Reviewed by Sarah Humayun

WHERE Worlds Collide: Pakistani Fiction in the New Millennium brings together nine studies of English novels by Pakistani authors with one of a non-fictional tract, Kamila Shamsie’s Offence: The Muslim Case. The novels include Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Kamila Shamsie’s In the City by the Sea and Kartography, Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil and Maps for Lost Lovers, H.M. Naqvi’s Homeboy, Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Geometry of God, and Sorayya Khan’s Noor.

As noted in the introduction, the subjects of this “far from exhaustive” survey have been chosen on the basis of the author’s “personal affinity and interest, meaning I’ve included those writers with whom I’m most familiar”. Though the treatment is not chronological, one of the aims of the work is to historicise what it calls the “second wave of Pakistani writers” — the wave that comes after the “genitors” and “pioneers” whose work tends to trail off in the 1980s. Among these, Waterman singles out Bapsi Sidhwa’s and Sara Suleri’s diasporic and historical concerns as being the direct ancestors of the kind of novels being written today.

As the terms of analysis here are generational, the question of why there was a hiatus between the first and second wave comes up. The second wave, the introduction suggests, could only get off the ground after the wounds inflicted on the collective psyche by the two Partitions had healed. This also suggests that we are dealing with fiction investigating trauma, recovering a history through fiction that cannot be accessed through straightforward historical memory.

The individual studies that follow bear this out, as in the chapters on Sorayya Khan’s Noor and Shamsie’s Kartography. However, it might have been helpful to give more sustained attention to trauma’s significance in influencing the subjects and specially the historical moment of the second wave that Waterman argues for. It could well be, as Waterman thinks, that the “combatants” of both 1947 and 1971 could not themselves articulate what their children undertook to fictionalise. But from the quote used to support this (from an interview with Sorayya Khan), it appears just as likely that their silence itself was the provocation for, rather than some necessary gestation period of, certain novelistic treatments. Some of the included works also envisage a more positive role for trauma and violence, which, it is more persuasively argued, “sometimes function as catalysts that accelerate change and cement relationships”. The chapter on Noor, in particular, is a thoughtful engagement with the novel, which shows how a child with seeming “indifference towards the origin of traumatic experience”’ helps a family repossess it in another form, that of art.

Waterman describes these novels as “fiction informed by history and operating as social critique”. The marked historicising impulse in this study is not gratuitous: Where Worlds Collide seems to regard the historical mode as inherent to Pakistani fiction in English, as well as desirable in view of the need to update the Pakistani story as it appears in the popular annals of the West. It takes up a mediating stance between the Pakistan evoked in the studied works — which retell the nation in fictions encompassing identity, personal and political history, and trauma — and competing security-obsessed stereotypical images of Pakistan in the West.

By now, this brokering position is a recognisable one in Pakistani English fiction studies. Hard to miss at publishing events and literary festivals, it establishes a reliable affinity between academics looking for a critical handle on Pakistani fiction in English and Anglophone audiences receptive to its projection as a story of a different story: an evolving, hybrid, if not outright contradictory micro-history of a region that is misrepresented in established narratives. To make a fresh representation of the current generation of Pakistani writers is perhaps the single most discernible aim of this book, one that it shares with some of the novels being written about.

Waterman draws on a rich array of writing on literature, history, social anthropology, psychoanalysis and political theory in his readings of the novels, which nevertheless are at their most insightful in the descriptive mode. Though he quotes liberally, and the wealth of critical reference at times throws stimulatingly unexpected light on the texts, sometimes the lack of context or expository discussion blunts the quoted material’s critical impact.

As the chapters in the book are not held together by an overarching argument, they will very much stand or fall on their own accounts. Scholars of Anglophone Pakistani fiction should certainly find them of interest, not least for what they have to say about questions of identity, a theme that the book traverses repeatedly. Waterman examines identity in process, in “becoming”, as it appears in the “grey area” between “essential essence of self” and “social production, requiring contact with another to bring ‘me’ into existence”. In their quest to open up calcified notions of identity to fictional possibility, to historical indeterminacy and the imagining of alternatives, Pakistani writers in this account cut figures remarkably consonant with writers in other places undergoing similar academic processing.

The study claims that “the story of the family is ultimately the story of Pakistan; the two cannot be separated, and given that much of contemporary Pakistani fiction is historical fiction, the family is ultimately the foundation of the history of Pakistan.” Although this assertion is not systematically argued for in the rest of the loosely-connected chapters, most of them do pay attention to the unfolding of the self within family, and, by extension, to the modes of belonging and memory that family enables and disables as the “fundamental unit of socialisation” and the “fundamental unit of hybridity”. The extended discussion of Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil, which maps the connections between a “hybrid” family comprising both biologically related and unrelated members in a “contact zone”, is notable in this regard.

One wishes that Waterman had spent more time setting out what the significance of relatedness and belonging through family means in the context of the work he is attempting. Equally useful would have been a consideration of exactly what is the relationship between the family’s looming presence in Pakistani fiction and its foundational status in its history. Since the question is addressed in a perfunctory manner, the claim ends up appearing rhetorical.

The last chapter of the book is a rather cursory “overview of the history of Pakistan since Partition, and the ongoing pursuit of a national identity, which is both political and Islamic”, offered on the back of Shamsie’s Offence. It describes the negotiations between ‘politically-exploited Islam’ and the idea of a Muslim nation, in which political Islamists have failed to achieve the upper hand. Everyday life in Pakistan belies the ideological claim to closure of identity, and political history shows that this has always remained contested anyway.

This last chapter makes one wonder, all over again, whether this and other efforts to recover the everyday in Pakistani life is intended for those who live everyday life in Pakistan. If it is true that “ultimately … perhaps the biggest contribution made by Pakistani writers [is] taking history with a capital ‘H’ into account, linking it to the every day, and daring to imagine a Pakistan whose story is not yet finished”, then Pakistani readers might be forgiven for feeling that Pakistani writing in English should now take this as a given, and turn its attention to other kinds of daring.

Where Worlds Collide: Pakistani Fiction in the New Millennium

(LITERARY CRITIQUE)

By David Waterman

OUP, Karachi

ISBN 978-0199400324

260pp.