Mapping Karachi’s Charms and Contradictions

No mention of Mohsin Hamid`s ``Moth Smoke`` in new Pakistani English literature?

Ras

Zeynab

Thanks for this piece about Kamila Shamsie. Always a pleasure to read about good Pakistani writers.

Can we also have an article about Jhumpa Lahiri - one of my favourites.

Ras: I would say Mohsin Hamid is the best of the lot. I would place Kamila Shamsie at no. 2. Haven`t read some of the others, but the ones I have read still have a long way to go.

Kamila Shamsie`s Salt and Saffron was a classic...


I don`t understand how this air marshal field Marshal Romair can rate writers... I think Mohsin Hamid is no 1 ... and Kamila is 2... Bapsi Sidhwa is 47 and Arundhati is probably 38... How can this dude come up with such numbers... is everything a number game to him... about competition between writers? Top 10 writers of the world? Top 10 writers of Pakistan? Worst 10 writers of the world? Pseudo-secular... secularatic... etc etc...

I am amazed at the narrow focus of this self proclaimed `great literary mind`.

-YLH

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Great article! K. Shamsie sounds like a promising writer...


Def. hope to read more work from this writer and others in this vein!

Would it be possible to read more book reviews on work by young Pakistani writers on Chowk?


Manto,

I would ignore the ranking business...we should be celebrating the fact that a talented group of writers is developing...

Zeynab,

Another pathetic pakistani with quill in the lotus extract while the streets of karachi are flooded with sectarian blood drowning the jihadic dinn. Leave the quill, walk down the streets with incediary torch to put an end to the montrocity, starting with a coastal town, moving quickly to the upper reaches of k2.

mohsin hamid is good!

I read Kartography and was deeply, profoundly, massively underwhelmed. She is a mediocre writer. The whole novel meandered aimlessly, and there were some sentences which made me wince with embarassment. I was quite dissapointed because I had heard a lot about her. Pakistan has yet to produce a writer of true quality. Mohsin Hamid is a much better author than Kamilla Shamshie. For me the most notable Pakistani novelist is Hanif Kureishi, and he is a British writer of Pakistani descent. I have been told by a Pakistani friend that the best novel written about Pakistan is `Shame` by Salman Rushdie, and he is an Indian.

I never read anything by Shamsie and err..do not really have any interest to read her stuff at this moment. But on a slightly different note i ve been wondering why do these people seem so ready to abandon the language of the subjects they wanna write about? I am not sure but in contemporary fiction isnt it a unique trend with respect to indian writers?
Rushdie is an oddity and doesnt necessarily make a case for all these wannabes to write in english (when assuming they are writing about the indigenous cultures in south asia).

peace.

Saminasha #6: ``we should be celebrating the fact that a talented group of writers is developing... ``

I don`t think a talented group of witers is developing in Pakistan. There are very very few in Pakistan, or from Pakistan. I try to read as many of them as I can. And haven`t run across too many. Are there any others you have read, that are not on this list?

I think the ones mentioned in this article is all that there are. Amongst them, Mohsin Hamid is good, as is Shamsie. Tariq Ali is average, if you count him as a Pakistani novelist. Hanif Kureshi may be on the top of the list, if one considers him a Pakistani novelist. Uzma Aslam`s book is very average. Sara Suleri`s Mealess Days was ok. I think Shamsie`s own evaluation, ``There’s almost nothing going on now, especially in fiction writing. But the good news is that it’s growing,`` is accurate.

In the past, ten years or so, I can only think of two or three (Shamsie, Hamid) who have gained some international recognition.

Most of the South Asian English success stories come from India. There is a whole long list of them.

``I would ignore the ranking business...``

The criteria used internationally for writers, is there sales and the awards they win. So they get rated all the time. In fact, they get their biggest career push and recognition by getting ranked on the Booker list or the Orange futures etc. That is why they write every award in big huge letters on the covers of their books.

Kamila Shamsie, herself, has made a name, since she won awards, or was on lists of finalists. I cannot think of too many other professions where ratings and rankings and awards are considered so decisive in a person`s career. There are so many books that get published. The only way for a writer to make it out of this huge crowd is to get rated or ranked somewhere, on some literaray list. Or have huge sales, like Clancy etc.

So I am not sure if the ranking business can be ignored, if one is doing an evaluation of English authors from Pakistan. One can just ignore it as a personal preference.

``Would it be possible to read more book reviews on work by young Pakistani writers on Chowk? ``

I think Mothsmoke and Kartography have been reviewed on Chowk, in detail.

Zeynab:

thanks for sharing this here…

…even if it’s true that kamila only writes about a certain segment of Karachi, I would not fault her for it…knowledge and experience adds a depth to the repertoire in a writer’s bag…that is not to say a good writer cannot depict life in korangi of dastagir, drigh or landhi…research and observation can make up for actual experience…it all depends on where the story takes the writer…

…love her for loving my Karachi:)

…as someone has already pointed out…amidst active Pakistani fiction writer there have been some notable names missing here…Bapsi Sidhwa, Mohsin Hamid and Bina Shah (Animal Medicine (OUP 2000), Where They Dream in Blue (Alhamra 2001) – and her third book and second novel on Karachi coming out shortly)

lve,

t

Ref nazarhayatkhan #2

S`more on Jhumpa Lahiri. Again from ``India Currents``.

By Any Other Name

CHITRA PARAYATH, Nov 07, 2003

THE NAMESAKE. By Jhumpa Lahiri. Houghton Mifflin Company. Hardcover, 304 pages. $24. Audiobook read by Sarita Chowdhury. Random House Audio. 10 hrs. 9 min., 6 cassettes. $34.95.

As with most second efforts after a rous-ing debut, Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake was much anticipated and the object of considerable curiosity. Lahiri, a Bengali-American from New England, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 with her first book, a collection of stories titled Interpreter of Maladies. Early reviews of The Namesake have been glowing for the most part. Lahiri, clearly, is no one-hit wonder.

Lahiri has won critical acclaim for her sensitive and thoughtful portrayal of the immigrant experience, especially the conflicts of assimilation and issues of cultural disorientation. The Namesake is a meditation on personal identity, cultural displacement, and mortality and an insightful treatise on the complexities of foreignness.

To Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, Indian immigrants in the U.S., is born a baby boy, Gogol Ganguli (named after the long-dead Russian writer of whom Ashoke is a fan). The name is given not with any deliberation, but the result of being confronted by the strange practice in American hospitals of assigning the new-born a moniker before the mom is sent home. The Gangulis will, in the course of the first quarter of the book, go through the rituals of the immigrant experience, retracing every step an Indian family takes in the process of becoming American. Moving to a suburb with a decent school district, they graduate from the instamatic camera to a decent hi-tech one, to hosting yearly Christmas parties for their Indian friends.

Food is a continuing theme in The Namesake. The book opens with the pregnant Ashima preparing a chaat, saddened by the fact that it lacks a certain something compared to the one she ate on the streets of Calcutta. That serves as a metaphor for her life in America as she defies assimilation and clings doggedly to the memory of the mother country and its customs for many years. For Ashima, being a foreigner is “a perpetual wait, a constant burden … a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding.” Lahiri dwells at, sometimes tedious, length on Gogol’s education in matters of Western food and cuisine.

Gogol is a reluctant hero. He reasons that by changing his name from Gogol to Nikhil, he could shed some cumbersome ties to his past, relishing the moments when he encounters people who have never known him as Gogol. The irony, of course, is that the reader, as the novelist herself has invested too much in the significance of his name and can seldom think of him as anyone but Gogol. Parents bestow upon us names, traditions, and expectations, never once anticipating the overhead these add to the exasperating process of assimilation.

Even as Nikhil, our hero is never quite secure in his identity. He leaves home for college, seeking to escape the world his parents inhabit. He tries to discover himself in a series of romantic entanglements, some described entirely without fanfare by Lahiri and others in painful detail. He gives bits and pieces of himself to his girlfriends, sometimes to their families, realizing that it is more than what he has given to his own flesh and blood. While his courtships are long and strangely confident, the break-ups, as they usually are, invariably quick and sudden.

Gogol’s battles with himself continue well into his marriage with fellow Bengali Moushumi Mazoomdar. However, his reconciliation with his roots is rather predictable. His homecoming collides with his mother leaving for Calcutta after mourning her dead husband, and this reviewer groaned when in the last page of the novel, Gogol picks up a book to read: “The Overcoat.”

Lahiri uses Gogol’s inner thoughts and emotions as a vehicle to explore the life of the peripheral characters around him, his family, girlfriends, their families, none escape the keen eye of this master storyteller. Gogol’s moments with his father and his father’s memories are remarkably touching. Lahiri deals with quiet rebellions, longings, and random musings with great sensitivity and her attention to detail is meticulous. No detail of Gogol’s life is too trivial for Lahiri as she scrupulously chronicles every step and misstep in his arduous path to assimilation. Therein lies an obvious flaw: the characters in many situations are weighed down by their blandness. While we celebrate Lahiri’s simple style, the sheer lack of energy in the characters makes them seem, often, the most staid and boring characters ever put down on paper. At certain points in the tale, Lahiri seems to be looking down on her characters from a distance, investing them with very little insight at times, and incredible brilliance and wisdom at others.

There is a striking universality to the tale. First generation immigrants straddling two worlds, strive to achieve the fine balance between the transplanted world of their parents and the native one that they seek to embrace as their own. Lahiri, reflecting her personal experiences combined with a keen observation of diasporic culture, brings legitimacy and poignance to the predicament of the Gangulis in this foreign land. She writes with quiet authority, bestowing upon her characters an appealing sensibility, at once gentle and mildly exaggerated (and, therefore, irritating to an Indian reader).

Ref nazarhayatkhan #2

[Can we also have an article about Jhumpa Lahiri - one of my favourites.]

Here it is, from ``India Currents`` published in the San Francisco Bay Area.
(http://ncu.dwalliance.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=d66f5c977e198271b7c029e7f688a3d5)

Do go to the website. There are a couple of pictures of this stunningly beautiful writer you wouldn`t want to miss.

Interpreter of the Second Generation

Pulitzer-winner Jhumpa Lahiri talks about being “between the cracks of two cultures,” her wedding in Kolkata, and ideas that shaped her new book

SANDIP ROY-CHOWDHURY, Nov 03, 2003

On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix.

The year is 1968 and it’s hard to make a satisfying jhaal muri in an apartment in Massachusetts, no matter if it’s the one thing you crave in your pregnancy. Reading the exceptional detail in her first full-length novel, The Namesake, it’s easy to forget that Jhumpa Lahiri probably doesn’t remember much of Bengali life in Boston or Cambridge in the late 1960s. She was born in 1967 in London and moved with her parents to the United States soon after. Unlike the Amy Tans and Chitra Divakarunis and Bharati Mukherjees with whom she is often compared, Lahiri is very much the “second-generation” writer. That’s why, though The Namesake starts with Ashima in her kitchen in Central Square, its real protagonist is the son she is pregnant with—Gogol. Lahiri was in San Francisco recently talking about Gogol, the Pulitzer, and the sounds of Bengali.

After winning the Pulitzer for your first collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies, everyone has been waiting to see if you could live up to that promise and write a full-length novel. Does The Namesake feel a bit like the child star’s first movie as an adult?

I tried not to think about what other people were going to think about my next book. I had already started the book when I got the Pulitzer and just stuck to the path. I knew I couldn’t live up to any expectation that once you write a successful book the next one has to be as successful or more successful. As a writer I just want to grow and learn from each book.

Do you remember the moment you heard you had won the Pulitzer?

Yes, I was in my apartment. We had just come back from a short trip to Boston and I was heating up some soup for my lunch. My suitcases were still not unpacked. And the phone rang. It was 1 or 2 in the afternoon. The person who called me was from Houghton Mifflin, my publisher, but no one I knew, and she said “I need to know what year you were born.” And then she asked some other fact like where I was born. I just told her. Sometimes people need some information for a reading for a flyer or something. And then she said: “You don’t know why I am calling, do you?” And I said, “No, why are you calling?” And she said, “You just won the Pulitzer.” And that’s how I found out from a person I had never spoken to in my life.

Your given name was Nilanjana but the name that stuck was your nickname Jhumpa. Gogol, your protagonist was supposed to have a “good name” sent by his grandmother in India which gets lost in the mail. And now you spend every interview explaining this Bengali custom of a public and private name. Did you want to play with names in this book?

The whole book started with a name—Gogol. It belonged to a friend of one of my cousins in Kolkata. I was made aware of it on one of my visits there many years ago. The idea made its way to a notebook I keep of story ideas. And I just jotted down “a boy named Gogol.” And slowly, subconsciously I was sort of meditating on the idea of names and what they mean, like the whole idea of having two names, which I didn’t really have, but so many people around me including my sister and friends did. I took it for granted in my life but knew that it was so inexplicable to other people in my life.

Another thing we take for granted is the way our parents (and many of us) were married. Gogol calls his parents’ arranged marriage “unthinkable and unremarkable.” When were you aware that that was something different about your parents?

From a very early age. In school my friends would say their parents met in college or at a high school dance. And I was always aware my parents had married in a very different way. And when people asked me: “Oh, did your parents have an arranged marriage?” in a very bewildered and mildly horrified tone of voice, I was aware it was regarded as a sort of barbaric, unthinkable concept.

There are still people who feel, oh my God, it’s such an exotic old-fashioned sort of idea and it’s hard to explain that it’s very much a living, thriving tradition. It’s a way of being married as opposed to the romantic falling in love way that also exists in India.

At the same time, these were my parents and it seemed so normal and I knew so many people whom I was close to and loved who had gotten married this way. So I felt both very protective and defensive of my parents and their tradition and also sort of worried that this might happen to me and that might not be something I wanted.

Speaking of marriage, your own wedding in Kolkata was quite a mob scene with daily newspaper articles. How was that experience?
I was totally overwhelmed by the level of attention. I just didn’t realize there would be so much interest in our wedding. I wasn’t thrilled by it. I am a very private person and felt my marriage should be a private event. I tried to resist it. But then we realized it was an avalanche and it was going to happen. So we just tried to sort of accept the attention and have as private a wedding as possible.

When your parents moved to Cambridge, MA and then to Rhode Island in the late ’60s, what was the community like?

From the stories I hear, it’s similar to the world I depict in the novel. My mother was always wandering around the streets of Harvard in Central Square pushing me in my stroller and every time she would see someone who looked Bengali there was this instant “who are you, where are you from, let’s be friends.” They sort of gathered a community that way literally from spotting each other on the streets. There were enough Bengalis to have a growing circle of friends over the years and my parents are still tied to many of those people, which I think is really remarkable.

But in the book, Gogol, as he grows older, is annoyed by the constant weekend parties with other Bengalis. He describes how his 14th birthday is just an excuse for his parents to have friends from three states visit and cook food, make sandesh out of ricotta cheese and play cards and chat while the bored kids watch television.

It’s true I was always of two minds. On one hand I found these get-togethers tedious and monotonous and not what I would choose to do with my weekends every weekend. It was very clear it was very much about the parents and their need to really relax on the weekends. When you are a foreigner and still getting used to the culture, you are walking a fine line. The parties on the weekend allowed them to forget all that and just speak in Bengali and eat food and celebrate in a way that they weren’t allowed to on a daily basis.

Once my parents moved to Rhode Island they were still crossing state borders to attend these parties—it was a huge priority in their lives, especially for my mother who was more isolated since she didn’t work for a long time.

At one point Gogol goes home and his father starts talking to Manhattanites about how you have to be careful where you park in their quiet suburban towns and Gogol is irritated by his parents’ “perpetual fear of disaster.” For me that was a telling moment of how immigrants, no matter how long they live here, never quite feel safe.

Yes, absolutely. I have observed that with my parents. Here is one of the things that tipped me off early. None of my friends’ parents locked their doors. We grew up in a safe town, a sleepy neighborhood, and I’d go to my friends’ homes and their front doors were open and back doors were open. My parents were always locking the door, locking the garage, closing the windows, locking the windows every night, and I think it’s just a sense of not feeling on firm ground. And you want to feel protected somehow.

Why have you said you inherited a sense of exile from your parents?

I think that I never feel fully part of the world I was brought up in. My parents were always very resistant in many ways to living in America and missed India so much and had a lot of misgivings about their lives here. It was hard for me to think of myself as fully American. I thought it would be very much a betrayal of my parents and what they believed and who they are. My parents feel less foreign now than they did 30 years ago but they still feel like outsiders.

How then did you feel when you experienced your parents on trips to India? How were they transformed? Gogol is amazed as his mother roams around Kolkata with ease, shopping at New Market, going to films with her friends.

My parents turned into different people. It was like those weekend parties, but even more. It was truly a transformation. They were so much more relaxed, so much more at ease and I felt there was happiness that they were deprived of in their normal lives and that they could finally connect to. When I think of it now and I try to imagine what it would be like to see my parents and my sister once every two or three years, I am amazed at what my parents dealt with.

When I was growing up, the separation felt so great, so insurmountable. There was no e-mail. Phone lines were dreadful and so expensive, and every call from India was bad news. The world seemed so much more vast and so much more difficult to navigate.

But does that put a weird pressure on people like you, the second generation, to see your parents so palpably happy in India and realizing that in some ways they gave up this happiness for a better life for you?

This was one of the things that really separated me from my parents. I could try to sympathize, empathize the best that I could, but the fact of the matter is that my connection to India will never be what my parents’ is. I always feel I both belong and don’t belong there. But the older I’ve gotten the more I realize I do belong more to America than India just because I have spent so much more of my life here.

But I have often wondered why did my parents really come here. So many of these Bengali immigrants don’t really come to America for a life and death situation. Most of them have not escaped excruciating war, poverty, or political persecution that many other immigrants have experienced. Not to say their experiences were not painful, but my parents were so ambivalent and so guilt-ridden about coming here. That’s because they came essentially for opportunity and a better life. But my parents could easily have stayed in Kolkata and raised a family and had a nice home. Coming to America was a choice to have a better life for themselves and their children, thereby sacrificing connections to their families.

But though you now feel more American than Indian, are you surprised that the first stories you wrote were set in India? I read you wrote your first novel when you were seven. Was that set in India?

(Laughs) I called them novels but they weren’t very long. They were just stories about girls having various adventures in boarding schools. Some of them were with supernatural powers.

The first stories I wrote from Interpreter of Maladies were set in India. But before that I wrote many other stories I was not happy with. Maybe it was the distance that allowed me to write about India. Often, for a writer the hardest things to write about are the things that are closest because you have to be objective. It’s a greater challenge for me to tell a story like the one in The Namesake.

Your work is so tied to ethnicity and roots. Yet your husband is Guatemalan-born of Greek heritage. What do you think of roots and knowing where you come from when you look at your son?

I have never felt a strong affiliation with any nation or ethnic group. I always felt between the cracks of two cultures. So much of it was about where I was and who was viewing me. When I went to Calcutta my relatives would think of me so much as American. A foreigner. In America it’s always, you are Indian, when did you come here.

I hope for my son that it will be something he may be confused about for a time but that he will accept it and just understand that this is what can happen and it’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing to be a little mixed up.

But you have held on to your roots. Though you never grew up in Kolkata, you have retained your mother tongue—Bengali.

I don’t know, but it must be hardwired. When I first saw my son I didn’t say: “How cute!” It just came out in Bengali. That’s the language of tenderness for me.

I mentioned a handful of Pakistani writers in this article, but this was not a definitive list by any means. I did not go into a detailed listing of fiction writing from Pakistan because thought that it would take away from this particular article, so I chose to randomly mention some young upcoming writers. Kamila Shamsie did talk about Mohsin Hamid and a few others which the `among others` in this article refers too.

Apart from the well-known authors that have been already mentioned by people here like Sara Suleri, Bina Shah, Bapsi Sidhwa there are also other writers from Pakistan with notable work, like Tahira Naqvi, the author of `Attar of Roses` and `Amreeka, Amreeka` , Aamer Hussein`s `Mirror to the Sun` and `Cactus Town`, Abdullah Hussein, the urdu novelist`s `The Weary Generations` , Rukhsana Ahmad, the co-author of `Flaming Spirit` , Moazzam Sheikh`s `Sahab` etc , to name a few. There are others like Adam Zameenzad, Shirin Haroun, Shaherbano Bilgrami ......... but again this is not a definitive list !

romair: you refer to the book ``Mealess Days`` by sara suleri. You mean ``Meatless Days`` of course. No doubt a freudian slip at 4:30 pm in these ramzan days.