March 23, 2003

WAS it the dissertation research? Has it been the home connection? Or simply a case of exploring horizons to reach out to people who have mattered in the course of things written and read? The largely student audience with ambitions of reaching out to the creative world of the novelist, fired a barrage of queries at the day’s ‘writer in focus’.

“All three. All along.” Was the answer. Always one keen to share her world with others, Qaisra Shahraz went on to speak with disarming cheer. Author sittings are always more stimulating than a one-to-one interview or even a ‘talk’ where the author may get away with having her own word. In Pakistan on a British Council invitation, the two way dialogue initiated an hour long unravelling of the crossword puzzle that makes up a writer’s life, person and profession.

Qaisra Shahraz’ repeat (her last visit to Pakistan a year ago, also sponsored by the British Council had been a maiden introduction to home readers) visit was to touch base with the scenes and stories she has begun to weave into English literature. It knit into a symphony of all the primeval factors that have been instrumental in carrying her across borders and boundaries. She admitted as much in the dialogue that ensued.

The quest for a rooted identity, fielding queries about religion, the hijab, the Muslim identity overlaid by cultural taboos, exploring the infinite beauty in cross cultural literatures and the resultant possibilities of alternate ways of life, have always been enigmas she has sought to address. Sharing with her audience, the pains and gains of a life fraught with journeys of another kind, the writer first summarized her experiences before getting ready for an inquest.

“Where did your journeys lead to?” was expectedly the first query. “The journeys brought me face to face with parameters defying openings.” Yet she chose to travel on and in doing so, the personal and the public became one concentric whole as she continued the cross cultural journey of discovery; made all the more intellectually relevant since she is a woman, albeit a ‘privileged’ one!

For those among the eager audience who had done their homework — that of reading The Holy Woman — Shahraz’ maiden venture into novel writing gave them an insight into the author’s fascination with the home country which she had left for a British citizenship at age eight with immigrant parents. The book helped her realize her approach to the first of the many journeys she was destined to make.

To date she continues to revel in the exercise. True enough, writing Saturday mornings tucked up in bed with a pot of tea (‘That’s the only time I can afford to be off my domestic and professional duties’) for company, she admitted to an extraordinary ‘high’ as she journeyed across the seas, back and forth, revelling in the flights of imagination and images.

“How?” asked a student of English literature, “Had it been possible to write of rural Pakistan when you admit to having spent the crucial growing up years in a western locale?”

“Those were precious moments when I was free to fly back to a landscape which has developed as an alter ego. It was a dream world that I knew was out there. I had grown up with a halo of it around my western existence. A parallel identity that kept beckoning me to my roots. I had to take that journey to share that distant dream with the people among whom I had grown up. Placing my novel in the landscape of a rural Pakistan that I have never experienced had also become some sort of a compulsive balancing act. Of course I am conscious of my British identity. That was how I have been able to survive there, but I had to cross the border to get here.”

That initial ‘crossing’ lead into exciting inroads. Typhoon, her second novel that is now in print, too is based in the same locale. “So this is going to be my third novel which I am now writing.” The lure of the cross-cultural literary melody has been always a recurrent refrain. Even her first short story, years ago had talked of the issues generated by divergent cultures in a common setting.

Another young lady wanted more details. “Crossing borders is not something handed to you on a plate. Did you chart out a course?” With Shahraz’ initial border crossing having occurred as a student, the query invited a trip down memory lane. “I read the Russians, the French, the American, even the African writers. That was a delightful experience. I was getting to know about societies other then the one I had grown up in.

“As I thirsted for more I got to cross further borders into a world of women writers that was not listed anywhere. I realized that Jane Austen was not the first woman novelist of note. Shocking, but the fact is that near to three hundred women writers have been deleted from literary history! Their books were not in circulation. Nobody knew about them.”

Shahraz’ journey into the world of those ‘deleted’ women leads her to wondering how the world of women writers differed from their male counterparts. “The very fact that I, a woman, can afford to write, looks like an achievement all right!” As the talk revolved around the other borders in her life, she confessed to the stress of it all. “No, it has never been easy. Possibly I faced borders in greater numbers then non-writers. Some crossings have been so expeditiously necessitated that they have scandalized my own self. They gave more reason to take up the challenge of crossing over into unknown realms.”

Perplexed by the writers enigmatic relationship with land and language the audience quested for more detail. “There was this international congress of writers in Pakistan nine years ago, where I was introduced to Ishfaque Sahib and Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi and so many others. Can you imagine my shock when I realized that I was a stranger amongst them all. I did not know them. I had not read them. I was 36 when I set out to cross that one border, discovering in the process, the beauty of Urdu poetry as it envelops one in a mushaira.”

Urdu language still remains a challenge but Shahraz is adamant that she will cross that over as well.

“Crossings lead to dislocation. Why did not your first experience of novel writing dictate some rest? You went on into writing for television.”

Having read and written herself across the barriers of culture and creativity, Shahraz might as well have rested on her laurels. “No way. I knew there were more borders to be crossed.” This time it would be more public, a really demanding crossing. Ten more minutes of explaining her creativity from private novelist to television drama writer?

“I knew it was a huge responsibility. Far, far more demanding and public then writing a book. But I thirsted for it. I had built up an intimate relationship with the reader through the Holy Woman but television drama meant that the words I wrote would actually take on shapes and forms. I realized that the diversity of a global audience was going to take away from me and my pen the right to control those images.”

Almost doubting the rationality of the decision, Shahraz finally took up the challenge. PTV ran the play for a whole quarter and Shahraz crossed another border...into the world where each word put into the mouth of a character carried a heavy burden. “Each crossing has brought its own rewards. The television script was the opportunity to cross borders again and again. I was living and writing in Manchester but I was thinking Pakistan.”

Having journeyed through the many borders of land, language, cultures and beliefs, Qaisra Shahraz is to be celebrated as a woman writer, who in her own words is, “ luckier than a lot of those other woman who may be burgeoning with creativity but lack the space to address its needs. I wrote of a particular landscape but I expanded it to a larger world.”

Something of the Jane Austen syndrome because that was one case where a small landscape was often enlarged into a complete world.

Finally Qaisra Shahraz admitted to other borders too. There have been borders whose crossings have daunted even the creativity of the woman who worked for 20 years before finally getting the opportunity to get published. “In the final analysis every crossing has been worth the effort.”

“And with each crossing of a border I have moved on, balancing, on the one hand, the domestic life that women all over take as second nature. On the other hand, are the journeys across borders and boundaries that I have to cross as a writer”. Here is wishing Shahraz bon voyage.

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