By Ayesha Hasan
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Visitors take pictures by the message board at the inaugural Lahore Literary Festival
It began as the most sought after event in the history of the city – a city full of art and culture, the home to the Mughal emperors and their architectural aestheticism, the city that fascinated British rulers for over 100 years. Book lovers were excited and so were the writers. None of them wanted to miss out the event that had been announced just a few weeks before its launch.
Book lovers poured in on the two days of the first ever Lahore Literary Festival (LLF) held at the Alhamra Arts Centre in the heart of the city. Unhampered by continuous rain, people went through the schedule lists in their hands to make their way into the halls where their favourite authors were speaking. For me, it was a hard choice to make. Though I attended consecutive sessions, my heart and mind travelled to the overlapping sessions as self-created images from other halls popped in my mind. What must Bapsi Sidhwa (Ice Candy Man, 1991) be saying while I listened to Owen Bennett-Jones (Target Britain, 2013) speak about national narrative? What excerpt must Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 2007) be reading from his new book, as I listened to Linda Bird Francke and Victoria Schofield talk about ghost writing Daughter of the East (2008), an autobiography of the slain first woman prime minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto. Twitter saved my life. Updates from each session every second made me feel as I was present at more than one place at the same time, like a dream where you see yourself at multiple locations. My toes were damp and numb. I kept stepping into puddles on the building premises. I was not alone as I noticed many wet pairs of boots standing in a queue to get into the hall where Pakistani-British award-winning author Nadeem Aslam was about to launch the Indian Subcontinent edition of his new book The Blind Man’s Garden. I grabbed a copy available at a 15% discount and waited for the session to end before I could get it signed. He was personally my favourite author at the event.
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Nadeem Aslam in conversation with Declan Walsh
Aslam’s writing has always clicked with me; he creates images where violence and beauty intertwine in a magical way that combines fiction and reality. He grew up in a Pakistani rural city and learnt English only when he moved to the UK at the age of 14. He now references Czeslaw Milosz, Vladimir Nabokov and Herman Melville. To learn English, he copied several books out by hand, including Moby Dick (1851) and Lolita (1958). To write about a blind man, he taped his eyes for weeks to feel what a blind man would do. During a discussion with him a day before the LLF, he told me that he regularly went for a walk to note down things that he found interesting. He would return with his pockets full of notes that would later go into his record books, numbered according to the years, where he had been noting things down since the age of 17. These notes, he told me, helped him create stories. No wonder, I have always found a touch of realism in his work, especially his master piece, The Waster Vigil (2008).
Being a writer in Pakistan can be a tough job. With almost half of its population illiterate, the public is judgmental and sensitive about books and authors, art and artists, love and relationships. They tend to evaluate everything on a scale that is determined by their religions and culture. At an event such as the LLF, choosing excerpts to read can be a tough job, too. In a country, where the majority of people try to connect everything with religion, you never know if the word that leaves your mouth will be your last word.
But the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid and Indian writer Jeet Thayil prefer taking risks. Thayil read from his book Narcopolis (2012) which is about opium and its effect and is set in the 1970s Old Bombay. Minutes after he read the excerpt containing explicit words from the Urdu-Hindi slang that he used for various castes in the Indian Subcontinent, all the copies of the book available at the event were sold out. What could have offended a lot of people there, actually made them laugh their lungs out. The hall echoed with more laughter as Thayil continued to read, literally swearing at each caste. Later, I overheard some people commenting at Thayil’s ‘clever marketing of his book’ by ‘deliberately choosing’ the particular excerpt. Literary festivals are a good way to market work and for readers, signed copies are a life-long treasure.
While there were sessions where authors discussed the globalisation of Pakistani literature and the challenges of use of language in storytelling, several others deliberated on the declining interest of Pakistani readers in Urdu literature. Indian writers had a somewhat similar observation on Hindi literature. But all concluded unanimously that writing in English gave them a larger market to write for. At the same session, Pakistani-Canadian Musharraf Ali Farooqi ( Between Clay and Dust 2012) said he would have preferred writing in Urdu, but could not trust local editors with his work.
The second day of the event brought some sunshine. The umbrellas were gone and so were the boots. Dressed in bright colours, it was now an opportunity for the audience to show off their Hermes bags, their Gucci sunglasses and LV and Chanel sandals. More than half of the visitors belonged to the local fashion and entertainment industries. There were also international bloggers, local and international publishers and journalists from around the world.
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People queuing to get into talks
Halls were full and so was the parking lot. It took me 40 minutes to find a safe place to park – 500 metres from the centre’s building. Author Tehmina Durrani made her first public appearance in 12 years after her book My Feudal Lord (1991) was published in which she had explained her personal experience of an abusive marriage to a famous politician, whom she later took a divorce from. Durrani is now married to another politician, who is part of the ruling government. This is her third marriage. Doors of the hall where she talked had to be locked during the session for it could not accommodate even one more person. Dozens of people had to be denied entry. Durrani talked about how her family had disowned her for 13 years for abandoning her first husband for the love of a man, stronger and more powerful than the former. This is something any conservative family in Pakistan would do to such a daughter. Durrani’s courage to speak about it publicly is, nonetheless, a valiant step on the face of our backward society.
In Pakistani society, it is very common for an artist’s years of hard work to be criticised because it might contain overt images of people or has symbolism that is above a layman’s understanding. Most people here are offended by pictures that represent people, calling them anti-Islamic. Religion is the new obsession in Pakistan. Well, not that new, but the implications have never been so extreme.
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Selma Dabbagh
Then there were sessions that I unwillingly missed, because I wanted to attend all of them, had they not been scheduled on overlapping timings. I especially regret missing those on the courtesan in literature, Urdu poetry, Kathak dance and women’s voices from colonial times to modern Pakistan. Women were prominent speakers at the LLF. Palestinian-British fiction writer Selma Dabbagh whose debut novel Out of It (2011) a story of a Palestinian family who flees the violence in Palestine and settles in the UK and the Gulf – was particularly impressive. Unsurprisingly, Dabbagh has strong views on the Israeli occupation of Palestine and writes about conflict zones and political issues. Although she lives in Britain, Dabbagh still feels her strong connection to Palestine and her ‘responsibility’ to highlight the problems of the people there, through fiction writing. Her calm speech, reasonable stance, upright posture and specifically her understanding of subject area were impressive.
LLF was a venue for the audience to catch a glimpse of their favourite writers, catch-up with friends and acquaintances or make public appearances. For me it meant more than that. As an aspiring author, I learned two things. First – always know the beginning and end of your story and let what’s in-between come to you and second – always arrive at least 30 minutes before the sessions begins if you don’t want to sit in the stairs.
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