Luka and the Fire of Life

mandy — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 16:00:00 +0000

The world according to Salman Rushdie post-fatwa is a very bad place. If his books from this era are anything to go by, most people are judgmental, small-minded, and intolerant. In this book, and its prequel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Rushdie is passing that same worldview on to his sons. Buried under verbal twists and turns and puns and slapstick, Luka and the Fire of Life is about a boy undertaking a quest through a mythical world (created, it seems, by his father’s stories) to save his father’s life. He braves great challenges and finds courage he did not know he had. Ostensibly, Luka is on a quest to find his own voice, but the voice he actually finds his father’s.

While I was reading the book, I kept trying to imagine a twelve-year-old boy reading it, but I couldn’t. The references to video games are a bit sad—like a sixty-year-old father trying to appear cool by getting into what his pre-teen son likes—and wouldn’t fool any kid. The adventures were too wordy and too weighty to really pull me along, let alone a mile-a-minute boy. Luka and the Fire of Life left me with an overwhelming sense of a man desperate to prove his own relevance—to everyone, but maybe mostly to his son.

And where is Luka’s mother in all this? Soraya is a flat character, given to pronouncements about how hilarious the men in her family are, more often tut-tutting than actually speaking. She sits uselessly by Rashid’s bedside while her son goes out to save the world. I wondered what kind of quest Rushdie would think of for her if he could. She does appear in an alternate form in the fantasy world, helping Luka on his way, but she does not present any counterweight to his father or his father’s image of the world.

Rushdie was at his peak with The Satanic Verses, a book I believe was as close to genius as anything written in this generation, when Rushdie was forced into hiding. It is impossible to imagine the impact a worldwide death sentence would have on a creative mind, but if Rushdie’s books of this era are any indication, then the fatwa killed the spark built in Rushdie’s early work.

I remember the hate and the close-mindedness of the fatwa; for many in the West, it may have been one the first glimpses of the power and reach of extremist Islam. But I also remember the courage of the many who stood with Rushdie and protected him in those years. I remember rallies at University and writers and others risking their lives to stand up for Rushdie. Where is that alternate worldview in his books? Tragically for his readers, Rushdie seems yet to see this side of this momentous event.

It seems like today—when religious extremisms and hate seem to be winning the war of words, when secularism and so-called blasphemy can get even the Governor of Punjab killed—Rushdie could help us see the other realities. He could show the world beyond it and behind it, not just point us through it, as if it were the only truth and, like it or not, we have to navigate it, with just a dancing bear and a singing dog and a few words of advice from an aging storyteller. I want the Rushdie of The Satanic Verses back; he really knew how to cut the legs out from under the small-minded power of intolerance.

Written by: Khadijah Fancy, February 5th 2011

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