A Pakistani Woman’s Voice

"I have decided to dedicate my writing to women," says Tahira Naqvi very determinedly. The author of Atar of Roses and Other Stories from Pakistan and Dying in a Strange Country, Ms Naqvi is an acclaimed fiction writer, translator and professor who considers herself to be a ’feminist’ although she finds the word itself to be quite limiting. "I’m very involved with women’s issues and very interested in their lives, their thoughts and ideas so I’ve chosen to translate the works of women and write about women," she tells me.

Clearly on a determined pursuit to dismiss stereotypes, Ms Naqvi is one of the few writers who seem to be making a conscious effort to dispel decadent myths about South Asian and Muslim women in the West. "Every one wants to pin these women as women who are in constant pain and are being oppressed. And they are, there’s no denying that. But then we all need to know this other woman who is able to fight the system. I’m very possessive about this idea when I write about Pakistani women. In Pakistan we have a wonderful mix, we do have women who are extremely independent and educated and who can fight off this kind of oppression. Then there are the middle class women who are strong but silent, they are not oppressed but leading quiet lives. And unfortunately there is a category of women who are being horribly oppressed and I’m very conscious of this in my writing," she comments.

She regrets that most of the work that comes from Muslim, South Asian and Western writers propagates stereotypical notions. There’s mostly no hope for those women that they write about, they’re doomed eternally with all the miserable, horrible things that are happening to them. After all she herself has also written about women who are oppressed.

Citing from her short stories, she notes, "’A woman of no consequence’ is a very sad story about the horrible things that can happen to a young woman in Pakistan. At the same time her friend, the narrator, manages to fight the system and get away. It shows that there is a balance and that there are women who do not succumb to social evils.

"In ’The notebook’, there is a woman who is abused by her husband but in the end she stands up for herself. Then there are stories like ’The peephole’, which I was inspired to write because there’s such a dim view of arranged marriages and people have such distorted notions about the South Asian culture, also of women and the roles and identities of women in Muslim societies. So I thought I have to write a story to show that it can be a happy and wonderful thing too."

In order to give many outstanding South Asian Urdu writers a Western audience, Ms Naqvi has translated their work into English. Her impressive collection of translated works include Another Lonely Voice: The Life and Works of Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai’s The Quilt and other Short Stories, The Heart Breaks Free: The Wild One and My Friend, My Enemy, Jahanara Habibullah’s Remembrance of Days Past, Khadija Mastoor’s Cool, Sweet Water. Of all these writers Ms Naqvi feels closest to Chughtai.

"Sometimes I think I’ve become Chughtai’s protege in her absence. I think of myself as her student because I’ve worked so much with her writing. She was the last writer of Urdu and the first South Asian woman writer to write like that and now because of these translations her work has joined the canons of international feminist writing."

In her own writing Ms Naqvi has skilfully examined the lives of Pakistani women on both sides of the world, weaving personal stories from Pakistan intricately with the immigrant experience. Living in the US for the past thirty-two years she feels that living between the two cultures has provided the impetus for her writing.

She says, "The connection between the home country and the acquired immigrant culture has always fascinated me and I’m always being compelled to think or write about it. I started off with diasporic fiction but at one point I felt that there were no more stories to tell so I began writing about Pakistan as if I had never left."

Her first novel (she won’t reveal the title), which will be published soon, is set in Pakistan but Ms Naqvi is already working on her second novel that is again diasporic fiction. "It’s an interesting development for me as a writer because I had never thought that I would go back and start writing about the diaspora again. But I have been impelled by the events of 9/11, which have made us aware that our position here as Pakistanis, as Muslims, is not as comfortable as we would like to believe. We are not as rooted as we thought we were. And nothing has happened, I cannot say that anybody has ever said anything untoward or done something unpleasant to my children or me. It’s just that there’s something in the air, something that made me feel for the first time that I’m not really on firm ground but rather that the ground on which I stand is shifting."

Undoubtedly Ms Naqvi’s writing has become even more relevant in the post Sept/11 world as not only does she give Pakistani people, immigrants or otherwise, a convincingly authentic voice but also because she uses her writing to ’bridge gaps and create tolerance’ about her culture. Reflecting her own concerns, most of her characters are socially and politically conscious people who are confronted with important but mundane everyday issues. Although her plots are mostly politically motivated, Ms Naqvi has not always been interested in politics.

"I was always on the fringes of politics, never cared about it and didn’t know much of what was going on but since the sectarian violence began in Pakistan I’ve developed a great interest in Pakistani politics. Now I’m always writing from the point of view of politics. Politics is always somewhere in the backdrop as a setting to my stories. My first novel, like many of my short stories, is set against a very political background. Some of the terrible things that have been happening in Pakistan are featured in this novel in a very direct way with the involvement of the characters."

While more often than not, Ms Naqvi’s work is generically labelled as South Asian fiction, she maintains that she always writes purely from a Pakistani point of view. "Pakistani immigrant life, women or rather their stories are different from the stories of Indian women. Despite the fact that we are all South Asian or that we share a common heritage and history, the fact that we are Muslims creates constraints and attitudes in our culture which gives rise to a certain kind of a lifestyle or a behaviour. I as a Pakistani writer with a Pakistani writer’s and a Muslim woman’s sensibility come with a built in restraint that works itself into the narrative.

"If you compare my characters with characters of Bharati Mukherji, Chitra Divakaruni or Jhumpa Lahiri, you will find them totally different people. I’m also an older writer and my stories are of another time, another period. So I identify with them in one sense as they are South Asian but on the other hand I feel separate from them because I’m writing about a totally different kind of a world. They’re all writing about one kind of a world, it’s an Indian world and most of the characters are Hindu. My world is the Muslim world. And I think it’s wonderful that a lot of young Pakistani women and men are writing also now. But I sometimes feel very isolated because I’m in that age group where I’m looking at the same world that these young people are but from a different angle and a different frame of reference."

She contemplates for a while when I ask her why other well-educated Pakistani women from her generation never wrote. "Writing is a very revelatory experience, you reveal yourself totally when you write," she finally says. "Even women who are well educated feel certain constraints in writing about personal things. And in that respect we’re still in purdah, even though we’re actually not. We are women who have great difficulty in expressing ourselves and revealing our lives. I fought with this reticence in the beginning but I don’t feel so intimidated now.

"Initially it was problematic because I could not talk about certain things but then I felt it’s important that women’s inner lives should be explored for other women and even men. Men don’t really know much about women’s inner lives, what they think of, what they daydream of. Another reason is that we don’t get enough encouragement from either our culture or our family to write. Sometimes you have people in your own society or even your family who will object to what you write and one is even afraid of the husband, his family and even one’s own children. There’s always that thought at the back of people’s mind that she must have experienced this herself or that these thoughts must be passing through her head which is so unfortunate," she remarks.

In spite of such odds, Ms Naqvi seems to have made peace with the intangible sense of isolation that she feels as a writer, the social inhibitions that hold women like her from expressing creativity and the unsettling nuances that affect Pakistani immigrants in these times. Instead she writes with an unassuming simplicity and sensitivity that exudes hope for women while sharing their concerns realistically, as one of her characters observes at a light-hearted but poignant ending, ’All is not lost, is it?’


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Tahira Naqvi: profile Tahira Naqvi was born and raised in Lahore. She studied at the Lahore Convent and did her Bachelors from Lahore College. She did a Masters in Psychology from Government College, Lahore and another Masters in English Education. She currently teaches English at the Westchester Community College in White Plains, New York. She also teaches Urdu at the New York University in Manhattan. Tahira Naqvi moved to the US in 1971 and has been living there ever since.