Pakistan

My Sisters Made of Light

mandy — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

When I attended the book signing for Jacqueline St. Joan’s novel My Sisters Made of Light, I knew nothing about the book aside from its inspiration: a chance encounter between St. Joan, an American domestic violence activist, and Aisha, a Pakistani activist. St. Joan was moved by a shared sense of purpose to write Aisha’s story—the story of a teacher who has orchestrated secret efforts to rescue women condemned to death for so-called honor crimes in Pakistan for the past twenty-five years.

Due to the sensitivity of the issue, St. Joan ultimately chose to fictionalize Aisha’s story. She takes readers on an intimate journey into the lives of four emboldened sisters—the “mother” of the family, Uji, and her sisters Reshma, Faisah, and Meena—as they confront the beauties and betrayals of their culture. The resulting novel is a moving portrayal of the violence women in Pakistan experience, the widespread impact, and the courageous individuals who are fighting to eradicate these life-threatening human rights violations.

Traversing the diversity of Pakistan’s distinct cultures and classes, My Sisters Made of Light successfully weaves past and present, foreign and familiar, and personal and political to create a compelling account of the devastating suffering and extraordinary heroism that exists in ordinary lives. In addition to vividly illustrating the risks and successes of human rights activism in Pakistan, My Sisters Made of Light depicts the heart-wrenching complexities that rest at the core of familial allegiances and alienation.

Together with Uji, readers encounter woman after woman, injustice after injustice: Bilqis, burned to death by her uncle; Taslima, shot and killed by an assassin hired by her family; Chanda, a girl child whose nose was sliced off by her father. What seems like a never-ending compilation of injustices reads just as it should: overwhelming and deeply unnerving. Each incident is one woman’s story and one part of a larger narrative—that of the insidious and ubiquitous legacies of violence that extend far beyond boundaries of culture and country.

At the book signing, St. Joan emphasized that, although written for the women of Pakistan, My Sisters Made of Light is ultimately intended for a Western audience. Careful not to reinforce all-too-common stereotypes of victimized Muslim women, the book’s strength is the universal: what it means to be a mother, a daughter, and a sister. The tears I shed at several points while reading the book speak to its success.

To this day, Aisha is struggling to ensure women’s human rights are respected in Pakistan. Her most recent undertaking is a safe shelter for women and children escaping abuse. Aisha has the land for a shelter and the contractors are even lined up to build it; she just needs the cash to pay for it. St. Joan is dedicating half of the proceeds from the sale of My Sisters Made of Light to help Aisha. Although the book ends, the struggle for women’s human rights does not.

Written by: Alicia Simoni, January 26th 2011

You Have Given Me a Country

caitlin — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Neela Vaswani

Sarabande Books

At the beginning of You Have Given Me a Country, author Neela Vaswani writes, “What follows is real, and imagined.” Thus begins Vaswani's memoir, a dreamy collection of reflections on her family's multiracial, multinational history.

Ashok Vaswani, Neela's father, was born in Sindh (now a province of Pakistan) before the cataclysm of Partition. As a toddler, Ashok fled with his family to the new state of India, where his father found a job as a traveling railroad physician. Later, Ashok traveled to the US to practice medicine and to leave behind a tense postwar economy and a family that had fractured under the pressure of exile. “To my father, nationality was fickle, unreliable,” writes Neela. “My father said, 'Homeland is in the body,' and 'Land is in the blood.'”

Neela's mother, Sheila Vaswani (nee Kent), was born an Irish Catholic American to a family that could beat up and then forgive an uncle who had molested another relative, but that could never accept a gay cousin. Sheila remained a lifelong Catholic, sitting stone-faced at church with her mixed-race daughter, forevermore denied the privilege of communion for having married outside her faith. It was Sheila who castigated Neela's father's colleagues for calling him Frank: “It's not hard. Ashok. Rhymes with Coke.”

The book is told in a loosely chronological series of vignettes and family stories. On the whole, You Have Given Me a Country is told through Neela's eyes, but it is not Neela's story. Although we learn the journeys, prides, and sorrows of Ashok and Sheila, we catch only glimpses of Neela: a nosebleed here, a day in preschool there, and then, at the end, the preparations for her wedding, to a man whom we never really meet. What we do learn about Neela, though, is that she has consistently watched and loved each of her parents, seeing the complexity, the isolation, the miracle of their lives together, creating one tiny space where, as Neela writes, “difference was a way of life. A constant negotiation of respect, ignorance, new understanding... What was not accepted by society was real and lived by me and mine. Love, the great border crosser. No passport required.”

By deliberately framing her story as a “mixed-genre memoir” (which is to say a lived history, but one that refuses to claim perfect allegiance to fact), Vaswani makes a contribution to the contemporary debate about trauma, memory, and narrative. By refusing to promise truth, Vaswani protects her story against anyone, be it relative or critic, who would wish to discredit its accuracy. At the same time, she carves out space to tell as much truth as she wants while still protecting her family's privacy; readers are bound to remember that each story she tells could be a fabrication, after all. (It should be noted that Vaswani is not the first author to take this approach: Audre Lorde's “biomythography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name comes to mind.)

Critics sometimes have a point when they complain about the accuracy or objectivity of memoirs. However, sometimes these complaints are merely cleverly—and perhaps unconsciously—disguised ruses to silence marginalized stories that are, at best, uncomfortable, and at worst, incriminating. By sidestepping the demand to portray herself as an objective witness, Vaswani shrewdly protects her own story against such attempts to discredit it. Simultaneously, she subtly makes the point that when it comes to narrative, validity and significance stem from something more complicated than mere literal truth.

Vaswani's prose is spare and vivid and her characters richly human. In this series of carefully chosen, effortlessly linked memories, she tells the histories, the romances, and the tragedies of her own family's dance with diaspora, exile, homeland, immigration, identity, and dignity.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, October 20th 2010

Granta 112: Pakistan

gwen — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by John Freeman

Sigrid Rausing

I was not looking forward to the new issue of Granta on Pakistan. I worried about opening it and finding it looked like some compendium of war reportage. But what I saw when I opened the envelope made me laugh, and it has been a long time since anything about my home country has done that.

The cover of this issue looks like one of the trucks that careen around Pakistan’s roads like some madman’s joke. They are always overloaded, belching black smoke, and as you make your way past, hoping that today will not be the day one falls on you, you catch a glimpse of Pakistan—a flower or a mountain or a building or a leaf—and that image stays with you.

The madman, it turns out, is Islam Gull and, by giving him the cover, Granta invites us all to take this overbalanced, barely road-safe vehicle and try to navigate Pakistan through it. The journey the magazine takes you on may not be as wild as a journey on a Pakistani truck, but it does try to be as kaleidoscopic.

The impressive list of writers doesn’t shy away from the many low points in Pakistan’s history and politics: Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator who Islamicised Pakistan; Benazir Bhutto and the failure of democracy to bring change; the endless war in Kashmir; Faisal Shahzad, the most famous Pakistani-American according to the New York Times; the rise of the Taliban; and even the beheading of Daniel Pearl, fictionalised by Mohsin Hamid. Division and nuance run through the magazine. Hamid voices this in “A Beheading” in a raw cry of: “Who the fuck are these people?” Meanwhile, Declan Walsh shows the fluid alliances in Northwest Pakistan and Basharat Peer speaks to young Kashmiris caught in a power struggle between India and Pakistan and feeling allegiance for neither.

Some of the most lasting images for me were in the love stories; it seems I can only find hope for Pakistan in fiction these days. There are five love stories in the collection and two bookend the magazine: “Leila in the Wilderness” by Nadeem Aslam and “The Sins of the Mother” by Jamil Ahmad. These two could be the beginning and end of the same story: the first is about a woman freed from her brutal husband by her childhood love; and the second ends with a woman killed by her lover to protect her from a worse fate, leaving behind their little son to pay for her sins.

The love stories have as much violence in them as the war reporting. Men use guns, rape, and brutal attempts to control and contain women to protect their honor. Yet in the face of this, there is also a sense of hope—against all odds.

In Pakistan, men cannot sin; women bear the brunt of men’s and even the country’s honor and only they can betray it. The love stories and indeed—as they are woven throughout—the magazine as a whole tease out this issue of honor and humanity. The art in the magazine, introduced with bittersweet resignation by Hari Kunzru, also beautifully testifies to the endurance of this humanity, despite the geopolitical forces that buffet it.

And so this is the image Granta leaves you with: the image of a multitude, divided on itself, yet comprised of individuals who each love this country that betrays them and fails them and yet also somehow contains them all. And while you may not be able to understand why they love it, in the end, you cannot deny that they do.

Written by: Khadijah Fancy, October 18th 2010

The House Of Bilquis Bibi (7/2010)

admin — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Tamasha

London, England

Making her UK stage debut is veteran Indian singer and actress Ila Arun who plays the formidable lady in question. As the Pakistani mother of five unmarried daughters (Ghizala Avan, Vineeta Rishi, Shalini Peiris, Mariam Haque and Youkti Patel), Bilquis Bibi rules her house with an iron rod, almost literally. Brandishing her walking stick like a sword, she domineers her daughters, each of whom is trying to cope with the death of their father, Bilquis’s second husband.

Stricken with diabetes, her task of managing an all female household in mourning is further aggravated by her senile mother (Indira Joshi) and feisty maid servant, Bushra (the excellent Rina Fatania), on whom she relies on for the administration of life saving medication. Having agreed for her eldest girl Abida to marry her younger nephew Pappo, with their union comes the hope of love and new life in America. Conveniently turning a blind eye to the forbidden nightly visits Pappo pays to his fiancée’s balcony, it’s not until Bilquis realises that more than one of her daughters is staying awake for him that the real drama kicks in.

A zealous adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s masterpiece, The House of Bernarda Alba, Tamasha’s Bhuchar and co-founder and director Kristine Landon-Smith turn for to their favourite Spanish poet, dramatist, and theatre director for inspiration for the third time in their company’s history. Transporting one of his most famous plays from 1930s Spain to modern day Pakistan’s rich Punjab region, The House of Bilquis Bibi tells a personal story of suffocated small town lives with global ties. While the setting may be decades and continents apart, the core story and female characters remain as real and relevant today as they were during Lorca’s time.

While The House of Bilquis Bibi may not be Tamasha’s most ambitious productions, it is one of the most important. Besides giving a platform to a rare all female cast of nine, it also underlines Tamasha’s twenty-one-year history, an amazing body of work and the fact that one of the UK’s most successful Asian theatre companies started life as a project dreamt up by two friends in a small flat in Crouch End. For that Bhuchar and Landon-Smith must be applauded.

Excerpted from The NRI

Written by: Jaspreet Pandohar, August 9th 2010

Made in Pakistan

admin — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Nasir Khan

Talking Filmain

These days, political analysts on both sides of the aisle are calling Pakistan a failed state. While the “most dangerous place in the world” does face profound political and social turmoil, such sweeping commentary fails to capture the more personal intricacies of the lives of ordinary people living inside the country’s borders. Pakistan is more than the Taliban fighters implementing Sharia law in the Swat Valley, and it’s more than the frequent bombings of embassies and hotels from Islamabad to Karachi. As a way of countering the predominant fundamentalist image of Pakistanis constructed by the global media, filmmaker Nasir Khan recently released a poignant documentary that defies stereotypes and sheds light on some of the common challenges faced by citizens with lofty and patriotic ambitions.

Made in Pakistan presents the way a new generation of young leaders negotiates the conflicting pulls of consumerism, family, politics, gender, religion, and traditionalism. The film follows four educated, upper middle class, young Pakistanis in Lahore—a working mother, a lawyer, an event/PR manager, and a politician—from General Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of a state of emergency and military takeover in November 2007 to former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in January 2008. Waleed Khalid is a lawyer and professor at the Pakistan College of Law. He is a devout, but not uncritical, Muslim who has joined others employed in the judicial system to protest government corruption, in part fueled by American aid. In addition to raising her son, Rabia Aamir is the editor of The Fourth Article, a newly established magazine by and for politically savvy Pakistani youth. Aamir is a cultural activist who wants to find solutions to the political, social, and spiritual upheaval in the country. These two characters were the ones with whom I felt most sympathetic.

On the other hand, we have Tara Mahmood, a girl for whom the whole world is one big party waiting to happen, and she’s the one organizing it. Tara provides a lot of comic relief to an otherwise weighty film (at one point she says, "Alcohol is not banned here; it is just not legally sold."), and I was particularly moved when finally given the chance to see beyond her bubbly veneer. By contrast, duplicitous politician Mohsin Warraich provides an ominous, slimy representation of modern Pakistan: The film doesn’t have an outright villain, but if it did he’s be the one. Made in Pakistan is a compelling view of the immense contradictions of modern Pakistani society.

Review by Mandy Van Deven

Originally published in Bitch Magazine

Written by: Mandy Van Deven, June 15th 2010

Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style

admin — Mon, 10 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Fawzia Afzal-Khan

Syracuse University Press

A poet’s power lies not only in her well-crafted images but in the rhythm of her recitation. As I read Lahore With Love, the memoir of Fawzia Afzal-Khan, I longed to hear her read the volume aloud. Many parts of her story poured out in a stream of consciousness, and her anecdotes deftly wove between youth and adulthood, lighthearted desires and the pain of loss, politics and the laughter of girlfriends.

Afzal-Khan interweaves her personal story with key elements in the history of the establishment of Pakistan, her homeland, which was formed just ten years before her birth. The painful string of military dictatorships running her country creates a mirror for the tragic experiences endured by her girlfriends. As she writes, with foreboding, “I have sensed disaster coming their way, my way, my country’s way.” In some ways, Afzal-Khan escaped disaster: she is a professor in the English Department at Montclair State University (New Jersey), a scholar of postcolonial studies, a poet, and an actress. Yet while she lives a successful life in the United States, she carries with her a complicated sorrow and relief, a pain of loss that is aggravated each time she visits Pakistan and sees some new wounds inflicted upon her home and her loved ones.

Lahore With Love gives us vignettes of upper middle class life in a culture where propriety called for gender-segregated social gatherings, but someone was always ready to break rules. The line between acceptable “colonial” habits (Catholic school) and the dangerous “Western decadence” (art school) was at times thin and slippery. As the author forges her own self-identity, the nation also seeks a shape; she heads to the U.S. to obtain her PhD, and Pakistan begins to undergo Islamization, with new layers of reactionary rules added to the old. There is nothing dry about the presentation of material; in one bloody chapter, the story of Shia martyrs is juxtaposed with bullfighting in Spain.

At times I would have enjoyed seeing the vignettes fleshed out more fully, and I suspect some readers will want a volume of Pakistani history by their side to read further about incidents to which the author refers. However, any changes to the unique narrative structure would detract from the author’s intense style. Her voice is the one we use when we long for a reunion with dear friends who are now gone, or hunger to return to the past to stop tragedy from striking, or barely restrain our anger at the callousness of our fellow humans.

Afzal-Khan asks, “Are we doomed to inhabit this binary universe or can we challenge the system that turns us into the roles we wear like selves?” She sets for the reader a powerful mold-breaking example when she self-identifies as “actorsingerpoetactivistmemoirist.”

Written by: Lisa Rand, May 10th 2010

Transforming Faith: The Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism Among Urban Pakistani Women

admin — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Sadaf Ahmad

Syracuse University Press

In Transforming Faith, Sadaf Ahmad explores the role of Al-Huda, a women’s Islamic religious school, in promoting the spread of a particular kind of Islam, especially among educated middle- and upper-class women in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Ahmad sets the scene by situating her topic in an historical and global context. She provides a broad overview of the various branches of Islam, and she tells the history of Pakistan’s self-conception as an Islamic state. She describes how Pakistani leaders have drawn discursively on certain flavors of Islam in order to consolidate political power, and how those choices laid the foundation for today’s increasingly conservative politico-religious milieu in Pakistan. Ahmad also links these developments to contemporary global pressures, including the hegemonic and military threats to Pakistan that accompany the skyrocketing Islamophobia in the West.

Against this backdrop, Ahmad explores the growing movement of Islamic women’s religious education, which takes place through small dars, classes for neighborhood women about technical and practical dimensions of Islam that are usually run out of one woman’s home, and through the larger, more institutional Al-Huda network. Its official branches and smaller, less formal dars are run by Al-Huda graduates.

Drawing on a body of carefully selected theory, Ahmad sensitively situates her description of the Al-Huda movement (which in many ways promotes a rigid, patriarchal form of Islam) in its political and cultural context. She notes that women are often positioned by the modern state as the “keepers of tradition,” and that women (especially Muslim women under the Western gaze) are perceived to be helpless victims of patriarchal and state pressure. While she does not hesitate to identify Al-Huda’s flavor of Islam as reactionary, she is also careful to tease out the complex reasons that women seek out Al-Huda and find its teachings transformative and personally meaningful.

On the whole, I found the book extremely nuanced and insightful; however, I did feel that one key element was missing. I found it strange that Ahmad does not discuss the communal feminist aspects of Al-Huda and the dars. Large numbers of women are organizing themselves and each other to obtain highly technical religious knowledge without the mediation of male teachers. In fact, Al-Huda promotes Arabic literacy to enable women to develop a direct relationship with the sacred text of the Qu’ran. It seems that this growing expertise might enable women to take more of a role in defining what it means to be a devout Muslim (and a devout Muslim woman in particular), which could have far-reaching implications. The lack of discussion of this question is puzzling.

Ultimately Transforming Faith is an exploration of the role of pedagogy in producing social and cultural change. How do teachers (in whatever sense of the word) identify and recruit a body of students? In a given sociopolitical context, how do teachers discursively situate their chosen body of knowledge (or, as Foucault would say, technologies of the self) against the backdrop of their students’ lives? What makes it possible to convince students to use those technologies of the self to discipline themselves into “ethical/pious subjects” (as Ahmad writes, drawing on Foucault and Mahmood)? In what way does the state co-opt those particular “ethical/pious subjects” for its own ends? In what ways do “ethical/pious subjects” develop a particular vantage point for resistance?

With its complementary combination of critical history, theory, and ethnography, Transforming Faith is an excellent—and thoroughly readable—case study for examining these questions.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, April 6th 2010

New York Times 'Half The Sky' Issue

admin — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:42:00 +0000

Edited by Nicholas Kristof

New York Times

In July, I wrote a post about Nicholas D. Kristof's announcing a "special issue" of the New York Times Sunday Magazine that would cover women in the developing world. Well, that issue is now available online, and will be arriving to the doorsteps of NYT subscribers in a few days. While this issue would have felt more authentic had the Times solicited pieces written by women from the Majority World, there is still much to be gleaned from this weekend's glossy.

As I anticipated it would be, the artwork is fantastic. In "A Powerful Truth," a five-minute audio slideshow, Kristof briefly tells the stories of six women--Saima Muhammad, Goretti Nyabenda, Claudine Mukakarisa, Edna Adan, and Abbas Be--while Katy Grannan's photos supplement the words by geographically gliding one homeland to the next: Pakistan, Burundi, Rwanda, Somaliland, and India. Saima's and Abbas' stories are further detailed in "The Women’s Crusade," which explores the myriad challenges women face around the globe; examines the positive role microfinance, foreign aid, US policy, and NGOs play on bettering women's individual conditions; and positions women's collective empowerment squarely at the center of solving global ills--including human rights violations, poverty, war, heath crises, and modern day slavery.

Another feature piece is "A New Gender Agenda," in which Mark Landler interviews Hillary Clinton on which foreign policy issues will be prioritized in the Obama administration. While some of the questions Landler asks are bold, and he should be applauded for having asked them, Clinton consistently sidesteps, leaving much to be desired. "A School Bus for Shamsia"is a feel-good piece with many moments that don't feel so great. At its core, it's about the progress of girls' education in Afghanistan, and one journalist's accidental transformation into an activist. Despite acid attacks and other forms of intimidation, the girls who attend Mirwais Mena School in Kandahar are determined to complete their studies--even if it results in their death.

On the topic of girls' death, "The Daughter Deficit" outlines the cultural factors behind daughter deaths and sex-selective abortions in India and China--an ironical twist to how increasing development can backfire if not coupled with an increase in women's status. Some of you may remember Ellen Johnson Sirleaf from her appearance on The Daily Show a few months ago. In "Madame President", Deborah Solomon speaks to the only female head of state in Africa in what, ultimately and unfortunately, is a lackluster interview.

"The Feminist Hawks" is one of the more interesting articles here, as it deconstructs the use of feminist rhetoric ("women's empowerment") as it is applied by conservative "hawks" (or those who gun for military intervention), particularly with respect to the post-9/11 paternalistic focus on Muslim women's rights (a la "to hijab or not hijab"). Writer Virginia Heffernan further complicates this discussion by considering the effect the Internet has on disseminating and manipulating the message.

In addition to the content, this issue has two "Half the Sky" contests for artists and activists: 1) photographers can submit pictures that exemplify the theme of women and girls' empowerment and 2) those with personal stories regarding work done to empower women and girls (in the US and abroad) can post a comment on the contest's page. Winners chosen will receive a signed copy of Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's newly published book called, as you might have guessed, Half the Sky.

Perhaps the most important parts of this issue are the "Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid" and "Organizations Supporting Women in Developing Countries" pieces, accompanied by Lisa Belkin's explanation of gendered giving in "The Power of the Purse." Audre Lorde wrote, "The essence of a truly global feminism is the recognition of connection." The struggles of women around the globe are the struggles of women everywhere; as women in the Western world and women of means in the Global South, we must find a way to wield the privilege we possess in order to dismantle systems of oppression which keep other women's needs from being met. Problems are not monolithic, and neither are solutions. The only thing that is not an option is failing to act.

Cross-posted to Bitch Magazine's On the Map blog

Written by: Mandy Van Deven, August 20th 2009

Skunk Girl

admin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:49:00 +0000

By Sheba Karim

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Skunk Girl is Sheba Karim’s first novel. It is told from the point of view of sixteen-year-old Nina Khan, self-described as “a Pakistani Muslim girl” and from a small white town in upstate New York. Although published in 2009, the story is set in approximately 1993.

In a fast-paced, entertaining read, Nina narrates her life and drama as the only Pakistani and Muslim girl in her high school. She deals with worries about school and boys, as well body hair and strict parents. Karim keeps a light-hearted tone throughout the novel, balancing Nina’s self-deprecation with her humorous critique of others around her.

When a male friend asks Nina what her father would do if he ran outside and started kissing her in front of him, one of her best friends says, “Nina’s dad would kill her if you did that.”

“He wouldn’t kill me,” she responds.

In the narration, Nina explains:

“I must defend my father. He may be conservative, but he’s no murderer like those nutty Islamic fanatics they show on TV movies who marry unsuspecting white women, then kidnap their daughters and take them to some unnamed Middle Eastern country. He wouldn’t kill me, just yell and maybe cry and only ever let me out of the house for school.”

Karim takes on stereotypes in a less heavy-handed manner than, say, Randa Abdel-Fattah of Does My Head Look Big in This? and Ten Things I Hate About Me](http://feministreview.blogspot.com/2009/03/ten-things-i-hate-about-me.html). She uses humor to poke fun at, and thus challenge, popular portrayals of Muslim men.

At the same time, Karim doesn’t go the other route of painting Nina’s parents as permissive and progressive to challenge the image of Muslim parents as strict and conservative. Nina’s parents are in many ways much more conservative than Amal’s parents in Does My Head Look Big in This?. When Nina goes to the movies with her female friends and their boyfriends, she can’t let her father see that there are boys in the group, lest he “kill” her as discussed above. Neither Nina nor her sister has ever been to a school dance, and her parents get “worked up about the lack of morality in Western culture.” When they see one of Nina’s best friends having dinner with a boy, they grow concerned that Nina will want to have a boyfriend too, and they try to limit the amount of time Nina spends with her best friends, so she doesn’t become influenced to do “things that are wrong for you,” in the words of her mother.

Nina finds it hard to be the only girl in her school with such restrictions. She feels left out when classmate Serena holds a big party and she doesn’t even get an invitation, because, as Serena tells her, “you’re not allowed to go to parties and I don’t want to waste any [invitations].” But even while Nina bemoans her plight as the only high schooler at home on a Friday night, she never takes herself too seriously, which is refreshing.

Spending her Friday nights at home watching crime shows with her parents, Nina decides, “Maybe there are only two types of people who spend their Friday nights in high school at home—Pakistani Muslim girls and future serial killers. Though I suppose Indian and maybe even some Asian parents might be as strict with their kids.” She remembers hearing that there’s an Indian girl in the middle school: “Maybe I should become friends with her. I bet we’d be allowed to spend our Friday nights together, memorizing vocabulary words or something.”

In some ways, Nina’s parents are archetypes of strict, conservative parents. When Nina asks her father what would be so wrong with having friends who are boys, he replies, “If you lose sight of what is wrong and right, and start behaving like Americans, you’ll end up on the streets, on drugs, and a prostitute.” Nina comments on her father’s warning: “It is so preposterous that you can’t even argue with it.”

Despite their strictness, Nina’s parents fail to become stereotypes. Karim’s description of Nina’s father—who tells jokes, even though they’re not always funny, loves and sings along with qawwali music, and tries to have heart-to-hearts with his daughter—make him into a multidimensional, believable character. Nina’s mother, too, breaks out of the stereotype she could otherwise become. When Nina wails to her mother about the plight of being a “hairy Pakistani Muslim girl,” her mother says, “It’s not such a big deal,” and hands her a box of bleach, telling her stories of mixing her own ammonia and hydrogen peroxide concoction when she was in college in Pakistan.

It makes sense that Karim would write Nina’s parents as believable, multidimensional characters since her whole cast of characters is complex and engaging. Some characters, who start out as archetypes, such as Nina’s sister, Sonia, the “nerd girl,” and classmate Serena, popular mean girl, develop through the novel as Nina gets to know them better.

While Nina’s parents are strict about certain rules, they are less conservative about other issues. Nina explains that her mother is the only one who prays regularly, and that the family only ever prays together to keep up appearances whenever her mother’s sister, the very Pakistani, very Muslim Nasreen Khan, comes to visit. Karim depicts Muslims more conservative than Nina’s parents. Nina tells the story of the Qur’an teacher she had when she was young, Brother Hassan. When he sees her mother’s favorite painting hanging on the wall, of two Mexican women holding bright flowers, he instructs Nina to tell her mother to take it down: “It is haram to depict human figures,” he tells her. Instead, it is her teacher who Nina never sees again. She learns to read Qur’an instead from her mother, “under the watchful eyes of the Mexican women.”

With stories like this, Karim establishes a diversity of belief amongst Muslims. Nina’s mother, presented as the most religious member of her family, has a different understanding of Islam than Nina’s Qur’an teacher and is willing to stand up for it. That Nina’s mother does not discard the painting per Brother Hassan’s advice is not presented as a failure on her part to live by the rules of Islam, but as a way Nina’s mother rejects a more conservative interpretation of Islam and affirms her own values.

Nina, who admits to be less religious than her mother, does not live up to the archetype of a conservative Muslim girl either. Enamored by her crush, Asher Richelli, she doesn’t hold the same resistance to him that very consciously religious Amal of Does My Head Look Big in This? had for her crush. When Nina and her sister Sonia are left alone for a few days, when their parents fly to Pakistan early, Nina takes the opportunity to attend her first high school party, has her first beer, and proceeds to get drunk. Later, she asks her sister what makes a good Muslim.

Sonia replies:

“Whose definition are you applying to that? In every religion people pick and choose what they want to follow. Look at Ma and Dad’s own friends—a few of the aunties cover their hair, and a few of the aunties drink, some fast during during Ramadan, some don’t. You can’t spend your life worrying about what other people will think. If you live decently and help others, is Allah going to condemn you simply because you had a beer? I don’t think so, but others might. In the end, you have to do what you believe is right.”

Sonia’s advice of self-determination seems to the message of the book. She tells her sister, “When it comes to religion and orthodoxy and culture and self-actualization, there is no magic box [with] easy answers.” And indeed, Nina’s dilemma of what to do about her crush, Asher, is not presented as a test from God of resisting temptation, but as a religious, cultural, and family issue with which she must struggle—and not necessarily find any easy option. While Nina’s parents are quick to deplore what they see as immorality around them (and Nina’s potential fall to a drug-addicted prostitute), Nina does not judge. When best friend Bridget announces her decision to have sex with her boyfriend, Nina thinks about how surreal the idea is, and asks Bridget sincerely, “How are you feeling about it?”

But religious and familial drama is not the only issue facing Nina. Small New York town Deer Hook lacks in racial diversity, which worsens Nina’s feeling of isolation. Nina recalls an incident from her childhood. In the car, she asks her sister, “When you take over the world, can you make me white?” Her mother, driving, slams on the brakes and asks, “Why would you want that?” Nina narrates, “Because it sucks being one of the only brown kids in school, I thought. But I didn’t say this because even then I knew my mother wouldn’t understand.”

Nina describes the self-segregation by race during lunch: the few black and Latino students sit on one side of the lawn, while Nina, an Asian freshman, and couple other minorities sit on the “white side.” Even though she sits with the white students and her best friends are white, Nina can’t completely fit in, and sometimes wishes to be white.

Nina feels some affinity to Bridget’s boyfriend, Anthony, who is black and from the island of Grenada—one of the few non-white students at Deer Hook besides Nina. “Do you ever wish you were white?” she asks him, explaining that she would take the chance to live her life again as a “cute blonde” in a heartbeat. He suggests perhaps being white wouldn’t make her happier, considering everything she’d have to sacrifice for it: her family, her food, her pride. There are no incidents of overt racism that Nina and Anthony face, but Karim shows the difficulty of being one of the few non-white students in the school, especially when all their friends are white.

Nina challenges her parents’ racism when they find out Bridget is not just dating—horror!—but dating “a black boy,” as well as the preference for light skin within their Pakistani circles. These are probably the most overt discussions of racism in the book.

One of Nina’s biggest concerns is not just being a “Pakistani Muslim girl,” but being a “hairy Pakistani Muslim girl.” She explains that one day, “I fell asleep a human, and woke up a gorilla.” It is worse when she realizes that she has a stripe of dark hair down her neck to the center of her back. Describing her dilemma as being a “skunk girl,” from which the novel derives its title, Nina feels like a freak. She stands out in other ways. In hot weather, Nina sweats in jeans while others wear shorts. She wears jeans because that’s what Pakistani Muslim girls do, she says. But I wonder why she can’t wear a long skirt or looser, lighter pants at least.

Skunk Girl paints a picture of a believable Muslim teenager–not necessarily one the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations would send out to represent Muslim youth, but a girl with struggles and desires beyond fulfilling her mother’s image of the perfect Pakistani Muslim girl. It was refreshing that neither the title nor cover art revolved around Nina’s Muslim-ness. Books with a Muslim protagonist have been known to feature hijab-less characters in hijab to emphasize their faith. Not so for Skunk Girl. The book jacket shows a white stripe of fur against black, reflecting the book’s title.

Karim’s first novel is a fast and enjoyable read. I read it in one sitting. At 231 pages, in a comfortable font size and spacing, the book goes quickly. Karim maintains the pace with short chapters, an engaging plot, and an entertaining and likable narrator.

Nina’s story is compelling, touching on issues many young people face, whether or not they are Pakistani Muslim girls. But even when she takes on serious issues, Karim keeps the novel optimistic and funny. The message, in the end, is one of self-acceptance. Skunk Girl does not strive to be great literature. It makes a breezy, but thoughtful, summer read. I look forward to seeing what else Karim will bring to young adult fiction.

Cross-posted from Muslimah Media Watch

Written by: Melinda, July 7th 2009

Chup

admin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:06:00 +0000

By Zeb and Haniya

Chup is Zeb and Haniya's (pronounced "Zay-eb and Haa-nee-ya) debut album, which was released in July of 2008. The female-cousin duo has been marked as one of the first all-female bands from Pakistan. Ranging from alternative pop, art pashto and folk, ethnic blues, and world music, their music cannot be confined to just one category. Some of their influences include Suzanne Vega, Nick Drake, Elliott Smith, Simon and Garfunkel, Mark Knopfler, and Muddy Waters. At times, I can definitely hear glimpses of all their influences in their music. Zeb and Haniya have a surprisingly natural sound to them, which is refreshing.

In 2000, while attending college in the United States, Zeb and Haniya started playing together. They basically began experimenting with music as a hobby, but with a great response from the college community, decided to start recording. Zeb has been training as a vocalist since 1998 with the acclaimed Ustad Mubarak Ali Khan. Her first cousin Haniya is a guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter.

The self-track titled song "Chup" proves that contemporary Pakistani music is not just a man's domain. As one of the most popular songs downloaded on the internet, and having gotten generous airplay, “Chup” is one of Zeb and Haniya’s most well-known songs. It was written and composed during a break when they were in college. The song begins with a catchy guitar riff and a bossanova-sounding drum beat. Horns play throughout, and it's hard not to tap your foot or even start dancing while this song is playing.

Between Zeb's classical-sounding vocals and Zaniya's beautiful guitar arrangements, this Pakistani duo creates beautiful and highly emotive sounds.

Written by: MK Matson, June 15th 2009

Confessions of a Mullah Warrior

admin — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:53:00 +0000

By Masood Farivar

Atlantic Monthly Press

“History is full of great men,” Masood Farivar declares as a young man, about a third of the way into his memoir, Confessions of a Mullah Warrior. Luckily, Uncle Jaan Agha rhetorically slaps him on the back of the head, half a page later. The topic is dropped then, and for the remainder of the narrative. Confessions of a Mullah Warrior is full of Farivar’s mostly unintentional awkwardness with women, which is at times induced by modesty, at times total miscommunication, and mostly, it is innocent.

Farivar tells the story of his maturation, even though he seems to continually avoid growing up. Focusing on incidentals and plot rather than personal details, the book leaves the reader with a greater sense of Afghan customs and heritage than of the man who is Masood Farivar.

Farivar surveys his past longingly, abashedly, and ashamedly. Longing for the sense of homeland lost, he emigrates from Afghanistan to Pakistan and finally to the U.S., seemingly moving farther in body and spirit from a sense of belonging. All the while, Farivar seems to yearn more to fit into his environment than to be himself, and he seems a bashful adolescent well past the age. Farivar shamefully reproaches himself for trying to fit—and then for fitting in too well.

Farivar’s concerted attempt at placing himself in the center of world events and of using his life as a metaphor for every other mujahideen, martyr, and bystander causes him to be lost in the narrative. This is especially true as Farivar allows himself to indulge in some of the more irritating themes of the genre. There is also a constant need to find humor in a naive attempt to reclaim ownership of one’s past, and the memoir is replete with retrospective irony, which is pointed out to the reader each and every time.

Overall, while Confessions of a Mullah Warrior gives the reader a greater sense of the Afghani experience of repetitive conflicts and exile, it does not give the reader a sense of Masood Farivar.

Written by: Elisheva Zakheim, June 5th 2009

Yi As Akh Padshah Bai (There Was a Queen)

admin — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:09:00 +0000

Directed by Kavita Pai, Hansa Thapliyal

Other Media Communications

Yi As Akh Padshah Bai (There Was a Queen) is a documentary that tells the story of women in Kashmir, the northwestern region of the India currently controlled by Pakistan, India, and China. The directors dub it "the world's most picturesque conflict zone". India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Kashmir, and conflict has been a constant in the region since the 1990's when Kashmiri separatists began clashing with both Pakistani and Indian forces. Shot between 2005 and 2007 by an all-female crew, the film opens with two people telling stories of their children going missing without warning. Grief and missing children are themes that recur throughout the film.

The documentarians travel between cities and villages, and speak to Kashmiri women about their experience with the conflict. They ask the women what they think will bring about peace. Despite differences in geography and age, the women's experiences are remarkably consistent. Many tell stories about husbands, brothers, and sons being taken from them by armed men in the middle of the day, or being arrested under false pretenses and tortured until they confess to being a separatist. After false confessions have been extracted, the men are released, only to be picked up months later and interrogated again.

Other times, men vanish from their homes, leaving in the middle of the night to join one of the fighting factions. All the women are subjected to violence, either beatings from police or the gunfire and bombings that explode throughout the day. Most of the women can't imagine what would need to be done to bring about peace, and Hajra, a woman with four missing children, remarks, "Anyway, if your heart is rotted, what does it matter if peace will come?" For Hajra, and for many mothers like her, a ceasefire won't bring an end to her mourning.

While Yi As Akh Padshah Bai is concerned with the survivors of the conflict, it also deals with those who are missing and the gaps and silences. People and stories vanish without an explanation, and there is no clear narrative. The difficulty for someone unfamiliar with the Kashmiri conflict or the region is in trying to make sense of what's unspoken. Because Kashmir has a blend of cultures and languages, even the directors—who are themselves Indian, though not entirely fluent in all the local languages—miss pieces of the women's narratives.

Despite the difficulties in translating culture and language, what shines plainly through the film are the Kashmiri women's rage and grief at their powerlessness. The women have no legal recourse to seek restitution for their missing sons and husbands, who are the primary breadwinners for their families. Yi As Akh Padshah Bai is a film that is shocking, heartbreaking, and more than a little confusing.

Written by: Catherine Nicotera, May 29th 2009