an articulate, analytical person who can write well in English and is interested in researching on a cool topic, write to us at editor.papercuts@desiwriterslounge.net and we’ll find something for you to sink your teeth into!

Good luck to everyone who’s getting their stuff together for submission!

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Marilyn on the move

Props to our Creative Lead, Osman Khalid Butt, for designing this promotional flyer/poster for Vol. 8. The brick-like layers that Osman divided Marilyn into (yes, we call her that – refer to this if you don’t know why) represent her fractured identity beautifully and make the forceful gender statement that, no matter how amazing she is, at the end of the day she is just a picture on a wall.

We’re sending the image around these days to garner more attention for Vol. 8 and to encourage submissions for Vol. 9. So get on the bandwagon (because let’s face it… what else are they useful for anymore) and do the honourable thing – help Marilyn get off that wall and see the world!

 

Marilyn's ready to see more of the world. Facebook her or email her to your friends!

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Pakistan Today feature on DWL and Papercuts

We got some fantastic coverage recently in Pakistan Today, the country’s fastest growing English newspaper. Aamer Dhamani, sub-editor at PT, interviewed a number of our team members about DWL, what it has meant to us over the years and why the heck we love it so much. He also read Papercuts as part of his research and said the BEST things about it. Yeah, the DWL bug bit him too!

In print, the feature took up a whole page of the paper and sported a photo of our team members as well as an image of our Vol. 7 cover. The online version got 60 FB likes in less than a week, which is practically a miracle for art and culture pieces in Pakistani newspapers. It shows not only how much heart Aamer wrote this article with, but also points towards our increasing popularity and brand recognition.

Okay, enough bragging. Here’s the link to the online version of the feature! Enjoy. (And click on the FB like button if you know how totally awesome this is).

‘Papercuts’ rekindles joie de lire – Aamer Dhamani for Pakistan Today

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Show us a leg

Where is everybody??

You may be asking yourselves the same question, actually. We’ve been slow with keeping up on the forums but that’s because the team is busy, busy, busy with editing for Papercuts. As you all may know, this is the first time we’ve opened up our doors to public submissions. This has obviously increased our workload quite a bit, but we’ve dealt with the situation by expanding our poetry and prose teams. We’ve got two great new people on board: Omer Wahaj for prose and Hera Naguib for poetry. Some of you may already be working with these two if your submissions were selected for Vol. 8  🙂

In other news, we’ve issued a special bonus call for submissions for poetry. If you missed the boat the last time it came around, you have a second chance to submit a poem for Vol. 8! Same theme: Forbidden. Same address: editor.papercuts@desiwriterslounge.net Deadline: 2nd June. We’re doing this because we got so many poems on love and sex this time that our poetry editors have original sin coming out of their ears! We are looking for something different, people. As one of our editors never said (in fact, would never dream of saying) forbidden fruit doesn’t only refer to the low hanging fruit!

Anyway, this blog entry is just to verify that all of us are alive and kicking (often ourselves and occasionally each other) but we’d love to see more activity from YOU, dear readers and writers, on the forums. Remember, at the end of the day it’s you who keeps it going! So enough of a summer break, everyone, and let’s get back to some writing, shall we?

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Gone in 60 Minutes

 

October 2003 – Bozeman, Montana. It’s the coldest autumn I’ve ever seen. I’m part of a five-member team that has been sent by Rotary Pakistan on an exchange trip to Montana, USA. Our instructions are simple: Thou Shalt Improve Cultural Ties by Educating the American People about Thy Country. The mission itself is not quite that simple. We travel to small towns and prosperous but conservative communities in the heartland of rural America, in a frontier State where the Pioneer spirit is alive and well and Lewis and Clark are still everyone’s biggest heroes.

We hop from city to town to city, sometimes staying for a day, sometimes three days, and if we’re lucky, a week. We make bleary-eyed Power Point presentations at 7-am meetings in hotels – about small industry in Pakistan, about art, culture and advertising, about banking and debt relief, about poverty and schools for girls. We are asked if there are cars in our country or if people still travel on camels.

We meet hundreds of friendly, hospitable, open-hearted people, none of whom know what to expect from a Group Study Exchange team from Pakistan. They’re all visibly relieved to meet us; then they’re worried for us. They ask us if it’s safe in our part of the world, what with the war in Iraq and all. They tell us about the people who haven’t turned up to make our acquaintance: the woman across the street who’s frantic at the thought of her neighbor hosting a potential terrorist; the man two houses down whose brother was murdered in Karachi.

We cook bad Pakistani food with no fear of being found out. We make friends for life. We learn how to fry an egg by making it dance. We hear an early-morning broadcast on the radio about how schools in Pakistan teach students to hate America. We sing Elvis songs in a train. We realize that our Rotary meeting audiences are intrigued by us but they’d rather hear the new football coach speak about this season’s prospects for the State team, the Grizzlies.

We go to barn dances and we sit in silent awe on backyard piers that overlook idyllic, unspoilt lakes nestled between snow-capped mountains. We give talks about our country at schools where the globe being used in Geography class still shows East Pakistan.

And then, in Bozeman, I’m told by a Rotarian, “We have a special surprise for you! Have you heard of Greg Mortenson?”

I haven’t. And just like that, we’re whisked to the modest offices of the Central Asian Institute – an organization that funds and runs girls’ schools in Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan. After what we’ve experienced in the last few weeks, the CAI and its work is not just astonishing – it’s practically a culture shock. The programme officer is young and enthusiastic. She tries to speak a few words of Urdu. She can’t wait to visit Pakistan.

Mr. Mortenson is not there in person for the meeting… ironically, he’s in Pakistan, working on a project. I tell the CAI staff about the work I’m doing in an NGO for girls’ education in remote Pakistani villages. We make a $100 donation to the Institute before leaving. Somewhere not so far back in our minds there is the thought that it’s all going to come back to our part of the world anyway.

But now it turns out that only $41 probably made it back to ‘us’. In fact, a bigger portion of that donation ($47) would have gone towards funding Mr. Mortenson’s busy speaking programme, which takes him across the length and breadth of the United States all year round – much of that programme focused on promoting (and selling) his books.

No, this is not going where ’60 Minutes’ went with it. When news of the documentary broke, I had several conflicting thoughts and emotions. Like many others, I felt betrayed. Then I berated myself for expecting any different. Who could believe in goodness in today’s world? I met my cousin over breakfast and told her that Greg Mortenson was probably CIA anyway. Secretly, I felt terrible that his life’s work, which depended almost entirely on his reputation for its sustainability, was probably going to go down the drain. I was angry at ’60 Minutes’ for taking the sensational high road when the human impact was so evidently devastating. I was relieved that we never wound up scheduling the DWL floods fundraiser this year and requesting Mr. Mortenson to come as chief guest! I was torn about what this would mean for him as a writer. When did the story start taking precedence over the truth? Was it worth the risk of being found out?

And that last point was what eventually decided the matter for me. When Alex Haley was prosecuted for plagiarism and exposed for more or less making up the entire plot, premise and characters of Roots (1976) it could’ve signaled the end of the novel and his writing career. I imagine many hundreds of thousands of his readers, particularly African Americans, felt betrayed as well. And yet, more than forty years later, Roots remains THE definitive mainstream text on black history in America. The issues it raised and the awareness it created took black activism beyond American streets and living rooms onto the global stage of popular culture. Indeed, while Haley will always be remembered as the writer who lied, his book somehow survived the scandal. Why?

Because the book, even if fictional, was essentially true. Slavery was no tall tale.

Because that novel was just a dang good read.

The story related in Three Cups of Tea (of Greg Mortenson’s botched K2 attempt and subsequent visit to a remote mountain village) has been crucial to the success of his fundraising and awareness campaign. Now, although he still claims categorically that he did go to Korphe village in Baltistan after failing to summit K2, his porters apparently say he didn’t. Oops. Similarly, it turns out that his ‘kidnappers’ in Balochistan (related in Stones into Schools) were actually a bunch of people (including the chief of a think tank in Islamabad) who were just trying to show him around. The kidnapping, it would seem, was taking place in Greg’s head while he was being covertly transported around the tribal area with a group of acquaintances who’d confiscated his passport for safekeeping and had thrown a bag over his face for anonymity.

WHO CARES?

To my mind, the biggest contribution that Greg Mortenson has made to peace in this region is not in the schools he has set up; it is in the tireless activism that he has done in his home country and the way his books have drawn the world’s attention to a different, richer view of what Pakistan and Afghanistan are and what the priorities of a foreign policy to address this region should be. Mortenson has reached out to the American public the way no one has managed to do on our behalf ever before.

So it’s not the schools I’m so worried about. Education outside the State system is an ongoing, evolving endeavour in Pakistan. Programmes start, schools get set up, some schools close, others mushroom, projects run out of funding, lapsed schools are resurrected, one organization moves out, another moves in. Even if CAI starts raking in fewer funds and has to withdraw support for some schools, it is quite likely that the latter will be able to pull in funding from another organisation.

But who’s going to fund those advocacy trips around the US? Who’s going to buy the tickets for the thousands of hours that Greg Mortenson puts into talking about a part of the world that the American population actually knows very little of? Who’s going to plug the gap when those speaking engagements dwindle? Who’s going to publish and promote the next book that urges the world to see the humanity in our people and to invest in them?

Make no mistake, this is the real cost of that documentary and its fallout, which must necessarily come. It isn’t often that a do-gooder comes along with that killer combination of commitment and the power to hold you, to make you listen – to win your trust – as Greg Mortenson has. A very important voice is in danger of being silenced.

But in the middle of this mess, I have hope. It’s the books, you see. Whether or not Mr. Mortenson went to Korphe in 1993 does not eclipse the overall truth of what his books are shouting out to the world: Remember these are people, just like you; if you help them, you forge peace. And they’re good books. People will continue to read them and many people will continue to believe and to act because of them. I think sometimes we forget how powerful that can be.

You never know, the pen may still win the day.

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DWL pilots its YouTube channel

Exciting news! We’ve just taken a significant step to cementing our online presence as an international writers’ community. With the soft launch of the new DWL/Papercuts channel on YouTube, we’re looking to reach out to a wider audience and to promote our writers in a more diverse manner.

The experience of reading something, be it a poem, story or article, totally changes with some context or perspective. Audio-visual content provides both. We hope that supporting A/V material will make the content more accessible, easier to interpret and more interesting for readers.

Just to clarify: this is a pilot. We’ve only put two videos up so far and are gauging the response to them. If people like the concept, we will launch the channel formally and improve the production quality. The videos will always have an ‘at home’ feel to them, though, because we want to keep them real and to represent the true essence of amateur writing.

Go to http://www.youtube.com/user/DesiWritersLounge to check out the channel. AND DON’T FORGET TO CLICK ON THE ‘LIKE’ BUTTON!

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Karachi Literature Festival – Day 1 contd.

By the end of the first day, the festival was running well behind schedule. Mics weren’t working, sessions were starting up to an hour late and audiences were getting fidgety. Fortunately, an amazing aura of excitement continued to surround the hotel, so while there was some annoyance amongst the festival goers, no one really cared for too long. In retrospect, it’s quite possible that the organizers just didn’t plan for so many people to attend the event and got overwhelmed with the response. Some of the sessions were crammed to maximum hall capacity, particularly the Works in Progress session at the end of the first day.
This session was going to be a crowd puller from the start. The US embassy, which was a major partner in organizing this year’s KLF, had brought together quite the celeb group at one table: Ali Sethi (The Wish Maker), Daniyal Mueenuddin (In Other Rooms, Other Wonders), H.M. Naqvi (Home Boy), M. Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) and Sunil Sethi (The Big Book Shelf). I don’t think anyone was expecting anything really solid to come out of this little sitting; for most of the fans sitting there, it was probably just a chance to kill five birds with one stone. Considering that, one still managed to walk away with some interesting little nuggets from the aforementioned writers.
Ali Sethi was the youngest and the most intense member of the panel. Everything about him was geared to create an impression, from the stark rims on his glasses right down to the dramatic way in which he read out passages from texts about religious minorities in Pakistan. Evidently the writer still most concerned with ‘finding himself’, Sethi spoke passionately about the need to know one’s social reality and to figure out what one’s ‘social and economic inheritance’ was. His investigations into violence against religious minorities were driven by this same need to understand events as they unfolded around him; a process that his idealistic education abroad did not prepare him for, he said. Writing could help you decide what you believed in, said Sethi. This was an interesting turn from what one had normally heard, which was that you inevitably put to paper what already exists in your head and heart.
Daniyal Mueenuddin was by the far the most relaxed person sitting at the table. Leaning back comfortably for the most part, he listened with careful (though at times incredulous) attention to the rest of the panelists. He was adamant that writing was play for him – that he sat down to write when he wanted a break from real life. This stood out in sharp relief from the others’ descriptions of the writing process. M. Hanif, for example, spoke about the sense of loss that he felt when he was done writing a book: as if ‘an old friend or lover you’ve quarreled with every day has suddenly upped and left’. “I think all writers are mad,” Hanif grinned. “What kind of person sits in a corner and makes up stories and expects to be taken seriously?”
Sunil Sethi then followed with the opinion that all writing was ‘a hardship post’… by which point Mueenuddin, who’d clearly had enough of all the intensity, was compelled to sit up and disagree. Somehow, listening to him speak, one understood why he felt this way. Daniyal Mueenuddin’s work thrives on honesty and simple statements of fact. Nothing is strange in his world. The entire strength behind his debut novel was its easy, un-judging frankness. So yes, if I were to imagine Mueenuddin working at his desk, the image would not be of a tortured artist wringing his hands over the multiple layers of meaning hidden behind every sentence; it would be more a picture of a slightly relieved man writing his diary after a day of not quite being himself.
It was Hussain Naqvi who brought the whole picture back into perspective.“The production of prose becomes incidental,” he said. “Being a writer means negotiating life, family, making a living; and producing something that resonates within you as well as with others.” While Ali Sethi’s write-or-die attitude was infectious and Mueenuddin’s writing-is-play approach made sense, it was probably Naqvi’s exposition of the process that summed up the reality of being a career writer most effectively.
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Karachi Literature Festival – A DWLer’s observations

This entry has been submitted by Hamdan Malik.

Day 1: Confused, anxious, even shivering slightly.
My first KLF sitting was the Zulfikar Ghose writing workshop, which was quite interesting even if more of a lecture than a workshop. Some of what he discussed had already been advised on the DWL forums. He encouraged writers to write with brevity and recklessness and insisted on avoiding generalization and abstract notions.
At the end of the session, I met Jalal, Batool, Afia and Faraz. After a few minutes of chitchat, they ordered lunch and I took a zuhar break.
Returned to attend “Kia Urdu parhney waley kam hotey ja rahe hain” late and was sure I won’t find a place to sit, but all went well for me since they’d had technical difficulties and were running a half hour late. 
The session started with Ms. Arfa Sayeda Zehra apologizing for the delay in very pure, refined Urdu. After a few initial remarks, she handed the floor to panel members – interrupting only when the discussion veered too far off its course. It was pointed out that regional languages were facing the same problems across the Indo-Pak region as Urdu; various causal factors were put to light. One of the problems noted was the print and binding method used here; others were more abstract like natural birth and death of languages.
Day 2: Ego, anger, compassion and conclusion.
“A talk on Sufism with a foreign majority panel… this should be interesting,” I said to myself. It was interesting but to be honest I felt the only thing they did was to endorse contemporary mazaar culture and very safely ignored the real essence of tasawwuf . I had a question for Wasim Frembgen that I tried to ask in the lecture but they didn’t have the time to field it then.
Came back after Zuhar to find Afia distributing flyers. Then she had to buy a book and at the bookstall we bumped into fellow DWLer Madiha. We went back to the same table where we were sitting the day before and started chatting with some people who were sharing the table with us. They left after a while and we still hadn’t placed our order before Afia started running around again, trying to catch celebrities to milk interviews out of them. Finally, we had coffee and a short while later I spotted Wasim Frembgen and had my questions answered. It didn’t change what I thought of the Sufism talk, but we finished off nicely with a walk to Karen Armstrong’s lecture.
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Karachi LitFest – Day 1

Well into the first half (okay, the first paragraph) of this blogpost, a nasty little strain of Karachi fever came around to make my acquaintance. It started with a pain in the legs that, in the subsequent delirium of the fever, was misdiagnosed by me as a blood sugar surge (this assessment also had something to do with the fact that I’d guiltily consumed half a tub of pure, Swiss chocolate ice cream just minutes earlier). It was only after I’d groaned to Shehla that I’d finally given myself diabetes and had started preparing for my final farewells that a well-timed cup of chai parted the heavy curtains of delirium and showed me that I was simply running a temperature.
Yes, Lipton can do that.
Anyway, the fever’s been beat and we’re back to the real blog entry! As we’d mentioned earlier, there was a DWL contingent at the Karachi Literature Festival 2011, which kicked off on the 5th of February at the charming little Carlton Hotel in DHA Phase VIII. One look and you knew that the programme was an ambitious one. The organisers had divided the day into one-hour sessions running simultaneously across several of the hotel’s halls. This meant that attending one session almost always entailed missing out on another promising one, which was frustrating but also made one feel like one was pleasantly spoilt for choice.
It was evident that the ‘celebrity author’ card had been played to pull in the crowds and that the strategy had worked amazingly: an enormous number of people attended the event and there was a fantastic buzz throughout. The true success of a literature festival probably depends on its ability to create that vibe, trumping other more obvious indicators such as the number of books being launched or sometimes even the quality of the discussion. For two days, one could have contentedly sat in the central café area of the Carlton and soaked in the charged conversations for hours without getting bored or attending a single session. It also helped that after every twenty unknown faces you’d see a famous one. (I’m a celebrity junkie… now stop raising your eyebrow and move on.)
Those of us who were there the first day were excited about attending the creative writing workshop by Zulfikar Ghose. If you’re interested in creative writing, here are some of the lessons we took away from that session.
Probably the most valuable thing that Mr. Ghose tried to drum into our heads was to ditch the nonsense and get straight to the point. He spoke in some detail about the model of the traditional, well-made story as exemplified by Anton Chekhov’s work and shared some golden ‘rules’ of writing stories (all the while insisting that there were no rules, btw) that Chekhov himself had penned in his time.
The key thing about this form of writing is that it is pretension-free and doesn’t beat around the bush. Clarity and brevity are the order of the day, and the skillful storyteller is expected to steer clear of abstract words, generalizations and subjective assessments. Consequently, Mr. Ghose himself seemed to be a little wary of a stream of consciousness approach, which lends itself more easily to the dreaded abstractions, biases and generalizations that Chekhov warned against. He seemed to be more in favour of a good, old fashioned story, written with complete objectivity and brimming with expectation, continous action and ‘fluid movement’.
Not to worry, though, as achieving this is not as difficult as it sounds. Mr. Ghose made a simple and (I thought) utterly gorgeous articulation of what we as writers set out to do. In his opinion, writing is nothing more than a formula of language to understand the world around us. In other words, everything is an ongoing story… you just need to figure out how to get it down on paper. And for this, you don’t need an idea or a great Point to get started; you could just as well begin with an image. After that, stay with objective description and the rest will take care of itself, said Mr. Ghose. Aim for clear images, cliché-free messages and none of the tedium of lengthy, overly descriptive paragraphs.
The technique he suggested for this was to imagine that you, the writer, are a camera and that you can only see as much as the lens will show you. Move from character to object to situation, describing things as you see them. Weave background information into that description, thus allowing the reader to absorb the details at a subconscious level without being hammered over the head with them (we keep saying this on the DWL forums as well: show, don’t tell). Aim to create an image that will convey a larger story, basically, and that will give the reader subtle insights into the plot.
There’s a hilarious example here from a short story that he was reading out to the workshop group (A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor). The writer describes the character of the mother as ‘a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit’s ears’. To compare a face to a cabbage was odd, to say the least, Mr. Ghose pointed out to us. But could she have done it any better? Probably not, in my humble opinion, because the cabbage says it all. It implies that the young woman’s face wasn’t radiantly innocent as the face of a saint may be, rather it was bland and insipid. Right from the first sentence on her, we get the feeling that this is a woman who lacks character. Another thing our workshop moderator pointed out was that no woman in the West would wear a head-kerchief unless she was bald (unlikely in this case as the woman was young) or her hair was unwashed! Suddenly, the young mother was sketched out clearly in front of us and we knew exactly what kind of person was being introduced here, all with the help of a cabbage reference and a hair accessory.
Mr. Zulfikar Ghose highly recommended reading O’Connor’s story, incidentally, as a perfect example of a narrative with continuous action. For an alternative look at restrained characterization, he pointed to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. As general reading, he suggested that any aspiring writers go through Henry James’ famous essay, titled The Art of Fiction.

Hope you enjoyed reading this and got something out of it. God knows it took long enough to write! Next we’ll be posting a more informal entry by Hamdan Malik, one of our DWLers who was present at the festival and who proved amazingly adept at dragging unwilling waiters to our table to take down the order!