Abstract
This in-depth interview focuses on Aamer Hussein’s role as a writer in general and his Muslim identity and heritage in particular. Among the issues raised are his ideas about identity; his life in Britain; Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) writing; Islamophobia; his response to the Rushdie Affair and post-9/11 discourses; Muslim literary traditions; and bilingualism. Hussein is mostly acclaimed for his short stories. The present interview also discusses his writings in general with a special focus on Another Gulmohar Tree (2009), his era, his manifold influences, and his role as a critic, while also shedding light on postcolonial themes.
Introduction
The British-Pakistani writer Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1955. He moved to London, aged 15, in 1970. After graduating in South Asian Studies from SOAS (University of London), he started publishing short stories and critical pieces in the late 1980s. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004. He has judged many literary prizes, including the IMPAC Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the V. S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. He retired as Professorial Writing Fellow from the University of Southampton in 2015. He has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies since 2009. He has taught courses in twentieth-century and contemporary British, European, and world literature at the City Literary Institute since 2000.
His writing has been anthologized in many languages including Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, and Urdu. He has written eight original collections of stories, starting with Mirror to the Sun, his debut short story collection, which came out in 1993 and was published by Mantra in London. This was followed by This Other Salt (1999), which reveals Hussein’s artistic talent in intertwining stories with history, exile, satire, legend, and memoir. Hussein’s fiction carries a sense of the rich literary tradition of the East joined with an understanding of the West. Cactus Town (2002), his next collection, published by Oxford University Press, collects together 16 new and selected stories, each elegiac in quality. This made him particularly famous in his home country, Pakistan. These new stories appeared the same year in the British volume Turquoise (2002) which is set in Karachi, Lahore, and London, and illuminates the passions and fears of a world more complex and more beautiful than what the mainstream media images of Islam and Pakistan convey.
In his fourth collection, Insomnia (2007), Aamer Hussein charts the geographies of leave-taking and homecoming, the consolations and rivalries of friendship, the yearnings of adolescence, and maturity’s tentative acceptance of longing. Moving from Karachi to England, through India, Java, Italy, and Spain, this collection of exquisite stories engages with the grand narratives of our time. The Swan’s Wife from 2014 (published in India as 37 Bridges and Other Stories by HarperCollins in 2015) blends modern art with contemporary realities and traditional tales. From the experimental short story “The Tree at the Limit”, to the mellow, almost mythical “The Swan’s Wife”, and the rambling conversations of two Karachi veterans having lunch by the sea while their city rains down on them in “Two Old Friends”, these stories examine belonging and displacement, homes and would-be homes. Hussein’s other short story collections include the retrospective Electric Shadows published by Bengal Lights in 2013 (which carried one of his famous early stories “Your Children”), and Love and Its Seasons (2017), in which the title story about a young man resembles Hussein’s life. These were followed by Hermitage (2018), and most recently a volume in Urdu, Zindagi se pehle (Before Life), Hussein’s first collection of short stories in Urdu, which appeared in Pakistan in 2020. Acclaimed as a short story writer, he has also written two novels, Another Gulmohar Tree (2009), which counterpoints an exploration of the cross-cultural marriage of a writer and an artist with the magical fables they write, and The Cloud Messenger (2011), in which he has used motifs and legends from the literary heritage of the East to tell the story of a Pakistani expatriate in Europe, his encounter with European Orientalism, his intense personal relationships, and his final moment of arrival. His characters move from East to West or vice versa and live in cultures of hybridity amid postcolonial settings.
The following interview was conducted by email and telephone between 29 October 2020 and 26 February 2021.
Can you tell us about your migrations, your assimilation in different cultures, and your transition to Britain? You have been living in the UK for almost 50 years now; have you experienced any bias or otherness because of your South Asian Muslim identity?
I grew up in Pakistan — in Karachi, which was then the capital — and was educated entirely in English. In 1968, at the age of 13, I went to study in Ootacamund, south India, which was a region I didn’t know. I then chose to join my father in England, where he was living, and entered a college which had an eclectic, cosmopolitan atmosphere, with students from all over the world. I didn’t have problems adjusting. I spoke English as a first language. The freedoms I had were intoxicating. But soon I began to feel as if everyone had a home to go back to — the foreign students to their homelands, and the English, of course, belonged here. I began to want a place of my own, which I found in books and music. At university I studied Persian along with Urdu and History, perhaps as a reconnection with my heritage and what I felt my Anglophone, Eurocentric education had excluded; also, because I thought it would be more enjoyable than Law or the other subjects my parents encouraged me to study. Only much later did I become aware of how much those studies had developed my literary tastes.
I have never been ashamed of who I am. Living here for many years I felt myself to be cosmopolitan and very much at ease navigating cultures and languages, until 1989 and the Rushdie affair, when suddenly I was othered because of my Muslim upbringing. I was forced either to speak from a perspective of assimilation or to defend my heritage. I chose the latter. Some of my stories reflect that. Bias? That came more because of what was perceived as my foreignness or even exoticism than because of my Muslim background. In a way, that was an advantage, because I was forced to examine all my multiple selves more deeply. In my teaching career, there were times when I was cast as an “expert on Third World literature”, or limited to lecturing only on postcolonial topics, but with time I transcended that.
Have events like the Rushdie affair or 9/11 affected you as a writer?
In different ways, yes. I remember interviewing postcolonial feminist critic Rana Kabbani at that time; she’d written a slim work entitled Letter to Christendom (Kabbani, 1989) which expressed the suffocation and despair many of us felt at media attempts to stage an ideological war between Islam and Christianity. The Gulf War of 1990–1991 was a major turning point, when there were greater attempts to stage the conflict as a war between two worldviews: the clash of civilizations. I completely disagreed with that point of view because that war — even less than the war against Iraq after 9/11 — had nothing to do with religious radicalism and everything to do with a hegemonic control of economic resources. A decade later, I was just about to complete the final story of my third collection, Turquoise, when I witnessed the twin towers fall on a television screen in central London. I became acutely aware that several of my stories were about a quieter time in Pakistan. My characters embodied many of the positive virtues of Islam — particularly the strength and fortitude of the women, who belonged to traditional families that would normally not be associated with the feminist movement. Later, in Insomnia, there’s a story (“The Book of Maryam”) about a radical Pakistani poet who, after being searched and bullied at New York airport, arrives in London and recites a translation of the Surah Mariam, a few days before Christmas, which displays the similarity between Islam and Christianity, to an uncomprehending audience that is interested in other issues, such as the oppression of women in Islam.
What do you think of other South Asian or Arab origin writers living in the West whose works have more political undertones about Muslim realities than your writings?
I don’t read fiction for its political undertones, though obviously I perceive and hear them, but for emotional and moral truths of which politics are a part, though certainly not the essential part, unless the writer specifically sets out to make a statement or write a grand narrative. We have brilliant journalists, historians, and political analysts whom I read for information about current affairs. I do not demand that of fiction. And I would certainly never claim a journalistic platform. Writers of fiction and of nonfiction dialogue with each other, but out trajectories are often entirely different from those of the historian or the journalist: fact-finding is not a storyteller’s primary task. For example, one of the earliest North African expatriate writers I read was the Francophone Tahar Ben Jelloun who only much later dealt with, and delved into, the pain of migrant life. A few years ago I heard him speak at a London bookshop, and he said that with the rising tide of racism in France he was able to breathe as soon as he crossed the channel to London where Muslims — particularly women wearing hijab — seemed to move so much more freely, in a tolerant atmosphere.
In about 1986, I became bored with the complacency of much of the Western literature I was reading and actively sought out writings from many lands. I saw myself as a writer from the Third World. I had lived there half my life, and that too in my formative years. The category was more inclusive than Commonwealth Literature — it was fun to be bracketed with Australians and Canadians but ultimately their references were to a grand canon of European literature and, increasingly, mine were not. I did feel an affinity with writers from Muslim lands; reading them also made me aware of a great sense of loss of my homeland. (In fact, the philosophical dissertation I had abandoned was precisely about that.) I was particularly taken by the work of Naguib Mahfouz. He wrote — often critically — as an insider from a Muslim land, in his own language, Arabic. I was far away from Pakistan, and had decided not to return under the oppressive regime of Zia-ul-Haq. Mahfouz’s Miramar (1978) left an indelible impression on me in the mid-1980s, which more than two decades later surfaced in the final section of The Cloud Messenger, a novel I planned right back then. Miramar had quotes from the Quran and a Sufi worldview delicately woven into the text, and I was aware, for the first time, of how this could be achieved. Similarly, Pramoedya Ananta Toer moved me hugely with his novels and short stories, written in Indonesian. I was also impressed to see how all postcolonial Indonesian writers had rejected Dutch, their colonial language, as a literary medium.
Since my French was fairly fluent I read North African writers who were writing in the language of their erstwhile colonial masters but appropriating it for their own anticolonial, anti-imperialist purposes. Assia Djebar was foremost among these. Though she had studied and then lived in France for many years, she wrote about Muslim lives in her native Algeria with a confidence that inspired me to address my own cultural heritage. Later, as a response to The Satanic Verses (1988), Assia wrote a beautiful novel (Far from Medina, 1991) about the women of Medina who witnessed the major moments of the Prophet Mohammed’s life. She was obsessed with guilt about the fact that she continued to write in French, which increased my interest in the question of language. Although it took me time, I determined to master Urdu and read as much in it as I could, rather than complain of losing my mother tongue. (I had starting reading Urdu at 15 when I explored the work of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Muhammad Iqbal, and later other modern poets — Makhdoom Mohiuddin, Majaz Lakhnawi, and, among contemporaries, Iftikhar Arif — but apart from the works we studied at university my reading of prose remained sporadic until I was in my thirties.)
However, no one I read was doing what I had started to — writing about the daily lives and relationships of Muslims in a Western city. For migrant fictions, you had to look to Caribbean writers, but their heritage was entirely different. Later Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) was a great success and spawned some imitations, but his interests were quite remote from mine. My parents were expats who travelled freely between their home countries and England. I came and went often from India where I visited my mother’s family. By then I was developing a sense of being a nomad — as I wrote somewhere, I feel comfortably homeless in at least three languages and twice as many countries. As a writer, I found my own path when I wrote my stories set in London.
You were writing about the issues of Muslims well before Muslim writing gained attention. How would you contrast your writing with post-9/11 fiction on or about Muslims?
A difficult question. I didn’t have a specific brief or agenda. I placed Muslims centre stage in my stories, without making an issue of their origins, because I was writing about what I knew most intimately. When we were affected deeply by national and international events my characters couldn’t but be aware of these facts — and this becomes more evident in my fourth collection, Insomnia.
When I began publishing my stories there weren’t any South Asian Muslim writers working in Britain that I knew, except for the wonderful Attia Hosain. She had ceased to write years before, but her two major works — Phoenix Fled (1953), and Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) — were reissued in the 1980s; she became an inspirational figure on the South Asian literary scene here. I reviewed both her books, which were set entirely in India. Then there was Ahdaf Soueif, who was Egyptian; her In the Eye of the Sun (1992), set largely in England, was an eye-opener to many readers who came to this country from Third World countries.
My close South Asian contemporaries were Sunetra Gupta, Amit Chaudhuri, and Romesh Gunesekera, all of whom wrote about life in England at some point, but they weren’t Pakistani!
As for Pakistani writers: I read Kamila Shamsie in 1999 and Mohsin Hamid a year or so later; Kamila wrote about a Karachi (In the City by the Sea, 1998) I could recognize, even with a twinge of nostalgia; and Mohsin’s first novel (Moth Smoke, 2000) was set in Lahore, a city I had only visited once. By the time The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) was published I’d been writing for years and had my own distinct voice; his book was a revelation to Western readers, and I’d call it the pioneering first of a minor wave of 9/11 novels, or fictions that dealt with aspects of radicalism or terrorism. I had written “Your Children” (Hussein, 2013: 45–63) way back in 1991; it was about an Indonesian brother and sister who are drawn to a purist — not extremist — Muslim sect, much to the chagrin of their freethinking mother, and find themselves drawn to student activism in London. The brother is killed in a vicious racist attack during a very peaceful demonstration against the warfare in Iraq. I explored the agnostic mother’s difficulties in grieving without faith, and her reconciliation with her religious, hijab-wearing daughter. It was written right after the Iraq War and received some attention.
“But here, we’re all the same, Bihari or Bangla”, you wrote in “Karima”, Electric Shadows (Hussein, 2013: 31). How is it to be a writer of Muslim heritage living among the British?
Some — or several — of my friends were of Middle Eastern heritage, with close ties to Muslim cultures. Others were East Asian, or European. I had much in common with them across boundaries of ethnicity and language, probably as much as I did with many South Asians with whom I shared no language or landscape. I was never stranded on any monocultural island, either English or South Asian. As a teenager, I was fascinated by books from cultures as far apart as Japan and Nigeria, and the libraries allowed me to explore these texts along with the standard Anglo-American fare. I also acquired several languages along the way and felt like a world citizen without really dwelling on my identity. In the 1970s, there was no specific prejudice against Muslims, many of whom were from oil-rich countries. Instead, hatred was directed towards working-class people of Afro-Caribbean origin and “Pakis”, which was how they described South Asians. I was insulated from that.
With the group of international friends I made as a writer, the Muslim heritage some of us shared emerged in varied ways after we were pressured to take a stance as writers or (sometimes reluctant) spokespeople for our cultures. Some of my British friends were very sensitive to issues of difference; with other acquaintances there were ambiguities and disagreements.
“We Muslims are the new Jews”, says MP, who has been victim of a hit-and-run and a firebomb attack (Steve Doughty in The Daily Mail, July 3, 2008). How do you see the present polarization of Muslims, with different kinds of stereotypes? You wrote in “37 Bridges”, “Not all the world’s Muslims are Arab, I retort. But you’re so fair, and your hair is brown” (Hussein, 2015: 174). What do you think of the monolithic projections of Muslims?
I loathe all monolithic projections. They are false and perfidious. Are there many stereotypes of us, though, apart from firebrand mullahs, veiled women, and bearded men with bombs in their backpacks? Or their opposite, the “nice” Muslim who keeps quiet about his or her beliefs, and bends over backwards to apologize for the misdeeds of the “community”, toeing some imaginary liberal line? Or the Muslim self-hater? I think there are many, many kinds of Muslims in every society in which I’ve encountered them, including my native Pakistan. Many of them hold complex and even contradictory positions about what is secular and what belongs to the realm of the sacred.
As a writer do you feel any responsibility of representing your community? Do you think that could be an important tool to bring forth the real image of Muslims and change the perception of Muslims worldwide?
Unconsciously, I have done this many times. I became aware of it once when my novel The Cloud Messenger was shortlisted for a prize — ironically, a prize for Muslim writers. One of the judges dismissed it as presenting a worldview too sympathetic to Islam. The book hardly has a religious theme, though it engages with the poetry of the Sindhi Sufi Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai. Earlier, I presented the main protagonist of my novel Another Gulmohar Tree as struggling with issues of faith. And later, the story “37 Bridges” (Hussein, 2015) (translated by my mother from my Urdu original “Saintis Pul”, published in the magazine Dunyazad in March 2015) — which does specifically engage with the issue of Muslims in the West through the experiences of a Turkish Cypriot woman in Paris — led a rather intelligent reviewer in India to see the eponymous collection as an exploration of Muslims’ lives in Europe. I was fine with that reading of several of my stories, though if the book has an underlying theme, it is the conflict between faith and doubt — articulated, because of my own Muslim sensibility, through dialogues between Muslim believers and rationalists, in such stories as “Two Old Friends” and “The Man from Beni Mora” (Hussein, 2015).
The characters in your fictions are multicultural, belonging to different backgrounds. Do you think Muslims are isolating themselves from other communities? They are usually thought of not as secular.
I’m certainly not a sociologist; however, I believe it depends on various contexts. If they are, it is to their detriment — I grew up learning to open my mind to all communities and the positive elements of their beliefs, particularly Christianity (I was educated at a Catholic school) and also the mystic aspects of Hinduism. My mother, who grew up in Malwa in west-central India, loved, and sang, the poetry of Kabirdas and Meerabai, though she was a believing Sunni Muslim and also steeped in the Masnavi of Maulana Rumi.
My own characters often interact with people from other cultures. In my only full-length novel, The Cloud Messenger, the narrator is deeply involved with an Italian woman and has a difficult relationship with an Italian male friend. He often visits Italy and, like me, speaks the language fluently. In “Love and the Seasons”, the story closest to my own life, the central character’s closest friend is a young Hungarian refugee. I didn’t plan any of this. It emerged from my lived experience, transformed by memory into fiction.
In “37 Bridges” the narrator is interrogated by a “friend” who asks him why Muslims contribute so little to Western societies while Jews gave so much. I was shocked because in my very bourgeois London neighbourhood, I am surrounded by Muslim doctors, dentists, and pharmacists; hairdressers, technicians, key workers, and those who care for the elderly. They include Pakistanis, Palestinians, Iranians, Kurds, Turks, Iraqis, and Somalis. This city wouldn’t run without them. Particularly post-Brexit. On the other hand, yes, all of us are being ethnicized and othered because of our faith. In that sense, a category has been created that is based on religion — or attributed religion — rather than on geographical origins. Racial crimes have always existed; now the visibility of mosques has made attackers more vicious and bolder.
In your short story “Your Children”, a character claims: “I prefer to call myself post-everything. Post-modern, post-colonial, post-feminist” (Hussein, 2013: 47). Does this reflect your beliefs as a writer?
No. That’s something I heard an Indonesian woman academic say, back in 1991. I don’t define myself in these ways. However, reading Edward Said in the 1980s influenced my generation, because he expressed and critiqued in theoretical terms the misconceptions about cultural superiority that we as writers were already deeply aware of. The world as I see it is still neo-colonial, and post-feminism is an illusion as we still have to achieve gender equality in many countries. These considerations will be discernible in various ways to the readers of my work, particularly the issue of gender, as I have never had a problem with creating strong, independent women characters or seeing the world in both its masculine and its feminine dimensions. As for postmodernism as a purely literary strategy, we are all, as a writer friend observed many years ago, postmodern in certain ways. As for me, yes, I am a restless, wayward writer and often look for new paths when I’m working on a fiction — you may call some or even much of my writing experimental. I rarely follow rules unless I set myself the task of keeping to a certain narrow path, and then that too becomes an experiment in discipline.
Some of your stories revisit the literary heritage of Muslims, and you have imagined them in modern settings. How well do you think writers should be connected with their pasts? Also, you have been dealing with mysticism in many of your stories. Do you think mysticism is different for Westerners?
For myself, I do connect to the past, but it’s up to other writers to choose. I am enriched by Persian poetry more than by any other canon. And by the Urdu poems of Meer, Ghalib, and Faiz. I have also, since my teens, read the works of mystic poets such as Bulleh Shah and Sachal Sarmast. I am certainly hugely inspired by the Quran on which I drew deeply for “The Book of Maryam” in Insomnia (Sura Maryam), Another Gulmohar Tree (Surah Kahf, Surah Yaseen, Surah Rahman), and the later story “The Man From Beni Mora” (Hussein, 2015) with its references to the commentaries of Imam Ghazali. My own literary antecedents, which I discovered when I had a chance to explore Urdu literature at university, are in the masnavis of Meer Hasan, Mirza Shauq, and others, the marsiyas of Mir Anis, and the prose retellings of old tales such as Bagh o Bahar (The Four Dervishes) by Meer Amman — more important to me than the English canon, I’m afraid. But I became more conscious of these classical influences when I was completing my first collection, Mirror to the Sun, and built on it quite consciously in later stories. Even later I began to draw on Buddhist and Sufi parables in my fiction, creating new, modern fables of my own such as “Lake”, “Hermitage” (Hussein, 2018), and “The Blue Bead” (Hussein, 2020).
I don’t want to produce readymade or tinned mysticism as fast food for readers. When I actually engage with mystics — for example Attar or Rumi — I produce fairly faithful replicas of their work. I can’t read inferior translations of Persian mystic texts without cringing, as many of them have been reduced to trite aphorisms for social media. And novels that purport to be about the lives of saints bore me. I’d rather read their work, in the original whenever possible, and also serious works of exegesis, than speculative accounts of their lives. Some Western experts such as Anne-Marie Schimmel (1922–2003) and William Chittick (1943–) have opened doors into the worlds of the Sufi masters in sophisticated and sensitive ways. My own idol is Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch (1909–1999), who converted to Islam after reading the English writings of Iqbal and dedicated her entire life to translating the Persian works of Iqbal and Rumi into French. She is buried in Konya near Rumi’s grave. Strangely, she was best known in the East; she taught at Al-Azhar for many years, and had a following in Turkey, while in her native France her message of peaceful Islam was discreetly marginalized except by French Muslims.
You have built a huge fan base all over the world through your writings, particularly in South Asia. Do you see any change in the perception of your readers about your books as you are getting more recognized?
To begin with I was read by people who loved short stories and yet people would ask me, when will the novel appear? Eventually The Cloud Messenger did appear in 2011 and did quite well, but it’s the shorter work, Another Gulmohar Tree, for which I’m best known to Anglophone readers in Pakistan. This is an irony for someone who has dedicated his life to the short story. Now Pakistan has increasingly claimed me as one of their own favoured writers in the last decade or more, and I have a readership in India, too. And perhaps my books have become more challenging for a Western readership. I only had a tiny book, Love and Its Seasons (Hussein, 2017), published here in 2017 in a limited edition by a poet who fell in love with the stories, as they say. But readers from Britain and the US still rediscover and write about my work. Young scholars in Pakistan have begun to analyse the way my fiction describes the natural world, or my increasing use of animal fables taken from traditional Eastern sources.
What are your views about the aesthetic and the use of ornamental language for fiction? Are there any examples of famous texts which have affected you as a writer by their style?
I think it is up to the writer to use the best, and the most spontaneous, language she or he can — to suit the story, the text, and the subject. I love some books written in ornamental language and others stripped down to the barest bones. I’ve recently started to take photographs of flowers, trees, and the streets around me, not because I want to be known as a photographer but because I want, as Ghalib says, to immerse my eye in every colour. I found that looking in this way deepens my connection to the world around me and must have an effect on how I write. Some of my own images appeared in two of my recent collections, notably Love and Its Seasons (Hussein, 2017). I’m also fascinated by painting, pottery, carpentry, gardening, and cooking as forms of self-expression and communication, but I’m absolutely no good at any of those.
As a short story writer, let me stay with my chosen genre. Yes. Qurratulain Hyder’s “Patjhar ki Avaz”, “Dalanvala”, and “Jilavatan”, all in her collection Patkhar ki Awaaz (1967), Intizar Husain’s “Ik Bin Likhi Razmiya” and “Aakhri Admi” — don’t ask me where or when I first read those; the stories “Bawuk” and “Sri Sumarah” by the Indonesian writer Umar Kayam (Sri Sumarah and Other Stories, 1980); and several stories by Isak Dinesen and Tennessee Williams. Among novels, Cesare Pavese’s Moon and the Bonfire (1952, trans. Louise Sinclair), Toer’s The Fugitive (1950) and Ismat Chughtai’s Terhi Lekeer (1944) had a huge impact on the young writer I was.
You wrote in “Skies”, “We probably live in three rooms at once: the room of memories, the room of dreams and the room of the chore-burdened present” (Hussein, 2013: 68). What is your idea of home?
I wouldn’t write those words now! I do tend to live very much in the present, with one eye on the future. For now, during the Covid-19 lockdown, home is my flat, from where I am answering your questions in a room where I can see trees from four windows throughout the year, in the neighbourhood I’ve lived in for 40-odd years, which is Little Venice in West London. But I can’t stay still here for too long; I want other skies. I’m fond of Italy. I’ll always have a strong attachment to Karachi where I was born and where I return for my friends, the sea, and for work . . . After recovering from an accident last year I flew to Pakistan five times in as many months, and I was back there as soon as lockdown allowed me to enter Karachi. I visit so often that I’m teased by friends about living between two countries, but I stay at a club and haven’t put down fresh or permanent roots in any part of Pakistan. Some part of me always does, and always will, feel emotionally unhoused, dislocated, stranded, wherever I might find myself. That’s what made me begin to write. Too late to change it now.
In Hermitage you wrote, “We shared a past in three countries and two languages” (Hussein, 2018: 99). As a multilingual writer, you have written in both English and Urdu as well. How do you feel about choosing a particular language for a particular story?
Complicated — but it also comes from being asked to write a certain story in a certain language! I love Urdu more, though English comes most easily to me. But occasionally Urdu has nuances which English can never capture. The quote above comes from a memoir piece “Annie” (Hussein, 2018) I wrote about Qurratulain Hyder, about a decade after her death; I began to write in Urdu as a tribute to her some five years after she died, because I wanted at first to see if it would change my mode of expression. Indeed it did, particularly in the melodic qualities of the language, and the humour and wit of the spoken word in my use of dialogue. And then I wanted to reach an entirely different audience. So it was a kind of return of the prodigal — and it’s been a significant reason for my constant trips to Pakistan, where I published my first collection of Urdu stories, Zindagi Se Pehle (Hussein, 2020), earlier this year. Either language might flood my consciousness quite spontaneously, but frankly it’s more often a question of what I’m asked to write by editors. I rarely give myself the privilege of writing for my own pleasure. When I do, each language has its own strengths, though in Urdu I capture words as if they were fireflies — there, I am poeticizing my feelings as Urdu writers are accused of doing. There are also levels of humour in Urdu that I find difficult to replicate in English.
Your characters exchange from East to West and vice versa, as in Another Gulmohar Tree. Were you consciously trying to see the world without any divides or borders?
Probably! As you once observed, Another Gulmohar Tree set out to do this by bringing a Western woman to the East, where she makes a home and a life for herself, in contrast to the usual postcolonial psychodrama of hapless Westerners being consumed by the mendacious East. In fact, her life in Karachi allows her a degree of fulfilment that may not have been available to her in the West. In other stories, skilled expats from South Asia or the Middle East find themselves bored, handicapped, or alienated by the lack of opportunities they encounter in the West. “Sweet Rice” and “Painting on Glass” (Hussein, 1999) were written in the 1990s as a response to a commission to address this issue, and appeared in my second collection, This Other Salt, at the cusp of the millennium. The theme is again addressed in the title story of Turquoise in which a Pakistani woman’s brief and poignant encounter with a lonely Indonesian man foregrounds temporary or permanent varieties of dislocation. As for my own world, it’s not divided. On two visits to Indonesia, I felt completely at ease, and even managed to pick up some sentences in the language. The blend of local traditions with Islamic ritual is fascinating and landscapes are of unimaginable beauty.
India and Karachi figure in your writings. How much is that drawn from your real life experiences? How would you define Another Gulmohar Tree? Can we call it a postcolonial text — a novella, short novel, or anything else?
Less than half are from my life! The minute I reentered the subcontinent, I was in an imaginative terrain where I felt entirely comfortable. That persisted, but since Gulmohar I’ve rarely returned to the landscapes of my earlier fiction. I can’t say why.
Up to the reader to define Gulmohar! I originally saw it as a romantic comedy of manners, then as a story about a marriage that nearly falls apart. However, the love story was between a Pakistani man working in London not long after Partition, and an Englishwoman who leaves London to follow him. England is shown — with its many austerities in the aftermath of the Second World War — for a few months at the start of the 1950s. By contrast, the timespan in Pakistan covers a decade, and in the background you sense the presence of a military dictator and a degree of intellectual censorship. I couldn’t avoid the postcolonial, post-national dimensions of the novel, almost as soon as I began to write, though I wanted to write it with a very light touch and not to move my focus away from the central figures of Usman and Lydia. Gulmohar could be called a novella, as it’s too long to be a short story. And it does stand alone, like a novella. But a novella has a certain grace of line, which the addition of the fables at the beginning of the book subverts. So in its published form it isn’t a novella; I’d call it either two stories or a short novel, probably the latter because the connection between its two disparate parts becomes clear when the first part is revealed to be a collaboration between Usman and Lydia, and one of the turning points of their evolving relationship.
Okay. Is there any significance of the title of Another Gulmohar Tree? What did you want to say through this book? Can you elaborate on your choice of characters?
My original title was Puzzled Angels, but my friend Ruth Padel suggested this title, taken from the conclusion of the book, and my editor loved it. Remember the gulmohar tree is presented in the novel as a “migrant” from Madagascar, though it has taken root and flourished in Pakistani soil. Both Usman and Lydia put down fresh roots in Karachi; neither of them is a native of the city. At the end, Lydia wants to plant another tree to establish the safety of her family boundaries. The words “gul” and “mohar” mean flower and coin, and as I wrote the fables that preface the book, the tree emerged as an image of bounty and blessing, which is how Usman sees it at the conclusion.
I had two impulses from the start. One was historical: to recreate the atmosphere of the 1950s and the 1960s in Pakistan, which I felt had not been done; the second was to write about the European wives of Pakistani men who had settled there and found some fulfilment in their lives, unlike the discontented women of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Indian stories. The fulfilled women included writer Alys Faiz, and artists Anna Molka and Esther Rahim, and later C. Z. Abbas, whose husband Ghulam Abbas wrote a story about post-Partition Karachi that touched on both themes and made me want to set my story there in that period. I wanted, as I said earlier, to treat this as social comedy, but as I went along it became the story of a long marriage with its problems and its pleasures, and with the military regime of Ayub Khan as the background to some of the most significant events in the story.
I always saw the character of Lydia as an Englishwoman who goes to Karachi and falls in love with her adopted city — and I always saw her as an artist who draws inspiration from the landscapes of Pakistan. Usman emerged more clearly in my mind as I began to write; he embodies many of the dilemmas of intellectuals in the post-independence era in a “new” country. How does a writer deal with repression, corruption, and change? Does he remain silent, protest loudly, or create a fantasy world of animals and magic? I also wanted to see how this era would affect his religious beliefs — he is led to question, but never abandon, his faith. In order to write an Englishwoman, I deliberately gave her qualities of my own, though I wanted to set a challenge to myself by making Usman as distant from me in character and background as I could possibly make him. The story has two perspectives and allows readers to switch between both, or to choose to observe the world from the point of view of one or the other. Lydia has a fluid identity that shifts between her culture of origin and the one she adopts. Usman is resolutely a son of the soil, and though he leaves Punjab, it is always the hinterland of his stories.
Finally, their marriage is a protagonist in the story — it also goes through a long period of doubt. Lydia sees the world in bright colours and is an optimist. Usman’s world is grey, and his talent is for recreating his world in meticulously crafted sentences. Many writers see the world in full colour — I do, for example, and shared this attribute with Lydia — but he doesn’t. Usman has to learn to take some pleasure in love and nature; he learns too that “love was its own burden, its own task” (Hussein, 2009: 110), a lesson that Lydia has unconsciously learnt from the beginning of their life together.
One of the fables in the opening sequence that begins the book is a retelling of a parable in Surah Kahf. Usman’s own questions about his faith are built around the Surah Rahman, which is both quoted and paraphrased.
Could you discuss your role as a critic?
It was almost accidental. I had interviewed my friend and mentor, Han Suyin, in 1987 for South magazine (Hussein, 1987); the books editor of its sister publication, Third World Quarterly, met me at a reading by Nirmal Verma in 1988 and asked if I’d be interested in reviewing a book of his stories in translation, as I had read the originals in Hindi. That was followed by my review of Attia Hosain’s works published in the Third World Quarterly (Hussein, 1988). I was also very taken by Chinese literature in translation, which I felt ought to be better known, and began to write about that. I never saw myself as a critic, but as a reader who worked hard at interpreting a text and above all wanted to share his joy (and very occasionally his annoyance) in certain forms of writing. In the late 1980s, I was involved (with Han Suyin) in a research project, “Asian Voices in English”, which led to a conference in Hong Kong, and that gave me the air of authority about the subject which I did not claim. Once my books were published, I was approached by editors to review books as a writer, not necessarily books that connected with my origins. Because of my knowledge of three romance languages as well as Urdu, I began to write longer, more analytical pieces for literary journals that focused on translations. I suppose those could be described as criticism, but not in the academic sense. It has never been my primary mode of expression.
Your writings include characters from different backgrounds, both believers and non-believers. What is it to be a believer in these Covid times?
I remember reading, in my teens, the opening words of Waris Shah’s Heer, which translate as something like, “Love lights up the world”. How could you survive these times without believing in infinite and unconditional love? More acutely now than ever, as a human being and as a writer, I feel the pain of others who call out from their traps of isolation and solitude. This comes from my belief — call it simplistic if you like — in a common human experience. And I’m sure it’s inspired by an abiding faith.
Are you being creative in this lockdown era? Are you working on anything new?
Yes and yes! I’m putting together a new collection, which is almost complete, and wish I could write even more fiction — but I’ve come to realize that communicating with people, reading their stories and listening to their complaints, is also a form of creativity.
I grudgingly agreed to teach my weekly world literature class on Zoom this year; oddly, I’m really enjoying it. I also seem to be involved in Zoom talks and panels every few days or weeks which means I reach an Indian audience, too. I’ve judged international prizes for years but I’m doing something much more practical now: I work with a team to give grants to writers to complete promising works in progress. There’s something rewarding in the notion of seeing an unfinished manuscript completed and on its way to publication.
“Companionship and inspiration, not dependency and duty, were what he wanted” (Hussein, 2009: 133). What did you want to achieve as a writer?
To move people. To make them sense the joys and sorrows of others. To make them glimpse themselves. That’s all; I never had any grandiose design, and I don’t now. I never wanted fame, though I accepted the degree of it that came my way, and occasionally enjoy public appearances and the trips — as long as those don’t take up more than a few days a year. Travelling and seeing new places is always exciting, and it’s good to be back in places one knows.
Is there any of your published work you think you shouldn’t have written or don’t want associated with you? What is your advice to your younger self?
There’s only one story I won’t allow to be reprinted — “Benedetta, Amata” (Hussein, 1999). On the other hand, I’m bored with two stories that have appeared too often: “Karima” and “Little Tales” from my first collection, Mirror to the Sun (1993). I don’t recognize myself as the writer of my early stories, though I stand by them. My voice began to emerge in This Other Salt (1999), and by the time I began to write Turquoise, in 2000, I was at home in my skin as a storyteller.
A few years ago I’d have said: Read and read and read, which is what I did. That’s still important advice, to learn about the stylistics and architectonics of fiction. But first of all and above all you need to look around you, to recognize the simplest needs, satisfactions, and aspirations of the people you know. That’s where stories are born. Even sci-fi and fantasies.
