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 Kamila Shamsie and her mother, Muneeza Shamsie.

Interview with Kamila Shamsie for ‘Burnt Shadows’ 

 “The mist gave way to rain as she spoke -- not a gentle rain that whispered of harvest and bounty but a harsh, hammering rain.  It fell like sheets of liquid steel, pounding all the life out of the tiny creatures in its path.  Monstrous watery shapes formed and disintegrated before Sajjad’s eyes as his tears splintered the rain.  If he let go of Hiroko she would slip away in fluid form.  Everything about her so precarious.” 

 The above is an excerpt from Kamila Shamsie’s most recent book, “Burnt Shadows.”  Shamsie is a prominent Pakistani novelist who grew up in Karachi and has written five novels in English.  Her novels have earned her international recognition and high words of praise from the literary world. 

Her most recent novel, “Burnt Shadows” centers around a Japanese woman, Hiroko who survived the nuclear bomb in Nagasaki and it follows her and her son through certain pivotal moments in their life.   

This recent book marks a great shift in Shamsie’s writing.  Whereas before, her novels always centered around the places and personnas that were most famliar to Shamsie, this novel moves into a new realm where Shamsie has to imagine places and times that are radically different from anything she has personally experienced or written before.  Her prose seems almost poetic at times and the reader is immediately immersed into the world that Shamsie has created with her compelling storytelling and astute, at times, amusing insights into life and people. 

Aside from writing novels, Shamsie contributes both as a columnist and reviewer to The Guardian and is an active member on the editorial advisory board of the publication, “The Index on Censorship.”  I recently spoke to Shamsie via phone from her home in London about her latest book, the writing process, and her insights regarding the growing number of Pakistani novelists who write in English.  

Q. This book, ’Burnt Shadows’ is a radical departure from your past books in many ways.  What was the inspiration to feature a Japanese woman who survived the nuclear bomb in Nagasaki? 

A. Well the original idea was going to be not so much of a departure because I was going to write about a Pakistani character, and it was going to be set around the time Pakistan and India tested their nuclear bombs.  These were really vague, general ideas I had but I thought, there will be this Pakistani guy and his grandmother will be Japanese and she will have survived Nagasaki so he’ll have a very different family history and a very different way of thinking about the bomb.  And pretty much as soon as I thought that idea I thought, well, why does he have a Japanese grandmother?  How did this woman end up in Pakistan?  Is she still alive when India and Pakistan test their nuclear bombs?  And the more I thought about it--somehow I got fairly fixated on this idea of a Japanese woman who ends up in Pakistan, and ,in the end, the grandson figure never really happens.  We also don’t see the Indo-Pak nuclear tests.   

But the original idea was still going to be along the lines of what I had done earlier which is located in Pakistan in some crucial point of political history.  It just sort of went in different directions.  And I was conscious of wanting to do something different because I had written four books back to back very quickly.  And then I took about eighteen months off and I just felt, somehow, that I was ready for a departure.  So when I had the idea of this Japanese character, I just thought well maybe this is that departure.  I thought, let’s go with it and see where it leads. 

Q. Where did your interest in the nuclear bomb come from?  Was it just an idea that came into your head or was there something specific that made you want to talk about that? 

A. The point where I remember first becoming fascinated with Nagasaki and interested in the dropping of the bomb was when I was an undergraduate at Hamilton and I gone to a lecture.  I don’t remember what it was.  But at a certain point in the lecture, whomever was speaking was talking about the failure of American foreign policy and she said: even those people who justify the bomb in Hiroshima, how do they justify Nagasaki three days later?  And that stuck in my head.  I never did any research behind it.  It’s not like I started reading the about the bomb, but every now and then it would come back to me and I kept noticing that people talk a lot about Hiroshima but very rarely about Nagasaki.  And the idea of this being the  symbolic kind of experience of how nations are willing to commit horrible acts over and over again--so Nagasaki became symbolic of that.  And I’m sure that India and Pakistan being nuclear-armed, at some unconscious level must have played a part in my growing interest in it. 

Q. How did you do your research for this book?  Did you actually go to Japan? 

A. I didn’t go to Japan.  Partly I was aware that there was no way I could go back to Nagasaki before the bomb.  Quite literally what I was writing about had been obliterated.  From doing research, at one point, I got so interested in the place that I just wanted to go for my sake rather than the book.  And I looked up the visa requirements for a Pakistani citizen to get a Japanese tourist visa, but it was so impossible.   

One of the interesting things is that I wrote the Delhi section without having visited most of those places in Delhi I was writing about.  I mean, I  had visited Delhi before but I hadn’t been to say, Qutb Minar or Civil Lines where the Burtons lived.  So I had to do some research reconstructing it.  And then having written that Delhi section I went to all those neighborhoods and locations I had written about and it was slightly nerve wracking to go there because I thought, what if I go there and discover I got it all wrong and that research wasn’t enough for me to reconstruct it and what will that mean for the Nagasaki section?  Of course I went to Delhi and I went to those places and they felt very familiar, and I realized you couldn’t do thorough enough research.  Sure there were a few details here and there you miss.  But there was nothing I had gotten wrong as such.  There were a few things I could add in but nothing I needed to go in and take out.  So that makes one feel a little more confident.   

But I did masses and masses of research online and through books.  I was lucky I was teaching at Hamilton for part of the time I was writing this book so I used Interlibrary Loan a lot.  The thing was that more helpful than books in some way was on the internet.  There were sites that had pictures of Nagasaki before the war.  And for me, I mean different writers work differently, in order to write about a place I have to be able to visualize it.  So once I was able to do that, once I saw those photographs and got a sense of peoples’ clothing and the topography and what the houses looked like, that was the most important thing, more important than the historical details though obviously I needed all that as well. 

Q. No you’ve portrayed Nagasaki very beautifully.  The reader can totally imagine the landscape and I had never really thought about Nagasaki before and this made me really think about it and imagine what it must have been like before the bomb and the day the bomb fell. 

Your publisher had given me an advance copy of your book and in the cover page she writes that she strongly feels this is going to be your “breakthrough” book, a book that takes you from being a good writer to “spectacular.”  Did you feel that the process of writing this book was somehow different from your other books?   

A. It did feel different and particularly when I was writing the Nagasaki section.  I had been so accustomed to writing what was familiar.  For this Nagasaki section, literally for every sentence I wrote I had to do pages of research.  So I had to look up something like what was the weather that day [the bomb fell].  So it meant I was writing sentences much more slowly because I would write and then go check something and then come back.  So that process was a different thing.  The voice and the tone of voice of the Japan section coming through is quite different reflecting the different way in which I was writing.  I had no way of knowing whether anyone else would think it worked or not, but internally it was like a doorway opened up where I thought if I can take this on then--there was a kind of sense of being freed of a certain restriction of thinking you needed to stay inside what you knew.  And then even though the book at a certain point does go to Karachi, it is not the Clifton or Defense areas of my previous books.  I felt, lets completely go on new ground now. 

Q. So you felt you had a new found sense of confidence now… 

A. Not just that but suddenly becoming interested in doing things a different way.  Before I was very interested in capturing the world I had lived through, in some way.  But I suppose that if you do that for four books you feel that you have lived out that desire and now I want to turn my attention onto another kind of writing. 

Q. Talk to me about the process of writing.  For instance, how long does it take you to write a book?  Is it a continuous process or does it get interrupted?    Do you tend to be very disciplined when writing?  Do you have a lot of ideas in your head and try different things or do you decide on something and then just go with it? 

A.  It always starts with a particular image.  So this one was the image of a woman with her back tattooed with bird shaped burns.  There was that one image and from there I built everything up.  So it is always a single, very small image which goes around in my head for a while and then other images attach themselves.  But I am really making it up as I go along.   

When I started this book, I had no idea it would end the way it did.  The opening page of the man in the prison cell was written right at the end even though it was the first page.  So when I started, I really didn’t know where I was going with it.  As for the discipline, when I start a novel I have to be disciplined in as much as I have to be quite strict about it--every morning I will sit down and have my morning cup of tea and start writing.  Beginnings are slow.  I don’t know the characters, I don’t know the situation.  You spend lots of time staring at a blank screen.  But there always comes a certain point where you shift gear and I get a good sense of where this is going.   

And at that point it is not about discipline.  Laurie Moore had a great line when someone asked her, do you have to be very disciplined?  And she said, you don’t need to be disciplined when you are obsessed!   And there comes a point in the writing when that happens where I want know what is happening with the characters. So I wake up in the morning and I want to get to work as quickly as possible.  And then I, very often, will keep writing until I have to force myself to stop.  So it’s part of the process.  And when I do write, once I’ve started properly, I’ll write every day.  I’ll often take some time off between drafts.  So there can sometimes be gaps of weeks maybe more than weeks even.  Also when I finish a first draft I tend to give it to two or three people whose opinion I trust.  I am also then waiting for them to read it and come back to me with their comments.  

Q. I know that you‘ve always wanted to be a writer and you‘ve been writing for a long time.  What have been some of your challenges as a writer.  What is particularly hard for you when writing? 

A.  Beginnings are really hard, always.  And in some ways it is a comfort to have done five [novels] that you sit down and think, it’s always this hard and inevitably something gets going.  So I don’t get too stressed about it knowing that in time I have to go through the difficulty of beginnings.  But they are always difficult, always very hard other than the first novel.  With the first novel I had structure in my head of what it was going to be about but ever since then, I start, I write a paragraph or two and then I think where is this going, how does this ever become a full length novel?  So that is very hard.  

Q. Do you have a specific goal you want to accomplish with your writing (such as making people more aware of Pakistani culture) or do you just go where your writing takes you? 

A.  If you are going to spend a couple of years on a project, it has to be something that you really want to do for yourself.  I am not so selfless that I can say I will do this for other people.  I also don’t have delusions that millions and millions of people are going to read my book and it’s going to the change the way the world sees Pakistan.  So I don’t think of the work in that way.  It’s just that I am very interested in how Pakistan has got to be where it is, and what kind of country it is and so that comes out.  A lot of people make very strong distinctions between more political and less political writing.  And to me it’s clear that we all, as writers, write what we are interested in.  Now some human beings are more political than others.  But we all start from the same place which is, what stories do I feel compelled to tell?  

Q. When you started writing, there were very few Pakistani writers out there who wrote in English.  This is slowly changing.  Do you feel that has changed the writing environment for you, somehow?  Are publishers more interested in Pakistani writers now since Pakistan has become such a dominant part of America’s post 9/11 strategy? 

A. For me it really hasn’t made a difference.  I have been with my main publishers in England since the year 2000.  I tend to work with the same people.  A lot of my publishers for translations, Italians, Germans, etc. are the same publishers I’ve had now for a while.  So I haven’t felt a difference in that way. 

But there has been a very wonderful difference in as much as people are now aware of Pakistani writing as being its own separate thing whereas ten years ago people didn’t know if you should be considered part of Indian writing or if you were Middle Eastern writing or what were you, really.   

This year my book is coming out, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s book is coming out in England very soon.  Mohammed Hanif’s paperback will be out this year too.  And there are literary festivals where I’m on panels with other Pakistani writers such as Mueenuddin and Hanif, and that’s really nice because a few years ago I would find myself on the Muslim panel, where you were with someone from Egypt and someone from Turkey and you from Pakistan and you’d have completely different stories and experiences, so it’s nice to feel that you have these people around you who have not just the same experience of being a writer but also come from this place that is so much in the news and for which you have a personal connection.   

It is true that, I think, publishers are certainly noticing.  I know, in India, a lot of publishers are very much on the lookout for Pakistani writing.  And in England and America, certainly to a greater extent.  And it’s not post 9/11.  It’s really been the last couple of years.  Because post 9/11 the first places people looked to were Afghanistan and Iraq.  Pakistan was still in the background.  And two things have happened.  One is in the last couple of years, politically, we are so much front and center so it’s just a country people are hearing a lot more about and also, two,  because you have books like “Reluctant Fundamentalist” and “Exploding Mangoes” coming out or getting huge acclaim, up for prizes and things like that.  So in a literary sense, as well, people are starting to notice that.  

Q. What are your future plans?  Do you intend to keep writing novels?  Are you interested in things like short stories, screen plays or poetry? 

A. I do write some short stories.  I have no thoughts of having a collection of short stories, but it’s a form I really admire.  But literally in between novels or drafts I am working on short stories that get published in magazines here and there.  Screen plays, I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to write one.  And I think I am too tied to the form of prose fiction to do that.  And poetry, again, I love to read it.  But when I think of writing I think in terms of stories. 

Q. What advice or words of caution would you have for other upcoming Pakistani writers? 

A. You know, if someone really seriously wants to be a writer then words of caution are irrelevant.  If you really want to do it, you’ll do it.  You’ll find a way to do it.  I think there are too many people who, before they write the book, start thinking, well how will I get a publisher or what do publishers want?  So my first words would be, write the book first.  Do that and then start thinking about the other stuff.  There is really no point in second guessing because at the end of the day your book lands on the desk of an individual human being and it’s a question of the book and the editor somehow making a match.   

And don’t say, one day I’ll write a book and how do I get that published, etc.  If you’re going to write, write.  And then after that start the next step.  You know, one of the things we do have in this generation is because of the internet, even if you are sitting in Pakistan, you can still look up all the literary agents in England or America.  You can contact them via email and email your manuscripts over to them.  I think a generation ago, it was that much more daunting to actually get in touch of people outside of Pakistan and now it’s much more possible.   

And I would also say despite how hairy things politically are between India and Pakistan, Indian publishing right now is at a very exciting moment.  Most of the major publishing houses now have Indian branches whether it is Penguin, Harper Collins or Random House.  And I know personally from knowing some of those editors that they are really looking for Pakistani writing, so we don’t anymore have to think that England and America are the only options in the absence of publishing houses in Pakistan.  If you get picked up by Random House India, they might likely tell Random House UK or USA about it.  So that’s a place to keep an eye on.   

Thank you, so much, for your time, Kamila.   

Anjum D. Alden  

Kamila Shamsie’s latest book, “Burnt Shadows” is now available in Pakistan and the United Kingdom.  It will be available in all major booksellers in the United States at the end of April.  Copies can be ordered in advance from www.amazon.com 

Thank you to Kamila Shamsie’s publisher, Picador, for providing us with an advance copy of the book.

Credit for Kamila's photograph - Mark Pringle

Kamila Shamsie's other books include:

In the City by the Sea (1998) 
Salt and Saffron (2000)
Kartography (2002) 
Broken Verses (2005)