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IN a recent essay ‘Draws and Drawbacks of Success’ in the New York Times, author Mohsin Hamid discusses the conundrums faced by writers. Questioning the somewhat arbitrary nature of commercial success, the bounties of which permit authors to write without having to worry about the onerous details of day-to-day survival, Hamid wonders whether the subcontinental poets of old, who never were nor ever expected to be paid, were better off.
The question is an interesting one, and Hamid does not pretend to have an answer. Whether better or worse off than before, he concludes, today’s writers continue to live double lives, “working their day jobs, and writing — unpaid, alone, with passion — at night”. His words sum up the conditions of many Pakistani writers. In a tottering economy, the task of survival is a formidable one.
This lament for writers, particularly those of a country increasingly constricted and confused, would be like any other in Pakistan, whose cup of sorrows brimmeth over with every dawn. It is, after all, not only writers who suffer the consequences of intellectual constriction.
The purges of public voices, the random killings, the caustic castigations heaped on dissenters, all come together to form their own walls, corralling and crushing creativity. In a country made touchy and defensive, smarting against the hurt of the world’s exclusion, offence is subjective — and writers and thinkers such easy prey. The crushed are the most capable of crushing others, and so the country turns its curses on those who would be creative.
Those are the curses of condition, of inhabiting a particularly dark time in a particularly beleaguered place; they impose an even more oppressive arithmetic on the writer’s condition. With the burdens of the ‘other’ more successful life — as a doctor, an engineer, a banker or whichever ‘real’ profession is chosen — the writer must also bear the burden of futility.
The failure to cultivate more writers means the story of Pakistan will be incomplete.
If the incredible task of being published and heard is actually accomplished, there will be the perils of persecution, the lone writer’s dismal lack of protection, the absent posse of armed guards; the penetrability of their marginal lives lies easily exposed. If anything worthwhile is being said, then, it will impose the cost not simply of a lesser living and lost nights, but perhaps of life itself.
The ever diminishing ranks of readers do not help the condition. According to a survey carried out by Gallup Pakistan in 2011, 70pc of the Pakistani population polled said that “they are not in the habit of reading books”. In 2002, 54pc of people polled said that they were non-readers. In the country’s urban areas, a thin 35pc profess to be readers, as opposed to only 25pc in the rural areas. Finally, women read less than men; only 25pc describe themselves as readers.
The written word creates a reflection of the condition and realities of a society. The failure to cultivate more writers, particularly those who can write in English and hence participate in a global literary discourse, means that the story of Pakistan in the larger world will be an incomplete one.
As Hamid implies in his essay, and as most Pakistani writers know, creative pursuit requires the leisure of not having to worry about the humdrum task of earning a living. In Pakistan, this task often extends not simply to the day and day job, but also to the paltriness of the night as a reprieve, its own discomforts: power cuts, and crowded dwellings, and much more. For women, whose lives are entangled in relationships, obligations to home and hearth, and who increasingly contribute to the family coffers, the task of writing is nearly impossible.
If these conditions continue, then the narrative of the nation — its reflection in the written word — will be given to only the very rich (who can, by definition, evade the imperative of commercial success to persist) or to the foreign. Within contemporary Pakistan, it is only those born into privilege and political clout who will be penning reflections of life within the country.
Some of them, aware of their privilege, will perhaps focus on the silent and poverty-stricken sufferers of the country. The striations of status mean that these will be imaginative exercises, born of little actual experience. Others, those who have not lived in Pakistan beyond their quest for literary material, are also well-situated to mine Pakistan’s own lack of creative cultivation. Before the world, it is their voices that will tell the story of Pakistan.
There is nothing wrong with this; for the writer’s subject should indeed be the writer’s choice. Its inequity lies in the parallel silence that exists within Pakistan itself, where poor and middle-class writers bear the burdens of silence imposed by structural and ideological pressures that are now almost inextricable.
Within Pakistan, then, the cultivation of creativity must be understood not simply as an indulgence for good times of largesse and plenty. Instead, it must be seen as an investment in creating the narrative of a nation, a story of Pakistan, in which Pakistanis have played some part.
When only the very rich or the foreign speak for Pakistan, theirs is an incomplete story, leaving the others unrepresented and often misunderstood.
The poets of old, whose memory Hamid so eloquently rekindles, may indeed exist today — but their voices are unheard, their rhymes relegated to scraps of paper and bedside diaries where they live and die undiscovered.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
