This thread is dedicated to interviews of noteworthy writers, thinkers , philosophers of this contemporary period of our existance.
Please share if you read any of them.
Re: Interviews & Reflections
Mohammed Hanif was born in Okara, Punjab and studied at M.C.High School. He graduated from Pakistan Air Force Academy as a Pilot Officer but subsequently left to pursue a career in journalism. He worked for Newsline as a senior reporter and won two APNS awards. He has written for India Today, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Counter Punch. His stage play 'Murnay Ke Baad Kiya Hoga' was a minor hit in Karachi in the 1990s and later became a critically acclaimed BBC drama: What Now, Now that We are Dead? His feature film The Long Night has been shown at a number of film festivals. Another stage play The Dictator's Wife was recently staged at Hampstead Theatre London. He is a graduate of University of East Anglia's creative writing programme. He is currently head of BBC's Urdu Service and lives in London.
The News on Sunday: Your debut novel has yet to be launched, but it has already created a stir in the international publishing circles. What do you make of it?
Mohammed Hanif: It's got some nice pre-publication reviews in the trade press and some very fine editors have said some very fine things about it. My favourite bits are a quote by John Le Carre who calls it 'deliciously anarchic' and a random US blogger who has called it 'a whirlwind of a novel'. As a result one can feel a bit smug but I have a straight-talking ten year old son who says that it's just another book with a silly title. So that puts everything in perspective and one gets on with peeling potatoes or whatever other household chore might be at hand.
TNS: How old were you when Zia-ul-Haq's C-130 crashed in 1988, do you remember the exact moment when you heard the news, where were you and what were you doing? What was your instant reaction?
MH: I was twenty two and I do remember the day very clearly. We were in the officers' mess when we heard the rumours. Strangely we didn't think of General Zia first. We were worried about who else might be on the plane. We were of course very concerned about the future of our country, so we pooled our meager savings and ordered a bottle of something expensive. I think the bootlegger gave us a discount to mark the day. We didn't know much about what was happening in the civilian world but during his time, Zia had made some dire attempts to make us better Muslims. When we started our training we had social evening with our college band belting out bad versions of Alamgir. By the time Zia took control we were being subjected to hour long dars-e-Qurans first thing in the morning.
Towards the end of his tenure things got really bizarre. We were caught stealing oranges from a neighbouring orchard once. Our punishment? We were ordered to spend three days with tableeghi jamaat. Most fun a nineteen year old could expect to have in those times. I tried to pick an argument with the very kind elderly dude who was heading our tableeghi mission. I said I feel a bit strange knocking on doors and preaching to people who were very clearly already Muslims. "You are a Muslim and look at yourself," he told me. We protested by escaping our tableeghi camp one night to watch a late night show of Anjuman's latest film and found ourselves sitting next to the very people we had been preaching to during the day. They had a good laugh. To answer your question I think we instinctively knew that we were reaching the end of a farce. We felt relieved.
TNS: Can you compare that raw, passionate, instant reaction of a young cadet to the mature and objective analysis of a seasoned journalist and writer that you are today?
MH: I think Zia had a much more profound effect on civilians than he did on the army. The armed forces are trained to do quick about-turns and get on with their lives. Civilians are a bit slow. After Zia's death I found out that a whole generation of my civilian contemporaries had no clue what they were supposed to be doing with their lives. A lot of my friends spent half their youth waiting for the drug pushers. Others went on to become psychiatrists and advertising executives. I still don't know what was worse. There were obviously heroic attempts at resistance but those were very few. When I drifted into journalism I noticed that for a whole decade you couldn't find a single piece of political analysis not tracing every evil in the land to Zia. That irritated me but also kept my interest alive in the man. And then we ended up with Musharraf who I thought was General Zia on speed, a kind of chest-thumping-instead-of-hand-wringing version of Zia. If Zia was all fake modesty, Musharraf has been all fake bravado. We lived and are still living the same nightmare but probably in reverse. So yes very reluctantly I have to agree with my journalist colleagues who can't do their eight hundred words without evoking Zia's ghost. The man still mocks us from his grave.
TNS: Woven around a real incident that took place near Bahawalpur twenty years ago, your novel will always be subject to who's who type questions regarding the characters. How have you prepared yourself for that onslaught of questions from the (particularly Pakistani) readers? Will you be answering them as a researcher / journalist, or would you rather invoke the 'fiction writer's immunity'?
MH: Of course they are all completely fictional. Any resemblance with any real life characters is only a sign of writer's laziness. Do you really think that such responsible people like Zia and Akhtar would behave in such a silly way? (a deep meaningful smile that develops into a big laughter)
TNS: One of the most pivotal and potent characters, Col. Shigri, appears in the narrative very briefly, through a couple of flashbacks, still it leaves a lasting impression. Can you tell us how you developed this character in your mind?
MH: I am glad you like Colonel Shigri because he is the only character who arrived fully formed. He is the kind of romantic father figure we never have as individuals or as a nation. The kind of fauji who earned the respect of our truckers and bus driver, pak fauj ko salaam type fauji. Since the readers, like his son, don't see him very often I had to build his character through fragments of gossip. He is one of those people who have power and secrets and bizarre principles and bit of a myth in their own lifetime. For example Colonel Shigri has no qualms running a torture chamber because those are his orders but he is also the most honest and upright person you are likely to come across in this book.
TNS: Can we talk a bit on your technique now? At what stage of the story development and on what criterion did you choose this distinctive structure having two voices: one for the narrator and the other for Ali, the protagonist?
MH: The only thing I had in the beginning was Ali Shigri's voice: a brash, super-confident voice that I hoped would begin to crack at some point. I wanted him to get to Zia but as an ordinary subject of a dictator that would take a long time. And I was a bit impatient. I wanted to see where Zia was a few weeks before his death, what was going through his mind. I read up stuff on him, written mostly by people who were sucking up to him during all those years and most of it was so banal that it was fascinating. I tried to spice up his life a bit. And of course they had to come together in the very end.
TNS: Switching between the two voices is so smooth that at times it acquires the clarity and agility of 'parallel cutting' in a screen play. Is it your conscious effort to maintain that swiftness or does it come naturally, thanks to your training as a screen-writer?
MH: In a hopeless kind of way, I believe that readability is very important. I have written a couple of stage plays and it's absolutely heart breaking to sit in the back row and find your audience wondering what the hell is this guy trying to say. I have written a couple of radio plays, and one and a half film script. And all those struggles might have taught me a thing or two about when to shut up.
TNS: What do you read in free time? Other than essential classics like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Balzac etc, who impressed you as a fiction writer and who is your favourite contemporary novelist?
MH: The best book I have read in any language recently is Ghulam Bagh by Mirza Athar Baig. It's so relentlessly inventive and playful. I can always read Truman Capote who is always profound and funny and anything by Asad Mohammed Khan who just knows how to spin a yarn. I haven't read Balzac yet. I guess I am saving him for my retirement.
TNS: I've kept the most irritable question for the end:
Debut novels are notorious for being autobiographical. To what extent would you take the blame for being Ali Shigri yourself?
MH: I wish I was a bit more like Shigri. He can do stuff with swords and guns and planes which I can't do. My only adventures are usually about getting a paragraph right. I think the only real similarity would be our shared cravings for Gold Leafs.
TNS: And finally, will you please tell us something about your next literary venture?
MH: I am scribbling away lazily about a mother and son story, a very quiet, very straight, very civilian love story with death and sex as its main themes. I was hoping it would be more about sex and survival but it's turning out to be more about decay and death. But it's hardly a venture yet, just some notes and some curiosity about where it might lead.
*courtesy : thenews *
Re: Interviews & Reflections
An evening with Mohsin Hamid
IN late April, Mohsin Hamid’s brilliant sophomore novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist was the object of regard at the Washington DC bookstore Politics and Prose.
Some 300 booklovers — at least a quarter of them of South Asian origin — crowded the bookshop, most with a copy of the novel in hand to get it autographed by the author.
This was Hamid’s 12th stop on an ongoing hectic book tour that made him criss-cross the entire American continent, from sea to shining sea, perhaps, with not enough sleep in between. The atmosphere in the bookshop, with overflowing admirers, reminded me of the hilarious Dylan Thomas poem ‘A visit to America’, which reads in part:
" Across the United States of America
From New York to California
And back glazed again
For many months of the year
There streams and sings for its heady supper
A dazed and prejudiced procession of foreign lecturers
Scholars, sociologists, economists, writers
Authorities on this and that
And, even in theory on the United States of America …
The proceedings began with Carla Cohen, co-owner of the popular bookshop, introducing Hamid in glowing terms. She called the novel very well-written and “haunting”. Our novelist then started his presentation by reading an excerpt from his first novel Moth Smoke, which he called a mirror image of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. He followed this by reading three excerpts from his latest work, interspersed with provocative comments. "
Listening to him, one could not help being impressed by this Pakistani prodigy. Not only is his writing imbued with a sophistication and maturity of a great talent but he also speaks with an equally canny intelligence and command of nuance.
Hamid explained that his new work was not a traditional, one dimensional immigrant’s novel but an emigrant’s novel, where his protagonist Changez comes to America, falls in love and then gets disillusioned after 9/11, before returning to Lahore, his hometown. But more on this later.
Hamid went on to elucidate that although his novel was a slim one, it took seven drafts and seven years to complete. No wonder he felt that this long gestation period was like giving birth to a pearl. It kind of reminded me of Bharati Mukherjee’s comment from one of her novels that she is “really incubating an enormous diamond.”
The reason it took so long to write this novel, he said, was his search for the precise voice for the single-person narration of his protagonist. After several drafts, he decided on a voice that was “courtly and menacing, a vaguely anachronistic voice rooted in the Anglo-Indian heritage of elite Pakistani schools and suggestive of an older system of values and of an abiding historical pride.”
As a result, when he finished the sixth draft in early 2006, Simon Prosser at Hamish Hamilton in UK bought it right away. Later, he worked with him and another agent, who bought it for Harcourt in America, followed by a seventh revision.
This detailed explanation of the process made clear as to how much effort, time, money and teamwork go into the making of a marketable work of fiction in the West.
Next, Hamid dealt with the question of how politicians or even journalists invariably simplify complex issues. For example, labels like “Axis of evil” or “Islamo-fascism” are not only reductive, but they are absurd. The conflict between the East and the West, he said, was the result of mutual ignorance and suspicion. The crucial issue was “an empathy deficit” between the two sides.
It is this theme of suspicion between the two worlds that Hamid says he played upon in his novel. You have a bearded Muslim man, Changez, who like a chameleon is constantly changing his moods. He tells his life story to a mysterious American stranger who is, perhaps, armed and may even be an assassin. At one point, he says:
“I hope you will not mind my saying so, but the frequency and purposefulness with which you glance about brings to mind the behaviour of an animal that has ventured too far from its lair and is now in unfamiliar surroundings, uncertain whether it is predator or prey!”
In my view, this paradox of who is the predator and who is the prey is the central pivot of Hamid’s novel on which he works his magic, subtly. Those of us who have read Orhan Pamuk’s Snow will recall a similar encounter between a Turkish fundamentalist and a liberal professor in a café in Kars.
In the end the fundamentalist murders the professor. On the other hand, most readers are aware how meetings with fundamentalists in Karachi cafes resulted in the execution/murder of an American journalist, Daniel Pearl.
Mohsin Hamid talked for about 20 minutes before inviting questions from the audience.
The first question I asked him about his novel was whether he would agree that his characters of Erica and Chris were more allegorical than real persons because they were very thinly drawn sketches. Besides, Changez’s capricious love for America mirrored his affair with Erica. In fact at a crucial juncture in the novel, both America and Erica are shown to suffer from dangerous nostalgia. Was it a coincidence that the name ‘Erica’ rhymed with America or that Erica’s dead former lover Chris appeared to be a metaphor for Christianity?
Hamid gave a short, non-committal reply. He said that his novel was not an allegory and that it was a love story, both with America and a woman by the name of Erica. I don’t blame him for saying so since the other interpretation would transform the novel into a didactic work and move the narrative from drama to an essay.
My second question to Hamid was regarding his classification of The Reluctant Fundamentalist as an emigrant’s not an immigrant’s novel. I asked if the real reason for Changez’s departure from America was not the aftermath of 9/11 alone, but as he himself put it in the novel, “I was, in four and half years never an American.”
As we know from the novel, Changez had no mainstream friends in America. The only two friends he had were presumably an African-American and a gay person. Further, Changez detested the fellow employees at his firm who invariably acted as the world’s “ruling class”.
Under these circumstances, was it not his epiphany, while in Chile, that he was a “modern-day janissary” an over-reaction born of his own insecurities, I asked.
Hamid disagreed with the thrust of my question and explained how many Pakistanis of his generation who had lived in New York for less than 10 years got truly disgusted with the treatment of Muslims after 9/11 and therefore quit. Immigrants living in America for over 10 years did stay on, he said.
I agreed with Hamid that no doubt some Muslims were singled out and harshly discriminated against prompting even Philip Roth to write a novel titled Plot Against America but hopefully the immediate American paranoia to the 9/11 attacks would be only a passing phase in US political history. As we have seen, after the recent 2006 general elections, the bogus xenophobia orchestrated by the Cheney-Bush policies was already unravelling. Today, all Americans have begun to suffer from 9/11 fatigue.
Having lived in the USA for 30 years, I added, what I believe will endure for first-generation immigrants like Changez is the age-old question which I raised in a 1992-essay titled ‘The dilemma of becoming an American’. Can I build two landscapes in one life? Can Lahore’s Ravi ever flow into Washington’s Potomac?
We then moved on to a discussion about the intriguing ending of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. One of the great merits of Hamid’s novel, I told him, is the incredible quality of leaving space for the reader’s thoughts to echo. What makes the ending both stunning and ambiguous is the seductive trap, which he skilfully laid all along based on the reader’s own expectations and mindset. The novel thus becomes a mirror in which each reader sees his own image and prejudices. By drawing the reader into the monologue of Changez, the novel thus imparts urgency to the narrative, making it a highly entertaining work of fiction.
Courtesy : The Dawn
Re: Interviews & Reflections
Tariq Ali is a noted writer and he has several books to his credit.
His interview on bbc.
Re: Interviews & Reflections
Part 2