Write What You Know?

By Sauleha Kamal

One old writing class adage advises new writers to “write what they know”. It’s sound advice for sure and it’s been known to produce some very good writing, but I can’t help but wonder what happens when what you know can’t be reconciled with what your readers know? For writers from non-Western backgrounds, writing in English automatically opens up their work to Western audiences, but can we truly write what we know and connect with our audiences if some of our experiences are foreign to our readers? Can all of our readers connect with our work when some may not understand the context? That’s the challenge of anyone writing in English about a country or a culture that is not considered “mainstream” in the Western world — a culture the majority of English readers don’t know.

Pakistanis are a people who love stories and story telling. I grew up in Islamabad, where my schoolteachers would assign us stories in English class and in Urdu class. I had learned to read very early on so that by the time I was tasked with writing stories, I had read many of them and my writing mirrored what I read. My Urdu stories would be populated with Ayeshas and Tariqs but my English stories would feature Jessicas, Toms and Henrys. As far as I knew, Ayeshas and Tariqs didn’t seem to belong to the world of English stories because there were no Ayeshas in Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl novels or in “Peter and Jane” and Dr. Seuss books. I was a child and I childishly reproduced what I read, not what I saw; to me, Anglo-Saxon names were a natural part of English stories. Surely, characters with Pakistani names couldn’t exist in English literature, just as characters with British names couldn’t exist in Urdu stories. Janes and Jennifers belonged to the pages of English books, while names that flourished in both hemispheres, names such as Sara and Daniyal, could be permitted after minor alterations to pronunciation. This was, of course, born of both naiveté and a lack of exposure to stories about people who were culturally and racially similar to me. In my mind, it was conventional that English characters have Anglo-Saxon names while Urdu characters have South Asian Muslim names just as it was conventional that English was written from left to right and Urdu from right to left. It wasn’t something I was going to question.

Growing up in 21st century, internet-age Pakistan, there was this sense of the world’s rapid globalization; it was not inconceivable that someone who had never left their small corner of the world would have a somewhat accurate conception of a completely different place thousands of miles away — in fact, it’s what I expected. While attending college in the United States, however, I discovered that intercultural communication is still relatively one-sided. It is almost as if communication between the Eastern and Western hemisphere tends to take on more characteristics of a lecture than a dialogue. The West speaks and the East passively listens — American culture dominates media the world over: Hollywood manufactures movies and the rest of the world consumes them, teenagers across the world listen to the Billboard Top 100 and the Western canon receives praise in classrooms across different countries. The other side of the world is more isolated: foreign films have a very niche audience in America, you would be hard-pressed to find Pakistani music in the iTunes library of American teenagers and hardly anyone in the West, outside of the academic world, even acknowledges the existence of a rich Eastern canon. A large part of this divide comes down to language barriers, of course. English is the lingua franca for most of the world — it’s been widely exported outside the small borders of its native England — and it’s much easier to export culture when you’ve already exported language. Though this explains some of the reasons for the one-sidedness of intercultural communication, it certainly does not solve the problems that arise from it.

When I first started college in the United States, icebreakers and small talk would of course bring the dreaded “where are you from?” question. When I would say Pakistan, I was sometimes met with surprise at my command over the English language. I grew up bilingual, meandering out of English into Urdu and back again — something that is pretty common to Pakistani middle class experience. So I felt strange when they complimented my English: we had very probably learned the language at the same time, but I did understand why they wouldn’t know that. Had I grown up as they had, seeing the images of Pakistan that populate American media, I would have been surprised too. Just last year, Zero Dark Thirty portrayed Islamabad as a desert where people spoke Arabic — a far cry from the lush valley where Urdu, English, Punjabi and Pashto are most commonly spoken and learning Arabic is a distant dream for many.

Virginia Woolf wrote about the struggles of writing as a woman in mid-20th century London in her essay ‘Professions for Women’. For Woolf, years of cultural repression of women’s voices had rendered women writers unable to express themselves without first vanquishing the burden of cultural expectations. Though Woolf knew her road to writing had been paved by women writers such as Fanny Burney, Aphra Behn, Harriet Martineau, Jane Austen, and George Eliot, she still felt the pressure to be the tender, flattering and sympathetic “Angel in the House” who would not “let anybody guess that [she had] a mind of [her] own”. Woolf termed the expected ideal of femininity the “Angel in the House” after the self-sacrificing heroine of a 19th century poem. Woolf struggled against the Angel in the House every time she picked up her pen; as a Muslim, Pakistani woman I struggle with the double-glazed glass ceiling that comes with being a minority writer and a woman every time I write. Womanhood was conflated with the sort of self-sacrificing spirit that extended to a total repression of the self in the concept of the Angel in the House, just as non-mainstream cultures are marked with an air of mystery and excess.

The literary conception of the Indian subcontinent, for example, has been historically defined by geographical distance, excessive luxury and the fantastical objects imported from India that allowed India to become — in Edward Said’s words — the mysterious Other in the Western canon. This one-dimensional portrayal of non-mainstream cultures implanted in the Western imagination the idea that the Orient (or the East) is to be admired for the luxuries acquired from it and reviled or ignored for the darkness that is always associated with it, but any investigation of it is to always remain skin-deep and in line with all previous conceptions. In this conception, fiction set in the East is often expected to be exotic, mysterious and fascinating simply because of its setting rather than any elements of the narrative itself. Woolf said women writers were “impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex”, I believe international / minority writers writing in English run the risk of being impeded by the extreme conventionality of Western-centric literature.

As minority writers, we must contend with a different kind of phantom than the Angel in the House Woolf encountered — one that is just as hard to kill. We must kill the Othered versions of our cultures that have dominated narratives about us for so many decades: the versions of people of color that have hovered in the periphery of many a novel. Two such characters are Safie, the daughter of a Turkish merchant, in ‘Frankenstein’ and the mysterious yet subservient lascar Ram Dass in ‘The Little Princess’. Safie is referred to more often as “the Arabian” than by her proper name indicating that her geographic origin is a satisfactory signifier for her just as it would be for any other beautiful, Oriental object, and there is no need to use her proper name. Ram Dass is similarly defined by his Indian-ness, which is conflated to his role as humble yet nondescript servant to the white gentleman who is a key figure in the story. The legacy of colonialism is such that we begin to see ourselves as removed from the mainstream and become sidekicks in the narratives of our own lives (as we see those who look like us playing sidekicks in most mainstream stories). This is especially dangerous because it makes us aspire to be more like the convention, alter ourselves and try to project a manufactured persona both in our lives and in our writing. That’s an inevitable consequence of growing up in a post-colonial country where the specter of colonialism looms so large that you can find mothers chiding their children for speaking their native Urdu over English, and see local television channels flooded with advertisements for the popular skin-bleaching cream Fair and Lovely. In my experience, the cultural hegemony of the West over the East is so potent that the West has always seemed to be banging down the door of the East, whereas the East has always seemed far away from the West.  The West has been allowed to remain largely uninformed about the East but a lack of Western knowledge in the post-colonial East is often deemed inexcusable.

When I tried to write a novel for the first time, I drew inspiration from mainstream Western literature both contemporary and classic, but tried to infuse into it the sights and sounds that were so familiar to me: images of men in shalwar kameez baking fresh naan in furnace-hot tandoors and the melodic sounds of the adhan coming from the neighborhood mosques every few hours. I found that my biggest challenge as a writer was not plot structure or character development (I had found adequate examples to emulate for all of those aspects) but setting. The most prominent thing about a novel set in New York City or London will never be New York City or London (unless that were specifically the aim of the novelist) but an English novel set in Islamabad or Abu Dhabi might as well be those places themselves simply because there has not been enough literature about these places before. It falls to the few writers writing about these places to try to create their canon, to educate, inform, to reeducate, to introduce, to explain and to challenge preconceived notions, all the while trying to entertain. Such writers, therefore, become unwilling cultural ambassadors. Though they may have set out to write about magic or heartbreak or friendship, they always end up writing about culture. If these works make to bookshops, they are inevitably classified as “foreign” or “international”.

As a teenager trying to write a full-length work for the first time, I did not want to take on the role of any sort of cultural ambassador, nor was I qualified for such a role. My struggle was to somehow write what I knew and still remain appealing to the mainstream without catering to it. I wanted to shake hands with the mainstream — two equals with a lot in common but with different experiences, not perform for it on a stage of its choosing. But try as I might to set up a stage, I found no solid ground to stand on, no extensive literary heritage on the shoulders of which I could prop myself up. It soon became clear that what I had been trying to do was somehow erect a building without a foundation. So, I floundered, over-researched, revised drafts and scrapped key plot elements, as is the painful practice of all serious writers everywhere, but for me the question that I grappled with most was not about form or writing style or any of those other things that prompt drafts on drafts. My main challenge was setting in everything I ever wrote. I wondered whether I could write a novel without a setting, in a world without any cultural baggage. Meandering around the hurdles seemed easier than confronting them. To become a writer, Virginia Woolf had to kill the Angel in the House; I feel I must stop scrutinizing myself through the eyes of a mainstream audience that seems to stubbornly lean over my shoulder every time I open a new MS Word document. I’ll try writing and it would show up again, othering me, demanding that I explain my culture in footnotes and introductions.

Part of the problem lies in how the West has been presented with mostly singular narratives of Eastern countries and cultures. People have heard about the men who have murdered their own sisters and daughters in the name of religion, culture and some strange conception of honor, but nobody talks about the kind Pakistani men who encourage their daughters to pursue education just as they would their sons. What if the world had heard about men like Abdul-Sattar Edhi, who runs the world’s largest ambulance service and operates free nursing homes, orphanages, clinics and women’s shelters? Surely, the conception of Pakistan would be different then.  No one has just one version of self, so it is ridiculous to expect multiple people in a nation or of a particular race or religion to have one monolithic identity. Every writer, however, has her biases and I have mine. My writing is inevitably colored by these biases and, indeed, sometimes I think all writing is the product of the writer’s personal biases. There is a reason Plato called poets and writers liars in ‘The Republic’: when I write about Pakistan, I only write about my version of Pakistan. I couldn’t tell you if my version is the real Pakistan at all but I will insist that it is one of multiple real Pakistans. All I know is that it’s my truth and I can only capture my truth. It made me uncomfortable to write about Pakistan for a wider audience when I was younger and I never understood why. Now I’m starting to and I suspect it’s because I knew that if I did then someone, somewhere might take my truth as the truth. Even the hint of that possibility made me feel disingenuous, as though I were somehow concealing the experiences of all other Pakistanis simply by presenting my own.

I will be the first to acknowledge that my homeland is far from perfect, but it is not without its own charms — not without courage, resilience and small kindnesses of strangers that somehow coexist with the unimaginable cruelties that populate the front pages of daily newspapers.  It is hard to write about those unimaginable cruelties happening in a place you love, but it feels almost unconscionable to write about them for an audience that might never hear about the courage, the resilience and the small kindnesses, an audience that might just focus on cruelties and corruption and nod as if to say “I knew it” and file your writing under evidence that Pakistan is the failed state Western magazines are so eager to call it. The challenge of the minority writer in English, then, is to tell her own truth without letting it look like the truth, to share stories of the people and places she knows without making it appear as if that’s all there is to her country or her community.

I wanted to write about kind couples who were content with their traditional arranged marriages without ever commenting on it explicitly, about girls who wore hijabs to cover their hair or niqabs to cover their faces or dupattas to cover their chests or no veils at all existing in the same society and caring for the same humanity without it ever being an issue of major contention. It would inevitably be questioned, though, that’s just where we are right now. Pakistani writing in English is, in some ways, still in its infancy; the power dynamics that govern all other aspects of Pakistani life inevitably seep into the literary world as well. Pakistani writers such as Mohsin Hamid and Daniyal Mueenuddin have gained mainstream recognition all over the world, yes, and that is something to be celebrated but the problem here lies in the fact that these few writers cannot tell the stories of all of Pakistan because they do not know them as well. Writing, after all, is a privilege, a privilege that is only extended to the elite of Pakistan that possesses both the tools and the time to write. The stories of most of the population remain untold. Young Adult and Children’s literature also remains largely unexplored.

The legacy of colonialism is also that I’m completely bilingual and that I feel comfortable expressing myself in both the language of my ancestors and their oppressors and that I even love the language of their oppressors. When we as “people of color” in the postcolonial world examine our choice to write in English, however, we must remember that the tools have been forced into our hands: we might as well wield them. It’s only fair. It is 2014 and our world is as globalized as it has ever been, many writers have already written about minority experiences and international experiences. Therefore, when I chose to start writing, I did not find the literary world completely devoid of writing about my culture, I did not find a vast canon either. It falls to writers today to build our own canon so that tomorrow our multiple truths can come together to constitute a more accurate truth.

Indeed, communication has never before been easier: I can write something in Islamabad, upload it on the internet and hypothetically have it read in Sydney a few seconds later. When words are so easily transmitted, however, they become even more crucial because they are read more easily and misconstrued just as easily. To ensure that our words will inform rather than misinform and be interpreted the way we meant them to be interpreted, we must write more about our diverse, individual experiences and write more widely to cultivate more discerning audiences so that eventually we can truly and freely write what we know.