Culture and Anglophone Pakistani Fiction by Women

Culture and Literature: Some Questions

 What is culture? Does it entail traditions, values, and practices or should we
think about it on abstract level of ideas and conceptual frameworks that
determine norms in the first place?
 Culture is a verb rather than a noun; a dynamic process and not a static
product. Any effort to reduce it to the level of static monolithic identity block
is doomed to failure.
 Pakistanis are bound to think about ‘what culture does’, and ‘what culture is’
because of their postcolonial rootlessness.
 The pertinent question is: should Pakistani writers and readers reject the
identity forming potential of culture outright? Or should they employ culture
in a productive debate between ‘identity’ and ‘performativity’.
 Who determines culture and the cultural debates? Bourgeoisie elite, burocratic
middle class, working middle class, lower class, or intelligentsia? Or culture
is determined by someone who occupies the central global stage and tells the
third world citizens, “I know you, so I, on your behalf, have decided that this
is your culture”?
 Is there any connection between nationalism and national culture? If yes, what
role Literature plays in formation, expression, and rejection of national
culture?
Literature and the Formation of National Culture
 Before its manifestation on concrete level, national culture is expressed on
symbolic level.
 National flag, anthem, history, game, dress, poet, language, literature etc are
some symbolic aspects of national culture that act as the binding forces to
manufacture a cohesive national-work-force.
 Literature is a concrete demonstration of symbolic aspects of (national)
culture and the readers are supposed to think about what does literature do
with national culture. Does it promote national culture? Does it undermine
it? Or does it prioritize global culture over national culture?
 We must remember that the choice of forms, contents, symbols, images,
metaphors and ideas is never an apolitical innocence. Every aspect of
literature is grounded in the worldliness of its author.
  Worldliness of a text stands for: who has produced a text and what is the
medium of its circulation, to whom it is addressed, and what sort of reception
it anticipates.
 Cultural studies boil down to the aspects of an author’s, text’s, and critic’s
worldliness.
The Holy Woman by Qaisra Shehraz (2001)
 Shehraz problematizes the western and secular conception of ‘oppressive
veil’ and employs ‘veil’ as an empowering tool of national (Muslim) identity
construction in her text.
 It is significant to remember that agents of global culture (mis)use veil as the
cultural marker to discuss Islam, Islamic world and Muslim woman.
 Shehraz’s choice of ‘veil’ as the central trope of her novel is deliberate and
showcases her worldliness that perceives veil as liberating rather than
oppressive identity marker.
 Zari Bano travels around the world, learns Islamic history and Jurisprudence
and stands against the oppressive patriarchal structures of her home and clan.
 Quran and Islam, rather than western secularism, are employed by Zari Bano
to initiate a meaningful change.
 The dehumanizing practice of ‘marriage with Quran’ is criticized not from
some external secular point of reference but from within Islamic tradition.
 A just critique comes from within because you cannot comment
authentically upon any discourse unless you are part of that discourse.
 Secular western discourse projects itself as the sole savior of the third world
and employs ‘save the black/brown woman from black/brown men’ narrative
to intervene in the third world. Shehraz’s novel rejects this hegemonic
discourse.
 In western conceptualizations, third world woman lacks ‘agency and
subjectivity’. She has two options, endless suffering or meaningless
rebellion, and only westernization is the viable way out of suffering. Shehraz
rejects these conceptualizations.
 She projects a culturally dynamic but grounded, socially engaged but
individualized, and politically radical but responsible female subject in her
novel. Moreover, she employs humor as an inherent aspect of her plot
construction and characterization.
The Diary of a Social Butterfly by Moni Mohsin (2008)
 The more stable a culture is, the more refined its humor becomes. One can
observe, explore and explain through foreign culture, but one can pray, fight,
cry and laugh only through one’s own culture.
 Moni Mohsin produces a comedy out of the most critical phases of Pakistani
history (2001-2008), and rejects the imperial assertion: ‘third world can
produce only national (tragic) allegories’.
 Butterfly a socialite, goes to parties, is obsessed with fashion and novelty,
feels it alright to prioritize her personal history over political (national)
history, and thus becomes a woman who transcends ‘oppressed Pakistani
woman’ stereotype.
 To say that Pakistani culture and landscape (cultural landscape) comprises
only dirt, corruption, mismanagement, anxiety and cynicism is a false
oversimplification. Butterfly intervenes into this stereotypical generalization.
 Moni Mohsin employs ‘Metonymic Gaps’ in form of her consistent usage of
Pakistani idioms, phrases and expressions to intentionally exclude foreign
readers from participating in pleasure-seeking/information-seeking reading.
 “I said to him, why brother? It’s not as if it was your father’s paper. Why
are you taking it so personally, baba?”
 “Ek tau this Jonkers has always been such a problem. So stupid he is. So
bonga. So trusting. Always falling for the wrong types with tight-tight
shirts and lose-lose morals”
 “Rewindable. Sorry, sorry, I mean reversible”.
 “Our noses will be cut and our faces will be blackened”.
 “Sometimes I think Janoo’s meter is turned”.
 “Janoo says, he’s just an ABCD loser. ABCD? Haw baba, don’t you
know? American Born Confused Desi”
 “Musharaf pledges to hunt Uzbek militants. Butterfly gets tricked by her
cook”.
 Butterfly definitely does not represent every Pakistani woman but she
certainly foregrounds a subject position that feels pleasure in her Pakistani
culture.
 Moni Mohsin’s text, thus, initiates a genre in Anglophone Pakistani fiction
that directly addresses its Pakistani readers instead of trading away its culture
to western readership.
How It Happened by Shazaf Fatima Haider (2012)
 Haider writes a family saga that is opposite to typical family stories linked
with national stories portrayed in Ice Candy Man, Noor, Meatless Days, Moth
Smoke, The Geometry of God, Burnt Shadows, and The Blind Man’s Garden.
Family story is no more a national allegory in How it Happened.
 Dadi in Meatless Days is an oppressed women who symbolizes the fate of
the marginalized in Pakistan, but Dadi in How it Happened embodies the
cultural nuances of Pakistani joint family system: she is what holds the family
fabric intact in her empowered stature.
 The typical Anglophone Pakistani fiction employs (scathing) irony and satire
to mock the cultural particularities of Pakistan but Haider employs
(productive) humor to foreground the nourishing aspects of Pakistani culture.
 Haider, like Moni Mohis, employs metonymic gaps in her novel.
 The blending of Drawing room and phone conversations, get-togethers and
visits of relatives and friends, occasional episodes of family troubles, and
comic juxtapositions between tradition and novelty, provides a trope that
incorporates liberal values without compromising Pakistani cultural
particularities.
 It is commonly assumed that third world fiction lack ‘romance’ but Haider’s
text disrupts this assumption.
Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal (2019)
 Kamal’s Unmarriageable is another text that performs two primary functions:
it replicates Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and cultivates a romantic tale
that entails a story of love and marriage.
 Kamal, like Qaisra Shehraz, Moni Mohsin, and Shazaf Fatima Haider,
employs humor, forgrounds the nuances of Pakistani culture, disrupts euro-
American expectations, and primarily addresses their Pakistani readers
without becoming cultural informants.
 Women in Unmarriageable are not some oppressed fools but are self-
conscious subjects who move around a dynamic culture.
 The story of the novel is not about politics and revolves around the cultural
particularities of Pakistan. Conversations, meet-ups, parties, domestic chores,
professional hazards, foods, rituals, and almost every aspect of Pakistani
culture is projected through the motif of marriage.
  People with their lived experiences, rather than landscape designed to
stimulate exoticism, are portrayed to project a Pakistani culture that is self-
nourishing despite many socio-political and cultural problems.
Conclusion
 Contemporary Pakistani female fiction writers are disrupting euro-American
assumptions about Pakistani Anglophone fiction.
 Rather than being political and cultural critics (informants) of their society,
they tend to demonstrate a tendency of celebrating Pakistani culture.
 Their works present cultural nuances in harmony with the changing global
world and demonstrate Pakistani culture in dialogue rather than in conflict
with global culture.
 The employment of metonymic gaps constructs a cultural continuum between
authors and their Pakistani readers.
 Last but not the least, the employment of humor as the legitimate and
somewhat ultimate tool of disrupting domestic and western cultural hegemony
imparts a distinctive feature to Contemporary Anglophone Pakistani Women
fiction.
Thank You & Best of Luck
Dr. Asma Aftab in collaboration with Muddassar Ali
Department of English, GCUF.
July 10, 2023