Pakistan
>Right now we need more than news images
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Hari Kunzru introduces a visual essay of Pakistani artists @ Granta.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )We hear a lot – perhaps too much – about ‘identity’ in relation to South Asian art. Whether it’s national or personal, this elusive quality is often seen as the primary concern of South Asian writers and visual artists, to the exclusion of all other aesthetic categories. By contrast, those who can lay claim to sufficient whiteness or Westernness are presumed to be the unreflective owners of secure but troublingly authoritarian identities whose dismantling is the proper task of progressive artistic practice. It’s a formulation which has, after a generation or so of post-colonial criticism, become an orthodoxy.
High Noon, as the title suggests, stages a confrontation with this brittle identity politics and claims a kind of luminous clarity, where shadows and ambiguities disappear. Noon is when mad dogs and Englishmen are the only creatures out on the street. High NOON is also a punning physicist’s term for certain states of quantum superposition, when particles exist in both of two possible states, so perhaps there’s also a suggestion of kairos in the title, the ‘time of chance’, that suspended moment when decisive action may bring about great and significant change. Clearly, for Pakistan, such a time is at hand.
>I couldn’t forget what I was, who I was
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Zaiba Malik remembers the pleasures and conflicts of her childhood among the Pakistan immigrants in Bradford, England @ Granta
I was born in 1969, in a red-brick hospital just outside Bradford which has since been converted into a psychiatric unit. The very first words that I heard were uttered by my father. They were the Shahadah – the Islamic declaration of faith, whispered three times into my right ear. A couple of days later, my mother took me home to a tiny, overcrowded terraced house. I was her third child, born with Pakistani values and a Muslim soul.
I knew I was Pakistani long before I knew I was English, just as I knew I was Muslim long before I knew I was British. It’s hardly surprising. There was the blatant declaration my mother, Umejee, made me repeat from the age of about four:
‘We are Pakistani.
Pakistani children are good children.’And there was the way that she and Dad always referred to Pakistan and never England as home, so that I knew more about the imprisonment and execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto than I did about the Winter of Discontent; the way we only spoke Punjabi in the house; the way our food smelt and tasted so different to English people’s and how we used our hands, not knives and forks, to eat.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )On the odd occasion, my parents would surprise me with signs of assimilation. My mother was such a staunch supporter of the monarchy that she regularly made me write letters to Her Majesty, asking if she could go and work for her at Buckingham Palace. ‘I am a very clean lady,’ I wrote, as Mum dictated. ‘My own house in Bradford is very clean. You are very decent people. You are like my family. I will do what you need, cook, clean, iron.’
>I needed to place myself in his landscape
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John Siddique recovers fragments of his father’s journey to Lahore after the Partition @ Granta
Faizal carries his wife in his pocket: she is a white handkerchief. Faizal carries his three daughters in his other pocket: three small stones gathered from the side of the road. Their names are lost to walking. His sons Mohammed and Rafiq flank him. They carry the memories of their sisters and mother in their silence. Faizal closed down his carpet shop three months ago; he misses his days bargaining at his counter. No one has told Faizal why India has changed – he is not one of those men who drinks tea and talks politics at night. Every time he meets a dead person he asks them what his wife’s name was. He asks and puts his hands in his pockets.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Zoom out and it looks like the whole of India is walking. Walking towards a blue line on a rough map drawn on to a napkin. Mohammed Siddique, my father, is a young man of seventeen years on the road from Jullundur to Lahore. He will never be a Pakistani, he will always be an immigrant – a series of questions which Faizal cannot answer.
The scent of the fields after the rain has stopped for a while. Humidity rising. The earth’s redness in the dusk. Walking towards a blue line on a piece of paper. ‘It will be better when we’re across the border,’ Faizal says.
They move in colour, carrying everything they can. Though the eye of the century sees them in black and white, as a series of stills in a photographer’s portfolio. Partition: sounds like a thin wall made of simple materials between rooms that can easily be taken down. Take the word in your left hand and feel its weight. It is nothing – a few sheets of paper.
>The Disappeared of Pakistan
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J. Malcolm Garcia on the thousands of Pakistanis swept up in the “war on terror” @ Guernica.
Amina kept all the flowers her husband Masood gave her over the years. She kept the first bottle of perfume, the first scarf. She believes he will be back as strongly as she believes in God. Tomorrow or the day after or next week or next month. She doesn’t know when, but someday. She must believe this to stay motivated. If she is a fool, okay, let her be a fool.
For years she was unaware of the miseries of the world. She decorated their Rawalpindi home, painted pictures and wrote poetry. She never read newspapers. They met in 1977 when she stopped by a gallery he administered and inquired about hanging some of her paintings. He could organize things in an instant.
They married and had children. They loved to go hiking on weekends. They enjoyed impulsively packing up their son and daughter and driving into the countryside with no specific destination in mind. When it snowed in the mountains they would go skiing on a whim, leaving behind the congestion of city life with all its problems and politics. Masood was openly critical of corruption and of his government’s ties with the War on Terror, but otherwise he was not a political person.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Nor was she—until he disappeared.
altimoniere 