The Pakistani Diaspora

Ghose, Suleri and Qureishi

 
“A serious house on serious earth it is…”

Philip Larkin

The writers in diaspora are not dissimilar to Oedipus at Colonos where he makes Antigone, his daughter, the compass. He asks her to make sense of the place they had arrived at. The diaspora writers make their wider audience the Antigone to their predicament. The predicament is that of a lost home, a blurred identity and a confused sense of direction. All these they have to negotiate in order to better connect with their past, present and future. They seek counsel in the world of creativity- writing- in order to carve out an individual niche in a chaotic world of displaced identities and multifarious origins.

The image of a native alien, the word coined by Zulfiqar Ghose, is common to most writers internationally too; but my aim through this is to talk about the Pakistani diaspora writers including Sara Suleri, Zulfiqar Ghose and Hanif Qureshi.

The rootlessness that these postcolonial diasporic authors talk about is encapsulated in the words of Zulfiqar Ghose who makes one of the first generation of English writers in Pakistan:

With the theme of rootlessness, Zulfiqar Ghose’s words ring true:

“When we left Bombay in 1952 for England, we were leaving two countries, for in some way we were alien to both and our emigration to a country to which we were not native only emphasised our alienation from the country in which we had been born.”

This is the rootlessness, the absolute absence of a belonging is what these lines help explain to the lay man. These lines help not only perpetuate the diaspora discourse, but simultaneously aid in understanding the mental stress and anxiety of having to leave a homeland.

The writers deftly demonstrate how the familiar struggles between new and old, assimilation and cultural preservation, striving toward the future and longing for the past, play out in people in diaspora.

Sara Suleri, while talking about transmutation, dedicates one entire chapter to the cause in her book Boys will be Boys. She says,

“Cultures are certainly translated things: moving from one to another requires a discursive equilibrium hard to acquire, hard to retain.”

In the same vein, while the writers explore this magical effect of transformation, they arrive at considering themselves the citizens of the world at large and not just one nationality. Their horizons broaden and they arrive at an eventual peace with their new found new identities.

In Confessions of a Native Alien, the author says that he left Pakistan when it was still in British India and when he returned the whole place had fragmented. Losing sense of ownership of the India he had known he was now torn, belonging nowhere. This created a ‘schizophrenic need’ in him to belong. And hence this theme remained a consistent feature of his writings.

For Zulfiqar Ghose, all is being written as a part of an obsession. He writes, “Some images of that time persist as obsessions”. He reminisces and then frets. As he says in the book that, “You’re tormented by not belonging” .This is the theme that runs throughout his autobiography. It is essential to see the paranoia, this psychological duress. He felt, in England and in the South Asia, that, he was constantly being watched. This is the height of the psychopathology that has resulted in his not being able to connect with any geographical space or any national conscience. For him, to be able to call a country his own, is a source of intense nausea and sentiment. When these two combine, the mental condition is all the more worsened; this leads him to question the criterion of belonging to one nation or calling one geographical area his own. He constantly oscillates between these dichotomous feelings creating in himself a rootless person. We see an epitome of the vicissitudes of native alienhood. This approach is very explicit in ZG. He talks of his lifelong struggle, his  “…difficulty in belonging to both which ended in belonging to neither.”

Diaspora writers are at worst pitiable, and at best teachers of a higher conscience.

Moving on, picking Ghose’s theme to belong and feeling alienated at the same time, Suleri talks for the people with foreign mothers and Pakistani fathers. In Boys will be Boys (BWBB) and Meatless Days (MD), she talks in turn about her father and mother and the rest of the familial framework that helps us understand her brought up and the feelings she had at being torn between two cultures. While Boys Will Be Boys is an elegy of a daughter, Meatless Days is a heartbreaking story consisting of small snippets of her life in Pakistan- that is happy and happening in one instant, and depressing and desolate the next. We see how memory and writing overlaps in her work and like Ghose, she too understands that memory convolutes many of the realities as subjective versions of the event and not objective at all.

For Suleri the definition of homeland is also different and more complex because her mother was Welsh. So she perfectly straddled two distinct cultures and ways of life. Due to thi one is forced to say that hers was a predicament more complicated than Ghose because in her home, since she was a little child, she witnessed the dichotomies of being a foreigner in alien soils in the shape of her mother.

In MD, we see that the author literally breaks down to find meanings to her person; in her own obliteration she seeks refuge; “Only in my obliteration will you see shapes of what I really can be…It is a rib that floats in longing for some other cage”. Through this bodily grotesque the author has tried to depict the fact that she is constantly a migrant in search for new meanings and home. A rib is most fundamental for a body, if that goes afloat, really all the purpose of the body is in a mess. Through the rib, she has driven home another new meaning that is of womanhood in a shambles as well. As woman was made from Adam’s rib, she feels her position in society threatened, and personally in a shambles. She can no longer find meaning for herself at any level. As a woman, as someone belonging to a certain race and nationality, she feels she is in a constant state of flux. In MD, the author talks of the bodies dismantling and her own womanhood being placeless. Her mum’s rootlessness and lack of belonging to the land she inhabited only physically had had a major impact on the author’s psyche. Suleri’s role of being a woman, the most personally vital character, even is in a shambles. This is because every culture has a way of transcribing a role for women; when the cultures are always changing and the place is constantly in flux an individual goes off on a tangent and loses one specific direction. When this confusion occurs as to who am I and where do I belong, the stature of a woman comes crumbling down. This confusion augments the psychosis already at play in a person’s mind.

Sara relates her niece, Heba’s, question in BWBB, “Why can’t one place be home?” This question carries a resounding echo of search for meaning of one’s home in the family. What does it mean to be having a permanent aboard, a home! How does it feel to belong above all else and to be rooted with one’s tentacles deeply entrenched in a culture, a nation, a society and a people? These yearnings tell of the collective psyche of the diaspora people most exquisitely captured in a young girl’s seemingly innocuous question.

Moving to Hanif Qureishi,  in his book, My Ear at His Heart author accounts his father’s book which tells the family’s history, memories and past; how relationships are affected by distance; how rootlessness is a trait of people who change countries and shift often; and what role racial criticism and bullying has on individuals. This Kureishi shares in great detail with Ghose where rootlessness makes a mess out of individuals.

What I find particularly interesting is that, the people in diaspora are constantly in search for their past, their memories and this very nostalgia is what they try to find their identities in. Kureishi opens the book with the thought that the book that his father wrote, “…will tell me a lot about my father” (Kureishi 1). Moreover, he comments, “…I seem to be opening a door on my past, preserved in words- some clue or key to my father’s life.” (Kureishi 14) They desperately want a hint to their past, their origin. A connection that fosters their linkage with the old, and hence they try to find their own position in what was, and is no more. Ghose and Suleri share the same. They delve in an uncharted realm called memories. Ghose particularly says that memories are deceptive because they are always so subjective. Suleri also reminisces heavily on her old Lahore house and how it all worked within a joint family set up. Hence to say in brief, roots and past drive deep roads into family historicity and identity. When the past is recaptured, it leads to a discovery of the self. It opens a window into a cluster of appurtenances which heighten an acute sense of identity.

Kureishi and Suleri share another very interesting aspect. The love inducted in them by their parents for reading and books, and eventually writing. They felt their lives revolved around the ambit of writing. Like Kureishi says, “Through books I was entering a narrative, a myth.” Their fathers have had an indelible mark on the process of thinking for writing. Both their fathers were particular about their rules of writing and they inherited it. For Sara, the process of “chiseling” the written word before it goes to an audience was what she learnt for her father.

While the love and longing for the land is tactile in the diasporic writings, their love for religion is not very tactile again owing to a loosely tethered identity.

We see that like the postcolonial British authors, there is a tactile elegy in the works of the Pakistani diaspora. There world is fractured and their lives are torn by rootlessness. Their direction is blurred and their purpose is lost in the wilderness of time. As Suleri quotes Mirza Ghalib,

Koi Wirani si Wirani hai

‘there is a wilderness within a wilderness’

The void that diaspora people feel can not be filled by any material comfort or provision. Their loss of a permanent home and roots is translated in the pain that reflects on their work. Their search for home is what tortures them. And what adds insult to injury is the absence of the happy and lasting home for they are in a constant search for settlement. If at all, “a serious house on serious earth it is…”