Pakistani English fiction's search

for approval and appreciation

Maniza Naqvi

Readers visiting the stalls of the Lahore Literary Festival 2013 | M

Arif, White Star

A uthors of Pakistani origin writing in English are on

fire abroad. And in Pakistan, they are igniting a frisson
of excitement and minor pyrotechnics among their
readership. It is a moment to celebrate. If this
reviewer could create awards, say, the Herald’s Best
Novels Awards 2017, these would go to Osama
Siddique, for his superb, succinct yet vast book
Snuffing Out the Moon, and to Sami Shah for Boy of
Fire and Earth. With these exceptional novels, the two
writers have changed the texture and tone of
Pakistani English fiction.

Irrefutable evidence that possession, and being

possessed, is the current state of Pakistani English
literature can be found in The Djinn Falls in Love, a
captivating collection of short stories edited by
Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin. Included in this
collection are spellbinding and riveting stories by
contemporary writers of Pakistani origin such as Sami
Shah and Usman T Malik. Transformative? Yes.

Most of the authors getting attention are those who

emerged on the international scene and are on their
third or fourth novel. Mohsin Hamid with Exit West
and Kamila Shamsie with Home Fire, made it to the
longlist for the Man Booker Prize in 2017. Hamid’s
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, too, was shortlisted for
the Booker, in 2007.

Pakistani novelists located in Pakistan and abroad –

at first mostly women; now increasingly women and
men in equal numbers – have been writing in English
for 70 years. Getting noticed and unnoticed in unequal
measure and owning this tongue of the Empire, they
have been telling stories that chip away at boundaries
and categories within ourselves and between ‘us’ and
‘them’, the colonised and the coloniser, the post-
Empire and the new empires.

The numbers are increasing exponentially. This alone

is exhilarating. Over 100 writers have over 150 novels
and many anthologies among them. But they have not
necessarily written 150 different and good stories
which resonate with an audience beyond a small elite
group. And this may be because we cannot exorcise
our colonial past or rise beyond our vantage points of
birth.

There are shimmering exceptions. These are

bookended between Azhar Abidi’s two splendid works
– his 2006 glorious gem Passarola Rising and 2008
book Twilight – and Snuffing Out the Moon and Boy of
Fire and Earth. In between them, Jamil Ahmad’s
quiet, gracefully told and powerful The Wandering
Falcon, published in 2011, is one of the finest pieces
of English fiction from Pakistan.

In the same category is Faiqa Mansab’s This House

of Clay and Water that literally embraces the ‘other’.
Set in the underbelly of Lahore, it talks about poverty,
power and the shimmer of other worlds. It betrays
class and social order, as does Feryal Gauhar’s The
Scent of Wet Earth in August, a fearless literary gem.
If these were to be translated into Urdu, they would
probably be banned. They are that good.

Snuffing Out the Moon lays out the most imaginative

landscape. It covers the entire breadth and measure
of the great possibilities of Pakistani English fiction —
ranging from memoir to fantasy. The novel, spread
over six eras and arranged like an accordion,
contracts and expands in time. It distills the past and
the future to highlight the essence of our civilization,
reminding us of who we were and are, imagining what
is to come and encompassing epochs, saints, sages,
monks, priests, fraudsters, frogs, dragonflies, pilots,
princes, paupers and predators. If it is translated into
other languages, including Urdu, it will still shine.

The writers I would suggest you read, other than the

ones I have already mentioned, are Mohammed
Hanif, Saba Imtiaz, H M Naqvi, Rayika Choudri,
Shandana Minhas, Soniah Kamal, Omar Shahid
Hamid, Bina Shah and Humera Afridi. Why? Because
they see and show us how to see by making the page
come alive with their words. They enrich our
imagination. They draw the reader in as if they are
practitioners of origami who turn paper into pieces of
art. They make the reader see something in a new
way or be disturbed by it long after they have read
about it. Their writing is introspective. It is evocative.
In the last year, around 20 new Pakistani novels in
English were published. Their storytelling has moved
on to geographies beyond our homes, to imagined
lives: on an island beyond our shores, beyond Earth,
even beyond time into centuries that are yet to come.
Read The Light Blue Jumper by Sidra F Sheikh and
The Curse of Mohenjodaro by Maha Khan Phillips.

The previous year’s bumper crop also includes Those

Children by Shahbano Bilgrami, The Party Worker by
Omar Shahid Hamid, The Golden Legend by Nadeem
Aslam and, translated from the Urdu masterpiece,
The Weary Generations by Abdullah Hussein. Read
them all.

Lahore Literary Festival 2014 | M Arif, White Star

Pakistani English fiction’s growth may also be due to
a flourishing of journalism as freedom of the press
and expression has expanded post-military
dictatorships. By writing for newspapers and
magazines, writers got a break and an outlet for
honing their writing skills. Then the digital and social
media revolutions happened and they made writing
unstoppable. With dozens of television channels and
now a fledgling but promising film industry beginning
to blossom, the demand for scriptwriters and
copywriters continues to burgeon.

Much is expected from our writers. They are expected

to be intellectuals able to map injustices, the logic of
war and military occupation and the subversion of
truth. They are expected to be well versed in the
reality that is the world order. Yet few are. The others
could be writing pulp fiction.

T he historical growth of Pakistani narratives in

English is mapped in Muneeza Shamsie’s labour of
love, Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of
Pakistani Literature in English. Most Pakistani fiction
is about Partition, houses and property lost and the
civil war in what was once East Pakistan. We also
write about feudal families, the martial law years
under General Ziaul Haq and the life and times of
Benazir Bhutto (while claiming that we are not writing
about either of the two).

We write about how British or American we really are.

We write as if we are rich people doing rich things
without any introspection. We write about those
fundamentalists, fanatics and jihadists who are not us.
We rarely write novels which open our eyes and
hearts to an experience that we haven’t had
ourselves. We write what we know: we write of
identity and the humiliations thereof, assuaged by
fabulous wealth. We write about that time we went to
college abroad and were disoriented and unhappy.

Perhaps writing fiction has been the only way to get

around official facts in Pakistan. When history
becomes unbearable and the telling of it dangerous,
then perhaps it becomes necessary to put it down as
memoir and fiction, making it about one’s own family.
As if to fly under the radar of censorship’s scrutiny, as
if to say: look this is harmless; I am only writing about
my dysfunctional family; I am not writing about the
state; it is just a family saga.

Most writers do not write to shock, shake or change

(perhaps the next generation will, or our next novel
will). If we ever do so, we will do so between the lines
to get past the brutality of dictators who do not take
kindly to poets or writers, or to get past the reprisal of
the class and society most of us belong to. We write
like we are afraid. Fearful. Terrified. Of not being
accepted. Or of being punished. Perhaps we are. The
kindest thing to say about this kind of writing is
perhaps that we write between the lines and in doing
so we don’t.

Mohsin Hamid | Arif Mahmood, White Star

But scriptwriters, playwrights, poets, novelists and

short story writers are holding up a mirror to society
and are writing compelling stories. They are writing in
Urdu, not in English, though. Someday when their
works are translated, the English readership will be
better off because of them. These writers are
challenging the norms in poetry and in prose,
fearlessly taking on tough social issues with
considerable humour and rage. Syed Kashif Raza is
an example with his poetry and soon to be published
novel. Julien Columeau, a Frenchman, with his short
stories, Chowrangi Kahaniyan, is another example.
Many Pakistani writers of English may not be able to
read him or others like him because they cannot read
or write in Urdu — or in any other Pakistani language.

That is why they write in English. Urdu, Punjabi or

Sindhi poetry they quote or take inspiration from
comes to them in English translation from Agha
Shahid Ali, Frances W Pritchett, Naomi Lazard, Ralph
Russell, Annemarie Schimmel and Victor G Kiernan.
That says something. Tragic.

Mohammed Hanif is an exception. His is a controlled

rage, though packaged sweetly in a laconic, wry,
witty, kind, generous and spirited tone. He is
scathingly acerbic, accurate and unforgiving and is as
good in Urdu as he is in English. Even better perhaps.

Who reads these works of fiction written in English?

Who writes them? Who cares about this fiction? Does
it matter? This fiction straddles many worlds and is
eloquent in all; it is for all — goes the argument in its
favour. This is global storytelling. Not Pakistani per se.

T he original sin, the story goes, was when the

beloved father of the nation, an England-educated
gentleman, announced in English that the official
language of Pakistan would be Urdu to audiences
who could understand or speak neither. You can
imagine how squatting listeners withering in the sun in
Dhaka that day or listening to him over thousands of
radios a thousand miles away in West Pakistan must
have scratched their heads and asked each other,
“What is he on about?”

The great gentleman could be forgiven. A native

Gujrati speaker himself and comfortable in the English
of his schooling and legal training and practice, he
might have thought that his Bengali audience was just
as likely to understand him in English as in Urdu,
especially since he spoke haltingly in Urdu given that
it was not his native tongue. He was more at ease,
crisp, precise and eloquent in English than in any
other language.

Children’s workbooks stacked alongside Urdu poetry Emaan Rana,

White Star
As are today’s Pakistani writers in English. And that
may be a problem.

Our English writers speak to each other and, for now,

to a small readership within the country, though they
have a larger market abroad and among the diaspora.
Educated in private schools at home and abroad, they
write from places far away from Pakistan or from
cocooned places within Pakistan where the elite
congregate, walled away from the country’s reality.
Much like Christiane Amanpour reporting about the
American invasion of Afghanistan from the rooftop of
Islamabad’s Marriot Hotel.

And their novels tell the same story one way or the
other as if processing, re-enacting and litigating the
many complexities encapsulated in the moment of
Partition and displacement — or the moment leading
to that moment or the moment after that. At this
moment, they cannot seem to dissociate their writing
from the vantage point of a passenger in flight out of
the country.

Compelling, illuminating and transformational writing

is an act of betrayal of the world a writer lives in.
Pakistan’s English writers by and large have not been
betrayers. Their narratives seem to be received from
headlines and remain, to a large degree, oriented
towards imagining reality and the world through
European and American perceptions. Writing in
English but not for ourselves remains our colonial
challenge and dilemma, something we cannot seem
to overcome.

Statistically speaking, Pakistan is the third largest

country in the world where English is a major medium
of instruction but only the elite write and read in it.
What they write reflects that they look for validation
and an audience elsewhere. Perhaps that is fine:
those who read and write English, after all, are taking
up leadership positions at global forums. Another
thing to be proud of. But are they changing narratives
about Pakistan?

Pakistan’s literacy rates hold it back from marshalling

the power of its numbers to influence intellectual
thought globally. Its low literacy rate has a lot to do
with elite capture of resources. But even with these
caveats, Pakistani writers are in possession of the
English language and, at the current rate of their
progress, will own it. English is as much ours now as
anybody else’s, our demons and our angels.

Pakistan is also the third largest military contributor to

the United Nations peacekeeping forces around the
globe. Our military footprint is also visible in the
Middle East. These facts seem to play an important
role in why our elite, a class enamoured by power, is
writing and reading narratives that support war. How
much of Pakistani fiction in English justifies war and
jihad porn? How much of it reeks of orientalism? If
Europeans had written these novels would we have
screamed accusations of orientalism and white male
privilege against them?

International recognition of Pakistan’s fiction writers

goes hand in hand with war. In the last 17 years –
when wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been
ongoing and spilling over and expanding into our own
territory – Pakistan’s writers in English have achieved
global acclaim. War has been marvelous for them.
Is Pakistani fiction that gets international recognition
part of a new world literature that, in turn, feeds a
narrative dominant in the current global order? When
called out for promoting the dominant narratives of
global power or for downright misrepresentations in
their fiction, our writers are quick to their own defense,
haughtily shrugging off the accusation by glibly
pointing out that they write ‘lies’, after all that is what
fiction means.

Problematically, however, renowned fiction writers of

Pakistani origin also report news and write
commentary, posing as Pakistan’s credible voice for a
global audience. They are writers of fiction but are
regularly called upon as writers of fact, contributing to
a global conversation on all things related to war and
terrorism and, thus, adding to public records of the
‘Pakistani’ view in American and British newspapers.
This only strengthens the dominant narrative in favour
of an endless war that is now in its 18th year.

Why are their writings on news judged and bound by

their places of origin and national identity while their
storytelling is considered world literature and judged
without boundaries? In a world of fake news, is the
fiction produced by Pakistanis fake literature?
Increasingly, a novel’s merit is judged by it being
published in either India or London or New York.
Pakistani authors gain validity only after agents and
editors there nod their approval. And if this happens
then it does not matter if the storytelling tends to be
the rich kid’s view of the world — a Harry Potter
version of poverty, refugees and migration or a Jane
Austen version of everything else.

“P akistani fiction has come of age. New and

emerging Pakistani writers are taking big leaps of faith
and venturing into new genres such as literary
thrillers, science fiction, fantasy and even graphic
novels. The literary fiction from Pakistan is at par with
fiction from anywhere else in the Subcontinent,” says
Kanishka Gupta, a literary agent in India who has
signed up many authors from Pakistan.
Many readers in Pakistan may agree with him — it is
wonderful that our writers are winning awards abroad.
Often, though, it seems that such praise has been
more for the celebrity of the writers than for their
writing. People may name a few authors but almost
never the books they have written. People may have
read articles about certain writers. They may have
also perused articles written by novelists of Pakistani
origin in such newspapers as the New York Times,
Financial Times and The Guardian.

Uncharitable opinions also abound and these term

Pakistani writing in English as ordinary things told in
ordinary ways, as jihad porn, as parroting western
headlines.

Osama Siddique | Courtesy alephi.com

It may be unfair to expect that Pakistani fiction writers
in English write researched histories of their people
and their land or other peoples and other lands. But
these expectations are owed to the fact that the non-
fiction arena in English in Pakistan is dominated by
memoirs of retired generals and bureaucrats which
readers perhaps treat as fiction.

But fiction of any merit is not entertainment. It does

not seek to put a positive spin on travesty and
atrocity. It is often not a purely feel-good experience
unless it is meant for children or as bodice-ripper
romance or as pornography. It does not allow us to
escape from introspection or exonerate ourselves
from the consequences of our actions. It often has the
responsibility to tell the truth in powerful ways
because most of the written non-fiction, no matter how
well written, tells untruths.

But there is a tendency among Pakistani English

writers not to do that. Instead, they have a tendency
to be the sole spokesperson for Pakistan, speaking to
a foreign power in the way it wants to be addressed
and, in the process, strangulating and muffling all
other voices. The urgency to be the native informant.
Why is this so? The answer is complicated. It may boil
down to geographical boundaries and political
blueprints imposed on us by our colonial masters and
the abused nature of our still-colonised society in a
country that, to foreign interests, seems nothing more
than a potash mine, a petroleum field or a port — the
great plantation and its house slaves yearning not to
be free.

Colonisation tends to keep on giving long after the

colonisers have physically left. Literary careers are
made in the nostalgia for it. The writers who are
nostalgic about it are labelled as native informants
mostly by those who are bitter about their success.
These native informants, the accusations go, tend to
continue having the out-of-body experience of never
being able to be themselves. They can only see
themselves through eyes that are not their own —
always imagining and narrating reality in a way that
might be pleasing to the colonial abuser. They pick up
subjects that are pleasing to the abuser. They create
characters that fit the characterisations created by the
abuser. They stick to the dominant power’s narrative.

The novels that get praise abroad, and subsequently

in Pakistan, promote narratives written in the tradition
of taking cues from elsewhere and seeing Pakistan
from a foreigner’s eyes. Even the websites for the
authors published abroad do not mention reviews and
interviews published in Pakistani magazines or
newspapers. The opinions of outsiders matter the
most because the blueprints for Pakistan’s narrative
and its boundaries were, after all, decided elsewhere.
This condition confines our writing in English to a
constant seeking of approval from the colonial makers
of our polity and society.

English remains the language of masters. We are

likely to command our dogs in English. To us, it is the
language of consequence, of unquestionable
authority, and it informs our relationship with those
who are below us and those who are above us. We
have servants and we have masters and we use two
voices to converse with them: the one with which we
snarl and bark at servants and the other full of
deferential tonal genuflections with which we
supplicate to masters. Those who do not have these
two choices have their own voices to listen to but we
call them ‘the voiceless’.

Pakistan’s literature is far more than the written word.

It is also the spoken word that we hear from
storytellers. Rapt listeners hear such stories in
villages, at chai khanas and in the laps of mothers.
These are stories of ordinary things told in
extraordinary ways. They talk of fantastic things in
even more phantasmagorical but relatable ways. But
those of us who write in English seem to have been
rendered tone deaf by the din of giving and taking
orders and the roar of the jet engine revving up for our
flight to success — one that we are so anxious about
missing.

The fiction produced by such writers does not reflect

the lives and experiences of ‘the voiceless’ — their
joys and foibles, their sorrows and mysteries, their
triumphs and injustices. This may be because most of
its creators rarely rub shoulders with those socially
different from themselves and remain cloistered in the
enclaves of the well-to-do. Most of the writers are not
really rooted in Pakistan. They have stakes in other
places outside of Pakistan.
Examples of the world’s great writers who did not live
in their own homelands is often given as a justification
for this, but those writers were often exiled and they
wrote in their native languages to be understood first
and foremost by their own people. Their writing was
so good that it was worth translating.

The world’s great novels read in English were not all

written in English. They include translations into
English from Russian, French, German, Spanish,
Italian, Arabic, Serbo-Croatian, Chinese and
Japanese. Perhaps Pakistan’s great English novel will
be one that is translated from a local language — a
few have already been translated.

Urdu literature, both old and new, shines in its own

skin. When it is translated into English, it continues to
sparkle because it is good. Would Pakistani English
novels written so far hold up that way if translated into
Urdu? Think about it. Some might. Most would not.
Two major Urdu novels have been translated into
English recently — Abdullah Hussain’s Udas Naslain
(as The Weary Generations) and Intizar Husain’s
Basti. An English translation of short stories by master
narrator Ghulam Abbas has also appeared under the
title of The Women’s Quarter: Selected Short Stories.
These works were written decades ago. Urdu readers
read them when they were first published. English
readers have only found them now. Translations of
Urdu poetry by Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed,
similarly, are substantively changing the tone and
narrative of Pakistani English literature, vastly
improving its quality.

Kamila Shamsie | Arif Mahmood, White Star

Such translations are catching on. Ali Madeeh Hashmi
recently translated Ali Akbar Natiq’s short stories into
English in a volume titled What Will You Give For This
Beauty. Urdu to English translations have also been
done by Zahra Sabri, Frances W Pritchett, Musharraf
Ali Farooqi, Bilal Tanweer and Aamer Hussein.

T he Heart Divided by Mumtaz Shahnawaz was

Pakistan’s first English novel. Its writer died in 1948
before it was published. It deals with Partition’s
trauma through the experience of one family.
Progressive writer Ahmed Ali wrote Twilight in Delhi in
1940 while he was still living in that city. He became a
reluctant Pakistani after Partition as he continued to
pine for his home town of Delhi during his forced
migration to Karachi. Zulfikar Ghose’s The Murder of
Aziz Khan was published in 1967. Bapsi Sidhwa self-
published her novel, The Crow Eaters, in the 1980s.
She followed it with Ice Candy Man that came out in
1988 and was republished as Cracking India. It has
also been turned into an award-winning film, Earth, in
India. She went on to write many more novels.

Author and activist Tariq Ali was perhaps the first

Pakistani writer to achieve international renown with
his controversial book Can Pakistan Survive which he
wrote after the 1971 civil war. It was banned in
Pakistan at the time. But it was not a novel. His novels
came later and included a quintet that started with
Shadows Of the Pomegranate Tree.

In 1989, Sara Suleri Goodyear arrived on the literary

scene with her novel Meatless Days and Rukhsana
Ahmad published her novel The Hope Chest in 1996.
My first novel Mass Transit was published by Oxford
University Press (OUP), Karachi, in 1998. It was the
first novel that OUP published. I went on to write four
more.

I would like to consider Hanif Kureishi as being linked

to Pakistan (even though he does not identify himself
as a Pakistani). Many of his short stories and novels
are, indeed, about Britons of Pakistani origin. Aamer
Hussein, also based in the United Kingdom, has
written several works of fiction including Another
Golmohar Tree and Insomnia. Nadeem Aslam,
another Pakistan-born writer who discovered his
creativity while living in the United Kingdom, has
written many novels such as Season of the Rainbirds,
The Wasted Vigil and The Blind Man’s Garden. His
sorrowful Maps for Lost Lovers, published in 2004,
stands out among his oeuvre.

Back home in Pakistan, works of English fiction have

been appearing thick and fast in recent years. Bina
Shah was one of the earliest writers to come on the
scene in the new millennium. Her promising first
novel, Where They Dream in Blue, came out in 2001.
It was followed by three more — The 786 Cybercafé,
Slum Child and, more recently, A Season For Martyrs.
Uzma Aslam Khan’s sensitive and carefully wrought
novel The Story of Noble Rot was also published in
2001. She has written a few others since. These
include Trespassing, The Geometry of God and
Thinner Than Skin. These are all worthy of more
attention than a mere mention, as are Sorraya Khan’s
Noor (published in 2003), Five Queens Road and City
of Spies.

Karachi Literature Festival 2013 | Arif Mahmood, White Star

Lara Zuberi’s The Lost Pearl, Sana Munir’s The
Satanist and Sehba Sarwar’s Black Wings (published
in 2004) are all worth more than a reference. Also
published during the 2000s were Qaisra Sharaz’s The
Holy Woman and Typhoon, Syeda Hina Babar Ali’s
Dream and Reality and Javed Amir’s Modern Soap.
Shandana Minhas’s smart and funny novel, Tunnel
Vision, came out in 2007. Almost a decade later she
published another, Daddy’s Boy. The other writer to
follow a similar time pattern is Shahbano Bilgrami. Her
first novel, Without Dreams, was published in 2007
and her second, Those Children, came out last year.
By 2010, Pakistani fiction in English had made its
mark to such an extent that Granta magazine
published a Pakistan issue that year. It included,
among many other pieces of writing, the work of such
authors as Sarfraz Manzoor and Fatima Bhutto.

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s precisely crafted collection of

short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, came
out the same year. It is a memorable book of
interconnected stories which appear to be based on
his family life. H M Naqvi, a gifted wordsmith, also
debuted in 2009 with his novel Home Boy. His second
novel, The Selected Works of Abdullah (the Cossack),
is set in Karachi. Its excerpts promise a brilliant work
by an author who has spent a long time researching
his material. Bilal Tanweer’s 2013 novel The Scatter
Here is Too Great combines both the elements
mentioned above — it is about Karachi and it is a
stringing together of short stories in the format of a
novel.

The speed with which new works of fiction are coming

out has only increased in the 2010s. Omar Shahid
Hamid has published three novels in five years. His
works belong to a new genre of writing in Pakistan.
They cover crime, police, security and intelligence.
His first novel, The Prisoner, that came out in 2013,
took me by surprise. Then he wrote The Spinner’s
Tale and The Party Worker, both covering the same
ground the first one had. Khalid Muhammed’s Agency
Rules and Akbar Agha’s Juggernaut also fall in the
same genre.

Saba Imtiaz’s 2014 novel Karachi, You’re Killing Me,

an intelligent, light page-turner, offers a funny take on
the life of a young journalist in a crime-infested,
terrorism-plagued metropolis. Anis Shivani’s novel
about the same city, Karachi Raj, came out in 2015.
Many other notable works of fiction came out much
earlier. Nafisa Haji wrote her first novel, The Writing
on My Forehead, in 2011 (and has written another,
The Sweetness of Tears, since then). Shehryar Fazli’s
Invitation was published the same year. It is about an
impending civil war in East Pakistan and is narrated
through a family’s property dispute, set amid a haze of
opium and sex. Aquila Ismail’s heartbreaking and
beautifully written Of Martyrs and Marigolds provides
a different perspective on the victims of the same war.
Shazaf Fatima Haider’s enjoyable debut novel, How It
Happened, came out in 2012 and is a comedy-
romance about an arranged marriage.

Of late, three writers have come from the same family.

Moni Mohsin, who has two books, The End of
Innocence and The Diary of a Social Butterfly, to her
credit, has been followed by her nephew Ali Sethi with
his novel The Wish Maker. His sister, Mira Sethi, is
also expected to publish her collection of short stories
soon.

There have been several anthologies of Pakistani

writers too. The one that I found the most exciting,
Life’s Too Short, came out in 2010. Edited by Faiza
Sultan Khan and published by Ayesha Raja, it
included new writings by Mehreen Ajaz, Ahmad Rafay
Alam, Attiq Uddin Ahmed, Sarwat Yasmeen Azeem,
Sadaf Halai, Michelle Farooqi, Danish Islam, Madiha
Sattar, Aziz A Sheikh and Mohammed Hanif (who
translated from Urdu the excerpt of a digest story,
Chhlava). Another collection of short stories, Break
Ups, that came out recently, includes short stories by
Imran Yusuf, Moeen Faruqi and Aziza Ahmad among
others.

I edited and curated two anthologies, Karachi: Our

Stories in Our Words and I’ll Find My Way. These
contained writings by 180 mostly first-time writers.
The Festival, another book that I curated, includes the
work of 40 writers of Pakistani origin. It carries
translations of the Urdu poetry of Kishwar Naheed
and Fahmida Riaz and Sindhi poetry of Hassan Dars
(translated into English by New York-based poet
Hasan Mujtaba and Mohammed Hanif) as well as
writings by Tahira Naqvi, Phiroozeh Romer, Umbreen
Butt, Ayesha Salman, Ishaat Habibullah and many
more.

Lahore Literary Festival 2014 | M Arif, White Star

Muneeza Shamsie, too, has edited two anthologies:

And the World Changed and A Dragon Fly in the Sun.
Fawzia Afzal Khan’s anthology Shattering
Stereotypes and Indian writer Rahkshanda Jalil’s
collection Neither Night Nor Day also feature a large
number of Pakistani writers. Bapsi Sidhwa and Asif
Farrukhi have compiled and edited collections of
English writing respectively about Lahore and
Karachi.

Women writers outnumber men in Pakistani English

fiction. Yet, bewilderingly, their work is often referred
to in dismissive terms – often by women reviewers –
even though most English fiction writers, English
language editors and journalists as well as teachers of
English are women. Most of these writers are
fearlessly feminist and many of them are socialist to
the core. They suspect that some sort of patriarchy
and clubby elitism is at play against their writing.
New writers are appearing on Pakistan’s English
writing scene every year. The more writers there are,
the more powerful the stories will be. They will be
interrogating the past, the present and the future in
more ways than the existing and previous generations
of writers have done. They will stem the tide of
revisionism that seeks to cast the world in the moulds
set by a new colonialism, and in doing so, they will
influence the global discourse in meaningful and
constructive ways.

These new writers are showing up in newspaper

columns, in feature stories on issues of consequence
in magazines and newspapers. They are not living in
pristine isolation. They are waiting for their buses
during rush hour and they change transport three
times to commute between their homes and their
workplaces. They live and work far from the quiet and
solitary world of air-conditioned SUVs and foreign-
funded residential enclaves.

They are not buying into the older narratives anymore.

Chasing, filing and editing stories in newsrooms, they
are the most exciting writers out there. They will effect
change. At least that is my hope. Someday soon,
amplifying the received truths churned out in war
rooms and concretised as fictionalised truths will not
hold. These writers will defy conventional wisdom,
bust myths and show us realities beyond anything
they have been capable of showing so far.

I can hear the susurrus of that change already. Soon

it will become a swirling, at a dizzying rate, faster than
fast. The new generation of writers will challenge, as
well as change, the narrative and the perspective —
not only for Pakistan but for the world.

If I were asked to imagine Pakistani writing a decade

on, I would imagine it this way: questioning
everything, honest, sizzling, sparkling, saucy and
impudent. It will be crazily creative, leading the world
in intellectual domain and ending the failure of
imagination that engulfs us now in a long dreamless
night.

This article was published in the Herald's February

2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in
print.

The writer is the author of four novels, 'Mass Transit',

'On Air', 'Stay With Me' and 'A Matter of Detail'.