The Diaspora Zeroes in on the Borders
This essay turns to the concerns of many Pakistani and Afghan writers, who live abroad but in their ‘writing’ of home, increasingly focus on the border zone between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The border zone is both an escape route and a concentration of f
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The Diaspora Zeroes in on the Borders
Increasingly, writers from Pakistan are writing about the porous borders between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel A God in Every Stone works on the history of the town as it was in the 1930s moving constantly between the British Cantonment and the local people and embedding itself in past histories. But earlier in Burnt Shadows, Raza Konrad Ashraf is first attracted and then trapped by the Afghan struggle. Fatima Bhutto locates her novel The Shadow of the Crescent Moon in Mir Ali, a border town and Nadeem Aslam in The Blind Man’s Garden also concentrates on the same area. What does this border signify? Adventure, mystery, loss, danger, conflict or escape? Khaled Hosseni, a diasporic writer from Afghanistan in his first novel The Kite Runner not only uses Peshawar as an escape route but also details the arduous journey. In A Thousand Splendid Suns both the Afghan–Pakistan and the Afghan-Iran border zones are sketched out in detail. Miriam and Laila make a failed trip to the Afghan–Pakistan border. The zeroing in on the border region is indicative of a larger political concern. As Nadeem Aslam has observed ‘History is the third parent’.1 History is also made up of the past and its stories are capable of sending tremors to the body. The North West Frontier Province, as the area was known in undivided India, had a reputation both for its brutality and its generosity. It neighbours Khyber Pass which has for generations been a trade route and an entry point for invaders. Tribal people and tribal culture are part of this region. It has a past history of Afghan control, the Sikh Empire and the British rule, even if one were not to move any farther back than the eighteenth century. As part of Pakistan, the Pashtun area has a history of separatist struggles. Mir Ali, the city where Fatima Bhutto sets her novel, is even closer to the border. One can well imagine the diverse population of this border territory. The Afghan war with its turbulent record of different enemies and ideologies—the Soviets, Muhujudeens, Americans and the Taliban—each placing the people under a state of near permanent curfew, and leading to want, deprivation and orphanhood
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Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man’s Garden (New Delhi: Random House, 2013) 5.
© The Author(s) 2017 J. Jain, The Diaspora Writes Home, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4846-3_15
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The Diaspora Zeroes in on the Borders
also brought into the border zone, a large number of Afghan refugees. As such it is both a haven of refuge and a place of violence and has come to play a significant role in politics and the writing about the war zone. Pakistani diaspora writes about India as part of memory as in the early sections of the Burnt Shadows,2 Dilli is remembered as it was in 1945. Lahore is the centre for Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist3 and is the cultural response to 9/11. There are also some narratives of the dictatorships in Pakistan as in Shamsie’s Broken Verses.4 But the choice of the border as location is an evi
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