Qatrina and the Books
Amit Chaudhuri
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n16/chau01_.html
The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam
What is Pakistani writing? Whatever it might be, it seems to have taken up newsprint lately. Things have been changing quickly and irrevocably over the last seven or eight years: a great symbol of American capitalism was destroyed by two aeroplanes; this was followed, some years later, by a crash in the market no less resounding and sudden; in South Asia, Pakistan (marginalised and nearly abandoned by post-Cold War politics) has been veering between being a frail democracy and becoming a basket case. In no obvious way connected to all this, a handful of Anglophone writers has recently been emerging from that country. Most of them are young, and have written one or two or three books; some, like Mohsin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif, have successful careers and lives elsewhere. Their work is not part of the long 20th century; they are not a necessary component of a post-colonial efflorescence, as Indian Anglophone writing appeared to be in the 1980s; they are not in any clear way a part of a national literature; they do not bring with them the promise of offering to the reader the 'sights and sounds' of what used to be, in Kipling's time, North-West India. They are a 21st-century phenomenon, appearing at a time when the new supposed fundamentals of this century – free-market dominance, the end of history, the clash of civilisations – suddenly seem frayed and ephemeral. Pakistani writers are interestingly poised: implicated in both the unfolding and the unravelling of our age.
Who, or what, are the antecedents of this present lot: Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Moni Mohsin, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Kamila Shamsie? The answer – given the multilingualism of
If we were to make a case for a Pakistani aesthetic, in the way that a case for an Indian aesthetic was once made by people like the art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, and then reformulated in postcolonial terms after Midnight's Children, we'd have to use different rhetoric from the sort that has haunted a certain view of the Indian arts for a century. Salman Rushdie has been an iconic figure to at least some of the writers I've mentioned (and some have been blurbed by him), but they treat their cultural inheritance in a different way. For one thing, they're largely, and enigmatically, silent about that inheritance and aesthetic; for another, their work – heterogeneous though it is – doesn't send out the message, as Rushdie's did (through markers in the writing that sought to establish continuities with carefully chosen texts like the Ramayana and The Thousand and One Nights), that the impulse towards the epic dominates South Asian storytelling. If anything, the miniaturist's impulse, with its attendant craftsmanship – which has as valid a lineage (some would argue a richer one) in Indian aesthetics as the epic – determines the texture of many of these new works. But even to begin to make a case based on cultural characteristics would be disingenuous, partly because the works themselves resist such an argument, as does the culture itself, with its own tradition of eclecticism and contradictory borrowings.
Two precursors to these new writers should be mentioned; both are still productive. The older of them is Bapsi Sidhwa, who is roughly a contemporary of Rushdie's and shares some of his preoccupations: to construct an imaginative (in Rushdie's case, mock-serious) investigation into the conditions of Partition and Independence; to record the everyday lives of a minority within the new nation (in Rushdie, the secular Muslim bourgeoisie; in Sidhwa, the Parsi community); the urge to find, in English, something like an authentic South Asian vernacular. Although she is Pakistani, Sidhwa could be seen to fit in with the general project of Indian English writing from the 1980s onwards. The other precursor, Aamer Hussein, who moved to
Hussein was formed by a world where the
And so, although Nadeem Aslam's third novel, The Wasted Vigil, addresses recent and not-so-recent history – the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan; the fall of the Taliban and the ongoing war there – it is, implicitly, about revisiting the past and recording the present without having easy access, any more, to the liberal or novelistic solutions that were available until so recently: realist reportage and analysis, fantasy, the epic, the fairy tale. Aslam has a reputation for lush, ornate writing – it is supposed to go with his brand of 'magic realism' – which makes him appear to fit into a familiar and successful tradition, in which style and aesthetics comply with, and display, national characteristics, where 'national' is primarily defined by being non-Western. Butterflies and visions inhabit his fiction.
The brief first section of the new novel, in which we encounter the Englishman Marcus and his Afghan wife, Qatrina, seems to confirm this impression: they live in an Afghani village near the Tora Bora mountains, in a house whose ceiling is covered by the books Qatrina once nailed to it (books that had been banned and, as a result, transformed into symbolic objects under the Taliban regime). Lara, a Russian woman staying with Marcus while she searches for her lost brother, Benedikt (who was in the Soviet army), notices at night that the books are 'each held in place by an iron nail hammered through it. A spike driven through the pages of history, a spike through the pages of love, a spike through the sacred.' That second sentence appears to place the narrative and its imagery and intent squarely in the line of what Fredric Jameson once called 'national allegory'. 'National', here, doesn't refer to a country demarcated by borders: it denotes the political and the postcolonial, since if the West is disreputably 'universal', the non-West is, or at least was, nicely encompassed by 'national', in Benedict Anderson's sense of the word. The 'book' has been a crucial element in the unfolding of that history; after the banning of The Satanic Verses, and the book-burnings and desecrations that followed, at the hands of fundamentalists of all persuasions, including Hindu ones, the book, especially the novel, became a talisman. It became a fetish of humanism, an incarnation of history, not only a receptacle for human wisdom, but a living thing with its own precarious career in the contemporary world. This incarnate quality is hinted at: 'The books are all up there, the large ones as well as those that are no thicker than the walls of the human heart.' Later, we learn that Qatrina is dead (she is mentioned in the first chapter in a flashback), and that, at the time she fixed the books to the ceiling, she was mad.
This may or may not be plausible, but it absolves the symbolism from too comfortable a resting place in liberal piety. Qatrina had lost her sanity because of what she'd had to do and suffer under the Taliban: accused of 'living in sin' with her husband, she'd had to chop off one of his hands as a punishment to them both. The Taliban are mad, but they represent a utopian idea of order; Qatrina's madness was a protest against utopia. But it was also a melancholy surrender of herself. The mad attack books; but the urge to fix books, to sacralise them by making them static, or to make them static by rendering them physically or metaphorically immovable, is also mad. It's an instance of the kind of liberal utopianism about culture that sounded very loudly after the fatwa. Aslam's novel, and the little fable in it about Qatrina and the books, reminds us that the liberal romanticism that appeared in the 1990s was, in its own way, problematic, one of the reasons being its soaring transcendentalism (it's logical that books should take refuge on a ceiling).
An example was Rushdie's letter to Rajiv Gandhi, then prime minister of
Almost everyone in the novel is pursuing a mission of some sort, either a political mission or one that has to do with recovering the missing or the dead. The object of pursuit, in either case, is hallucinatory and tantalising. Among the characters are two Americans: David Town, who, we hear much later, used to work for the CIA, and was also, once, the secret lover of Qatrina and Marcus's daughter, the murdered Zameen; and James Palantine, who's in the
For the next fraction of a second it is as though the truck is in fact the picture of a truck, a photograph printed on flimsy paper, and that the rays of the sun have been concentrated onto it with a magnifying glass. And then the ground falls away from his feet and a light as hard as the sun in a mirror fills his vision. The tar on a part of the road below him has caught fire. Soon they will feed you the entire world. The explosion has created static and a spark leaps from his thumb towards a smoking fragment of metal flying past him. Then he is on the ground. Beside him has landed a child's wooden leg, in flames, the leather straps burning with a different intensity than the wood, than the bright blood-seeping flesh of the severed thigh that is still attached. A woman in a burka on fire crosses his vision.
Violence and refulgence, the religious and the political, cruelty and vision are compressed in a series of images seen in shattered, out of the ordinary, discontinuous contexts. These glimpses don't generally take place where the 'epiphanies' of modernism occurred, in the midst of the banal and the everyday, in cities and neighbourhoods that are half-familiar to us. Aslam handles his fragments distinctively, even theatrically, whether the image in question is the 'child's wooden leg, in flames, the leather straps burning with a different intensity than the wood' in the passage above, or the hidden stump of Marcus's arm, or the giant head of the Buddha in Marcus's disused perfume factory, or the semi-visible paintings of animals on the walls of his house, or the recurrent motif of the pomegranate, or the Soviet soldier's head (probably the missing Benedikt's) discovered by Casa towards the end of the novel: 'that parchment-like face pasted onto the skull, the lips pulled back to reveal blackened teeth'.
These are not instances of the particular or the concrete as these things would have been understood by Ezra Pound or William Carlos Williams; they have an occluded quality, or the opacity of calligraphy or inscription ('that parchment-like face'). Civilisation, history and culture – the Buddha's head; Benedikt's severed head – are breakable, degradable and literally (as with the pomegranate) or figuratively (as with television images of war) consumable: we have an appetite, for civilisation and for its destruction. Aslam's extraordinary, complex style attempts to encompass these oscillations: it makes his language at once voluptuous and eloquent and scathing and melancholy. This language occasionally confuses his readers, critics and even his admirers. It's what made James Buchan describe the novel's terrain, in the Guardian, as 'a Persian miniature under some terrible curse'; and provoked Adam Mars-Jones, in the opening sentence of his admiring review in the Observer, to tackle this question: 'There isn't enough beauty in the world, but isn't it true that a work of art can be too beautiful?' It's also what causes the New York Times reviewer, Lorraine Adams, to caution Aslam about his tendency towards 'operatic effusion', and to quote admonishingly, among other passages and sentences, this discomfiting, almost exhibitionistic, convergence of culture, wounding, appetite and life: 'The pomegranate was on a table close to the fireplace. She slit it open now. The outer layer of scarlet seeds had been warmed by the flames. The temperature of menstrual blood, of semen just emerged from a man's body.'
In a recent issue of the Indian newspaper Mint, Salil Tripathi, speaking of the new Pakistani writing in English, offers a thesis for what is still a small, though undeniable, flowering: 'With the state withdrawing from exercising even a semblance of authority, several authors of Pakistani origin or heritage have seized that space, writing seminal works that provide clarity in our absurd times. Maybe exceptional strife spurs imagination – think of the Samizdat writers during the Cold War – although responding to the crisis is not the overt intention of any of
Rather than a tragic but noble history of oppression, I would say that it's the burden of a conflicted and ambiguous relationship to national history that marks the imaginative world of the Pakistani bourgeoisie from which these writers have emerged. It's difficult to say if – outside its growing pan-Islamism in the last four decades – there ever was a national myth of
The one great difference between independent
In this context, the example of music is instructive. After independence, the Indian state became a patron of Indian classical music, and encouraged many maestros who had been born in what became
I had a Pakistani friend when I was at
Amina wrote a number of passionate poems, exposing the gaping flaws in a democratic system that still allowed for horrifying poverty. She read them to a select gathering of Indian writers. The Indian intelligentsia, which has rarely known poverty since the last half-century, which is free to choose between the right and the left, between east and west, or north and south, is always thrilled by chastisement. They smiled warmly at her.
One of them remarked: 'It is a very sincere attempt.'
These words at once revealed to Amina that she had just posted another misaddressed letter.
Riaz, in this passage, describes the predicament of the Pakistani writer, as well as the liberties and opportunities that predicament gives her; she suggests, too, that the freedoms available to the Indian writer bring with them paradoxical forms of imprisonment. The dichotomy may be too neat always to hold true, but it reminds us that what is at stake here is more than just one country's suffering and another's success. The contexts at work have to do with national shame and writing as a form of self-awareness ('misaddressed letters'), on the one hand, and a curious mixture of an upbeat openness and a certain suspension of critical faculties, on the other: a curious kind of self-absorption. Riaz's story is an example of fiction skirting, and engaging with, the boundaries of criticism. Aslam's considerable novel emerges from a related history and probably from some of the same pressures: it too describes the journey from the sensuous to the critical, from its lavish propensity for the poetic image to its exploratory, persistent, questioning intelligence.
* Amit Chaudhuri reviewed The Reluctant Fundamentalist in the LRB of 4 October 2007.
Amit Chaudhuri teaches contemporary literature at the
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