New Delhi, April 10 (Inditop.com) The shadow of the gun, its impact on society and gender injustice are creeping into contemporary women’s literature in Pakistan, feels Lahore-based writer, critic and journalist Muneeza Shamsie.
“It is boom time for English writing in Pakistan. New writers are talking about changes and tackling urban realities like violence, terror and gender injustice in the society,” Shamsie, a member of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2010 jury, told Inditop in an interview here.
The writer was in the Indian capital to promote Commonwealth literature and interface with common readers and schoolchildren.
Citing young writer Uzma Aslam Khan’s book “Trespassing” as an example of “post-9/11 literature of angst and social metamorphosis” originating from Pakistan, she said Khan in her book has “explored the growth of violence and the brutalisation of society”.
“Uzma visits the dark alleys of Karachi to investigate how the sub-class of violence was influencing the country’s seamy underbelly,” Shamsie said.
Analysing the reasons for the explosion of creativity and culture in Pakistan, the writer said, “I think it was difficult for creativity to flourish in the totalitarian regime during General Zia’s reign. But society is freer now. The old political structures have gone.”
She said after reading her daughter and acclaimed novelist Kamila Shamsie’s books, what hit her was the “amount of violence they loaded”.
“And I realised that their generation had grown up with it. Several women writers in Pakistan are exploring the ramifications of terrorism and violence in society,” said Shamsie, who has translated and compiled three anthologies of Urdu writing in English.
She said the current genre of women writers in Pakistan treat “their subjects from the perspective of their gender and are aware of issues pertaining to their sex in the country’s civil society”.
“They do not always portray women as victims as they are generally portrayed,” Shamsie said.
Using “Geometry of God” by Uzma, as yet another instance, Shamsie said: “Feminist writers in Pakistan were also challenging the conventional roles played by women in society.
“The protagonist in ‘Geometry of God’, set in the 1980s, is a palaeontologist who functions in a male setup. The writer tries to capture her struggle as the sole woman palaeontologist in the country,” she said.
Daughter Kamila, in her magically-realistic novel, “Burnt Shadows”, travels from Nagasaki in 1945 to a prison cell in US in a story of love, betrayal and violence.
“Kamila’s protagonist, a Japanese woman, Hiroko Tanaka, who is a magical figure with three bird shaped burns on her back — a reminder of the atomic holocaust of Nagasaki –straddles the decades and locations in a world where old conflicts are replaced by new wars,” Shamsie said.
The book is reflective of the new-age immigrant literature that “multiculturalism” in Pakistan is growing.
The writer, who contributes to leading dailies in Pakistan, said “the freeing of Pakistan’s society has also seen the birth of a large body of Urdu protest poetry which has reached out to a wide audience”.
Shamsie belongs to the 20th century feminist writers in Pakistan whose cultural grounding was bi-lingual. She grew up in London and returned to the country as a 19-year-old.
“The restrictions initially stifled me. I was a very English girl unfamiliar with the traditional Islamic way of life. Hence, I took to South Asian literature, which chronicled experiences that had some relationship to my life. I started off with Attiya Hussain and Ahmed Ali because she was my aunt and later read authors like Nayantara Sehgal and R.K. Narayan. Writing gave me a great sense of freedom,” Shamsie said.
The writer is currently working on two volumes — Oxford Companion To Literature of Pakistan in English and a “History of Pakistani English Literature since 1947”.
