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Journalism of Courage
On the tables thousands of caterpillars were in various stages of spinning. Each had transformed from the drunken, lifeless chunk on perforated paper to an agile ballerina leaning forward on its tail. Everywhere she looked, each nosed the air like a wand and out passed silk8230; They worked ceaselessly for three days and nights, with material entirely of their own, and with nothing to orchestrate them besides their own internal clock. Each a perfectly self contained unit of life.
Silkworms destined to be killed for their soft yarn live their brief lives of freedom inside their cocoons. Pakistani novelist Uzma Aslam Khan finds in these cocoons and their stubborn privacy a metaphor for the human quest for freedom, and more specifically the urge of the women of her country to be free and to realise their potential.
Dia is a free spirit, a dreamer. Her mind8217;s nimble movements up and down time often take the history of her nation, and the nations around her, on paths they have never tread. And on one of these paths she meets Daanish another dreamer, a young man from 8220;Amreeka8221; where he was doing a course in journalism much against the wishes of his family. His father, a doctor, exemplifies for him freedom as he goes seafaring and comes back with shells of rare creatures for the son.
While Dia8217;s life revolves around the silkworms in her mother8217;s farm, Daanish8217;s world is in the confines of the many sea shells the father has brought him. The same sea shells, however, exemplify loss of freedom for Daanish8217;s mother Anu, for whom marriage has been a betrayal rather than a relationship of sharing.
The outwardly inanimate cocoons, however, unite Dia and Daanish even as sea shells and caterpillars permeate the book in a sub-human song of freedom that is stifled in the world of mortals.
While Trespassing is about individual freedom, the narrative is tense with violence right from the killing of thousands of silkworms in boiling water to extract silk to the random killings by anti-government groups. And most of all the violence in the minds of the women in the book as they chart their destinies through a male-dominated world.
While the voice of the one-book-old, new generation Pakistani writer is very much that of a modern woman impatient with the unfair deal meted out to her gender, the prose itself is lyrical with passages often comparable to nothing less than silk. This one, for instance: 8220;He wanted only to be with the nautilus. No, to be the nautilus. With ninety arms to swim away, and twenty cabins to roam.8221;
One book old she may be, but Uzma Aslam Khan, along with contemporaries like Kamila Shamsie, is certainly charting new terrain. Unlike their predecessors, writers like Bapsi Sidhwa, who were more preoccupied with Pakistan8217;s back stories, with nostalgia and with remembrance, the new crop appear very much focused on the present. And unlike their predecessors, they condone no transgressions attributable to history or social milieu.
History, of course, always intrudes, that is inevitable. In Kartography, for instance, Shamsie detailed her Karachi universe, braiding personal tales with the burdens of Pakistan8217;s ethnic and class strife. Similarly, Khan8217;s insistence on a woman8217;s right to self-respect allows no negotiation with socio-economic or political expediencies. This is a sub-genre in subcontinental fiction worth tracking.
