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Founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge University, Granta publishes fiction, original reportage, memoirs and photography four times a year. Granta's current issue (autumn 2010, issue number 112) is based entirely on Pakistan. With a host of events lined up for the launch of the issue in London, New York, San Francisco and Pakistan – from poetry readings and talks by prominent Pakistani writers to a LitCrawl – it sounds and looks promising. The first event was held on September 13, with an evening of poetry reading by Daniyal Mueenuddin and Amina Yaqin.
Today, six months on from when I first read Daniyal Mueenuddin’s ‘In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,’ I couldn't decide whether I actually liked his writing.
The problem, as some would argue is often the case, is the women. In Mueenuddin’s work, it appears that they’re always conniving, scheming; reduced to the sight, scent and subtle allure of their sexuality. In a sense, his women aren’t human. When I put this to a friend, her response was simple: he isn’t wrong. In a patriarchal world, Pakistani women often use their sexuality as their only source of power. To her, it wasn’t essentialising women, but describing the landscape of power they inhabit.
I was unconvinced. And so, when I walked into a poetry reading organised by the literary magazine, Granta, for the launch of their issue on Pakistan, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Mr Mueenuddin.
The evening began with a short, but insightful, talk by Dr Amina Yaqin, a professor of Urdu literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. A well-known translator of literature, she spoke mainly to introduce the audience to the most well-known of Urdu poets, but perhaps her best moments were when she revealed the trials of the translator: how does one translate idioms, turns of phrase, or even meaning-laden images from one language to another, without rendering the result ultimately meaningless? Her process, it seemed, stems from constant close reading, the advice of other literary giants, and a little bit of artistic license. You can hardly begrudge the translator that.
She also spoke, perhaps too briefly, about how the long oral tradition of poetry in South Asia’s regional languages “conveys the complex relationships between the public social sphere and the private individual sphere.” In between vignettes of Faiz and Iqbal, Fehmida Riaz and Ghalib, she gave the audience brief tastes of their actual words, interspersing Dasht-e-Tanhai with Khudi, Censorship with Ghalib’s ghazals.
This was all, of course, a sort of prelude. Daniyal Mueenuddin, winner of the Story Prize and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was to read some of his own, never before read in public, poetry.
Asked by John Freeman, Granta’s editor, what got him to start writing poetry and short stories, both notorious for being writing’s most difficult crafts, Mueenuddin was disarmingly honest: he told the audience about how he had been writing poetry since he was eight years old, but had never thought any of it was fit to be published. “I have always thought that poets,” he said, “are the princes amongst us.” Writing short stories, for him, was a conscious effort, given that he thought his poetry “just wasn’t good enough.”
Referring to novel writers, himself included (Mueenuddin is currently working on a novel set in 1970s Pakistan), as a “slovenly bunch,” he made the point that poetry and short stories require the most craft, the most attention to detail. With novels, he almost lamented, writers have the luxury of developing characters and threads that may ultimately lead nowhere: the short story is immediate, and every detail, each sentence is relevant.
He followed his talk with the promised reading. Incident at Al Riaz, Black Magic, Trying Tripe (published in Granta’s current issue) and Poem of the Mountain. Mostly autobiographical, his words read, much like his stories, as insights into seemingly innocuous moments.
Although even as I sat through the event, I wasn’t sure how I really felt about Mueenuddin’s writing. I can, however, say this: he has a deep appreciation of the craft of writing, and that, above all, is something worth admiring. Then again, even with his short stories, the form was never the problem: he can craft a scene, a narrative, or even a moment with the exquisite precision of the best short-form writers.
And, after all that, I think I finally began to like him when Mueenuddin responded to a rather pointed question about Pakistan's literati "isolating themselves from their own audience" by using English as their medium. He said, simply: “Isolating ourselves? We’re embracing our audience, because our audience is the West.”
Unpretentiously honest, Mueenuddin has, ultimately, won me over.
