On Saturday, November 5th, Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan gave a reading and Q&A at UNT. Fawzia was in Denton to give a paper at UNT’s South Asia Peace Conference. She is a University Distinguished Professor of English and the Director of Women and Gender Studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She has published poetry, plays, and books of literary and cultural criticism. Her memoir Lahore with Love Growing up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style was originally published by Syracuse University Press in 2010, and received rave reviews from both magazines and notable individuals such as Nawal el Saadawi, Bapsi Sidhwa, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Mandy Van Deven. Syracuse University Press dropped the book after a “character” threatened a lawsuit that proved inadmissible. But despite this attempted censorship—which Fawzia details on her website and in an appendix to the new edition of her book—her memoir remains in print with Insanity Ink Publications.
Fawzia’s memoir is the story of the past fifty years of Pakistan’s political, cultural, and social transformations. The book is both global and local, personal and political, and, as Carole Stone states in her introduction, it is “both a paean and rebuke to Pakistan, the country of Fawzia’s birth. It is a witness to violence against women, strictures of a patriarchal society, and narrow-minded religion, and dictorial government.” The Pakistan that Fawzia and her girlfriends inhabit is a country continually in flux, struggling to define itself in and against the increasingly homogenizing forces of globalization. The hopes, fears, triumphs, and shifting inter-relationships of this close group of female friends reveals, as Fawzia detailed in an interview, both “nostalgia for that vanished secular past and promise of Pakistan” as well as an acknowledgement of the reality of the country’s present. Yet Fawzia’s life as an international literary figure and activist diverges from the lives of her girlfriends who have remained in Pakistan, causing her to feel that she is constantly on “that rusty see-saw” remembered from childhood, a traveler both at home and abroad.
Fawzia is not the first writer to face controversy in telling the story of her life. Memoir is a genre often fraught with conflicting demands: to tell the truth, but to also acknowledge that memory can never be entirely truthful. To depict, then, these conflicting truths of memory in the most honest manner, but to also render the events of the past in a meaningful way. To give “reality” an unreal and artificial narrative structure necessarily means foregrounding some truths and letting others fall by the wayside.
In the Q&A after the lively reading which included singing, a theatrical dialogue, and “love” poetry, Fawzia discussed the role of the writer in composing memoir, stating that she was surprised and shocked that the offended character protested her depiction in the book—a depiction that Fawzia herself thought was more praise than condemnation. Many of the female characters in Lahore with Love lead lives circumscribed by oppression, struggling to exist in a patriarchal society that places little value in female narratives and voices. Madina, the offended character in what Fawzia calls “the offending chapter,” stands out for being one of the few women in the book who are able to speak without being silenced. Physically and psychologically, Madina stands out, speaks out, and carves a place for herself in the world. Controlling her public image—an image evidently upset by Fawzia’s memoir, although Fawzia told us that no one had been able to identify her character’s real-life counterpart before the scandal—seems in character with the orchestrated dramatizations that Fawzia depicts in the book. But the attempt to squelch Fawzia’s voice—her memoir—does not.
In some respects, all press is good press, and Fawzia’s memoir is now more well-known than ever. Dr. Masood Raja, a professor at UNT and editor and founder of Pakistaniaat, A Journal of Pakistan Studies, published a cluster on Lahore with Love last summer, showcasing an outpouring of support for the book. You can purchase the book directly here or on amazon.com.
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