INTERVIEW
Power, Ambition & Diasporic Nostalgia
Daniyal Mueenuddin on Writing Pakistan
Daniyal Mueenuddin’s latest, This Is Where The Serpent Lives, is a sprawling narrative that starts in 1955, with orphaned Bayazid, abandoned by the corner of a tea stall in Rawalpindi where he ultimately finds work and grows into the clever, resourceful man who finds himself entwined with the elite, serving as one Colonel Attar’s driver. In loyal, reliable Bayazid, we find the lost, the humiliated, the wanting, the resilient. Then the narrative stretches its lens to the wealthy family he serves – Colonel’s son, Hisham Attar, his wife, Shahnaz, and cousin, Rustom. Theirs is a story that unfolds over two novella-length chapters, from 1988 to 2005, circling how each returns from abroad and attempts to grasp the lay of the land amid the culture shock, the loyalties tested and betrayals served. And finally, the last section, which spans until 2013, follows Saqib, a servant under Bayazid’s wing in the Attar family but one grossly unlike him. Where Bayazid is content with the hand he’s dealt, Saqib is seen wanting more, and more.
In conversation, Daniyal tells me he’s a storyteller, transmuting certain context and place for readers distant in time and space. Indeed, this is evident in the way he brings you a sliver of rural Pakistan, carefully situating his reader in the hierarchical culture and its rules without overt hand-holding. Naturally, we spoke about pandering to an audience unfamiliar with Pakistan, about the diasporic reader and their nostalgia, and of course, how power perpetuates hierarchies and inequality in the feudal landscape.
BAREERAH GHANI: I want to begin with power. Particularly that instance where Saqib is learning the value of appearances, and you write, “power is exercised through manners.” I think about how in Karachi, if you get stopped over by the police and you act like you’re someone important or you have higher connections, you can escape consequences. I would love to hear your thoughts on power as performance. To what extent are authority and influence determined not only by real status, but by how power is perceived and performed?
DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN: That’s true not just in Pakistan, but everywhere. For the powerful, power is more latent than active, especially the kind we’re talking about here. You’re in a culture which is hierarchical. And those hierarchies are understood by all the players, and so usually you’re not required to demonstrate your power. What you’re required to demonstrate are the marks of power, and to some extent, that’s accomplished by having the trappings of power, you know, the right car, the right accent, the right way of dressing. And that’s true everywhere, of course, but much more in Pakistan. This is one of the things I learned when I first came to Pakistan back in the 80s after being abroad in school. The first car I bought was a little ragtop Jeep. It was not at all something that signaled power. And I began to realize that when I pulled up to the police station, or wherever, to do a business meeting, these guys would look at me and they would think, who the hell is this? Because you’re sending all the wrong signals, you’re coming in a crappy car, as they think, and therefore they assume you have no power.
BG: In the book, you explore this idea of loyalty within such rigid hierarchies, within these appearances and even exertions of power by landowners with ties to the government and the ability to do whatever they want. And then you have men like Bayazid or those in “Muscle,” with decades-long allegiances to these wealthy families. I’m interested in how you think about the line between loyalty and servitude.
DM: There’s a real connection there, I think. The way that loyalty is performed is through servitude – the way that your retainers demonstrate their loyalty is by serving you, in a certain way. But I think that the relationship between those two attitudes has changed quite dramatically. In my father’s generation, servitude wasn’t considered a negative attachment in the same way that it increasingly is now. Previously, it was the case that you attach yourself to somebody in power, and then you serve them with the expectation of certain kinds of reciprocity, which is never stated. Now, it is different and the change has been accelerated so much by these smartphones, for example. The degree of discomfort with those attitudes of servitude has grown dramatically, and people are not willing to pay service in the way they did once quite unthinkingly. Now people are more and more testing the limits of the power they have by saying, if I serve you, what do I get in return?
The smartphones have had a much more significant impact than might be expected by readers in the West. In the West, most of the population has a basic education, have historically been exposed to books and newspapers, are aware of a larger world. For people in the countryside, before the smartphones came there was really no understanding of any place beyond their immediate neighborhood. Many in the Punjabi countryside would never in their lives go to Lahore, for example, or even to one of the smaller cities. This is even more true in the other provinces of Pakistan, Sindh and Baluchistan and the Frontier. When TV came in the 60s and 70s the population got some exposure, and then with video films, somewhat more – as they began to access Indian films more generally. But the information flow was carefully controlled on the television. When the phones came, suddenly any clever boy could look and see exactly what anyone in the West could see. They could see that the norms of deference and subservience that defined their lives were local.
BG: I’m wondering if younger landowners returning home with ideas of reforming these inherited systems plays a role in how the feudal landscape is changing, especially expressions of loyalty and servitude. I’m thinking about Rustom and Hisham wanting to strip away boundaries between master-servant; Shahnaz insisting on sending Saqib abroad for education.
DM: Well, this is not a trend. I was able to come back and take control of my farm, but that was many years ago, and my father was still alive, and had been in government. I would bet in all of Pakistan, there would be a handful of people in the last ten years who’ve come back from abroad and tried to take control of their lands in the way that I did. (Of course, there are young men who are well familiar with the system around their property and who then return and slot into the position established by their fathers, but those are different, those young men have been groomed and prepared, as neither Rustom nor I were.) Often, people come to me and say, oh, you know, my family has lands in Bahawal Nagar or wherever, and it’s being controlled by my uncle or my cousin, and I’ve decided to come back and take possession of my land from him. I don’t give them much hope. It’s not that easy to do, it’s almost impossible. Usually what happens is people go abroad and then stay there. Back here in the dust and the must, with all the corruption and the violence, who comes back from abroad if they can help it and tries to take over a property? Unless it’s a very large property. And in that case, there are incredible challenges as well.
What you’re required to demonstrate are the marks of power, and to some extent, that’s accomplished by having the trappings of power, you know, the right car, the right accent, the right way of dressing.
BG: In Hisham and Shahnaz, and their desire to “help” the people who are dependent on them, there’s a certain kind of paternalism that mirrors the white savior narrative in post-colonial settings. Were you consciously exploring that?
DM: Yeah, very much. My interest in that whole dynamic began with my mother. She was American and came to Pakistan knowing nothing about the country. And as a kid, I observed very closely, her evolving relationship with the people who worked for our family. She started out very blue-eyed and thinking I want to change the system, and I’m going to treat everybody fairly, in the ways I might treat people in America. I was fascinated by the ways in which my mother so profoundly misunderstood the system and what was possible in the system.
I think you see the same thing with Hisham and Shahnaz. They have that paternal view of, oh, the people love us, and we must take care of them. That’s not the way it works. Those attitudes lead you to trouble, as we see with Saqib – in a way, he’s given expectations and hopes that are not consistent with the available futures for him. Although I think in his case––I must say this, because people have asked me about this – it seems to me that Saqib is by no means finished, even though he gets very badly abused. That’s just the beginning for him. He’s going to be living in America or England or somewhere else abroad before you know it. And guys like him do well when they go abroad. I think the one quality which we Pakistanis have in great profusion is our resilience. You put us anywhere, and we can succeed and flourish. Particularly in the West. Here, you’re working under such difficult circumstances if you’re poor, or if you’re not from an established family. These guys have got all that energy, power and impulse, and you take them abroad and they soon are blown up into wonderful shapes, if they get just a few lucky breaks.
BG: Saqib’s ambition, like you just talked about, is vast. It’s fueled by this deep desire to be accepted into high society, but with each milestone he achieves, his hunger only grows. I couldn’t help but think about the line between ambition and greed blurring when class and status come into play. Can you talk about this in connection with glaring poverty and the rigid hierarchies of rural Pakistani?
DM: Ambition and greed, the meanings of the two are so different. Ambition is to try to move yourself up and forward and to increase your resources in some way. Saqib wants to do better, he wants to get ahead. He doesn’t really know what he wants. And that’s true of all of us. We never know what we want. But he knows that he wants more than what he has.
I would never think of Saqib as being greedy. Greed is an excessive desire for things or for something. Saqib is very sensible about his view of money, for example. He thinks of money as one should think about it, as a very, very powerful tool, but something that has no intrinsic value, obviously. Wealth and money are only useful if they lead on to other things. Money itself is not something that Saqib is drawn to. He’s drawn to what money can give him. He wants what Shahnaz and Hisham have. He wants to crawl out of his own skin, almost. That’s what makes it so pathetic and so profound. And what’s remarkable is that this is achievable if he goes abroad but in Pakistan, he can only become rich, but he can’t become Shahnaz and Hisham. Nobody will ever let him into that club.
…my first draft is not that different from my final draft.
BG: You know you talk about, Saqib and Hisham and Shahnaz, as if they’re real people.
DM: To me, they are. I just spent five years hanging out with them.
BG: Absolutely, I agree. I’m curious how do you create your characters? Because they are so watertight, and so full of life on the page.
DM: The first thing you have to remember is that the only information the reader has is the marks you put on the paper. What I can do is give you, very carefully, lots of little points of information. And that is one of the secrets of writing – you have to, in your own brain, not only be able to three-dimensionally understand these characters, you have to see them moving through space and time. But when you settle down to write about them, you have to understand that it’s impressionistic. And you just keep dotting in these bits, and as you’re working with it, you’re thinking about what’s missing, what aspect of the personality is in there. But I think a lot of it just happens as you move them through space, you have impulse and instinct that guides you in what needs to be there. It’s about what information must you include, and what information must you exclude and what information may you include. So it’s sort of making these baskets of information. But that makes it sound as if I do this all so consciously. I think that the reason people say writers are born, not made, is that these are intuitions that just happen because you’ve read so much, and you’ve written so much.
BG: And when you say five years with this book, how many drafts are we talking?
DM: Well, that’s the weird thing. Everybody thinks that I’m such a, as we say in Urdu, لکیر کا فقیر, that I spend so much time slaving over this stuff. But my first draft is not that different from my final draft. The changes that I make are the critical ones. With this book, the process was writing it, and then spending lots of time re-reading it, but not that much time rewriting so much as finding the places where I needed to make edits. My sentences come out pretty final. It’s more like these information choices, where I must ask myself, what am I not getting across, or what part of this character has not been represented adequately. So, for me, it’s more a process of refinement, sharpening it.
BG: In one instance, when Rustom is in New York, you write that he starts feeling nostalgic and romantic about Pakistan. How do you contend with distance reshaping memory, and belonging, particularly for overseas Pakistanis whose imagined homeland is vastly different from everyday realities on the ground?
DM: I suffer from that, too. I have this sort of love-hate relationship with Pakistan. I’ll come here, and initially be just so thrilled by the vividness of the place and all the complexities of it. And then, find that it’s too much. It’s psychologically too taxing. And then I’ll go abroad and start getting that romantic haze that grows around it. And I spend a lot of time moving through that haze. In a way, that gives me an advantage. An important part of my readership is these expatriate Indians and Pakistanis who are nostalgic for the place, who are missing home. A home which they often don’t even know. So I can say anything I like. I’m always most afraid of what my friends here in Pakistan will think, because they’re the ones who actually know whether or not I’m just making it all up, or whether there’s some truth to what I say.
BG: Who is your ideal reader? Do you think about how your average Pakistani is going to encounter this text, and what they would think about it?
DM: The average Pakistani won’t encounter this text. This is read by a tiny sliver of the population who care about such things and who are capable of reading such things.
In terms of my ideal reader, the one I’m most interested in is the one who is passionate about literature. My goal is to write great fiction, and great fiction doesn’t really matter where the reader is from, or who the reader is, all you need is a passionate reader. I’m glad that the Pakistanis find it interesting, but I certainly hope that I am of interest to more than just the ones who happen to come from this country.
I’ll come here, and initially be just so thrilled by the vividness of the place and all the complexities of it. And then, find that it’s too much. It’s psychologically too taxing.
BG: Is there any part of your writer brain that feels like you have to explain certain things to an audience who may not be super familiar with what you’re talking about?
DM: Yeah, I try to keep aware of that. Because for me, I know it so well. I try to be very alert to the fact that a large number of my readers are probably people who don’t know much about Pakistan at all. So I have to be very attentive to the fact that I can’t assume any knowledge whatsoever. And the way I try to write it, this isn’t very conscious, but in the back of my mind, I’m always thinking about the fact that I’d like my mother’s family in Wisconsin to be able to pick up this book and read it and find it moving and interesting without having any knowledge of Pakistan whatsoever.
Bareerah Ghani is a Canadian-Pakistani writer and editor. She holds an MFA in Fiction from George Mason University, and freelances as a book reviewer at Publishers Weekly. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Moon City Review, and other places.