Dur e Aziz Amna’s second book, A Splintering, traces the fortunes of Tara, a woman driven by escalating wants. Readers of Amna’s first book, American Fever, may catch echoes of the knowing, sometimes acidic, always perspicacious first-person narrator of that book in Tara, albeit at a much keener pitch, for the subject of A Splintering is to a greater extent, and much more violently, the extremes of human relationships and emotions.
In the opening of the book we are quickly introduced to all the things that Tara wants: an emerald ring that belonged to her grandfather; to go about in modern clothes without a chadar; a clean, well-dressed family; the freedom of the city. As the story picks up speed, Tara covets more and more. To leave behind her past, to be made anew, to be rich.
Tara is a rapacious observer, and she is learning all the time. Disgusted by the “petty, foolish femininities” of her sisters, and beset by feelings of being an “unwoman,” she looks to the men around her for models. But her most important education is in teaching herself how to transgress. At one point, after she’s sold her gold jewelry to fix her teeth in secret from her in-laws, she says, “Over the next few days, I absorbed the after-effects of my decision the way dry soil soaks in rainfall. No amount of anger or resentment that I received, from either Hajra or Hamad, broke me. It was an important lesson that stayed with me. It was better to transgress and count on the people in power to forgive you, rather than wait for their permission.”
Dure and I spoke over Zoom, before the US release of her book. She had been speaking at book events in Pakistan and the UK, where it was already out, and was preparing for her tour in North America. We talked about readers’ reactions to the book, translating Tara’s worldview into language, “believable” characters, and how this book written deep from Tara’s consciousness might really be about men.
The conversation has been edited for clarity.
ANUM ASI: I wanted to start with the opening itself. I found it interesting that there is a direct address from Tara to the reader, an appeal for sympathy while at the same time calling herself an “unreliable character.” She’s summarizing the big themes of the novel, telling us how she found it impossible to live as a “blank, happy woman” even when she had everything she thought she wanted. And it sounds like she’s talking to a jury: she’s justifying herself in some way.
DUR E AZIZ AMNA: I love the fact that you used the word “jury” because, to peel the curtain back a little, the book started off originally in Tara’s childhood home, with a scene with her brother acting the way that he typically does. And a big struggle that I had with this book, once it went out on submission, is that a lot of editors, particularly US-based editors, kept calling it very dark. There was a phrase, where I thought wow, I want to use this as a blurb: it was something like “irrevocably dark.” But this was meant to be derogatory. I constantly kept getting this feedback, that the book is too dark, that it’s very hard to get into because it’s too depressing. So one of the things that I talked to my agent about was that maybe we change the opening and instead of focusing on her brother and that misery of her childhood, we start with this ambition of hers. The reason I’m picking out the word jury is that I almost rewrote that beginning in order to test the waters with the reader: Hey, can I try to get your attention about this book? I got so frustrated with the idea that no one could get into the head of this person who felt so alive to me. That’s why there’s that language of, oh I know I’m not a relatable character, and I know this is going to be a hard sell for you. I feel as though it was half Tara and half literally me, auditioning as the writer.
AA: I love that. Because this voice is so vivid and immersive, and because it does feel like she’s auditioning all the most alive parts of herself. That was my question as well: Who is her audience in that opening? It’s so interesting to learn that the audience is more an audience for you as an author. Because, as I read, I was wondering: Is it a jury of her peers? Is it people from Mazinagar, is it people from her newer milieu in Rawalpindi? All these gradations of class and wealth that she’s moving through, who is she talking to?
DAA: I think in that very first address, it is just the reader, whoever the imagined reader might be. And the other thing is, when she says, I have to show you where I come from and we go back into her childhood, a lot of that is a very specific environment. I could argue that, while of course it might be hard for a Brooklyn-based or Toronto-based reader to access that, there might even be a lot of Pakistani readers, or South Asian readers, who are now so far removed from village life that it might be hard for them, too, to fully understand that environment. So I thought of opening the book with something that, more and more, all of us feel – which is this vast wealth inequality that is constantly slapping us in the face, not because it didn’t exist before but because now it’s much more visible. That felt like a bigger tent to gather under.
It felt refreshing to be with this character who didn’t have any of the beliefs that I do.
AA: Tara is very much a character of want. It feels like the structure of the novel is just her broadening her horizons: looking at something, thinking that she wants it, and trying to go out and get it. From the very beginning, when they go to Islamabad and she sees that family. And then she manages to move to Rawalpindi, and she thinks well now I want to work, and now I want to escape from my mother-in-law, and it just keeps growing and it never ends. Was that structure something that you had from the beginning? That thread of what she wants and how she gets it, which draws us along? And did you have all the different parts of her journey mapped out?
DAA: No, not really. I always knew that this was going to be a character who was animated or motivated by an endless want, or an endless desire for things, and I knew that there was going to be that move from the village to the city, just because that’s specifically a milieu I feel very strongly about. My parents were of that generation, and I think that so much of my life, particularly because we’ve kept very close contact with that prior life, has been tainted by that move. And I always knew that there was going to be some sexual transgression as well. Initially, I had her cheating on her husband, but at some point I decided that the main motivation was going to be wealth: beyond a rebellion from societal mores, beyond wanting to be a free woman sexually. More than any of that, I wanted it to be about money and about wealth. In the first draft I actually had her as a PTV broadcaster. I went to the PTV headquarters and interviewed people, ex-newscasters. But in interviewing them I realized that the logistics didn’t really work out for what I needed her to do. So I ended up having her be a teacher.
AA: That would have made her a public person in a way that it’s interesting that she’s not: all of these broader events happening, filtering through to her life, their effects visible to us, her reactions visible to us. But in the way you chose to write her, what she’s doing is very personal. Nobody is really looking at her except the people just around her, and they’re the ones she’s fighting with. She’s not fighting on a public stand. If she were, that would have been a very different story.
DAA: That’s a great point. One of the things that my agent suggested – and I’m very happy I didn’t follow through with this – was to give her some friends because she’s a very lonely person. But I didn’t really want to do that because that didn’t feel like the person she is. Of course she knows people in the classroom and whatnot, but it didn’t feel to me that she was the kind of person who would have friends important enough to make it into the book. So yes, a lot of what is happening to her, in every way, is happening very much at the private and domestic scale.
I thought of opening the book with something that, more and more, all of us feel – which is this vast wealth inequality that is constantly slapping us in the face, not because it didn’t exist before but because now it’s much more visible
AA: I find that so recognizable too, because she’s such a divided person. The way she’s so hellbent on leaving her past behind, I recognize that from people that I know, which is that they don’t have friends because there’s a part of themselves that they’re not sharing with anyone, and nobody understands their life now, neither the people from their past nor the ones in their new life. So it’s just very lonely. It’s a lonely movement.
I also sometimes feel that we have a glut of these very confused characters in some of the fiction that’s been coming out in the last however many years, people who are drifting and aimless, and maybe it’s a kind of response to how difficult the world is. But Tara is not like that: she’s not confused, she’s not aimless. She has this clarifying fire around her that burns away anything extraneous to what she wants, and what she wants is wealth, and maybe attendant power. Were there any models, real or fictional, that you had in mind when you thought of a female character like this? Who has so much clarity of purpose?
DAA: When I was in London, there was an event after which one of the readers came over. She’d read the book and loved it, and she said something about finding it so interesting that I’d said I love [Elena] Ferrante, because it felt like Tara was Lila’s story. I was struck by that, because in the original draft, the very seed of Tara had been Lila. Of course Elena is the one that does all the right things [in The Neapolitan Quartet], but she’s still a very passive character in some ways, she’s so cerebral, and she’s writing all this, whereas Lila is the one who does things and then completely disappears. And so, at the very start of the book, Tara had actually disappeared. She had gone into hiding, her husband was trying to find her, and then she slowly revealed what her life story was. At some point, I don’t remember now exactly when, I decided to eschew that disappearance. I think that is one model – this person who is afraid of very few things, or is not held back in the ways that other people are. Then there’s the idea, more than the person herself, of Qandeel Baloch, the woman who will disregard the limits very blatantly that society has set for her.
Also, the thing that I keep struggling with is that there are so many people who tell me that they were totally with Tara while she was fighting for her education, or while she was trying to get out of the grips of her brother, but then, you know, she goes too far. And that’s interesting to me, because we have so many examples of male characters who are complete anti-heroes – and at this point, the term anti-hero itself is such a trope. Male characters who are full of flaws, who commit all sorts of crimes and bad deeds, but they are somehow redeemable, and the viewer or the reader ends up loving them, despite their flaws or maybe even because of them. And I think there’s something about women that makes it very, very hard for that to happen. So I really wanted to create a character that’s very hard to like.
AA: Yes, there’s always a morality attached to whether you get to like a female character or not: Would I agree morally with her choices? I don’t, and therefore I can’t really stand by her. When the interesting thing, I guess, is not to stand by her, it is just to witness her.
That also brings me to Hamad. He’s such an unusual man, or seen as one. Where Tara is active, he is so passive. I also love that we don’t really get to see or hear too much about him right away, even after they get married. There is that brief consummation scene, and then we get ten or fifteen pages of the mother-in-law, the house, the chores, what language we are going to speak, before Hamad is properly described. What was your thought process as you developed his character, and as you thought about introducing him?
DAA: I really struggled with him, at least in the first few drafts. For example, my husband would read it, and he would say, I refuse to believe that a man like this could exist. I had to work on his believability while at the same time being okay with the fact that he might not be a fully believable character. Fiction is fiction and you don’t always need to map it exactly to reality, and of course crazy things happen all the time and so the fact that someone like him could exist is in no way unusual, and in no way insane. I do think that I struggled a lot with how he came across on paper and if people would even digest him.
At the same time, a lot of him is a foil to Tara. He thinks of himself as an intellectual, and he has all these ideals. And what was fun for me was that much of what he stands for is what I’d imagine a lot of people who read this book believe, all the “right” things politically: socialism, or reading books and literature, or passing on language, all these things that, as good liberals, we know where we stand on. And then there’s Tara who doesn’t give a fuck about any of this.
With her, I was trying to escape all these orthodoxies that we believe in so firmly (and probably for good reasons). It felt refreshing to be with this character who didn’t have any of the beliefs that I do. At the same time, she has this husband who is educated and who has all these ideas, yet, as we see, he still feels like he has rights over her body, and he still acts exactly how we would expect him to act. I was very interested in that dichotomy, too, because I’ve seen it in so many men around me.
I always knew that this was going to be a character who was animated or motivated by an endless want, or an endless desire for things
AA: That’s what made him so interesting to me too, because, on the one hand, he has no qualms about things like, I expect sex from her even if she doesn’t want it, or if she gets her tubes tied, that’s an infringement on me, or she has to listen to my parents. But then there’s another side of him – his passivity, his extreme need for comfort, which lets him “allow” her to do what she’s doing. So it was interesting how you handled which parts of his character would come forward where.
I do also want to talk about her mother, and here Ferrante again comes to mind, especially Troubling Love, where a kind of horror and shame is attached to the body of the mother, which becomes a grotesque stand-in for everything that is wrong with the character’s background, everything that is wrong with Mazinagar, or everything that is wrong with Naples. In Troubling Love, it feels like a dislocation, or a pathology, that the character needs to get rid of, but I didn’t see that kind of dynamic in your book. It’s not framed as a pathology. Instead, it’s presented as absolutely rational that Tara would have these feelings towards her mother. When you were writing this relationship, what were some of the questions you had in mind, or how did you conceive of that relationship?
DAA: For some reason, and I’m still not sure why that is – though we’ve discussed how so much of what Tara believes is completely outside of the bounds of what I think or feel, so maybe that explains it – every time I’d finish my writing day, I’d feel as if every kind of energy had been sucked out of me. There are some projects that refresh you or bring you happiness, and this really wasn’t one of them. I left the day completely exhausted, and maybe it was because I was so fully in her – the novel can’t see outside of her viewpoint. And it’s up to the reader, how much and what they are able to see around her. But while I was writing it I was so fully in her psyche that I sort of took everything that she said at face value.
You might have also read Frantumaglia, where Ferrante says that sometimes I worry that all I’ve written about is the mother-daughter relationship. A lot of Ferrante’s work takes that as a major focus of her project, whereas I wanted other models as well. There’s the brother who Tara, unbeknownst to herself, is modeling herself off of – towards the end, when she hits her daughter, is one of the first, or maybe the only moment when she acknowledges that oh! I’m becoming him. I think one of the differences might be that Tara is also so eager to be the men in her life, and any time she feels that she is not doing that and is drifting back towards being her mother, she freaks out. And I’m thinking, of course, about the films [she plays in her mind] where she is so tied to the idea of being a man.
AA: I found that so fascinating too – her whole conception of what a woman is, she’s struggling with it throughout.
DAA: This also came up when I was in Lahore, because the interviewer there was like, what’s wrong with all the men in this book? They’re all so hormonal, they’re crazy, what’s up with them? During that conversation, I realized that in some ways the book is about men, and this sort of obsession with men, which is probably because I am obsessed with men. Because when you’re growing up as a woman in Pakistan, you have to be. You’re constantly hyper-aware of their expectations and their needs and of them looking at you. You are specially obsessed about that last one. And so you’re always constantly studying them in turn. Maybe that is why the book also became, in some ways, a study of men.
AA: You wrote in your Substack that you think of nostalgia as a very masculine trait. Tara also says, “I’m not a nostalgist,” and she identifies her brother the same way, saying that because he’s not a nostalgist, he too is meant for the city. And she gets angry at people who are sentimental about the village. Is there anything you want to say about the role of nostalgia, what you were thinking as you were writing it?
DAA: Part of that almost reactionary feeling toward nostalgia might have been personal, because my first book was a very different project, a very nostalgist project, about a young woman who’s moved away, and is very much stuck on home, and is reading Faiz, all those classic things. Once you’ve written a book – and especially if you’re working on the very next project – the first book becomes like an ex that you’re trying to get rid of. I wanted to create an anti-Hira, someone who had no feelings towards home in that way. And, although it feels like a blanket statement to say that nostalgia is a masculine emotion, it feels anecdotally true to me. All the women in my life who have made that move – I’m thinking of my mother, or other women who made the move from the village to the city – haven’t got a single nice thing to say about the village. There’s no part of them that wants to return, or that yearns for those good old days. Which is why some of that is also gendered in the book: The people who are mentioning the village fondly are the men she meets – Hamad, and more than him, his father. But her mother, when she comes to the city, is perfectly happy, and Tara herself is perfectly happy there.
AA: Yes. Every time she looks at Mazinagar or thinks about it, it is a lacerating experience. She’s like – this ugly, barren, bloody, disgusting landscape [both laugh]. Which I thought, you know what, you’re justified in thinking that given…
DAA: I mean, that’s why I’ve had to change the name. Initially, it was a real town, I think. But I didn’t want any one poor town in Pakistan to bear the burden of all the abuse she’s hurling at it.
I was trying to make language disappear
AA: Our previous discussion answered some of this next question, I think. The book is in first person: Was it ever in a different perspective? Asking you what the first person affords you at this point in time is probably redundant, but did you ever consider writing it in third?
DAA: No, no, I didn’t at all. And I don’t know why that is. I mean, they say that a good POV is one that you don’t notice, it disappears or it doesn’t matter as much. And I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, but for some reason, almost every character comes to me in the first person.
AA: Are you considering switching it up, is that something that appeals to you, or is it more “I will let the character decide for me?”
DAA: I guess I’m curious what you think: What would be the advantage of shifting to the third person?
AA: I think, in this case at least, Tara’s perspective is so vast, that – as you said – it completely overwhelms the whole book. And that’s what works for this book, especially the way that she’s thinking of home, the way that she’s thinking about what she wants and needs. It becomes compelling because we see it from her perspective. Maybe third person might work if you wanted to introduce a level of irony, or direct the reader towards thinking about Tara’s feelings in a different way, give it that kind of breathing room, an outside perspective on Tara.
I think often writers have one that they prefer or naturally turn to, and then one that they’re like, oh maybe I should experiment with this. For me, I usually do first person, and then I keep thinking maybe I should be doing third instead…
DAA: I’m thinking now of Flesh [by David Szalay]. I so aggressively love that book, and I’ve been reading about people who don’t, which of course they are welcome to their bad, wrong opinions [laughs]. The whole project of the book is to create distance between the reader and the main character, and this [the third person POV] is another trick he uses to create that distance – never even assuming that you are inside the character.
AA: I also found that book interesting because of the way he handles time jumps. And you’re also writing in this huge time frame; a lot of stuff happens to Tara. How were you thinking about time passing in the book, and what was your process for figuring out how to handle it?
DAA: That was a bit of a struggle, because I knew early on that I wanted the two bookends of Zia’s death and Bhutto’s, so obviously that leaves a fixed amount of time. That was non-fungible, which meant I’d have to stretch or contract time as needed. There were a few moments – for example, when she starts seeing Ashraf – where it was a little annoying how much time there had to pass between when they meet and when Bhutto is killed (towards the end of the book). But I was so stuck on those two bookends, particularly Bhutto’s death (which you can’t really say much about without giving away the book) that had to really be the end of the book. And I actually don’t know why Zia had to be there.
AA: I think that scene was the one where her brother kind of…
DAA: Well, he brings in the TV, and that’s when things start changing and all the rest – so yes, maybe it was that.
AA: Did you write a lot and then cut it down, or did you know which scenes had to be there?
DAA: No, no. The other thing [about the timespan] that I did want was for her children to grow up a little, as I particularly wanted the relationship between her and her daughter to get slightly messy as she grows up. But I did not [write a lot and then cut it down]. This is more or less what it was. Obviously, scenes have been edited a lot, and there are a lot of scenes that were changed plot-wise, but I don’t ever – I’m never able to – write very long things.
AA: I’ve often read or heard you described as a lyrical writer. But I think, in A Splintering, what stands out to me is the straightforward, analytical quality of your writing, rather than it mainly proceeding on a lyrical basis of image or rhythm. When you were writing it, was there anything in particular you wanted to do with language? Something you wanted to do differently than before or an object you were aiming for?
DAA: I actually have no idea what that word [lyrical] means. I’ve seen that too, so many times, and it’s always meant, I think, as praise –
AA: It is, yes.
DAA: But I never know what to make of it, because I feel like the way I write – I intentionally try to write very plainly. It’s always curious to me when “lyrical” is used as an adjective to describe my work.
I was trying to make language disappear. I think a lot of it is, again, that reaction to the first book, this idea of the multi-lingual narrative which I am so tired of – I wanted to be just done with that [laughs]. I don’t think I succeeded, but I didn’t want there to be a single Urdu word in the entire book. I think there are a couple, like charpai, that I couldn’t find a good translation for. Also, it didn’t feel true to Tara herself. She doesn’t care about language, she doesn’t care about transmission, she doesn’t want her kids to learn Punjabi. Her only awareness of language is in its relation to shame – such as when she notices that her accent is different from her husband’s – as opposed to it being something to take pride in, or a thing to hold on to. This is also why I’m particularly curious to know why anyone would think this book is lyrical, because I so intentionally tried to make it very flat.
AA: Last question! Do you have any writing rituals?
DAA: No, though I just realized that my library keeps a lot of old Paris Reviews, so I’ve been going through all the Art of Fiction interviews. I don’t know what it is about them but they’re so good, and you can’t really assess what the common thread [among them] is, because they’re of different writers, and by different writers. This is not really a ritual, since I only read them when I’m struggling or when I’m trying to get started on the next project. But going through other writers’ interviews, or learning about their writing processes is something I’ve been doing recently.
Anum Asi is a writer from Karachi with a degree in Creative Writing from Cornell University where she served as an Assistant Editor at EPOCH magazine. Her fiction has appeared in publications including Virginia Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Necessary Fiction, and The Aleph Review, won the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Fiction and has been supported by Monson Arts, Banff Center for the Arts and Creativity, the Atlantic Center for the Arts and VONA/Voices, among others. She has taught creative writing at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, and Habib University.
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