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The write stuff
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It's been an amazing creative journey for Kamila Shamsie. GEETA DOCTOR chats with the Pakistani writer during her visit to the city
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Pic. by T.A.Hafeez
KAMILA SHAMSIE is tall, cool and as perfectly poised as a piece of crystal hanging on a silver chain. She allows you to watch the different facets of her life glow and catch the light, as she describes the swift and almost certain trajectory from child to student to writer that she has made while travelling from her native city of Karachi to the literary capitals of the West.
At the Stella Maris College, where Shamsie has been invited to take part in a week-long writer-in-residence programme, Shamsie does not seem any older than the girls she has come to teach — creative writing. Her creative journey on the other hand is all but remarkable. Shamsie, 31, has three novels to her credit. She spent seven years in America as a college student, where she lives part of the time, teaching creative writing, the rest of the time living in London, and in Karachi.
"At nine, I knew I wanted to be a reader, because I loved reading. But at that point, you couldn't do this. Well, I loved writing as well, so it seemed like a good second option." She describes with wry humour how she wrote her first book at 11, with a friend and went on to produce two more works that were studded with references to fields and meadows and characters with very English names, until her mother suggested that it might make sense to give them something more familiar and closer to home.
She describes her sense of shock and wonder that any writer could write about Karachi. The writer was of course Salman Rushdie and the book, "Midnight's Children". Not only was Karachi mentioned as a place and a time where things could and did happen, it was fictionalised in certain ways that did not accord with the place that she knew. Why had Rushdie dismissed it as "a city of acquiescence" she wondered, when it was anything but that. It was then that she learnt an important lesson that as a novelist, you did not have to agree with everything or even anything a writer said, but it did allow for an area for disagreement. "I realised for the first time, also that there was a very different viewpoint from what we had at home. It was a moment of registration of the "otherness" in a sense."
The other writers whom she mentions are Bapsi Sidhwa whose book "The Ice-Candy Man" re-creates the horrors of Partition as seen through the eyes of a young Parsi girl, and Sara Suleri, whose book "Meatless Days" dared look behind the silence of censorship to present a candid view of family life in Pakistan. Shamsie is eloquent when she describes the rapture of every student of literature on first reading Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse", the idea that the written word could be so filled with an intimation of perfection.
At Karachi, her home is filled with books. Her mother Muneeza Shamsie is a writer who has edited an anthology of Pakistani writers, her father is a businessman, while her sister whom she describes as being a gifted ceramic artist, now teaches at the Grammar School in Karachi, which by the way is where she sets part of her first novel, "In a City by the Sea". In it, her narrator, Hasan, is a young boy, who's coping with the tensions of living at a time when General Zia's polished martial smile cracks up the certainties of a privileged existence. Or at least this is what one gathers reading the synopsis by reviewer Rehan Ansari, who notes, "This is the first novel of our generation... They are the children of men and women who were young in very optimistic times — the late 50s and early 60s, the Ayubian era of nation-building. Their children, us, were designed to experience optimism, and when we were on the verge of adulthood, it was the late 70s, when all hell broke loose... .This novel concerns the extra-judicial killing of my generation's optimism."
Shamsie's novels, therefore, speak to a new generation of Pakistanis, who have to face up to their lives as they experience it, living in a world vastly different from what their elders might have wanted, or dreamt about. It's not out of place to mention here, that Shamsie's grand-aunt was none other than the celebrated Attiya Hossain, whose "Sunlight on a Broken Column" recreated with eloquence a way of life in Lucknow that vanished before her eyes. Her third novel, "Kartography" deals with the Bangladesh war of l97l, while the second one, "Salt and Saffron" the best known of her novels, tracks down a well-to-do family living in Karachi, who still have to come to terms with some of their past history.
As we discuss it, even a simple word "Saffron" can have different meanings in a different context. To her, it's a code word for wealth, a reference to the aristocratic upper class family that she's writing about. The salt is the hidden ingredient, taken for granted when handing down recipes and so acts as a trigger for the secrets that lie buried in the family history.
When we meet, Shamsie is both guarded and open at the same time.
It's as if, we have instinctively staked out a territory that says, "Pakistan" and "India" and we are negotiating an area that we can talk about.
"There is no one Pakistani voice. Just as there is no one Indian voice, or one British voice," she explains when talking about the problems of finding a narrative voice for herself. "My narrative voices are all Pakistani voices with separate narrative identities. When I write, I don't put in anything that will make it completely impenetrable to someone who doesn't know Pakistan at all. But at the same time, it is still a Pakistani voice and when I say Id, I don't explain that Id is the festival after the month of fasting called Ramzan, because it sounds stupid. Instead you say: On Id... and give a context whereby people can know it's a holiday."
She's obviously been very influenced by her teacher Agha Shahid Ali, during her years as a student at Hamilton College and the University of Massachusetts. Indeed, Agha Shahid Ali was a beacon for many poets and writers of the sub-continent before he died at the early age of 52, leaving plangent verses addressed to his beloved Kashmir as for instance in the farewell lament:
"We shall meet again, in Srinagar by the gates of the Village of Peace, our hands blossoming into fists till the soldiers return the keys and disappear. Again we'll enter our lost world, the first that vanished
In our absence from the broken city."
Shamsie speaks of the fun that he brought to the study of literature, of the generosity of his spirit that would reach out to his students who had brought their work for his inspection, with the command: "Do something with it. Do something!" Most of all however, it is the seriousness of his engagement with words, with literature that remain with her.
As we shift our ground from her novels to an article she wrote in The Guardian soon after the `attempt' on the Indian Parliament, in which Shamsie presents, how differently the `incident' seems to be from either side of the border, she re-iterates her view.
"My personal viewpoint is that neither of us are the good guys. All the confidence building measures and person to person interactions are vital because the citizens from both countries need to see individuals rather than see Musharraf or Vajpayee. If those are the only faces we see on either side, we are going to run into problems. When people from either countries meet, they get along fine, but once they start talking about political issues, like Kashmir, there's a huge ground that needs to be covered. The fact that people get along at a personal level is actually where the optimism lies and I do believe that is one way forward." As the leaves from a tropical Raintree drop down over us, Shamsie remarks on how different South India seems to her. Even the air feels different. One of Agha Shahid Ali's verses speak of death,
"From windows we hear grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall on us, like ash Kashmir is burning."
The question is not asked for there is no answer. How long will we let it burn?
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