Writers have always felt immobilised for short and long durations by what is conveniently called the writer’s block. I want to think about this problem in terms of Pakistani society only and since the writer’s block tends to be a highly educated man’s/woman’s condition specifically, I want to tackle it in terms of a small class of highly educated Pakistanis who can also think and write well in English.
The disintegration of ideas
I will posit the writer’s block – and the Pakistani strain specifically – as the failure, transient or permanent, to write anything new or original despite the existence of proficiency in the language itself. It is a condition of feeling lost, of not knowing what or what not to deal with as a writer coupled with not being able to determine where and how to begin writing. So the writer’s block manifests itself in a triad of failures; a) the creative failure to write originally; b) the epistemological failure to choose one’s material as a writer; and c) the technical failure to treat one’s material adequately as a writer.
Phenomenally, it manifests itself: a) as an illusory excess of ideas failing to be expressed where in fact there is a dearth of ideas; b) as a real excess of words over ideas; and finally c) as a masked deficiency of the freedom of expression appearing as not being able to write. Seeming to be an exclusively subjective problem originating in the author himself/herself, the writer’s block is in actual fact a reflex of the systemic and symbolic (linguistic) repression exercised in society and discourse, to use the typology of violence developed by the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. The systemic causes of the block constitute elements like national-political affiliation (belonging to a particular country), socio-cultural background (belonging to a particular social group, caste or ethnicity and the associated sets of transmitted traditions) and operation of economic forces (laws of market like the tendency of capital for accumulation).
Colonial ideology of education
The writer’s block in Pakistan owes its existence in significant part to the colonial ideology of education shaped by the ideas of Thomas Babbington Macaulay, a nineteenth-century British politician and man of letters, who impacted the evolution of the educational and administrative-legal systems of Pakistan, Bangladesh and India profoundly. Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education laid the foundations of a whole new way of life and education that is still in practice in varying forms in the three countries by displacing the indigenous systems of knowledge and education and established system of education and socialisation based on foreign values and language. Perhaps, the fact that Indian penal and criminal codes were also largely handiwork of Macaulay’s inspiration should come as no surprise; rather it should enable us to think about Žižek’s unity of systemic-symbolic violence and its effect on the subjectivity of social agents. On this reading, penalisation of acts and behaviours, incarceration and the writer’s block become different modes of the same usurpation of human freedom.
Neo-Macaulyist education
Macaulay’s ideas have outlived formal colonialism and now form the silent sub-text of the dominant practice of education in contemporary Pakistan. I call this practice Neo-Macaulayism. This practice leads to extremely poor educational outcomes for the majority of young Pakistanis. Neo-Macaulayist education leads to preservation of mainly two classes of educational institutions in Pakistan: (1) government schools trying to educate the humongous majority of Pakistanis where fluency in English functions as a perpetually elusive goal; and (2) private institutions mainly catering to a chosen class of local elites where English figures more prominently and more correctly than it does in government schools. The middle ground is inhabited by sub-standard private schools merely existing to perpetrate financial and intellectual fraud.
Educational disparities
Type-1 schools produce a mass of partially educated people doomed to provide clerical and low administrative services in perennially low-paid jobs. Type-2 schools produce a minority of well-educated people providing all kinds of national leadership in diverse fields. These domestic elites also act as the custodians of Pakistani high culture. It is mostly the members of this group who enjoy the benefits of education in Western universities i.e., those of Australia, North America and Western Europe, thereby finishing abroad a process of acculturation that began very close at home.
Priveleged vs the under-priveleged
English acts as a floating medium of privileged cultural exchange and as an exclusive unit of equivalence not only in the global but in Pakistani culture much as American dollar functions in the global market, against which all other cultural objects have to prove their worth and value. The longing to possess it as a medium of expression is found most vehemently in the middle and lower-middle classes of the country. These classes vividly display the whole regime of desires, efforts, struggles, frustrations and fulfilment experienced in the course of acquiring a socially privileged foreign tongue – a process not altogether different from the strategies of amorous courtship with its possible happy or unhappy consequences.
Flawed perceptions
Once we cease to be autochthonous in the way we perceive and access the world, we fail to think and write originally by clothing ourselves in cultural hand-me-downs. The result is the reproduction of used theories and frayed patterns of diction which are debased like coins. Neo-Macaulaysim operates mainly by rendering its votaries unable to think or write anything new in general. It generates this block by wreaking utter confusion in the Pakistani sensibility through insidiously presenting everything Anglo-Saxon as inherently better than our indigenous traditions of learning and knowledge. This results in the impoverishment of the creative-critical imagination which develops a predilection in educated Pakistanis to busy themselves with secondary truths. These truths are made of derivative facts hiding the real causes of our social ills which have more to do with the techniques and forms of social control in practice in our country. They focus on finished and visible end-states of social problems not on the processes and practices of their constitution.
Suspension of individual capacity
Social science instruction also promotes writer’s block in Pakistan. Represented by historians, sociologists, economists, political scientists, journalists etc., social sciences today stand for a suspension of the capacity of the social scientist to act as an agent of social change and, hence the resulting valorisation of his/her status is just a witness. Fixed in his/her interpretive role limited to gathering, documenting and explaining data, the social scientist becomes a passive chronicler and ceases to be an active participant in the datum he is studying. This passivity shows that a reality which can be endlessly explained and critiqued but never changed eventually leads to an exhaustion of the critical faculties of the observer, helps in the reproduction of the things as they are and creates the loop in which original thinking can hardly be practiced.
The void of originality
The absence of originality in writing seems to me to be also underpinned by two opposite views of subjectivity that together constitute the world-view of the highly educated Pakistanis. Most writers in English in our society may not be consciously aware of these views but nonetheless act up to a certain extent to paralyse their creativity. One is inspired by the poststructuralist philosophies celebrating the death of the unitary character of the human subject through fragmentation into countless fluid states of being, each claiming an equal and opposing weight. The other is characterised by the re-instatement of the subject and his/her inflation to a point where other subjectivities become shut off from view and we end up becoming the centres of our own petty universes. These outlooks help spawn litanies of difference, diversity and solidarity on one hand and those of identity and exclusion on the other without any attempt to study the real conditions of constitution of these discourses.
Cultural superiority of English
Writer’s block is also reinforced by the relevance of the law of capital accumulation for the maintenance of the cultural superiority of English in Pakistan. The reason why there is a small number of Pakistanis capable of writing in English and even smaller number of professional writers in English can be explained with the help of the law of capital accumulation. The general tendency of market operations is not towards free and open competition but towards centralisation and concentration of capital. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the world-systems analyst, this tendency results in the formation of a limited number of quasi-monopolies – corporations earning stupendous profits – which end up hogging the market share. Similarly the knowledge of English in Pakistan as a socio-cultural process follows this general tendency of capital accumulation where the number of those who can write well in English remains minuscule and concentrated in upper-middle to high classes relative to millions who due to socio-economic and historical deprivations remain outside the privileged niche occupied by English-knowers. Wallerstein also proposes that quasi-monopolies tend to be self-liquidating as new industries based on new leading products keep replacing each other but the general tendency of capital to accumulate remains unchanged. While market in the knowledge of English in Pakistan follows the general tendency of capital to accumulate, it has so far not proven itself to be self-liquidating unlike industries based on material leading products for reasons of socio-cultural elitism maintained and nourished politically by successive regimes in Pakistan since 1947. The isolated niche-like character of English-knowledge market, protected from contact with social conditions prevalent in Pakistan by satiety and success, also explains the banality of ideas that exists in our educated classes manifested by their inability to provide general leadership and direction leading to equalitarian social change. The writer is a Senior Policy Analyst working for the OIC’s Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation.