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Book Reviews

A Rainbow Feast: New Asian Short Stories, edited and introduced by Mohammad A. Quayum. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2010. 328 pp. $18.99 (paperback).

his volume includes twenty-five previously unpublished stories by twenty-four writers of Asian descent and one Westerner now living

in Japan. Editor Mohammad A. Quayum introduces the volume and does an excellent job of explaining the history of the English-language short story in Asia as well as his rules for inclusion in this volume. Thirteen of the stories are by writers of South Asian origin (though several are now living outside the subcontinent), and some of these will be discussed below.

Quayum’s fifteen-page introduction is scholarly and thoughtful. He situates the English language’s role in the development of Asian literature, noting, of course, the British colonization of India and, later, Malaysia as well as the U.S.’s institutionalization of English education in the Philippines in 1901 and the post-World War II presence of American military personnel in the Pacific region. Quayum makes a strong (if somewhat familiar) case that, not just in Asia, but throughout the globe, English has become the “lingua franca of commerce, communication, and information technology, breaking down the traditional barriers among nations, and introducing the prospects of a new civilisational ‘meeting’ and spirit of cooperation” (11). After establishing this socio-historical context, he goes on to note that “India has contributed the most to Asian literature in English” (13) and posits that “it was not until after the Second World War that the tradition of writing short stories in English began to develop in Asian cultures or in the Asian diaspora” (15).

To showcase the vitality of the short story in Asia, Quayum first landed a publisher (Cavendish) and then, in academic fashion, issued a call for submissions. He received what he terms a nearly “overwhelming” response—“close to 140 entries”—though as many writers in the U.S. and U.K. know, those odds for acceptance (about 1 in 18) are pretty good (the typical North American literary journal, for instance, publishes perhaps 1 in 100 submissions at best). Among Quayum’s criteria were that the stories had to be “new” and that they had to be under 6,000 words. Many of the writers he included in this volume are relatively unknown, certainly in the West, in part because many have not yet published books though, as is typical for short story

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writers these days, they have published stories in small journals. While a reader in search of such prominent story writers as Jhumpa Lahiri or Hanif Kureishi will have to look elsewhere, a reader in search of good stories, regardless of the name attached to the writing, would do well to read this volume.

Several of the South Asian writers have been educated in England or the U.S., and many of the settings reflect this. The stories tend to be traditional in shape, as Quayum himself remarks, with beginnings, middles, and endings, and the stories emphasize both character development and Poe’s “single effect.” Of the thirteen stories by writers of South Asian descent, six are at least serviceable, another six are excellent, and one, by Qaisra Shahraz, perhaps the best known writer in the collection, is transcendent.

“Maya Niwas,” by Damyanti Ghosh and one of the standout stories in this collection, uses magical realism to tell the story of a dead patriarch who witnesses for decades the goings-on in his house by somehow moving from framed picture to framed picture of himself. Thanks to the story’s many fine details, including a strong opening—“I came to live in the world of picture frames nearly forty years ago, on the day of my last rites. As per Hindu custom, my son Suresh hung up a large frame on the living room wall overlooking the veranda. Those who believed me dead . . . did not know I could see and hear them as bloody well as ever” (36)—readers never for a moment doubt the man’s ability to see life unfold for his surviving relatives. At the same time, however, this seeing is double-edged: “I could not look into the frames, only out, so I could never be sure which pictures [had been hung around the house]. But this did not affect my joy in my new-found freedom. I skipped from room to room, travelling between photo frames, a solitary confinement inmate released into general prison” (37). What the narrator must finally reckon with is his own emotional impact on his loved ones, especially those he made unhappy when he was living, and who for decades try to come to terms with his legacy.

Another very fine story in the collection is “The Gourd Seller,” by Abha Iyengar. The title character cries out the qualities and benefits of his produce as he makes his way down the streets and alleys of Kanpur (“‘Green striped gourds . . . [l]ong gourds, round and smooth ones, plain ones too . . . [f]rom all parts of the world, to lighten up your summer meal, so healthy, so needed for a light recharge of batteries’”), and Reena, originally from Delhi and recently widowed, with a small child, is initially irritated, more than anything, by the man’s cries: “There was no end to his poetry on the goodness of the gourd” (89). But in time she, too, like the many disparate women of Kanpur who live along the gourd seller’s route, is won over by his earnest and valid salesmanship. Religious difference and, finally, strife provide a strong

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undercurrent in this story, when several Shia Muslims are killed by “angry Hindu mobs.” Ultimately, the story makes a subtle and well-founded plea for tolerance and good will.

“The Gambler,” by Barnali Saha, is set in the city of Chicago and features an immigrant whose American wife has recently taken their child, moved back to Connecticut to live with her parents, and filed for divorce. The day Aloke finds “a brown envelope in his mailbox . . . from the law office of Burt and Durham,” he leaves his home in a dazed state, steps onto a bus (“there were so many faces around him: poor faces, faces with gaping rictuses of malignancy and pain, hollow faces, sunken eyes”), and eventually finds himself in a remote section of the city. This atmospheric tale strongly evokes a stranger-in-a-strange-land motif and does a fine job of making the urban U.S. both frightening and expressionistic: “[H]e found himself standing at a strange and impoverished location with dishevelled structures around him; there were no street sign [sic] displayed anywhere. A couple of discount liquor and tobacco stores, several adult book stores were standing like haunted houses in the middle of the dirty road. Aloke noticed a bar along a narrow alley squeezed between old buildings” (262).

The most splendid story in the collection, “The Zemindar’s Wife,” is strongly reminiscent both of Chekhov, in its evocation of village life (e.g., “The Peasants”), and of Homer in its handling of the parity that must be established in a successful marriage between strong personalities. The title character herself is a figure of classic beauty: “Heads turned and eyes were riveted on Noor as she stepped into the courtyard from under the shade of the veranda. A hushed silence fell. Even the birds seemed to have stopped singing, entranced by her appearance. Noor walked gracefully to her seat, a shadow of a smile caressing her full, luscious, glossy lips; a tall, elegant, beautiful woman haughtily aware of the spell she had cast over her audience” (269). The reaction of others to a character’s physical virtues is of course a standard trope in Homer, and the quick but harsh note that “haughtily” implies is soon enough replaced for the villagers by a sincere warmth and an even deeper reverence for the Zemindar’s wife. Qaisra Shahraz is in full command of subject and technique, and it will spoil nothing to note that this story has an ending both deeply moving and joyous.

Mohammad A. Quayum has succeeded in compiling a strong assortment of short stories. There is enough variety and excellent writing in this volume to please anyone in search of new voices and fine storytelling.

Michael W. Cox University of Pittsburgh–Johnstown

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Saborna Roychowdhury. The Distance. Kolkata: Monfakira, 2009. 236 pp. $10.50 (paperback).

aborna Roychowdhury addresses the perennial questions facing contemporary Indian women in her first novel, The Distance, and

offers some surprising answers. Her protagonist, Mini, ponders duty and tradition versus personal ambition, arranged marriage versus a love match, and the allure of living in the West versus the familiarity of life in India. Roychowdhury offers a fresh take on these dilemmas while also underscoring the difficulty of finding any satisfactory resolution.

The Distance is narrated by Mini, a twenty-year-old college student in Calcutta. Mini’s family—in particular, her grandmother—is eager to arrange a marriage for her, but Mini has other ideas. Marriage, she has observed, leads to no great happiness. Her grandmother becomes a dour, unhappy woman and religious zealot after her husband impregnates their maid, and she leaves him and declares herself a widow rather than live with such a man. Mini’s mother, bewitched by the good looks of one prospective match, insists on marrying this impecunious man with few employment prospects; however, Mini’s father proves to be a sullen and sneering man not worthy of her affection. This marriage too becomes one constituted of duty and tradition rather than love and friendship. Despite these unfortunate examples of love and marriage within her family, Mini does fall in love with a fellow student, Amitav. He is a radical, the leader of the college’s Communist party, and a fervent speech-maker and charismatic leader of protests.

Mini is drawn to Amitav despite of, rather than because of his politics. She may not be satisfied with options afforded her by her middle-class life, but she does not fully embrace the protest lifestyle or Amitav’s politics. In an initial description of Amitav, Mini thinks: “Sometimes I wished he was more like the boys in my class who liked to watch Hindi films, worry about fashion trends, and whistle at pretty girls walking by. But Amitav had no time for women or fashion” (22). Although Amitav spends time with Mini, he shows little evidence that he sees her as his future wife. Instead, he seems to regard Mini as a challenge: how often can he goad her into breaking her parents’ and society’s rules? His greatest test is his insistence that she accompany him to a remote village to protest the cruelties of the local landlord. Mini acquiesces and enjoys the energy of the protest initially. However, when the danger of the situation becomes clear—for the landlord is not above killing those who are against him—she is eager to leave the village and return to her parents’ apartment. In what seems Amitav’s most manipulative move, he comes to her bed and makes love to her.

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His action seems less a demonstration of his feelings for Mini than an incentive for her to remain with him at the protest. The next morning one of their friends is found dead, and Mini demands that Amitav leave with her for Calcutta. Not surprisingly, he refuses, wanting to continue to fight against the landlord’s evil ways. Mini is shocked that he won’t give up his revolutionary politics for her sake and, disillusioned, she returns to Calcutta. As readers, however, we are not so surprised, as Amitav never indicated that he would abandon his principles for a middle-class marriage.

After mourning for Amitav for a year, Mini decides that she should accept an arranged marriage, naively thinking that “I needed a change in milieu, a little more freedom, and marriage was my only passport out” (98). She marries Neel, a boy from an appropriate caste and a graduate student living in Vancouver. Their marriage is happy initially, as Mini enjoys the luxuries of their apartment in Canada and the intimacies of marriage. However, she is dismayed to learn that Neel has no intention of returning to India after earning his degree, and she grows disillusioned with her acquaintances, who appear aloof and materialistic. It is only after Mini leaves India that she truly appreciates her life there. The novel concludes with Mini’s decision about her future: Will she stay with Neel in Canada and embrace a comfortable if bland middle-class existence? Or will she return to India—and possibly to Amitav—to be close to her family and her cultural roots?

The Distance offers no simple solutions to the social problems presented therein. Mini’s story demonstrates how stifling life may be for middle-class women in Calcutta. Although she and other women study for bachelor’s and master’s degrees, their education primarily serves as a tool for attracting a suitable husband, who will himself be responsible for supporting the family; it is heartbreaking to see one minor character, Radha, working in a Canadian laundry despite her master’s degree. The novel details many social problems in India—corrupt politicians, ineffective police, extreme poverty—but social action, in the form of Amitav’s speeches and marches, appear to result in danger and death for the reformers rather than any real societal change. Emigration to Western countries is rightly critiqued as a solution for a privileged few and no failsafe for personal happiness. The novel’s evocative title, broadly taken, reminds us of the space between the ideal world and grim reality.

The Distance does contain certain flaws not uncommon in a first novel. The dialogue is awkward at times, reading as exposition because of its complex sentence structure; consider Amitav’s words to Mini: “Then, placing her stylish sunglasses on the top of her head, she hastily jotted down a note and her driver passed it on to me” (199). Roychowdhury takes occasional liberties with her characters’

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personalities, most notably with Samita, Mini’s best friend at college, a chemistry major who “dreamt of becoming a researcher and finding cures for fatal diseases” (30). Five years later she is, without any explanation from the author, “Bengal’s filmy heartthrob” (199). Mini herself contains similar incongruities. For instance, she tells Radha that in India she led protests and that she misses the roil of revolutionary politics; yet in earlier pages she showed no such instigation or enthusiasm. While Mini may be subconsciously revising her past out of loneliness and boredom from her life as a Canadian housewife, the text itself simply seems contradictory, rather than demonstrating the complexities of an evolving character. Most puzzling, though, is the denouement of the novel. Mini and Amitav stumble into one last dangerous situation in the final chapter, but Roychowdhury abruptly takes us away from that shocking moment and into a rambling epilogue that divulges further improbable plot developments described in precious few sentences. The story would have been better served had these developments been described in several more chapters.

Despite these flaws, The Distance offers a thoughtful story about the plight of a young woman trying to find happiness amidst many challenges. Ultimately, this novel offers not a love triangle between Mini, Amitav, and Neel, but a love letter to India itself.

Robin Field King’s College

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Modern Poetry of Pakistan edited by Iftikhar Arif and Waqas Khwaja. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010. Pakistani Literature Series. 344 pp. $16.95 (paperback).

Contemporary American Poetry: An Anthology edited by Fakhar Zaman. Islamabad: Pakistan Academy of Letters, 2009.

he companion books or complementary volumes, whatever one may call them, Modern Poetry of Pakistan (2010) and

Contemporary American Poetry: An Anthology [Asaari Amriki Shairi] (2009) can be interpreted as a two-way intercultural journey between the poles apart, the United States of America and Pakistan. The books carry us through the postmodern trans on the powerful “wings of poesy,” making us realize that humanity’s heartthrob is accessible and translatable through the ultra-lands of our imagination. In general, the peculiar exchange through the translated and retranslated resources in these books offer what the editor Iftikhar Arif in his Preface to the Modern Poetry explains: “an appreciation of the poetic output . . . the remarkable range of poetic sentiments, thoughts, and themes” (xviii). Despite their geographical or spatial distances, the USA and Pakistan have been long-term close partners on many sensitive and sensible issues. A politician’s prerogative or a poet’s idealization, global peace is one of the basic human dreams but more so in our part of the world that is declared an “epicenter of terrorism.” Because understanding humanity other than ourselves is in itself a border-crossing phenomenon it reposes a dialogic dilemma that the American Romantic poet Robert Frost has beautifully described in his famous poem “Mending Wall”: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. . . .” That the poet’s dream to promote neighborly peace through poetic means can become a diplomatic realization and longer-lasting ex/change is a proven reality. It is perhaps with this faith that the authors and editors of Modern Poetry of Pakistan and Contemporary American Poetry from two great nations join heads and hands to share the philosophy of hearts and philology of minds of their peoples; peoples who apart from living in the newspaper clippings or media images have a genuine right to converse through the pens of poets and give voice to their reflective silences.

In our postmodern context and apart from its myriad connotative applications the prefix trans also determines our choice for transportation, transition, translation, transplantation, transfusion, transmutation, transformation to synchronize the fluidity of our linguistic journeys. It appreciates the possibility of our intercultural mergence with the need to be known to others, while to be known to others through the languages known to others becomes an art that

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requires some kind of poetic license for co-creating. It therefore generates its own grammar of clarity, its own syntactic and semantic structures. In Modern Poetry and Contemporary American Poetry, translation and retranslation of the regional or national thoughts and feelings to international ones or vice versa transform the creation into a co-creation, dispelling the locally limited identities into global citizenships beyond the rigidity of self. Oxymoronically and paradoxically, it breaks down our linguistic imprisonment by amplifying our minds and hearts, connecting us all the more as human beings. Although many translation theories are applicable to what has been attempted in these companion books, Lawrence Venuti’s criterion of the translator’s invisibility and pleasant fluency described in his The Translator’s Invisibility helps us understand the intent of the editors:

When simpatico [congeniality] is present, the translation process can be seen as a veritable recapitulation of the creative process by which the original came into existence; and when the translator is assumed to participate vicariously in the author’s thoughts and feelings, the translated text is read as a transparent expression of authorial psychology or meaning. (274)

Translations in both the books under review recapitulate the original, while the translators participate in this process to forward vicariously the psychology of semantics. Following the principle of underlying sympathy with the voices that represent peoples of the two lands, the books revitalize a readership that is replete with deeper comprehensibility. One glaring example of such transparently shared feelings can be quoted from the books’ launch at Lahore, covered by the daily Dawn in its 27 July 2011 “Metro and Central” supplement (17): “US consul swept along by Faiz’s poetry,” her eyes “brimmed with tears until she concluded” her rendering of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s famous poem “Don’t Ask My Dear the First Love Again [Mujh Say Pehli Si Mohabat Meray Mehboob Na Mang].” No doubt, this was a mind-to-mind and heart-to-heart exchange through the translated feel of the poem, a realization of the simpatico.

Apparently, the Translations Editor of Modern Poetry of Pakistan Waqas Khwaja seems consciously humble to quote Tony Barnstone in his “Introduction:” “all translation is mistranslation” (xix). He therefore strives hard throughout to render “thoughts, feelings, and emotions into recognizable shape, into legible characters, into comprehensible, communicable speech or discourse [that] lies at the heart of our experience of life” (xix). Khwaja’s efforts along with those of his teammates keep us in touch with the “fidelity” of the poems, more when the translators actually try to stay invisible. This behind the scene articulation carries the readers closer to the original. Because translation is not just about code switching from one language to the

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other but mainly about transporting and transplanting the ethos of one culture into another, this being a stereotypically open secret haunting the readers’ minds at the very outset or even before they turn the first page of the book, the translators’ job in both Modern Poetry and Contemporary American Poetry becomes very challenging. The process drastically involves the absence-presence dialectic, a highly cautious game similar to gardening; transplanting and fertilizing of a foreign tree to the local soil or of a local tree to the foreign soil. Both ways, keeping “fidelity” to originality demands tolerance along with technique from the gardener. In Modern Poetry, Khwaja and his team sow on both local and foreign soils very diligently. From Urdu, Sindhi, Pashto, Paunjabi, Baluchi, Siraiki, Gujrati, Kashmiri and other local linguistic seeds or saplings the growth appears well-seasoned at cultural and conventional levels. Poems in Modern Poetry do “come across as poems in English with a global touch and not as ‘English poems,’” because they “retain,” what Khwaja describes and then Khurram Khirram Siddiqi compiles as “the cultural flavors of the original” (xxxv).

Modern Poetry unveils multiple modalities related to the Pakistani local and regional poetics popular among its peoples. From the frankness of “nazm” or “azad nazm” to the sophistication of “ghazal,” from the rhyme and rhythm of “rubai” to the alliterative attributes of “thumri,” from the drumbeats of “qawwali” to the soothing semblance of the “sufiana kalam,” or from the meandering tones of “marsiya” to the melodious narrative of “masnavi,” the daunting experimentation in Modern Poetry highlights the class-gender-faith-ethnicity-nationality matrix around various eastern poetic techniques including “qita,” “qaul,” “doha,” or “qafia.” The translations here transmit cultural complexity that brood these diverse types, their lyrical and mystical enrichment to connect to historical grids for exceeding geographical graphs—be they Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Spanish, or South Asian in spirit and soul. Our journey from the clichéd passive eastern forms to much capitalized active western modes of expression transfers our idiomatic orientation into an occidental reality with powerful suggestion if not complete symbolism. Approximate if not appropriate the lineation, reproduction, contextualization of images through metaphors and similes, patterns of onomatopoeic and oxymoronic ideas, replication of instinctive frisson of responses, and many more ways of practicing the trans as a process of encapsulating with consistency the “unfamiliar” within the frame of “familiar” tames the strange to a more structured stance. From Ustad Daman’s typical Punjabi rendition regarding “He knows not what he must express” (64) to his challenging “My country has two Allahs” (65), from Allama Muhammad Iqbal’s “The Great Mosque of Cordoba” (3) to Munir

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Niazi’s “Love Will Not Happen Now,” from Kishwar Naheed’s “Counterclockwise” to Parvin Shakir’s “Misfit” and “Soliloquy,” or from Taos Binhali’s “Anthem” to Ata Shad’s “Laments of the Merchants of Hope” or to Hasina Gul’s “A Small Desire,” Modern Poetry blends the regional metrics with the national and international modulations to reveal a society riven by its political differences yet sharing the same concerns.

Following somewhat similar processes and procedures, Contemporary American Poetry: An Anthology or Asaari Amriki Shairi “opens as many windows on” what the Chief Editor and the Chairman of Pakistan Academy of Letters Fakhar Zaman nutshells in his Foreword, “each other’s interior space” for a “heart-to-heart conversation” (20). In its bilingually transmitted message Contemporary American Poetry complements the exchange between the peoples of Pakistan and United States to get “a whiff of . . . flavour” in “letter and spirit of the original” and therefore being able to listen to “the voice of the heart” (20). An “unusual literary enterprise,” as Dana Gioia, 2003–09 Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts at Washington, D.C., puts it, Asaari Amriki Shairi, like its companion anthology Modern Poetry, offers “a representative sampling of regional voices” from New England to the Mountain states to Southwest and Pacific Northwest (28). Not a “monologue” but a “chorus,” the anthology captures the “multicultural nature” of “voices singing in harmony, in counterpoint, and even occasionally in dissonance” (28). A mixture of old and new, it lets the readers wonder upon the historical enigma that Kevin Prufer, the Editor, reechoes so pertinently: “What is American about American poetry?” (30), something that Khurram Khirram Siddiqui then tries to demonstrate through the variety compiled by him in Asaari Amriki Shairi.

With an ever-ready historical backdrop of the shining stars of American poetic expression, its mythical and legendary lyricism, its chants, songs and incantations represented by the Mexican tribes or the native Pocahontas groups, by the Puritan European immigrants or the Catholic Latin settlers, or by the later poets like Anne Bradstreet (1612–72), Edward Taylor (1644–1727), Phillis Wheatley (1753–84), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), Walt Whitman (1819–92), Emily Dickinson (1810–50), Ezra Pound (1855–1972), Robert Frost (1874–1963), Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), Langston Hughes (1902–67), Robert Lowell (1917–77), Sylvia Plath (1932–63), or by even the later experimentalists like “Beat,” “Black Mountain,” “Nuyorican,” or other multiethnic groups and individuals—Nikki Giovani, Simon Ortiz, Amiri Baraka or Maya Angelou, and many others—Asaari Amriki Shairi reveals a constant humanity in transition, its tradition and promise that floats with radiance and malevolence. That American poetry is fundamentally about exploring the cosmic as well as human

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heartbeat is what makes it “inclusive” and “all-embracing” for its “ever-evolving population” (30). The anthology under review represents most of the living poets from 1946 to 1996, focusing more on the “unrhymed, unmetered . . . [and] lyrical free-verse”; the “Youth-oriented spoken word” that co-exists with the traditional rhymed forms (32). It is thus successful in offering a “vast landscape of competing, coexisting styles” (32) that are bound to be the byproduct of an academic filament. Thirty out of the represented thirty-five poets hold a university teaching background and are equally adept in websiting and emailing that are the newer or emerging globalized forms of literary cafés or coffeehouses.

Asaari Amriki Shairi focuses on variety and diversity to “suggest a wide range of aesthetic styles and concerns” (34). It explores and expresses the old human experience to what Ezra Pound proclaims, “make it new” and therefore take pride in being a human being. From Thomas James’ “Wajuhat (Reasons)” to Li-Young Lee’s “Takia (Pillow), Jane Kenyon’s “Aa Janey do Shaam Ko (Let Evening Come) to Terrance Hayes’ “Udaas Terrance (The Blue Terrance), Lynn Emanuel’s “Tadfeen (The Burial)” to D. A. Powell’s “Sunno Maan (listen mother, he punched the air),” Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Siaah Haans (Black Swan) to Frantz Wright’s “Aik Ghair-Aabaad Farmhouse key Khiyalaat (Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse) or to Cathy Song’s “Jhal Pakhiaan (Waterwings), the colloquial in this collection mixes with the conventional. The colloquial-conventional blend in poetry compiled here impresses what H. L. Hix rephrases in Whitmanisque style, “Yeh mujh mein hey keh ik kehkashaan ho jaoon / ya fern key podey ki aik paati (I have it in me to be a galaxy / Or one leaf on the frond of a fern) (401–02) or what Khaled Mattawa resounds in Langston Hughes’ tonality, “Mere hont ghulaamon key aik qafiley key saath aaey / Jin ka taaluq Azeem Sanussi sey tha (My lips came with a caravan of slaves / That belonged to the Grand Sanussi) (459–60). Overall, the poetry in Asaari Amriki Shairi is sung with the objective re-expressed poetically by Yusef Komunyakaa in his poem “Aafriat ka Bhais Badalna (Camouflaging the Chimera): “Baanson ko galey laga kar / Naddee kinarey uthti parvai mein hum ney taik laggai / Bhooton key saath aahista aahista ghisattey rahey (We hugged bamboo & leaned / against a breeze off the river, / slow-dragging with ghosts (127–28).

In gist, Asaari Amriki Shairi informs us about our historical journeys through the American poetic sensibility and traces its chameleonic chimera and its slow-dragging evolutionary process by understanding its ghostly and ghastly invisibilities, its deeper undercurrents that revive its primeval self for rejuvenating it anew. It is in its secret prerogative to hug the bamboos and lean against the slowly dragging ghosts of evolvement that the fundamental question has been raised again: “What is American

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about American poetry?” The ghosts of growing humanity allow us to look into who we are as humans and who we need to be, while America and Americans take pride in exploring and learning humanity in all its variation! Ever since Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and his “Passage to India,” the contemporary poets included in Asaari Amriki Shairi exhibit this spirit of reaching out the universe beyond; humanity that is not fixed to the limits of self but that exists in a trans and connects people-to-people through multicultural heartthrobs. Despite the limit of space, page, time and talent, the poems included in Asaari Amriki Shairi offer a model for diverse representational modes through literary expression. The readers get an idea about America and its evolving identity around its ages-old myths of melting-pot or mixed-salad. It introduces in many ways what Senator William J. Fulbright’s describes as “more and more compassion into the world affairs.”

Like any other project of its size and standard, one may always look for an ideally better presentation when it comes to critically analyzing the pros and cons of the companion volumes Modern Poetry and Contemporary American Poetry. Besides all the great impact that these volumes make, some gaps and shortcomings are visible and can be reviewed and remedied in the next editions. Contemporary American Poetry has a bilingual format, and one imagines if Modern Poetry could also accommodate such a multilingual spirit by offering the poetic versions in their original languages. That would have helped easy comparison. But then the placement of English and Urdu scripts side by side in Contemporary American Poetry (while English follows a left to right and Urdu right to left transcript) gives a jumbled effect, posing problems for a conventional reader of these languages. The editors might look into reformatting it differently for the readers’ convenience. Also the paper quality and production of Modern Poetry appears better than that of Contemporary American Poetry. Overall, the volumes manifest an investment of real hard work on the part of editors and proofers, for the readers may not find at all or very small-scale typos and other minor publication pitfalls.

From publication to publicizing and then to the current needs of going back into historical realities, the readers realize that the poets can still function as ambassadors of peace. Travelling across the politics of printing we may conclude that it is time now to take some more practical steps, that this effort in trans can become more productive when it continues to be known from those who know to those who do not. Some recommendations follow:

1. Embassies of both the countries can help introduce these books to the academic and cultural institutions, while the cultural attachés of the two countries may publicize significance of these complementary volumes to the higher education commissions and the local libraries.

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2. Professors of humanities and liberal arts may use materials from these books as textbooks for their classrooms, in particular for American Studies and South Asian or Pakistan Studies courses.

3. Professors and educationists can develop cultural and literary concordance to trace the thematic unity of this joint project when it comes to explore universal human values.

To wrap up, one may wait for and expect for more transparently shared feelings that sweep along poetry and poetic forms so that our eyes also brim with tears for humanity and let happen with “simpatico”—a mind-to-mind and heart-to-heart exchange.

Waseem Anwar Forman Christian College University

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Fawzia Afzal Khan. Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2010. 145 pp.

n a conversation that I had with Professor P. S. Chauhan via e-mail, he pointed out that in the recent surge in American autobiography the

urge to assert and celebrate the self is an inevitable response to the gradual obliteration of the self by the flattening forces of contemporary culture of the megalopolis. In that surge, Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s tightly woven, well-crafted, poetically exuberant, intellectually incisive memoir, Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style, is a delight to read. I particularly enjoyed reading Afzal-Khan’s memoir because the narrator’s location could have engendered the predicament of perceiving history and social and cultural praxes with an ahistorical cosmopolitanism, but the narrator steers clear of that danger by weaving the fragments of her memory to reconstruct history. In narratives inflected by feminism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism, Fawzia Afzal Khan, in her memoir, is increasingly concerned with the ideology of narrative texts. By deploying poststructuralist methodology in her works, Afzal-Khan attempts to relate form or technique to issues of social, cultural, and political ideology.

Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style veers away from the

formalism of narratology by serving certain interests and undermining others, expressing certain values and negating others, reconstructing certain power relations and challenging others. I borrow Susan Sniader Lancer’s notion of both narrative structures and women’s writing being constituted by the variables of race, gender, sexuality, education, marital status, social class, and nationality which generate complex conventions and relations of power. (Richter 184)

This complexity of identities challenges stereotypes, alliances, and biases generated by hegemonic discourse. The narrative voice in Afzal-Khan’s memoir engages questions of authority through employing the autodiegetic “I” to construct a credible voice and to mediate the voices of the other characters. This strategy enables the author to use narrative situations as textual mediums through which her own voice is channeled. Interestingly, Afzal-Khan combines the autodiegetic “I” with the authorial voice to transgress the conventional construction of the feminine. Within a narrative framework created by the interwovenness of postcolonialism and poststructuralism, the extension of Suleri Goodyear’s fictional authority to nonfictional referents enables her to make fruitful incursions into a culture’s political, social,

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literary, and intellectual paradigms. Afzal-Khan memoir sufficiently demonstrates that even the most general elements of narration are invested in a social and cultural ideology in which the narrating “I” is not separated from the female body, but, on the contrary, is gender specific.

For example, Afzal-Khan in her memoir, Lahore with Love, engages in more politically astute writing in order to underwrite the liaison of postcolonial and woman as the valorization of oppression, “elevating the racially female voice into a metaphor for ‘the good’” (Suleri 759). Afzal-Khan clearly rejects the traditional categories of narrator and character, enunciating subject and a subject of the statement, the author and the protagonist. Afzal-Khan creates the inevitable multiplicity of subject-positions for the purpose of liberating herself from colonial and neo-colonial mediations of female identity, which threaten to manipulate her subjectivity by a complex of signs and practices. She delightfully shares with the reader that

My place is now also a place where I manipulate my Muslim womanhood to make my way up the U.S. academic ladder, reporting to increased acclaim the dire situation of Muslim women of Pakistan. My place is now a paradox of no-place, my home is now abroad, I have become exotic to myself, a stranger to my own (s)kin. (10)

In her work, Afzal-Khan endeavors to reinterpret the repressive frameworks that essentialize the identities of former colonial female subjects by negotiating the dominant discourse from within in order to construct their subjectivity. She engages in reflective action to examine her own locations of privilege. Afzal-Khan tries to self-actualize and intervene in patriarchal national history by seeking in the interaction of modernity and communal memory not a vertical relationship producing totalized notions of nation, gender, class, race, ethnicity but intersectionalities between different cultural times, spaces, and ways of knowing the self in relation to the family, society, and the cosmos. She speaks from her location about the political realities that have woven the web of social relations she inhabits or has inhabited. Afzal-Khan writes

I have traveled to seek the “different,” “the exotic,” that always elusive space of greatness, of liberation, which is also the space of untruth, of deception. I have traveled far and wide, so wide as to put millions of miles and several continents between my mother country and myself. What has sustained me, kept me grounded through all the flying about I’ve done in the past three decades, has been the memories. (8)

Like feminist scholars Hazel Carby, Valeri Smith, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Barbara Smith, Afzal-Khan considers how race,

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nationality, class, religion, and gender intersect in the social construction of subjectivity. Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s work gives the clarion call for an increasingly materially grounded, historically aware, and yet also theoretically sophisticated feminism. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty points out, Western feminists portray themselves as “educated, modern, as having control over their own bodies and ‘sexualities,’ and the freedom to make their own decisions” (200). Post-independence subcontinental literature seems to ignore the “epistemic violence” involved in forging the postcolonial subject, in particular the female postcolonial subject (Spivak 234). The vision circulated by this literature creates the perception of an “authentic” consciousness. The narrator of Lahore With Love, who is well educated, articulate, intellectually perceptive, upwardly mobile, disrupts this essentializing monolithic discourse. Her position makes the boundaries of cultural identity and linguistic identity permeable, engendering the creation of a counter-culture that is not always explicable in terms of an allegory of otherness (Goodyear 4). This effect is achieved by the perception of the narrative as a site where multiple discourses intersperse with one another to create a polyvalent space. It is in this space that the material history of subject-constitution can be read via and in opposition to hegemonic structures.

The women who play significant roles in Afzal-Khan’s narrative— Sam, Haji, aka Shelley, Amena, aka Hayley, Saira, Honey, Madina— have material existences. These women are portrayed as intelligent and articulate persons whose subjectivity cannot be split into simplistic binaries: literate-illiterate, urban-rural, affluent-impoverished, repressed-emancipated, domestic-professional. Afzal-Khan’s women characters do not fit the mold of the gendered subaltern in the “third-world.” Generic constructions of the “third-world woman” create an essentialist entity, whose unprivileged position of playing second fiddle to men in all situations imposes restrictions on her social, political, cultural, and intellectual mobility. The rabidity of this discourse further distorts political and social systems by minimizing the threat of cultural difference posed to the normative center. Such a discourse constructs paradigms that allow the compartmentalization of the “third-world.” The narrator’s recounting of political and social events establishes this discourse and the subjectivities it shapes as slippery and liable to change as the frameworks of their possibility also change. Afzal-Khan foregrounds the subject constitution of the women in her narrative as “distinct actualities” that avert the debilitating generic construction of “third-world” women. This female subject is not a monolithic “Other,” but a heterogeneous figure whose richness and complexity cannot be compressed into pigeonholes that are created either by precolonial indigenous discourse or neo-orientalist strategies.

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The narrator’s sahelis are vivacious, exuberant, sensual, remarkable young women eager to plunge into life. Unwittingly, their curiosity, infatuation with the grandiosity and loftiness of theater and literature, their unsure and tentative baby steps into the mysterious realm of sexual intimacy, their implicit and explicit advocacy of a space in which women could pave their own paths makes them anathema to the rigidly patriarchal, brutally masculine and militaristic culture of Pakistan. Afzal-Khan’s sahelis are blossoming young women who have the chutzpah to make strategic life choices regarding education, livelihood, marriage, childbirth, sexuality, etc., which are critical for people to lead the sort of lives they want to lead and constitute life’s defining parameters. But to their chagrin they find themselves constrained by the normative structures through which Pakistani society creates gender roles. Afzal-Khan mourns the erasure of selfhood that some of her friends experienced: “Sometimes I wonder who it is of us all who succumbed to the dizzying pull of that spiral into the abyss of a self that is permanently dis-eases in the otherness of outsiderdom” (144).

The increasing gender violence in Pakistan is replete with instances of daughters being iconicized as repositories of familial honor making it obligatory for the patriarch of the household to prevent that honor from being besmirched, even if that means ruthlessly murdering the daughter who has the “audacity” to choose her own partner; there are instances of politically empowered women being culturally disempowered and made to faithfully play the compliant wife who uncomplainingly bears the pain of her husband’s many infidelities; there are other instances of ambitious and motivated young women who are reduced to intellectual penury by being made to take the back seat in deference to their husband’s managerial decisions; the reduction of the victim of rape to a wily seductress by Zia’s infamous Hudood Ordinance of 1979; the culpable objectification of women and the erosion of their selfhood legitimized by the Hudood Ordinance; the negation of a woman’s powers of reason and intellect by the discrediting of her testimony in a court of law; there is an instance of a female vigilante group in Pakistan that makes a facile attempt to reconstruct historical and cultural discourses in order to inspire the kind of cultural nationalism that fundamentalist politics requires. This organization advocates the creation of a homogeneous culture devoid of the freedoms that the women of the subcontinent have traditionally enjoyed. Their draconian methods to enforce purdah, reinforce a patriarchal structure in which an unaccompanied woman is rendered vulnerable, and curtail the mobility of the technology savvy youth end up reinforcing the already well-entrenched hierarchy. To her credit,

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Afzal-Khan does not conflate Islamic epistemology with cultural praxes in Pakistan.

The narrator’s politically and culturally constructed representation of her existence is manifested in her rendition of the coming of age of Pakistan. The indigenous elite of the Indian subcontinent engendered a nationalistic discourse which repositioned the postcolonial subject so that nation and nationalism became key concepts. The civil war in 1971 saw a further division of Pakistan and the creation of another geographical space: Bangladesh. Afzal-Khan mourns the terror spawned by that war in which rape was a weapon deployed to humiliate and degrade the “insurgent” Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan by the swashbuckling military of West Pakistan. After the gruesome partition of India in 1947, the establishment of Bangladesh as a nation-state caused another indeterminacy in the determinant concept of “nation.” The aftermath of 1971 was a period of political instability in Pakistan. The country witnessed a series of coup d’états, which were orchestrated by the army in order to install military dictatorships. The ardent nationalism of that era elicited the cohesive structure of an entrenched and centralized nation-state. Afzal-Khan is aware that the rhetoric of nationalism deployed to create a neat homogeneity can engender the politicization of identity in the form of fundamentalism, xenophobia, and a fanatical espousal of tradition. She observes that Pakistan is a paradox: “A place where the spaces I know most intimately are more secular than their counterparts in that paean to secularism, the US of A. And yet, a place where fanatical extremism, intolerance, and xenophobia have deep roots, sometimes pushing their way aboveground in the lease expected of spaces” (8). Afzal-Khan seems to resolve the ambivalence created by this political kaleidoscope, a space that slides geographically, linguistically, and ideologically by characterizing the sovereign subject as decentered. Afzal-Khan concludes that unlike her, her sahelis,

never had to contend with the ever-multiplying fissures of a selfhood fractured into so many roles, performances of identity I am doomed to rehearse and repeat ad nauseum as I shuttle back and forth, back and forth between here and there, America and Pakistan, my life as an academic, a scholar, a part girl, a mother, a daughter, a wife, a friend, a lover, an actorsingerpoetactivistmemoirist. (144–45)

I was raised in a secular Muslim home in we were encouraged to speak of the “liberation of women” and of a culturally syncretic society. I was taught that Islam provided women with social, political, and economic rights, however invisible those rights were in our society. It was instilled in me that Islam gave women property rights, the right to interrogate totalizing social and cultural institutions, the right to hold political office, the right to assert their agency in matters of social and political import, and the right to lead a dignified existence in which

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they could voice their opinions and desires. I was also educated in a Catholic school run by Irish missionaries, where my sahelis and I took especial delight in the innocuous trespasses of well-bred Convent girls. Forbidden fruit is especially delectable in a convent setting! I remember being blissfully unaware of the social injustices, political disenfranchisement, and economic inequities, and like Afzal-Khan and her sahelis, “. . . waiting for the bogeyman of nightmares, to snatch us and throw us into the vortex of life’s complexities” (144). But I have learned that a lot of the time cultural praxes exist independently of religious epistemologies; I have witnessed the militarization of the sociocultural fabric of Kashmir; I watch with remorse the clamping down of intellectual freedoms in Kashmir and the growing influence of fanatical elements in that polity; I am saddened by the shutting down of dissenting voices; I mourn the erosion of women’s activism in Kashmir by the reduction of their identities to grieving mother, martyr’s mother, or rape victim; I grieve the relegation of sane voices in civil society to the background; I am pained by the scathed psyches of women suffering psychosomatic illness in conflict zones. I, too, shuttle back and forth between America and Kashmir, my life as an academic, a scholar, a mother, a daughter, a wife, a friend, a writeractivistpublicspeaker. Like Afzal-Khan, I ask myself, “Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?” (145).

Nyla Ali Khan University of Oklahoma

Works Cited Goodyear, Suleri. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: U of Chicago P,

1992. Print. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and

Colonial Discourses.” Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Print.

Richter, David H. “Toward a Feminist Poetics of Narrative Voice.” Narrative/Theory. New York: Longman, 1996. Print.

Spivak, Gayatri. Outside in the Teaching Machine. London: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Suleri, Sara. “Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition.” Critical Inquiry 18.4 (1992): 756–69. Print.

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South Asian Review, Vol. 32, No. 3, 2011

Mulk Raj Anand. Conversations in Bloomsbury. New revised edition edited by Saros Cowasjee. New Delhi: Vision Books, 2011. 192 pp. 395 Rs.

ulk Raj Anand’s immensely complex Conversations in Bloomsbury charts the author’s journey through Bloomsbury as

“a naïve poet – just arrived from India.” (24) Written two decades later, however, the book is far from ingenuous. Formally interesting,1 each “conversation” results from an introduction, or an accidental meeting at a party, or at the Hogarth Press where Anand worked, so that ultimately Anand talks to many of the literati of Bloomsbury, including T. S. Eliot, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, C. E. M. Joad, Clive Bell, Aldous Huxley, and D. H. Lawrence. In the process Anand not only gains legitimacy by being acquainted with such eminent figures, but also establishes credibility in himself as someone worthy of their company. This new, multi-layered edition of the text, edited by Saros Cowasjee, revises the versions existing in print, correcting their errors, and has an introduction that tells the text’s publication history. Indeed, as Cowasjee has demonstrated, the earliest edition of the text contained a remarkable number of errors, many of which, to his surprise, remained uncorrected in the earliest two editions. The first edition came about on Cowasjee’s instigation when he offered Private Life of an Indian Prince to Bodley Head, and James Michie asked whether Anand had other texts to offer. Cowasjee told Michie about Anand’s twenty-year stay in Britain, and they agreed that his reminiscences would “be something unique for no other Indian had known such a galaxy of British writers” (10). Indeed Anand’s stay in London followed closely on Forster’s A Passage to India and took place when few Indians went to England. But in spite of Forster’s novel the English understood very little about the effects of colonization on India, or about Gandhi’s campaign for Indian Independence, for which Anand went to jail.

Anand wrote his reminiscences, but Cowasjee was reluctant to take them to Bodley Head because of the many errors, but also because he felt that it would be unappealing to British readers in that

there were passages in the book in which the narrator, portraying himself as a gauche Punjabi lad, not only holds his own but drives his points home much to the discomfort of those regarded in England as his intellectual superiors. The author’s admissions such as, ‘I had come to learn from, not to teach Eliot’ did little to allay the reader’s apprehensions when in the very next line he could speak of his disillusionment with Europe and his irrepressible urge ‘to show the concave mirror to the Western intellectuals, however eminent they may be.’ (10–11)

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Indeed, the discomfort Cowasjee expresses here is the same tension that Anand himself articulates and dramatizes throughout the Conversations. And as such, K. D. Verma’s comment on the dust jacket, that the text “is about a colonial’s relentless struggle to decolonize himself” represents the journey that Anand takes in struggling to overcome his overwhelming sense of inferiority, in the earliest Conversations, to find the confidence to speak to Eliot, Bell, and others and correct some of their misunderstandings about India, and to assert his own and India’s dignity

The earliest edition of the Conversations was rejected by Bodley Head but was published in India in 1981, with the errors, and then again in England in 1995, again unedited. The new edition (2011) has been substantially corrected by Cowasjee and has his introduction in which he not only tells the publication history but also explains the text’s significance in British and Indian letters. This new edition also has the preface that Anand wrote for the 1995 edition, in which he looks back on the writing of the book, which he describes as the “apperceptions of a brash young Indian writer,” which he hopes will “illumine that present-day intelligentsia” and afford them a view of “an earlier generation, when most of the upper British intellectuals remained above the battle” for Indian self-determination. (22)

So in 1995 Anand assumed a readership that would be more educated about India’s predicament under British imperial rule and sympathetic to India’s concerns during the 1920s, unlike the eminent people with whom Anand conversed between 1925 and 1945. This is only one of the many layers of complexity, however, since the dialogic form, as K. D. Verma comments, allows for the depiction of

a young Indian intellectual who is anxiously probing Western intellectual thought, and a keen, quick and sensitive inquiring mind who in his search for truth attempts to relate the two traditions; his own that he thinks he knows enough about, and the other with which he is brought into contact. (Verma 106)

The poignancy of Anand’s sense of inferiority to these eminent English writers and thinkers results from his estimation of their exposure to English culture and the metropolis, their seniority, and Anand’s origin in a culture that emphasized “deeply conditioned respect for the elders“ (35). But of course as a colonial subject he interiorizes the English belief in their own superiority when he finds himself as an Indian in a social milieu which Indians had not penetrated, even though his politics in Gandhi’s movement leads him to think otherwise.

His admiration for T. S. Eliot falters when he hears Eliot making pronouncements like: “’Gandhi seems to be an anarchist. Sometimes, I feel that Indians should pursue their culture and leave government to the British empiricists.’”(37) Early in the text Anand stifles his

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objections, and we read, “I wanted to correct Mr. Eliot for mispronouncing Mohammad. The thwartings which had made me a rebel at home throbbed in my head” (38). In other conversations, we read that when he is excited his “voice went out of [his] control” (36). He blushes to remember that he hoped to emulate Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and explains, “Joyce not only let us into his own dream world, but more. How shall I put it? I hate the phrase—into a “universal consciousness” (28). He then appropriates Joyce’s words, announcing, “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”’ (28). As a bildungsroman, Portrait thus provides an additional narrative framework, which nevertheless banishes the authorial retrospection that might provide an interpretation of the events while telling them; unlike Joyce’s narrator, Anand’s does not infuse the telling with irony. This allows a strong degree of sympathy for the young Indian poet and aligns our sympathy with the passion behind Anand’s belief in the Indian cause:

I accepted that most Englishmen believed in the Pax Britannica. Many of them had not been East of the Suez. And their lives were quite different. These intelligent men and women were perhaps allergic to Gandhi, because he only wore a loin-cloth. But they were far more liberal and broad-minded than the white Sahibs in India. (30)

This is only part of the multiplicity of perspectives that Conversations contains, or as Verma puts it,

a multiplicity of divergent voices, some even jarring and cacophonous like Blake’s warring factions, but nevertheless they are held together as a unified order by the controlling vision of the fictional persona of Anand. . . . The various dialogues are carefully structured dramatizations of some of the major ideological issues. (Verma 106)

As such, then, Conversations is simultaneously reminiscence, history of ideas, a representation of the discourse about art and philosophy as it would have taken place among the Bloomsbury circle, and a depiction of the speech and personalities of the famous Bloomsbury figures.

Anand and his anarchist friend Nikhil have a clearly defined sense of the purpose behind Indian Independence and in conversations in which they encounter patronizing comments from Eliot, Bonamy Dobree, and perhaps at the furthest extreme Clive Bell, Anand, in particular, develops the ability to speak back, however tentatively. Although awestruck at Eliot’s poetic sensibility and his forbidding demeanor, Anand challenges Eliot’s dismissal of the poet Iqbal, a profound influence on Anand. Perceiving that Eliot is severe because of a depth of feeling, Anand realizes that a “harsh mask” “hid a kind of

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humanity which he was too intellectually proud to show to people.” (151) Anand feels pity for the poet’s personal difficulties, and to small degrees asserts his own viewpoint. Eliot is the touchstone, in many ways, for Anand’s intellectual relationship with the Bloomsbury group, and in the last conversations we sees his acceptance of modernist thought when he fuses those ideas with Indian culture:

I was reacting against Rabindranath Tagore’s insistence on harmony in literature in some of his lectures, and I was confirming my own view of synaesthesia, in some of his own poems, where feelings and moods crossed over, from structure into lyricism, and form broke down. (175)

In what might amount to an explanation for the unusual narrative of the Conversations, Anand posits, “I wanted to transcend time and space by making the memory into duration through the imagination” (176). In the last scene of the text Anand watches an Indian dancer alongside Arthur Waley, Beryl De Zoete, and Maynard Keynes in a completion of this merging of his two worlds in the ecstasy of the dance. This fusion of worlds fuses his Indian culture with the modernist influences he has found in London.

Ann Rea University of Pittsburgh–Johnstown

Note 1. K. D. Verma notes the structural similarities between Anand’s

Conversations and its precursors in the dialogic form, particularly Plato’s Dialogues and “possibly” Hume’s Dialogues. See Verma’s “Ideological Confrontation and Synthesis in Mulk Raj Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury” in The Indian Imagination: Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English.

Work Cited Verma, K. D. “Ideological Confrontation and Synthesis in Mulk Raj Anand’s

Conversations in Bloomsbury.” The Indian Imagination: Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. 105–24. Print.

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South Asian Review, Vol. 32, No. 3, 2011

Daniyal Mueenuddin. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. W. W Norton. 256 pp. $23.95 (hardback). $13.95 (paperback).

aniyal Mueenuddin published his debut short story collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, at an auspicious time: the short

story cycle is enjoying resurgence. Within the last ten years, cycles have won The Story Prize, a couple of Pulitzer Prizes, the PEN Hemingway, and story collection awards (such as the Flannery O’Conner Prize), and have been, as Mueenuddin’s collection is, National Book Award Finalists. The new popularity of the form might have a bit to do with the way that the cycle straddles the line between a novel and a short story: a collection gives us a whole, often a region and its inhabitants, in a collage of easily digestible parts. For many reviewers of Mueenuddin’s collection, his “collage” becomes the voice of Pakistan entire, as Sohomjit Ray points out in his review of In Other Rooms, “The consensus is clear—eight short stories in a collection by a debutant [are] said to authentically portray [the] whole nation [of Pakistan]”(90). While Ray argues that Mueenuddin’s focus on place—traditionally one of the unifying themes of short story cycles—does not mean that the collection should be subjected to the nationalist stigma of speaking only for Pakistan, since the collection covers universal themes, he does not discuss the most obvious reason for why the St. Petersburg Times states that “Mueenuddin’s atmospheric prose aptly captures South Asian nuances, not just in dialect and cultural habits, but also in modes of thinking and relating”(emphasis added): almost every one of his stories specifically draws attention to not only what the protagonist thinks, but their entire manner of cognition.

Mueenuddin’s method of portraying the thought processes of his characters becomes clear at the conclusion of the first story in the collection, wherein the title character Nawabdin, the Electrician, confronts the death of a man who tried to rob and kill him:

Yet Nawab’s mind caught at this, looking at the man’s words and his death, like a bird hoping around some bright object, meaning to peck at it. And then he didn’t. He thought of the motorcycle, saved, and the glory of saving it. He was growing. Six shots, six chances, and not one of them killed him, not Nawabdin Electrician. (28)

We are already acquainted with the mind of Nawab, since earlier in the story “his thoughts wandered off into all sorts of tangents” (19). This technique of drawing attention to what and how a character is thinking goes against the grain of traditional writing advice: writers are told to inhabit the mind of the character so fully that we see the world of the story as if through their eyes, a technique known as free indirect

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discourse and perfected by, among others, Flaubert, whom critic James Wood calls the master of modern realist narration. If he were strictly adhering to this tactic, Mueenuddin would not have prefaced Nawab’s description of his environment, where he tells us that “the dwellings around him in the little hamlet had also finished their dinner, and the smoke from the cow-dung fires hung over the darkening roofs, a harsh spicy smell, like rough tobacco” (19), with a comment on how Nawab’s thoughts occurred when he was thinking about the familiar setting of his neighborhood. The very awkwardness of typing the description of what is happening in the prose is a testament to the fact that Mueenuddin’s methods, if not done with finesse, can halt the flow of a story.

Yet no one would deny that Mueenuddin’s stories are realistic; his ability to describe minutely comes provides the bulk of many of the worshipful blurbs: The Times says that the book “may be fiction—we have the author’s word for it—but it is of such an authentic stamp that it is history as well, more so by the day, and deserves to be read as such” (emphasis added), and The Observer states “there are tremendous stories here and if they are not autobiographical, then they are all clearly grounded in lived experience.” Mueenuddin skillfully walks a tightrope: he manages use the revelation of the “unnatural” process of thinking itself as a mode of characterization: Saleema’s “thoughts ducked in and out of holes, like mice” (40), we get inside the mind of K.K. Harouni in “Provide, Provide”: “The old man sentimentally thought that the people of Dunyapur . . . revered his family, whose roots had been in that soil for a mere hundred years” (64), and most striking, Helen’s thoughts at the conclusion of “Our Lady of Paris”:

Almost with horror she watched him approach her, then stand in front of her . . . she hardened herself to meet him . . . seeing through him, willing herself to remember the centuries, the kings and queens who had walked here, seen this river, this wet forest—and now their loves blown away, their pain. (168)

This is certainly a “universal” moment: Helen’s relationship with Sohail recedes into the background as the “loves” of the past that have been “blown away” by time take the foreground. Yet, we never for a moment forget that Helen is “willing herself” to “remember the centuries,” that this beautiful, profound moment does not come from either a god-like omniscient narrator or a character whom we cannot see, fully, against the river and the wet forest where Mueenuddin has placed her, just as, earlier in the story, we read her nervousness when she dresses precisely for every encounter with Sohail’s parents. Mueenuddin has taught us to read her from a multiplicity of angles: we

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are simultaneously seeing her and contained within the world of her perspective.

In her article Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies As A Short Story Cycle, Noelle Brada-Williams draws parallels between the “tensions” inherent in short story cycles and those that structure the reading of ethnic literature, arguing that “the unique vision of an individual artist and the unique representation he or she provides of a community are often challenged by readers from both within and outside the community being represented as various readers lobby for the value of one representation over another” (1). This “logic of representation” becomes particularly politically loaded when a society or ethnic group that is under-represented in literature is the focus or subject of a story. The “part,” even down to the imagined characters depicted, of the society presented stands in for the “whole” to those unfamiliar with the cultures, countries, or value-systems being portrayed. The baton of representation of “modes of thinking and relating” has been bestowed entirely upon Mueenuddin: much of his success with this book is attributed to his ability to speak for a people whom we, the West, do not traditionally hear from, but as Ray points out, referring to an interview with Mueenuddin in the Wall Street Journal: “It should be noted that Mueenuddin neither claims nor disclaims the status of being an insider who is in a position to supply knowledge accessible only to the members of a particular in-group, in this case, the redoubtable and putative monolith of Pakistani society” (91). Yet, this is precisely Dalrymple’s “gauntlet”: that Mueenuddin will do for Pakistan what Lahiri did for Asian, or what Isaac Bashevis Singer did for the “lost Jewish shtetl” (Wall Street Journal blurb) or what Turgenev did for late nineteenth-century Russia.

Mueenuddin’s skill at depicting the thoughts of a variety of characters may be a large part of the pleasure of reading his short story cycle: we have a host of thoughts and perspectives against a familiar backdrop, and the reader has the satisfaction of both the longer-form novel’s continuity and the short-form short story’s crispness and compression of action. This does not mean that Mueenuddin speaks for all of Pakistan, or that the insights that he provides about human nature should be confined to one geographic area. Whether or not “Pakistan has found its Chekov” (Miami Sun-Sentinel) is subject to debate. It is more important to examine why the language of literary critique rushes to fit In Other Rooms, Other Wonders into this frame of representational authority, what aspects of the collection make it slot into this list of authors who speak for those who cannot speak for themselves (along with Lahiri, Singer, Turgenev, and Chekov, comparisons are made to Updike, Gogol, Faulkner, William Trevor, Truman Capote, Alice Munro, James Salter, and Richard Ford), and how the format of the short story

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cycle, or the “linked” story collection, factors into the reception of the book.

Hillary Stringer University of North Texas

Works Cited Brada-Williams, Noelle. “Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies As

A Short Story Cycle.” MELUS. 29 (2004): 451–64. Web. Oct 2010. Mueenuddin, Daniyal. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. New York: Norton,

2009. Print. Ray, Sohomjit. “Review of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other

Wonders.” Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies. 2.1 (2010): 90–94. Web. Dec 2010.

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, 2008. Print.

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