Literature Beyond Borders: Pakistani Women Writers

Over these last months, we’ve had a wonderful time partnering with sister organisation The Second Floor (T2F) at PeaceNiche, who are based in Karachi, Pakistan. Their ground-breaking work is focussed on nourishing creativity, celebrating culture and encouraging curiosity. Our partnership project, Literature Beyond Borders, is funded by the British Council, and has enabled us to bring our reading and writing communities together to share, learn and collaborate in our digital spaces.

In celebration of our friendship with PeaceNiche, we’d like to spotlight some of the stellar Pakistani women writers you can find on our shelves…

Hoops of Fire edited by Aamer Hussein

Edited by Aamer Hussein, Hoop of Fire is a collection of short stories by Pakistani women writers including Jamila Hashmi, Mumtaz Shirin, Khadija Mastur, Khalida Husain and Fahmida Riaz. Each in its own unique way, these stories offer an insight into the social, political and psychological issues surrounding Pakistan’s convoluted history, from Partition to wars with India, the creation of Bangladesh and the ethnic conflicts in Karachi. With these sometimes brutally honest narratives oscillating between polemic and lyricism, Hussein aims to shed a light on a literary culture that is so rich in its variety and that deserves to be better known.

Cracking India: A Novel by Bapsi Sidhwa

Set in the tumultuous years during and after the 1947 Partition, this raw and powerful narrative offers the reader an insight into the aftermath of the events as they are witnessed by a little girl. Eight-year-old Lenny, who suffers from polio, leads a comfortable life, sheltered by her loving parents and her beloved Hindu care taker Ayah. With Ayah’s abduction, however, and the unfolding of Partition’s bloody aftermath, Lenny quickly loses her innocence as she navigates her teenage years and her awakening sexuality while witnessing bloodshed, violence and loss. In spite of its sensitive topic, revealing wounds that are still fresh, Cracking India manages time and again to make its reader crack a smile with its blatant humour and its subtle jesting. This novel is a chilling and visceral narrative that grips you from the very first page and is definitely worth a read.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

A modern re-imagination of Sophocles’s Antigone, this novel centres around two Muslim families in modern Britain with highly different views on family and the display of Muslim beliefs. Even if the reader is not familiar with the classical text, Home Fire is an excellent story about family, sacrifice and identity: it is told from various perspectives, the first of which centres around Isma, who moved to America in reply to an invitation by a mentor. Yet she cannot help but worry about her siblings – her headstrong sister Aneeka and especially her brother Parvaiz, who disappeared in an attempt to follow in the footsteps of a jihadist father he never knew. When Eamon, the son of a powerful political figure, comes into the lives of the two sisters, the stories and fates of their two families are suddenly and inextricably intertwined as Aneeka sees in him the chance to save their brother. The winner for the 2018 women’s prize of fiction, this novel is powerful, gripping and gut-wrenching and it will stay with you long after you’ve read its final page.

Trespassing by Uzma Aslam Khan

Set in Pakistan, the UK and the US, this novel gives a gripping insight into Pakistani and Muslim day-to-day culture. In the late sixties and in the middle of the anti-war campaigns against the dictatorial regime of Azub Khan, the two Pakistanis Riffat, who went to the US to study, and Shafqat, an heiress to her family’s silk factory in the countryside, have a passionate affair, but part on a point of principle. More than 20 years later, their lives collide again when Riffat finds out his daughter is dating Shafqat’s son. Part of the beauty of this novel lies in the narrative’s structure: divided into different sections, each of which is told from the perspective of a different character, these intricately woven tales leave the reader with food for though not only about forbidden love and the characters’ struggles and aspirations, but also about the social, political and economic issues of twentieth-century Pakistan.

Luck is the Hook and Leaving Fingerprints by Imtiaz Dharker

These two collections of poems were written by Imtiaz Dharker, a British poet, artist and video film maker who was born in Pakistan and grew up in a Muslim Calvinist Lahori household in Glasgow. The first collection of poems, Leaving Fingerprints, is strongly personal yet highly international in the way it raises questions about displacement, homesickness, urban violence and religious strives. Often appearing in pairs, the poems therein present the reader with an action followed by a reaction, a touch followed by a fingerprint. The second collection, Luck is the Hook, on the other hand, can be read as a continuation of Dharker’s previous award-winning book, Over the Moon, which centres around themes like grief and loss. Dharker’s poems in Luck is the Hook, by contrast, are accompanied by a sense of moving on and – rich and diverse in their topics, styles and structures – are illustrated with the artist’s unmistakable line-drawings which form an integral part of her books.

Poems by Noshi Gillani

This dual-language chapbook introduces the poetry of leading Urdu poet Noshi Gillani, translated by Lavinia Greenlaw and Nukhbah Langah. Gillani has gained a committed international audience due to the frankness and candour of her poems. In 1995, Gillani moved to San Fransisco – an experience which is reflected in many of her poems as they explore issues of diasporic and female identity. In 2008, parts of her poetry work was translated into English and her poems were read in the UK, with the Poetry Translation Centre’s World Poets’ Tour.

The Distance of a Shout by Kishwar Naheed

Kishwar Naheed, a feminist Urdu poet and a prominent voice in Urdu literature, is commonly known for her bold and radical views expressed in her poetry in an attempt to highlight the issues women are faced with in a male-dominated society. This collection of her work is representative of her varied style, and the translations of the poems therein are printed alongside their Urdu originals. These translations have been contributed by well-known poets and are aiming to make an English audience familiar with the work of this leading feminist poet.

And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women, edited by Muneeza Shamsie

The only English-language anthology of short stories by Pakistani women published in the United States, the twenty-five stories in And the World Changed centre around the lives and experiences of Pakistani women. The aim of the book being to “reveal how Pakistani women, writing in a global—albeit imperial—language, challenge stereotypes that patriarchal cultures in Pakistan and the diaspora have imposed on them, both as women and as writers”, these diverse stories shed a light on the intersections between gender, class, religion and culture. The wounds inflicted by colonialism are revealed to be still fresh and global as the narratives, which are arranged chronologically with regard to the authors’ ages, take the reader on a journey through Pakistan’s history and oscillate between nostalgic reminiscence and critical reflection.