Culture and identity: Pride and prejudice (Pakistani style)

Last updated on: January 7, 2008 at 6:00 pm by Guest Contributor

Culture and identity: Pride and prejudice (Pakistani style) 2008-01-07T18:00:00-04:00 Guest Contributor

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Not your father’s Pakistan

My father has this habit of giving me newspaper or magazine articles of people and trends that he admires. Most of the content has to do with South Asian success stories such as the dotcom billionaire turned philanthropist, the industrialist tycoon, a talented child prodigy, a famous surgeon or technology wizard or rocket scientist maverick; there’s almost always some tidbit about an accomplished artist, be it poet, painter or musician, the flamboyant sports star, tales of aspiring immigrants, and then there was that funny piece about rural Indian villagers who get to sit in an airplane for the first time ever.

It’s a bit of mystery figuring out why my Dad is so fascinated by these stories, what it is about them that compel him to take a pair of scissors and neatly trim the pages from the latest issue of Time or Newsweek. Abboo calls the articles cuttings instead of clippings and usually folds them in a neat little square tucked inside used manila envelopes. I am the recipient of more than a dozen such envelopes that litter my desk drawers. And I dare not throw them away even though I don’t fully understand what they all mean to my father who certainly did not dream of becoming the next Bill Gates or following in the footsteps of other luminary icons. Yet he goes on collecting these accolades in his usual custom.

A poignant article

On New Year’s eve, I received another article from Abboo. This time it did not come in an envelope. It was a hastily crumpled up full page reprint of a Los Angeles Times tribute to Benazir Bhutto published in the editorial pages of the Seattle Times. And it was the last thing I wanted to see after a bombardment of headlines, analysis, blog postings and all manners of reactions to Benazir’s assassination. I was numb with information overload. Besides, when it came to Pakistan, there was nothing new to learn was my crass conclusion.

The news item my Dad had saved was lying untouched on my dining room table. I glanced at its orange highlighted paragraphs, the margins strewn with Abboo’s own comments in his trademark full caps penmanship. He had also drawn a big circle around the center page photo, circa 1972, featuring Zufikhar Ali Bhutto, Benazir’s father when he was the Pakistani Prime Minister, on a state visit to Simla, shaking hands with the then Indian PM, Indira Gandhi, with a collegiate 19 year old Benazir standing nearby. A poignant image that I was much too young to remember given as I was only a year old at the time. But that image triggered something in Abboo because he wrote this:

WHAT A CHANCE HE HAD WITH HIS CHARISMATIC ABILITIES TO REBUILD THE COUNTRY AFTER THE 1971 DEBACLE. BUT HE BLEW IT! HIS DEEPLY ROOTED FEUDAL MENTALITY EVENTUALLY DID HIM IN.

There was also a smaller photo of a beaming Benazir, beautifully resplendent as a bride upon her marriage to a sober faced Sindhi turbaned Asif Zardari in Karachi on December 18, 1987, about five years after we had left the city and immigrated to America. Underneath that photo, Abboo had jotted this statement:

OBVIOULSY SHE DIDN’T MARRY HIM FOR HIS LOOKS!

Ha ha… I could almost hear my Dad’s chuckles and I admired him for holding on to his sense of humor, to be able to laugh in the face of tragedy. He has always told me not to take things so seriously and I suspect he’s telling me what he himself needs to hear. So I wasn’t anticipating Abboo would get all sentimental about the latest tragedy in Pakistan, a country that he and I both claim as our “homeland”, a loaded term that neither of us wants to wrestle with nowadays. Some days I think we just loathe the place, not even wanting to go anywhere near the touchy discussion points, so we behave as if nothing matters anymore. We become indifferent and sullen and tune out. Then there are days when we get a sudden hankering to adore the place as you still adore a sobbing infant or a cranky toddler because they are your children after all.

JFK in the bazaar

Those are the days when Abboo and I relive our individual memory lanes. He talks about his generation coming of age in the 1950’s and 60’s enamored with Hollywood movies and American jazz. Abboo recalls with a great deal of fondness live concerts in Karachi where he saw Dizzy Gillespie, Artie Shaw, Jack Teagarden and Dave Brubeck. He still knows the names of all the Spaghetti Westerns, Hitchcock and Cary Grant films that he and his friends from St. Pats watched at the Regal, Odeon and Palace cinemas. He remembers the day he was shopping in Bori Bazaar when he read about JFK’s assassination in a Pakistani newspaper.

I nearly cried, Abboo informs me. My father was so shook up over the incident that he had to sit down on the pavement to settle his nerves. I try to conjure the image of a Pakistani man crying over the death of an American president. Then I talk about my generation growing up in Karachi during the 1970’s, wearing hideous bellbottoms and batik blouses, the Mama Parsi school girl crushes on Bjorn Borg, turntable sing along sessions to my favorite albums by Abba and the Bee Gees and how my uber cool Clifton friends taught me to groove to Travolta’s Stayin’ Alive. Oh yes. Those were indeed the days, long departed days of our youths in a country that we longer recognize on CNN. So what does one do when memories clash with reality? And how do you go about validating a past that contradicts all that we know of the present? Will the world ever know about a Pakistan beyond danger and violence? Does it even want to? Who will convince the skeptics to believe in what is remotely positive when a country’s social sophistications and urban flairs lack the currency value of its fanatics and suicide bombers?

The impasse is to be expected. My father’s Pakistan no longer exists. Neither does mine. And yet, and yet, I know we still care. I know we care in the things that we say and what we choose not to say. I know Abboo cared about something when he scribbled on the newspaper he gave me. And I know that I’m taking an exorbitantly long time to write this piece because I still do care about what happens to Pakistan, no matter how much I like to pretend otherwise. Maybe this pretence of not caring is an offshoot of the classic immigrant dilemma of detaching from your roots in order to fit in. Or maybe it comes from the anxiety and nervousness that engulfs me every time I encounter border crossings and hand over my U.S. passport showcasing a recent Pakistani visa, knowing that I will be questioned, maybe even grilled about the purpose of my visit. Sometimes, I can’t help but wonder which scenario was better. When I arrived in the United States in 1982, I had the privilege of telling my seventh grade classmates that I came from Pakistan and received blank stares. Fast forward a quarter of a century. Now I have the privilege as a teacher of telling my eleventh grade high school students that Pakistan is my birthplace only to receive scandalous stares.

Perennial brick wall

No one wants to feel ashamed of where he or she is from. It should be a matter of pride, to raise your head high and utter the word Pakistan and not have to hold your breath and feel your insides cringe. But pride is hard to come by these days and I think that pride is ultimately what my Dad was referring to in all those stories he has given me over the years. Pride was foremost on Abboo’s mind mulling over that seminal photo in the LA Times of Zulfikhar Bhutto and his unfulfilled potential which later shaped my Dad’s prejudice. The same could be said for Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, who was also given the chance, not just once, but twice as Prime Minister in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. We will never know if she would have finally succeeded the third time around, back in the saddle of leadership, with her position of privilege and her articulate and intelligent mind that could have steered a sensible course for Pakistan, one that was aligned with progressive values with concern for public welfare overriding individual agendas. This, of course, is a tough act for any leader in any country in any given time to follow. To expect politicians to be saints is to be deluded. But to come up against sixty years of history repeating itself with the same old stalemates and disappointments, with the same crop of lackluster helmsmen and one very promising helmswoman with all their broken pledges and tragic endings as has been the case since Pakistan’s creation, is to be hitting your head against the perennial brick wall.

When will enough be finally enough? When will pride remain pride and not be soured by prejudice?

One can only hope and keep on hoping.

Maliha Masood is a Karachi transplant living in Seattle, WA. She is the author of the award-winning travelogue, Zaatar Days Henna Nights: Adventures, Dreams and Destinations across the Middle East and is currently at work on an anthology of essays from Pakistani-American perspectives. She can be reached at [email protected].

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