“It’s not about the politicians who are polemical but a large section of society, extensively sophisticated and custodians of human rights movements, who normalise something which is gruesome. The subject has been taken by the novelist in a subtle pattern through discourse and dialogue between characters,” said novelist Osama Siddique about Maniza Naqvi’s novel The Inn.

Ms Naqvi agreed with her fellow novelist who said The Inn was also about a group of people who normalised the gruesome.

They were speaking at the launch of the novel at the Lahore Literary Festival in a session moderated by novelist Osama Siddique.

Ms Naqvi wondered if the Pakistani writers had come out of colonialism or were still stuck in it.

“What to talk about the westerners, we ourselves colonise the people around us. Regarding the question about language, it’s sad that we give importance to conversation done in English. We are unaware of the stories written in our own languages.”

Osama called The Inn the book of ideas whose subject was international politics and the western attitude towards our part of the world.

“There was a rage in the main character which could turn polemical and it would have affected the novel. There is a flow in the novel and the best thing about it is that it has American literary, musical, cultural, social references in the charactersation which becomes believable. It’s important for a novelist to make characters believable if she/he is writing about a certain area and its culture,” said Osama Siddique.

DECOLONISING LIVES: Vietnamese novelist Nguyen Phan Que Mai said most of the writings about Vietnam have been done by westerners while Hollywood also misrepresented the Vietnamese.

“I wrote against that. I wrote about the Vietnamese women who I grew up with who had no choice but to be pillars of our society. Most of our men went to the war and came back traumatised and it were the women who rescued and nurtured those men,” she said during a session titled, Writing Our Stories: Decolonising Lives.

She said her book, The Mountains Sing, was an attempt to reclaim Vietnamese narrative.

Osman Yousefzada, the author of The Go-Between, said the decolonisation conversation for him revolved around working class women who were subjected to a patriarchal world.

“There are amazing matriarchs in this patriarchal world.”

Ms Mai bemoaned the Vietnamese culture had more than 4,000 years of history and the world saw it only from the perspective of the war.

“I want to present Vietnam as it is. The Vietnamese language is so rich with each word having different meanings.”

She declared that another way of decolonisation for her was to put the Vietnamese stories in the central stage set against the background of the Vietnam War where America had no speaking role.

“The war killed three million Vietnamese and only 60,000 Americans but more literature has been written about the latter than the former,” she added.

Osama Siddique, the author of Sniffing out the Moon, agreed with the two novelists.

If one looked at South Asian fiction written in English until three or four decades back, there was a huge amount of uncertainty about the idiom to be used and the themes.

“I face a question all the time, why English. And I can say that it’s (writing in English) also an act of defiance,” he said and added that Urdu and Punjabi also influenced his English langauge.

Published in Dawn, March 21st, 2022