Creative Lives. Группа авторов

and Ghulam Abbas; I was charmed by Flaubert and Maupassant and totally in awe of Dostoyevsky. Favourites amongst English authors were George Eliot, Jane Austen, Henry James, Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf. I still love George Eliot and Henry James though, in recent years, contemporaries have held me in thrall. One fears imitation, but I’d like to think I’ve learnt a little from all the disparate but accomplished writers whose work I’ve admired and loved over the years: Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Ondaatje, J.M. Coetzee and the inimitable Gabriel García Márquez.

      MM: Your extensive body of work is a testament to the ease with which you move from one genre to another: you have written numerous short stories, a novel as well as plays (both original and adaptations) for the stage and radio. How would you describe your experience of working in multiple genres? Do you have a preference?

      RA: It has been a privilege to be able to move between various genres and I’ve loved the shape-shifting that it enables. Each has its own particular challenges and rewards. I love the immediacy of theatre and its collaborative nature, the total freedom of working on a piece of fiction and the generous canvas a film script or a radio production offers. The constraints of each discipline require a different kind of creative energy and I do enjoy the tension induced by the effort to observe its formal strictures and maximize its strengths. I suspect I am happiest working on fiction but most confident with theatre writing. I also find film scripts an exciting area of work at the moment as they demand a stronger visual awareness and a careful commitment to movement/action alongside the reliance on sound and the use of words. As a writer you are always learning and growing with your work, which keeps it all fresh and exciting.

      MM: I was wondering about your relationship with Urdu literature as a diasporic writer and translator based in the UK.

      RA: I always loved Urdu literature and read a number of books at a precocious age since I hung out with older cousins and siblings. Bait-baazi was a favourite pastime (this parlour game requires you to quote a couplet starting with the last letter of the last line recited by your preceding competitor). It drew us into poetry reading and a devotion to rhyme and rhythm long before we understood much of the verse itself. It was all traditional poetry. Without TVs, mobiles and social media to distract us, we read extensively … literally, whatever we could find. However, I never understood the importance of one’s first language and of translations until I came to live in England and realized that our second and future generations would have very little access to our literature without them. There was hardly any provision for mother-tongue teaching and no space for our literature within what was then (and probably remains?) a deeply Eurocentric curriculum. I felt it was important to do what I could to rectify that, so I organized Urdu classes for Pakistani children (including my own) at our local state school, got my children to watch Hindi films and set about working on translations. I love translating and regret the fact that I now have too little time to expend on that, or even on attending Urdu mushairas [social gatherings where Urdu poetry is read] and literary events, which I seldom missed when I first came to the UK.

      MM: In the introduction to We Sinful Women, your collection of translated Urdu poems by Pakistani women (Ahmad 1991), you argued that “the most innovative, the most radical and the most interesting Urdu poetry of our time is being produced by women and not by male poets”. To what extent do you still believe this to be true?

RA: When you’re younger you do make bold generalisations more blithely than you would in your “wiser” middle years. I suspect this claim was gravely unpopular with the Pakistani literary establishment of the day, but when I reconsider it, even today, I feel there is some justification for it. The poets I chose, barring one or two, were almost all political at a visceral level. A bold strand of radicalism informs the DNA of the poems that were written to protest against General Zia’s Islamization programme; a couple of them were written at the behest of the Women’s Action Forum.1 The poets addressed the burning issues of the day, speaking out bravely when several of their male counterparts had maintained a stony silence. Choosing to resist meant they had to be innovative both in terms of content and form. The work speaks for itself and the impact of the collection was remarkable.

      MM: You have adapted several novels into radio plays, including Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. What did you find to be the main challenge when adapting a novel such as Midnight’s Children into a play?

      RA: Adapting any novel into a dramatic form is a challenge. Novels have a sprawling overpopulated world that throbs with energy, emotions and ideas, often expressed with considerable nuance and subtlety. Swathes of it are lost when you’re confined to a fraction of the original number of words and are expected to reshape the most coherent dramatic aspects of the story in a manner likely to draw the listener into that world instantly. Ideally, what you hope to do is distil the essence of the novel’s meaning through its most powerful moments / scenes and to preserve the tone of the original. My producer and I felt we realized both of those goals but we had to make some tough choices and brutal cuts along the way. The first half of the novel is more vivid and has the immediacy of a family saga, whilst the second morphs into a war fantasy and political melodrama that chugs along a different plane as Saleem is hurled overseas and loses his natal moorings. To connect those two halves of the novel in a meaningful way was perhaps the hardest trick.

      MM: In several of your works of fiction, including The Hope Chest, and short stories such as “The Gatekeeper’s Wife” and “Through the Rose-Tinted Window”, you present the reader with fascinating and unexpected examples of cross-cultural, interracial encounters between women. Could you talk about your interest in meetings and interactions between women belonging to different cultures?

      RA: I find those encounters absolutely fascinating. Subconsciously perhaps, they are at the core of my experience as a woman who came to live in London as an adult and understood, for the first time, in a very direct and personal sense the meaning of the term “the Other”. That sense of exposure as the Other has not changed. Though I am reasonably integrated into mainstream culture here, I am sensitive to the grating reality of a growing deep-seated hostility to Muslims or people of Muslim heritage settled here, which has supplanted the racism of the Enoch Powell days. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir [(1949) 2015] argues that women are so divided by class, nation, faith and race that it is hard for them to find common cause with each other. Her insight, perhaps inaccurately recalled here, seeped into my awareness early on and has lingered, I must admit. Sadly, it holds true even today. It probably explains this recurring trope in my work. The encounters work as a vehicle for exploring the contrasts in women’s lives but also delineate their inability to identify the commonalties in their experience and their often ineffectual support for each other. Occasionally, as in real life, a bridge is built and crossed and women succeed in creating bonds that transcend family, class and faith. Those rare moments bring hope and light into the stories.

      MM: In your writings you often also explore the tenuousness and fragility of women’s relationships with each other. I’m thinking of your play Song for a Sanctuary, which is set in a shelter for battered women, but also of your portrayal of Reshma and Shehzadi’s cross-class friendship in the novel The Hope Chest. How do you conceive of female solidarity?

      RA: Female solidarity is possible, but it does require a degree of self-awareness and political understanding of what divides us as women. It comes often too late. Cultural conflict is at the heart of the breach that erupts in violence in Song for a Sanctuary, where the residents in the refuge clash with the refuge workers, who are more powerful than them; one of them is definitely hostile to any perceived weakness in the victims. In River on Fire, both sisters, raised in different faith cultures by their liberal atheist mother, fight over the death ritual appropriate for her. Here again, the relatively powerful position of the older sister becomes an underlying trap that prevents the possibility of a dialogue, until it is too late.

      MM: In the Author’s Note accompanying your play Mistaken …: Annie Besant