Forgiveness...this seems like the one impossible thing. Is there forgiveness in this world? Can there be?
This is something that I've struggled with, something that I've found utterly alien. (You remember your Indian friend who asked you, exasperated: but how can you bury your dead...don't you know their souls must be brought to rest by fire?). Your bewilderment is probably at that level. I guess there will always be certain things in life that one finds odd, peculiar, not quite kosher and I suppose individuals vary in innate temperament and/or education as to the scope of their tolerance for the weird, sickening or disgusting (Montaigne comes to mind here). But no matter what, everyone's got their blind spots.
To set the record straight: there are lots of areas in which one can and should just let go. And one must always try and summon up the courage to forgive oneself as well. Even more difficult: one must sometimes put oneself in the position of asking for forgiveness. That is not the question, though.
Some will say that for forgiveness to be really meaningful we must look at extremes, human depravity itself-at both the individual and collective level. Only then, it is maintained, does forgiveness really make sense. But I simply can't stomach this idea. Why should rapists or paedophiles or war criminals be forgiven and by who? Certainly God can forgive whosoever He pleases, but why should the victims or their families forgive the barbarians at Auschwitz? Why should the Bangladeshi people forgive the Pakistani army or why should the Kashmiris forgive the Indian army fort heir atrocities? Is there something "high" or "noble" in doing so?
Because forgiveness ends the cycle of violence, because it brings "closure" to all concerned? Does it, does it really? Truth and reconciliation? We can forgive but we can never forget. This, to me, is like a statement in another language and I find it utterly incomprehensible.
Why should you ask forgiveness from others if you cannot forgive yourself? But this seems to miss the point because we can and do all sorts of things. But are there certain types of things (crimes, sins) which are beyond the human capacity to forgive? Is that kind of forgiveness really an other-worldly concept? The idea that we can or should have unlimited kindness, an endless capacity to forgive and unbounded hospitality strikes me as being somewhat unreasonable.
~~~
Prompted by a recent comment I feel compelled to ask myself why I haven't read more Paki literature (especially now that one of your friend's books is being published by Harper Collins this Fall).
If truth be told, that kind of writing makes me throw up. Pretentious, self-conscious, money-grabbing crap. The type of rubbish that I might pick up at the airport if there was a choice between it and, say, a biography of the Spice Girls. Kamila Shamsie, for example, writing about the air-heads in Karachi. Or Moshin Hamid's Reluctant Fundamentalist (okay, okay, he did interview you once and he was a charming young man). This is just the pseudo-liberal bandwagon rolling in, of course. Gosh, it's at times like this I wish I was a half-jewish lesbian extremist-Salafi dwarf struggling in a "post-colonial" world, suffocated by the tedium of bourgeois capitalism. Try and fit in every box possible so that some frustrated middle-aged woman in Hertfordshire or Ohio can have orgasms about how good her life is instead, so that she can be at "one with the universe" and still have her latte at the same time. You know how I despise that term, 'post-colonialism', don't you?
~~~
You met two Bulgarians and it struck you just how much they hated their own country, their own past (was that the real legacy of Communism?). You thought to yourself at the time: how very sad. And it seemed to be matched by a kind of reverential affection for all things western. Well, no, that in itself would have been understandable, I guess. Instead, what you noticed-and maybe this was just your overly critical eye coming in to play- was that their love only extended as far as the superficial things, like the possibility of a glitzy lifestyle, big money and fancy cars. The NHS and the National Gallery didn't stand a chance in comparison.
And what about your eagle-eye when it comes to your own distancing of yourself from Pakistan, Pakistanis, Muslims , Pakistani literature? Are you just a "brown sahib" or what one rather nasty commenter once called a member of the "comprador elite"?
It's not that you're constantly trying to escape being labeled or put in a box; it is, rather, that you don't care about such things (and probably never really have). It's probably the hardest thing to explain but if you're from London or New York you can't really have "pride" in your city. Being a New Yorker or a Londoner means, to me at least, that you don't really belong and, more to the point, that you don't care about belonging or not belonging. All you can do is sit in a bus and look out at the grey skies, the people outside, and then return to your book.
This is something that I've struggled with, something that I've found utterly alien. (You remember your Indian friend who asked you, exasperated: but how can you bury your dead...don't you know their souls must be brought to rest by fire?). Your bewilderment is probably at that level. I guess there will always be certain things in life that one finds odd, peculiar, not quite kosher and I suppose individuals vary in innate temperament and/or education as to the scope of their tolerance for the weird, sickening or disgusting (Montaigne comes to mind here). But no matter what, everyone's got their blind spots.
To set the record straight: there are lots of areas in which one can and should just let go. And one must always try and summon up the courage to forgive oneself as well. Even more difficult: one must sometimes put oneself in the position of asking for forgiveness. That is not the question, though.
Some will say that for forgiveness to be really meaningful we must look at extremes, human depravity itself-at both the individual and collective level. Only then, it is maintained, does forgiveness really make sense. But I simply can't stomach this idea. Why should rapists or paedophiles or war criminals be forgiven and by who? Certainly God can forgive whosoever He pleases, but why should the victims or their families forgive the barbarians at Auschwitz? Why should the Bangladeshi people forgive the Pakistani army or why should the Kashmiris forgive the Indian army fort heir atrocities? Is there something "high" or "noble" in doing so?
Because forgiveness ends the cycle of violence, because it brings "closure" to all concerned? Does it, does it really? Truth and reconciliation? We can forgive but we can never forget. This, to me, is like a statement in another language and I find it utterly incomprehensible.
Why should you ask forgiveness from others if you cannot forgive yourself? But this seems to miss the point because we can and do all sorts of things. But are there certain types of things (crimes, sins) which are beyond the human capacity to forgive? Is that kind of forgiveness really an other-worldly concept? The idea that we can or should have unlimited kindness, an endless capacity to forgive and unbounded hospitality strikes me as being somewhat unreasonable.
~~~
Prompted by a recent comment I feel compelled to ask myself why I haven't read more Paki literature (especially now that one of your friend's books is being published by Harper Collins this Fall).
If truth be told, that kind of writing makes me throw up. Pretentious, self-conscious, money-grabbing crap. The type of rubbish that I might pick up at the airport if there was a choice between it and, say, a biography of the Spice Girls. Kamila Shamsie, for example, writing about the air-heads in Karachi. Or Moshin Hamid's Reluctant Fundamentalist (okay, okay, he did interview you once and he was a charming young man). This is just the pseudo-liberal bandwagon rolling in, of course. Gosh, it's at times like this I wish I was a half-jewish lesbian extremist-Salafi dwarf struggling in a "post-colonial" world, suffocated by the tedium of bourgeois capitalism. Try and fit in every box possible so that some frustrated middle-aged woman in Hertfordshire or Ohio can have orgasms about how good her life is instead, so that she can be at "one with the universe" and still have her latte at the same time. You know how I despise that term, 'post-colonialism', don't you?
~~~
You met two Bulgarians and it struck you just how much they hated their own country, their own past (was that the real legacy of Communism?). You thought to yourself at the time: how very sad. And it seemed to be matched by a kind of reverential affection for all things western. Well, no, that in itself would have been understandable, I guess. Instead, what you noticed-and maybe this was just your overly critical eye coming in to play- was that their love only extended as far as the superficial things, like the possibility of a glitzy lifestyle, big money and fancy cars. The NHS and the National Gallery didn't stand a chance in comparison.
And what about your eagle-eye when it comes to your own distancing of yourself from Pakistan, Pakistanis, Muslims , Pakistani literature? Are you just a "brown sahib" or what one rather nasty commenter once called a member of the "comprador elite"?
It's not that you're constantly trying to escape being labeled or put in a box; it is, rather, that you don't care about such things (and probably never really have). It's probably the hardest thing to explain but if you're from London or New York you can't really have "pride" in your city. Being a New Yorker or a Londoner means, to me at least, that you don't really belong and, more to the point, that you don't care about belonging or not belonging. All you can do is sit in a bus and look out at the grey skies, the people outside, and then return to your book.
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