Pakistani Literature That Refuses to Pigeonhole Its Setting

Basmah Sakrani: If you think about the protagonists in your books—Tara in Dure’s, and any one of the women from Mahreen’s stories—what would they recognize in each other? What would feel familiar or unfamiliar?

Dur e Aziz Amna: I can go first. In full disclosure, I read Mahreen’s book a long time ago, so apologies if my memory is murky. But the one line that really stuck with me in “The Newlyweds” is that what really makes a woman is the flexible way in which she is able to change the nature of who she is, depending on her relationships. I am paraphrasing, but it struck me so much that I remember highlighting it.

I feel like that is also Tara, putting on the face she needs with every new person, being flexible in her idea of who she is, adapting based on who she is with.

Mahreen Sohail: Dure, I was looking through your book again this morning. Something that felt very familiar to me was that Tara is always reaching. And I think the women in my stories are also reaching, either for love or for something else.

Another thing I noticed was this disappointment with men, a slow, creeping disillusionment. I think that would feel familiar to many of the characters in my stories as well. 

BS: Both of your books feature characters who commit transgressive acts. As you are writing your characters and they become more real to you, how do you both decide where that moral line lies? What are you thinking when you decide to push something further or ignore that line?

MS: I am not sure that when I was writing, I was thinking about moral lines. Maybe that comes later, in the editing process, and certainly now, as I’m talking about the book.

Overall, there is this idea of women just living their lives. When you are in the midst of living, you are not thinking, this is the line I am crossing. And if the characters are well-rounded enough, it feels believable that they cross those lines, even in the context of a culture or a society like ours.

I am thinking about the story with the child soldiers, which is ambiguous. The sisters in it commit this act of kidnapping a girl. But I am hoping that the sisters’ backstory and their grief over their mother are enough to show how those choices could come about. So, it is not necessarily about crossing the moral line as much as it is about what kind of situation would allow someone to cross it. And often that happens organically. The characters do take over.

DAA: It’s funny you say that it’s in talking about the book when you realize these things. With Tara, she’s telling the story in retrospect, right? We start off with her saying, hey, I’ve done something really bad, hear me out. But it’s the fact that she can see those moral lines more clearly because she’s looking back at them.

In the moment, as Mahreen said, she’s very much just living her life and making the choices that she needs to, to survive or thrive or get ahead or whatever we would like to call it.

BS: I want to talk about being Pakistani writers. Pakistan appears differently in both your books, and I think both of you make this decision of kind of not naming the thing. Dure, you made up the village where Tara comes from, and Mahreen, you don’t name Pakistan at all, but it’s very evident in the description. How consciously do you think about that when you are creating something?

DAA: Yeah, that’s such a great question. I feel like I either have nothing to say about this or way too much.

With American Fever, it was a book very cognizant of the fact that it’s about this girl who’s from Pakistan just by the nature of what she’s doing, which is this exchange program. She feels like she’s representing the place, and then she feels the oppressiveness of that expectation.

With A Splintering, I wanted to leave all of that behind, which is why a lot of things are not named. Even the city that ends up being named, Mazinagar, is fictional, mostly because there’s so much vitriol in Tara’s language about the place that I didn’t want any small town in Pakistan to receive that.

I would have really liked to just completely strip away the proper nouns of places and markers. I also didn’t want there to be any Urdu in the book and sometimes that puzzles people, but I think I’m still trying to figure it out.

I fear that anytime you put in too much specificity, it detracts from the experience because the book can become this anthropological text versus just the story of the people who the story is about. But I’m not convinced that’s the exact solution.

MS: Yeah, I feel you, Dure. I found when I named places, they became associated with all of my specific feelings and attachments to a place. So not naming gave me this way of writing a range of experiences, a range of women who can do whatever they want, whereas otherwise, I feel like if I had named Pakistan, specifically Islamabad, I would have pigeonholed these stories into my version of it.

In some ways, it also feels like a lack. Would I be able to write a story that is very specifically Pakistani and named as such, and would it be good? So I don’t know if it’s me putting a Band-Aid on something or if it’s a good narrative choice. This one is tough for me as well.

DAA: I love that. I think naming things can also be a bit of a block for the writer.

BS: I loved how you both approached the answer to this question because in your responses, there’s this element of protection of Pakistan. Dure, you’re protecting the place from other people projecting things because of how you describe it. And Mahreen, you’re also very protective of your own ability to write beyond the place and write bigger than just the place.

DAA: Post 9/11, there was a lot of literature, some of it very good, which dealt so consciously with Pakistan as this place that either had to be explained or defended. Pakistan with a very capital P. Perhaps I was working against that. Just a small-p pakistan where it’s just a place, the way any place is a place where people live their ordinary lives.

BS: I want to transition to a question about form. Dure, you’ve written two very distinct novels. And Mahreen, you’ve got this collection, and you’re playing around a lot with form inside it. Does the form come first? Do you find relief or comfort in the conventions of the form you’re writing in?

MS: For some of the stories, the form does come first, and it helps contain the story. It defines the nature of what the story can be. But for a lot of them, it was the voice, and I don’t always know what’s going to come first.

“The Sisters” was written as a very traditional short story with a beginning, middle, and end, but it felt a little bit boring to me, so I went in and picked the lines I liked and was like, what if I just had this?

DAA: With both the novels, the voice emerged first and then the form followed.

But I’ve also learned to leave a lot of the certainties of writing by the wayside. You are always surprised and changed by your understanding of who you are as a writer. With the first book, there was an emphasis on language, culture, and cultural assimilation. That completely went by the wayside with the second. And with this third book, it doesn’t feel as voice driven, it feels more like a book about ideas.

BS: So, with that, I’m curious to understand something about how you both create. And I’ll preface this by saying I hate the word process. It just feels so erudite. But in terms of your writing style, are you outliners and planners, or are you feelers? Or is it a mix of both?

DAA: I’m not a planner at all. I still try to make notes, but then those notes get lost and they’re always, for some reason, loose leaf. So, I never know where they are. They’re never in a diary assigned for that project.

At some point you realize that’s the kind of person you are, and you live with it. But at least with the first two books, I knew what would happen at the end. I always know how the book will end, but the way we’re going to get there is very much a discovery.

MS: Yeah, I am so not a planner as well. I also do not even know how the thing will end. I find that if I plan something, it takes the magic out of it.

BS: That is very reassuring and validating, I have to admit. I’ve tried, and I’m now at the point [of] realizing I’m not one of these people. I can’t maintain this thing in a spreadsheet.

What is something in your books or your stories, a small detail, that you’re like, oh my God, I’m so proud of this?

DAA: I wish I had something I could turn to, something to hold onto in my moments of low self-esteem. This will be my homework. I will go back and find something to be proud of.

MS: I will tell you, Dure, one of the things in A Splintering that I thought was amazing was our relationship with Hamad, the husband. It was so nuanced, so well done, both his characterization and Tara’s evolving feelings towards him. It’s hard to believe you are not a planner.

For me, it’s the title. My editor came up with the title for the book, and I do quite like it. So maybe this is a moment for low self-esteem, I couldn’t even come up with a title.

BS: But you had the phrase in your story, so it was there. Who came up with your title, Dure?

DAA: The book initially sold as Farewell, Province. I came up with it and was still somewhat attached to it, but every single person hated it. It was a resounding failure, and the title we ended up with was one of 10 I’d sent in an email. It’s so funny, because I had to reverse engineer the part where it’s mentioned in the book.

BS: What are you reading right now?

MS: Just last night, I think I finished it in a day, was My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. I had preconceptions going in because the books are everywhere, but I loved it. I thought it was beautiful, calming, steadying. It was like reading someone’s diary.

I also just finished Mohammad Hanif’s Rebel English Academy and Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This is Where the Serpent Lives.

DAA: I’m thinking of Elena Ferrante’s interviews where she says that all books she grew up reading as a child were by men. Thankfully, I never had that problem. I’ve actually placed a moratorium on myself after getting so saturated with thinking about women while writing A Splintering. So now I’ve vowed to read books by men. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a novel with a fully male protagonist. So part of it is subconscious research, an anthropological interest in what are men exactly.

BS: How about you, Mahreen? What are you trying to do next?

MS: I am not writing much. I have a two-year-old, and I just do not know where the time goes. I do have another book I finished while I was pregnant that I’m hoping to send out. I have the ideas of a novel, but you never know where that goes.

BS: Are you both early morning writing people?

DAA: Sometimes people who don’t have kids ask me this question. I’m like, do you understand what it’s like to have this little thing that can entirely disrupt your day? This is what decides what my routine is for the day. Truly, my routine is at the mercy of the kids, but when things are working smoothly, I write in the mornings after breakfast and tap out by the afternoon.

The one thing I know is that it comes in spurts. There are times when I really, really want to write, and then I have to get all of that done, it becomes a distraction, a thing hanging over my head if I don’t do it.

MS: Before I had a baby, I could write at night. Now, after I get home from work and do bedtime, my brain is done.

Something strange also happened to me after having a kid: It’s become harder to write because the stakes for my characters don’t seem high enough. And in my life, they suddenly seem very high: I have this thing to keep alive. 

DAA: So what exactly does that mean? Did you mean your work as a writer feels like it has to now compete with your role as a mother? Or are you saying that what your characters are going through seems minuscule compared to your role as a mother?

MS: It seems terrible to do things to my characters, to do terrible things to them in a world that my son is growing up in. You know what I mean? That’s what it feels like to me. And it’s a very strange feeling.

BS: Last question. Mahreen, I was going through your other interviews, and in your interview in The Offing, you said this:

The women in these stories, and in some way many of us in real life, are wrestling with the question of how to be the best version of ourselves in our relationships—as sisters, brothers, wives, husbands, aunts, mothers—while still maintaining our independence. How do you keep some of yourself for yourself, and what is lost in the process?

So, with the discussion we’ve had today about womanhood and motherhood and being writers and having relationships and jobs and dreams and ambitions, how do you both keep some of yourself? And what do you feel like you lose in the process?

DAA: There’s this line by David Brooks, about how growing up, becoming an adult, is just how well you give up your individual freedoms and take on responsibilities.

Motherhood was really the first time where I truly felt a full abdication of the person I used to be. It was irrevocable. More than marriage, more than anything else. Now, I can’t even think of myself as anything else. The person that you are, there has to be a new person who comes in and takes that form of you.

I will stop talking now because I think I’m trying to say something, but it’s not coming out the way I want it to.

BS: It’s making sense to me.

MS: You are both further along the journey than I am. I think I have struggled to come to terms with the fact that I am fully this new person because of the small being that is co-opting me completely.

I am always finding ways to see, how can I get this part of my mental space back? It was useful to hear you say you have to just fully embrace who you are now, because I have been seeing it almost as a failing that I haven’t been able to get that version of my brain back. It is good to hear that you can’t go back to who you used to be.