Sister Act: Radio Free Speech in Bushland

In Houston, Texas, recently, Michael Woodson of People for Progressive Radio gets me on a radio show for a chat with my sister Sehba Sarwar who runs another organization, Voices Breaking Boundaries (VBB), in the city. We are to ’appear’at the community station KPFT 90.1 FM (part of "the Pacifica radio family"). "It will be great," enthuses Michael. "A sister show." Plus it would serve as a promo for a VBB talk I’m giving later on dissent in Pakistan, at an art and media space wonderfully named The Artery. All these are not-for-profit Houston-based organizations aimed at inciting progressive change. Sehba and Michael co-host a weekly KPFT show called Living Art, but Michael envisions this sister act as a separate slot.

The station has a casual but purposeful atmosphere. A notice-board and table in the informal reception are crowded with anti-war posters and notices, flyers of forthcoming events, as well as copies of the Pacifica Mission Statement. I learn that KPFT was founded by journalist Larry Lee, who convinced Pacifica to establish a listener-supported station as "an alternative voice to standard radio fare". Launched in March 1970, KPFT’s transmitter station was bombed two months later and it was off the air while being repaired. A few months later, it was bombed again, but again doggedly resumed transmission. (A Ku Klux Klansman was later convicted and imprisoned in connection with the bombing). And yet there are no security guards, or even a boundary wall outside. There obviously should be: I later learn that the main switchboard was stolen the day after I left.

The Pacifica radio network includes stations in Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York and Washington DC; over 50 community and public radio stations across the USA broadcast its news and public affairs programmes, reaching over a million listeners every week.

My encounter with KPFT’s live Free Speech Radio News (a national network that is also broadcast on KPFT), for which I’ve previously done the occasional ’headliner’ from Karachi, is a learning experience. There’s a palpable sense of bonhomie amongst the producers and reporters who buzz in and out. No one seems fazed that two shows are slotted at the same time (ours’ and a young guitarist). The station manager, Duane Bradley good humouredly proposes a compromise: both go on air for 20 minutes each instead of the promised half hour; the young South Asian-American producers of the next programme (an apolitical music show), willingly give up precious time from their slot.

There’s no producer for our show, so Sehba bustles into the impressive looking music library and pulls out a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan CD ("They’ve got to get other Pakistani music too") from ’Pakistan’ next to the better stocked ’India’ section. We make a quick outline of our chat. Young Byron Jackson volunteers at the soundboard and keeps time. It’s all cozily last-minute (just like home), then we’re on air. Nerve-rackingly for me, live.

Sehba on the other hand, with plenty of live radio chat behind her, is in her element, professionally interjecting the obligatory promos every few minutes, to remind listeners just tuning in that they are listening to KPFT. Inside the little recording studio, armed with huge headphones and mikes, we start with the similarities between Houston and Karachi -- sprawling cities near the sea, dusty, humid, hot, populated by ugly buildings, bugs and cockroaches; too much traffic, formed largely of migrants - although Houston’s four million pales before Karachi’s staggering 14 m.

We talk about why we are who we are -- writers, activists, artists, trying to create spaces for free expression. Our earliest political memory is of a teacher’s hunger strike led by Anita Ghulam Ali in Karachi, our mother among the garlanded strikers, piling into open-backed trucks after it ended, crowds, police, whispered disapproval that respectable women should be involved in such activities. We grew up with stories of the students’ movement in the fifties that our father led, which people we run into reminisce about nostalgically.

Looking back, we realize that notions of justice, fair play, and independent thinking, are instilled not by lectures but by example, by not overly protecting children, by letting them find their own way.

Twenty minutes, which initially seemed like forever, are suddenly all brief to cover the points that emerge as we span time and geographical distances, sitting in Houston, the home of Bush senior, far from memories of martial law and dissent in Pakistan. I can’t help thinking that it is ironic that just as people rarely know of the dissent in Pakistan, so too there is little knowledge of the vibrant dissent within the United States, where the corporatised mass media has so overwhelmingly supported the establishment even without the coercion of outright censorship of the kind that we in Pakistan have had to face.