Ahmer Naqvi" />
  • ABOUT
  • PRINT
  • PRAISE
  • SUBSCRIBE
  • OPENINGS
  • SUBMISSIONS
  • CONTACT
The Missing Slate - For the discerning reader
  • HOME
  • Magazine
  • In This Issue
  • Literature
    • Billy Luck
      Billy Luck
    • To the Depths
      To the Depths
    • Dearly Departed
      Dearly Departed
    • Fiction
    • Poetry
  • Arts AND Culture
    • Tramontane
      Tramontane
    • Blade Runner 2049
      Blade Runner 2049
    • Loving Vincent
      Loving Vincent
    • The Critics
      • FILM
      • BOOKS
      • TELEVISION
    • SPOTLIGHT
    • SPECIAL FEATURES
  • ESSAYS
    • A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
      A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
    • Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
      Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
    • Nature and Self
      Nature and Self
    • ARTICLES
    • COMMENTARY
    • Narrative Nonfiction
  • CONTESTS
    • Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
    • PUSHCART 2013
    • PUSHCART 2014
Arts & Culture, Special FeaturesOctober 15, 2014

Selfie

“Self” by Mansur Salim. Courtesy: ArtChowk Gallery.

By Ahmer Naqvi

Can you see them smiling?

I took the picture because I knew no one else would believe me. I knew no one would believe that they were soldiers; and not only soldiers but smartly dressed soldiers; and not only smartly dressed soldiers but smiling, smartly dressed soldiers. I knew no one would believe that they were capable of looking jaunty, capable of looking joyous and self-pleased.

We are a nation who loves our martial heroes. We look up to them for their professionalism, for their bravery, for their patriotism that none of us can ever seem to match. We love them for the exploits of war and valour they tell us about in stories and dramas and songs. We name streets, residential areas, roundabouts, shopping malls, shooting arcades, national holidays after them. We put them up in our stamps and our stickers; we allow them to populate our imagination and our mythologies. We let them make up history as fiction, and we stand by when they tell us they don’t like our fictions so they’ll be getting rid of them.

The assumption that these men were riding off to their deaths becomes more entrenched… they seem achingly innocent
This picture is a product of their fictions. It stands not on its own, but as a culmination of everything soldiers represent. When I show this picture to others, they sigh softly at how generous the smiles are, how expressive their eyes seem. There is an inherent tragedy that we ascribe to all soldiers, I suppose, where we feel that their ultimate fate will always be a heroic death, even though it’s usually heart disease that overcomes them in the battlefields of their air-conditioned drawing rooms.

But this picture is old, so when you or anyone else looks at it, the assumption that these men were riding off to their deaths becomes more entrenched. Look at them — riding horses with no helmets or even camouflage, bereft of guns and radio and helicopters and missiles — they seem achingly innocent, the lack of sophistication in their killing instruments imbuing them with a sense of heightened nobility in our minds.

Sometimes, I am told this picture feels like from a time “when men were men.”

I’ve always found such anxiety about a more masculine past slipping away through our finger to be so hilarious. When do men actually stop being men? How does this sentiment ever even gain rational acceptance?

People don’t like it when I get like this, all angry and questioning. They tell me to not overthink these things, and if I must overthink then not to say them out loud, and if I must say them out loud then to say them amongst friends who have learnt to accept me. But saying these things out loud in public is just a way to make myself look bad, they tell me. It makes me look bitter, I’m told, and once someone even said, it makes me look like I have an agenda.

An agenda?

That’s when I show them the pictures. First I show them this one, with smiling soldiers waving at me as they go away, the moment captured when I had shouted out at them with my camera and they had all turned to look as one. Then I show them the second picture, taken from the same spot but with camera facing me. I show them my swollen eyes, my bleeding mouth, my torn clothes, and my crooked legs.

Two pictures — shame and honour, war and its warriors, a woman and her rapists.

Ahmer Naqvi is a freelance journalist and filmmaker, currently living in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Tags

Ahmer NaqvifictionIslamabad workshop 2014Mansur Salim

Share on

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Google +
  • LinkedIn
  • Email
Previous articleVIFF ’14 Vol. 1: Amirpour, Perry, Godard and the Dardennes
Next articleTestimony in Sepia

You may also like

Pacific Islander Climate Change Poetry

Spotlight Artist: Scheherezade Junejo

Nobody Killed Her

Ad

In the Magazine

A Word from the Editor

Don’t cry like a girl. Be a (wo)man.

Why holding up the women in our lives can help build a nation, in place of tearing it down.

Literature

This House is an African House

"This house is an African house./ This your body is an African woman’s body..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

Shoots

"Sapling legs bend smoothly, power foot in place,/ her back, parallel to solid ground,/ makes her torso a table of support..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

A Dry Season Doctor in West Africa

"She presses her toes together. I will never marry, she says. Jamais dans cette vie! Where can I find a man like you?" By...

In the Issue

Property of a Sorceress

"She died under mango trees, under kola nut/ and avocado trees, her nose pressed to their roots,/ her hands buried in dead leaves, her...

Literature

What Took Us to War

"What took us to war has again begun,/ and what took us to war/ has opened its wide mouth/ again to confuse us." By...

Literature

Sometimes, I Close My Eyes

"sometimes, this is the way of the world,/ the simple, ordinary world, where things are/ sometimes too ordinary to matter. Sometimes,/ I close my...

Literature

Quarter to War

"The footfalls fading from the streets/ The trees departing from the avenues/ The sweat evaporating from the skin..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Literature

Transgendered

"Lagos is a chronicle of liquid geographies/ Swimming on every tongue..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Fiction

Sketches of my Mother

"The mother of my memories was elegant. She would not step out of the house without her trademark red lipstick and perfect hair. She...

Fiction

The Way of Meat

"Every day—any day—any one of us could be picked out for any reason, and we would be... We’d part like hair, pushing into the...

Fiction

Between Two Worlds

"Ursula spotted the three black students immediately. Everyone did. They could not be missed because they kept to themselves and apart from the rest...."...

Essays

Talking Gender

"In fact it is often through the uninformed use of such words that language becomes a tool in perpetuating sexism and violence against women...

Essays

Unmasking Female Circumcision

"Though the origins of the practice are unknown, many medical historians believe that FGM dates back to at least 2,000 years." Gimel Samera looks...

Essays

Not Just A Phase

"...in the workplace, a person can practically be forced out of their job by discrimination, taking numerous days off for fear of their physical...

Essays

The Birth of Bigotry

"The psychology of prejudice demands that we are each our own moral police". Maria Amir on the roots of bigotry and intolerance.

Fiction

The Score

"The person on the floor was unmistakeably dead. It looked like a woman; she couldn’t be sure yet..." By Hawa Jande Golakai.

More Stories

Of Bones and Lust

“The crowd stood, eerily quiet, gawking at the headless body doused in blood, tottering like an effigy in the cart as it creaked along.” Story of the Week (September 13), by Khanh Ha.

Back to top
One last love letter...

April 24, 2021

It has taken us some time and patience to come to this decision. TMS would not have seen the success that it did without our readers and the tireless team that ran the magazine for the better part of eight years.

But… all good things must come to an end, especially when we look at the ever-expanding art and literary landscape in Pakistan, the country of the magazine’s birth.

We are amazed and proud of what the next generation of creators are working with, the themes they are featuring, and their inclusivity in the diversity of voices they are publishing. When TMS began, this was the world we envisioned…

Though the magazine has closed and our submissions shuttered, this website will remain open for the foreseeable future as an archive of the great work we published and the astounding collection of diverse voices we were privileged to feature.

If, however, someone is interested in picking up the baton, please email Maryam Piracha, the editor, at maryamp@themissingslate.com.

Farewell, fam! It’s been quite a ride.

Read previous post:
VIFF ’14 Vol. 1: Amirpour, Perry, Godard and the Dardennes

Ben Hynes begins his coverage of the 2014 Vancouver International Film Festival with capsules on ‘Two Days, One Night’, ‘Goodbye...

Close