In celebration of International Women's Day, (March 8th), PakUSonline wanted to highlight the accomplishments of 2 gifted Pakistani women writers, who also happen  to be mother and daughter.  We are proud to present exclusive interviews of Muneeza Shamsie and her daughter, Kamila Shamsie.

Muneeza Shamsie is a writer, free lance journalist and is perhaps best  known for her pioneering work in putting together anthologies of Pakistani writers.  Her most recent anthology, 'And the World Changed' which  was published originally in India and reprinted in Pakistan twice, was published  in October 2008 in USA  and is a collection of 25 short stories by Pakistani women writers.  This is the only anthology of creative texts written originally in English by Pakistani women.  I met Muneeza to discuss this book and to talk about her journey in the literary field. 

Q. What got you started in the field of promoting Pakistani writers?

A.  My interest has to do with my own background.  I was at school in England from the age 9 through 19 and I saw my parents, who lived in Karachi, once a year. This was the norm for boys in our social milieu though few sent their girls abroad. As I grew older, I developed a great longing to find out more about my part of the world, about my own people.  And what was there for me to read in English? There were Kipling, and Foster’s portrayals of British India which had nothing to do with the world that I knew. In the 1960’s started to hone onto South Asian English Literature, which was largely Indian at the time but that started me off. 

While I was at school I became aware of how narratives of colonialism and gender define you and people’s perceptions of your country and your home. This was not something I read about, but experienced this first hand...  

Moreover, in terms of English Literature and gender, my father admired books like Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe.  I didn’t like these adventure stories, which were often about foolish little boys running away from home!  I started reading Little Women and Good Wives which I enjoyed a lot more but these books were by American authors and in those days Pakistan, people thought the literature of England was the only worthwhile English Literature. 

Q. Why do you think people are reading more and more South Asian English Literature? 

A.  I think it really acquired widespread international acceptance in the 1980s with the development of increasingly assertive migrant communities in the West and a new discourse in western academia.  There had been this big post-war debate on the English novel writing which was perceived to be on the decline – and possibly dead. Then they found that it was very much alive and well in |Britain’s erstwhile colonies and there was this wonderful surge of new writing coming from there.  

In the United States, there was a different dialogue going on. The voice of American literature was no longer ‘white America’ – it was Jewish America, Black America and so on.  I was in my late teens I think when I read the Afro-American writer James Baldwin  People like Hanif Kureishi have also been very deeply influenced by him. As an Asian Briton, Hanif’s discourse has certain resonance with Baldwin’s because they both write about growing up in a society where you ‘belong and yet not belong’ and are defined by the color of your skin. 

So perhaps the answer to your question is that the writing from the Commonwealth and America’s minority communities has injected a new life and a new perspective to the English Literature and that South Asian English Literature has benefited from this as more and more talented writers have emerged.                                

Q. The choice of journalism as a career seems an almost obvious one?

A. No, not really.  I wanted to be a scientist when I was at school but I was told there were no openings for women scientists in Pakistan.  I really didn’t know what to do after that.  But I loved writing and I was always scribbling away and working as a freelance journalist fitted in very well with my home life because children were very young at the time,   

I started contributing to Dawn in 1982. I had a very supportive and encouraging editor, Mr. Muhammed Ali Siddiqi.  He discovered that I loved reading. He kept giving me books to review and when writers would visit Pakistan, he would send me off to interview them.  A lot of them were Pakistani writers from the Diaspora. Everybody kept saying how there were lots of Indian writers but hardly any Pakistani writers but I was meeting them all the time!  

Also there was a rather vital and lively English language poetry scene in Pakistan during the 1960s and 1970 with wonderful work being produced by talented poets such Taufiq Rafat, Kaleem Omar, Adrian Husain, Salman Kureshi,   and Maki Kureishi.  Some of these people were my friends. I would attend poetry gatherings and write about them.  So all in all, through my work, my friends and my interests, I was exposed to the different facets of Pakistani English Literature.   

Q. How did you get started putting together your first anthology? 

A.  In 1989, there was a conference in Islamabad on English in South Asia. I presented a paper - ‘The English Novel in Pakistan’ but I could only come up with three novelists– Ahmed Ali, Zulfikar Ghose and Bapsi Sidhwa!  Then in 1996, Ameena Saiyid of Oxford University Press was bringing out a host of books to commemorate Pakistan’s Golden Jubilee. She asked me to put together a book on Pakistani English writing. The book, a collection of fiction, poetry and drama came out in 1997.  My in-house editor wondered what I would come up with because there didn’t seem to be very much but in the end that book had 44 writers of Pakistani origin in chronological order from Shahid Suhrawardy to Nadeem Aslam, and most people were absolutely amazed. 

Q. How did you address the question of who is ‘Pakistani’ and should be included? 

A.  In the past, and through this whole maze of a Pakistani ‘identity’, Pakistani critics had restricted themselves to writers living in Pakistan or to authors who were writing about Pakistan. I decided to take this further because where do you draw that dividing line? We live in a mobile world. So many people grew up in Pakistan and then moved abroad but are still connected to Pakistan. Why should we say this makes them less Pakistani than someone living here in Pakistan who is well traveled or has been educated in different countries? So for me the criterion became authors who claimed a Pakistani identity.  

Zulfikar Ghose is one example of this. The author of the riveting The Murder of Aziz Khan, he was born in Sialkot, but then left for Bombay in 1942, and then for England with his family in 1959. He married a Brazilian artist in 1964, became a Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and has lived there since then.  His eleven novels include a wonderful trilogy about Brazil where you can see the influence of his Pakistani heritage in the response to colonization, independence, litany of violence, martial law, urban warfare, poverty, the IMF.   

Diaspora writers often have a need to negotiate their way between two worlds to find a place where they belong and their story telling becomes their only home.  All the authors in my anthologies gave me permission to use their work, even Hanif Kureishi who some people insist is British and nothing else. But we live in a multi-cultural world and Hanif Kureishi was quite happy to be part of a Pakistani anthology, so in my opinion, nobody else should have an issue with that either.    

Q. What would you say are the main differences in the writing of Pakistani writers vs. Indian writers?

A.  The concept of Pakistan as a Muslim homeland was essentially Tran geographical, unlike India which is more geographically contained. The imagination of the Pakistani writers has often engaged with the wider Muslim world, or has a universalism which transcends national boundaries. Pakistani writers like Tariq Ali write passionately about Muslim Spain and Communist Europe.  Adam Zameenzad, who grew up both in Africa and in Pakistan, draws on his experience of both countries in his novel ‘My Friend Matt and Hena the Whore’. The book about famine in Africa revolves around three children - the occurrence of poverty and hunger, of children running from village to village and men with guns going after others with different ideologies - these are not unique to Africa but are reflected in our own history too.     

Despite our shared pre-1947 history, Pakistanis and Indians respond very differently to political issues because their post-independence political history has been so different in the two countries.  I don’t know if an Indian writer would find such quick parallels to South America or Turkey as a Pakistani writer does.   

Of course you have people with multiple identities, as you do in India – you can be American and a Pakistani, you can be a Pakistani Christian or Pakistani Parsi.  And these things emerge in these writings. 

Sadly, in Pakistan we don’t value and promote culture, fiction, writing, art. We are too caught up with what is allowed and what is not.  And this is not because of Islam because the Islamic world is full of art and culture and literature, so I think oppressive political systems must share a good part of the blame.   

Q. What was your second anthology about? 

A.  My first anthology raised all these questions of identity. I decided to explore this further and do a second anthology about migration, called ‘Leaving Home'.  I put non-fiction and fiction alongside each other. We have some amazingly good non-fiction writing in Pakistan – the work which appears in the press.  A lot of people don’t think its literature because it deals with current events, but I believe it forms the basis of good English language writing in Pakistan. 

In the migration anthology, I included stories that dealt with migration at Partition, migration from village to city, migration from Pakistan to other countries.  In each of these migrations, you have to make different kinds of adjustments and you find different identities also.  

Q. And your most recent work is about women writers.  How did that come about? 

A.  The third book came about after a chance meeting with Indian publisher Ritu Menon of Women Unlimited at a conference organized by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad. She asked me to do an anthology of Pakistani women writers.  A year later, at the next SDPI conference, I handed her the book on disk, And the World Changed.  In the past, people had done anthologies of women’s writing in Urdu translated into English.  I wanted to put together writings done originally in English and not translations.     

Q. Why not include translations?

A.  English language writing is different to other literatures of Pakistani because it is the result of the colonial encounter and entails an element of hybridism. The English-speaking Pakistani woman is barely represented in mainstream English literature or in the literatures of Pakistan. Therefore Pakistani women writing in English are speaking from the margins of two literatures and cultures. This is the first book to look at this genre, as a body of work.  

There are a lot of challenges involved because there are certain stylistic problems that all South Asian English language writers have to overcome.  What they are really trying to do is to translate the sub continental experience into another, very different (western) language i.e. English which is traditionally weighted by the narratives of patriarchy and empire. 

Q. Can you tell us a bit about the introduction you wrote for the new book? 

A.   I find that English language writing in Pakistan has had a very interesting background... In this book, for the American edition, I was asked to expand the introduction and explain why these Pakistani women were writing in English.  This took me into the colonial history of English in the subcontinent and its acquisition by South Asian men to communicate with the British rulers and as means of employment. The women, in the meantime, went on leading their separate purdah lives. As a result, the distance between Anglicized men and traditional women grew. This in turn led to a need to teach women English too. Added to that in British India, English was the language of Parliament and political debate and was associated with power, technological progress and social reform.  

All this became entwined with the whole issue of women’s education and purdah reform. As you know, Muslims in undivided India acquired English much later than Hindus. There was a great resistance to schools for Muslim women too even though many of them were purdah schools. The spread of missionary schools for girls, led to a huge debate between the traditionalists who were afraid of ‘alien’ influences and those who wanted to send their daughters to these English schools as a window to the modern world. 

And that choice spawned off its own set of issues. When you study in an English medium school, English becomes your strongest language and your instinct is to write in English. But where do you find your readership?  The English wanted South Asian English writing to confirm their notions of oriental exotica. In the ninetieth century, South Asian   English writers had tried to emulate British romantics to prove that they could write like Byron and Keats too. But in the twentieth century, with upsurge of pre-Partition nationalist sentiment, it was the normal for South Asians to use English to explain the sub-continent to the British Raj but it became unpatriotic to write the unpalatable truth in English - because the English would get a bad impression of your country.  And why should you write in the colonizer’s language? So what you have actually is Ismat Chugtai, Rashida Jahan and even Begum Ikramullah wrote Urdu fiction even though they were influenced by European writers.    

After Partition, English remained the language of government and there was a strong English language press, but there were no women reporters or editors. Welfare work and nation building was considered a more worthy occupation for the well-educated Pakistani women than writing in English. Many people considered English creative writing to be narcissistic and elitist, a leftover of the colonial times, regardless of gender. This really changed in 1980s when English came to be regarded as the global language of the electronic revolution.

Q. Is ‘And the World Changed’ focused on women’s issues?

A. Well I would say that since the stories are written by women, they bring women’s perspective to a strongly male-dominated society.  When I put out the call for stories, I did not specify subject matter because I did not want to limit the scope of the submissions.  This book of stories, rather than a collection of writings on issues but they  cover many varied experiences – from women as victims of Partition  (Bapsi Sidhwa, Roshni Rustomji), cultural commingling (Sara Suleri), a mother and a mentally disadvantaged child (Fahmida Riaz, Talat Abbasi)  the impermeability of class (Aamina Ahmed) to the all-male underworld of Karachi’s bus workshops where a man falls in love with the picture of his perfect woman -  painted on the side of a bus (Uzma Aslam Khan). All these stories are not necessarily written in a woman’s voice – the fact that they are written by women is enough.  

Q. Favorite writer? 

A. Well, I have to say, the books I like best are those by members of my family!  I get a great kick out of reading Kamila’s books and see where they are coming from and also writings of my Chachi, the Indian novelist Attia Hosain. This is not a professional opinion of course, but a hopelessly subjective one.  

I also love Sara Suleri’s work and Bapsi Sidhwa’s.  I find Tahira Naqvi very interesting because she writes English fiction and translates from Urdu. Urdu writing is usually very intense, full of unexpressed emotion that is hinted at rather than vocalized and Tahira brings that element into her fiction writing.  Rukshana Ahmed is also a translator and writer.  Her novel The Hope Chest is very moving and she has also translated Urdu poetry and is a playwright too I really enjoy her work  

Q. What is your new work?

A. This has to be my most ambitious work yet.  The Oxford Companion to the Literatures of Pakistan of which I am the Managing Editor and I have experts in the other languages of Pakistan working with me as editors. But it’s still very much a work-in-progress.  I am also writing critical book on the development of a Pakistani English literature. 

Thank you so much Muneeza for taking the time to talk to us.  We highly recommend ‘And the World Changed’ to our readers and we look forward to all your future works. 

Till next time,

Khuda Hafiz,

Aaliya Naqvi-Hai

Muneeza's Photo Credit: Ayesha Vellani

Muneeza Shamsie's other books include: