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June 16, 2002
REVIEWS: Love the imperfect city
How do you live in a city ripped apart by violence, but remain untainted by hatred? In Kartography, Kamila Shamsie explores loving something imperfect, whether our beloved is a person, or the city in which we live.
Karim and Raheen, have been ‘fated’ best friends since they first shared a cradle. Aged thirteen they complete each other’s sentences, anticipate each other’s emotions and are officially ‘blood-brothers’ (or at least ‘spit-brothers’). On the brink of adolescence, balanced between adult understanding and the intensity of childhood emotions, everything changes when Karim’s parents decide to leave Karachi and move to England.
Desperate to capture the last moments in the city he loves, and catapulted prematurely into adulthood by his parents’ imminent divorce, Karim becomes obsessed by maps. Through cartography, he tries to fix Karachi in his mind, unravel its history of bloodshed and make sense of its complexities.
Just as Karim is opening his eyes to the inequalities all around him, Raheen has decided to blind herself to the city’s failings. She believes you can only understand a place through its stories and sees Karim’s desire to analyze and map it as a sign he is becoming a stranger to her and Karachi. The turbulence of the metropolis’ politics, its poverty and corruption erects a barrier between the two friends, as real as the physical distance that separates them.
Misunderstanding and hidden secrets are brought to the surface eight years later when Karim and Raheen meet again and struggle to regain what they have lost. As in Salt and saffron, Shamsie’s last novel, the young protagonists must first extricate themselves from the web of memories and tangled emotions, which are echoes of an older love story.
Shamsie adroitly uses the love story to discuss the ethnic tensions scarring all levels of Karachi’s society. The 1971 civil war and Pakistan’s division is held up as a cautionary tale to Karachi’s inhabitants who have again allowed the city to be split along ethnic lines. As the prejudice and vilification of Bengalis is relived, Raheen and Karim can no longer hide from the violence, hatred and dishonesty demoralising the city.
Kartography allows no one to escape blame. Revered and protective friends of the family are simultaneously corrupt politicians, crooked businessmen and dangerous bigots shaping the city’s moral climate. Even Raheen’s idolized father, her ‘champion of justice’ has a tainted reputation. Raheen herself represents the city-dwellers who blinker themselves to occurrences outside their heavily guarded homes. She is taught trying to live ‘outside history’ can have disastrous consequences.
Karim’s fury at the decay and violence he cannot alter, compounded by his desire to apportion blame, makes him desperate to run away. Shamsie is unwilling to censure this choice, but does not see it as a solution. Instead Karachi’s citizens are asked to endeavour to come to terms with their own culpability in the city they have created, which allows the segregation of rich and poor, police brutality and a disregard for human life.
Shamsie’s work is unflinching, but never bleak. Karachi’s cruelty is exposed, but so are its moments of unparalleled beauty. While politics may be corrupt, forgiveness and friendship are honoured as precious commodities, binding people for life. Neither can the dangers of the city fully hide the generosity, and hospitality of its inhabitants. Treating a stranded, unaccompanied woman with care and respect, for instance, is “exactly the sort of thing you’d expect unknown men to do in Karachi”. Next to this, life in America with its lack of complications and intensity is represented as insipid if peaceful.
The heartbeat of Karachi — its filth and glamour - dominates the novel. While the modern romance is slightly flimsy, Shamsie’s latest work is nevertheless absorbing and significant. She teaches her audience to look at the destruction we are all capable of without seeking easy forgiveness. This is the only prescription to stop guilt turning into a ‘festering wound’ and instead allows us to move forward from denial to redemption and achieve a more honest future.
The book ends with fractured shards reflecting the newly erupted conflict on the city’s streets, but for Karim and Raheen the lesson has been well learnt. Both have understood nothing is completely pure and the people and places worth fighting for are the ones that force us to address the worst in our own personalities.
Writer’s email: homakhaleeli@hotmail.com
Kartography
By Kamila Shamsie
Bloomsbury
ISBN 0747557306
344pp. £9.99
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