Fatima Bhutto's interview with with Masoud Golsorkhi

Fatima Bhutto is a 28-year-old writer from Pakistan. Her grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed in 1979; her aunt Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in 2007; and her father Murtaza Bhutto was killed in 1996, probably – or most assume – on the orders of Asif Ali Zardari, widower of Benazir and current president of Pakistan. Fatima’s new book is an autobiographical tribute to her murdered father, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir. She discusses with Masoud Golsorkhi the genesis of the memoir, her everyday life in Karachi, and the rise of the suicide bomber.

Masoud Golsorkhi: What made you tackle your own life?

Fatima Bhutto: It was one of the last things I promised my father before he was killed, that I would tell his story. Just hours before he was killed we were all sitting together as a family and I said to him, “You have such a fascinating life, you should write a book.” And he said, “No, I can’t. It’s too dangerous for me to say the things I know. You do it. When I’m gone you can do it.” I was 14 at the time and wildly precocious, and I took out a pen and paper but he said, “No, no, not now, after I’m dead you can do the book.” And hours later he was killed, and it was the last thing I owed him I think. So six years ago when I was in London doing my Masters at SOAS [the School of Oriental and African Studies], I finally felt brave enough to start digging and to start searching for people, and then I started writing around two years ago.

MG: Why did you start writing then?

FB: Because two years ago these people many of whom I believed were guilty of murder were about to come back into office, and I thought if I don’t start now I’m going to lose access to people, to documents. I was right as it turned out because two months after I started writing, Asif Ali Zardari acquitted himself in all the murder cases he was involved in, one of which was my father’s, and then by September he was “elected” by his own parliament as president.

MG: The book lives in an interesting place between personal memoir and investigative journalism, yet it’s quite open about its limitations.

FB: To tackle a family this difficult and a country this complicated, the only way I could do it was just to be exceedingly honest. Even though this book was six years of research and flying back and forth for interviews, some points were still blank for me, like my uncle’s [Shahnawaz Bhutto] murder: the people who were there were either dead or they had moved on or they were untraceable. I sat down to write and I thought that’s what I have to say then, I can’t pretend that I know more than I do. And the things I like to read all have that sort of no-bullshit attitude in them. Malcolm X’s autobiography is one of my favourite books because at no point does he pretend; he is honest about what he knows and what he doesn’t. Malcolm X is very open about the fact that he was a hustler and a criminal, that he was self-hating, and what I like so much is not only the honesty but also the journey.

MG: Why was it so important for you to write about Pakistan?

FB: I felt very much that there had to be another space for discussion and another sort of story. It seems that so many people who write about Pakistan, so many people who want to tell our story, are foreigners. You know, they’re New York Times journalists or Washington Post correspondents or they write for the Guardian. Now we have a lot of Pakistani voices writing fiction, but not so much non-fiction, and historically a lot of our most famous poets wrote in exile, they couldn’t write in their own country because they were criticising regimes and institutions. But I think that silence is more dangerous, always, than speaking out. In a country like Pakistan where there’s a legacy of political violence, of state violence, its partner is silence. States assume that they can do this, whether it’s Pakistan or it’s Sri Lanka and its concentration camps, and that you will just shut up about it because the price is always too high. And these are countries where the price of everything is too high, water and electricity included, but silence is much more costly.

MG: What do you think about the way Pakistan is portrayed in the West?

FB: There are things that we know in Pakistan, that we watched happen, but the narrative that’s written for Pakistan by the West is totally different. Even when it comes to Benazir, for example, people abroad are always saying, “Oh my God, she did such wonderful things for women,” but in fact she was a woman who covered her hair when she didn’t have to, and most women didn’t at that time. And it was under her government that the Taliban was recognised by Pakistan, at a time when only three governments in the world recognised the Taliban: Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Benazir’s Pakistan.

MG: What is life in Pakistan like for your generation?

FB: I guess we came of age in the age of dictatorships, and we’ve had over 30 years now of either oppressive military regimes or oppressive civilian ones. It’s certainly a feeling that gets underneath your skin but you learn to adapt to that kind of fear and violence very quickly, you learn all the rules of how to survive it because you have to, because that’s what the environment is like. Take the Lawyers’ Movement [a protest movement started by Pakistani lawyers in 2007, after General Pervez Musharraf unconstitutionally sacked the Chief Justice Muhammad Chaudhry] – everybody in the West assumed that this was a movement about the sanctity of the law, but it wasn’t, it was a movement about one man’s unceremonial dismissal. And it wasn’t mentioned anywhere that this movement broke down the court system, that for two years people were languishing in jails because there was no one to represent them, and that the lawyers never spoke about the Hudood Laws [legislation enacted in 1979 that severely curtailed women’s rights], which say you can put a woman to death for having adultery. The Lawyers’ Movement was in a way a very tribal fight, but the impression that all this exposure gave was that it was some sort of watershed for democracy, and it really wasn’t. I suppose the other paradigm is a completely ridiculous one that says, “Oh well, look we had fashion week in Pakistan and therefore everything is fine, therefore the Taliban can’t win.” But again that’s a very difficult picture because that fashion week is enjoyed by not even a per cent of the population: it’s a per cent of a per cent of a per cent. It’s almost proving what the Islamists say about a certain segment of the population: that they don’t even care about their own country, that they only care about their own wealth and their own luxuries and their own opportunities, which is what a fashion week looks like in a country where we should really be having an electricity week, a sanitation week, a plumbing week!

MG: What was the country like when your grandfather was in charge?

FB: I wasn’t born then. But I knew that Pakistan through my father’s dreams and his longing for a country that no longer existed. I never saw the Pakistan that was pre-fundamentalism, pre-Afghan war, but it was described to me in this sort of utopian way, as a place that was really trying something new, a country that was in the middle of an experiment, and the imagination they had for themselves was grand and it was proud. It was the kind of place that visually seemed impossible to me because my father would tell me about riding bikes down to the beach to watch the cavalry come and wash their horses in the ocean. In the Karachi that I live in now you don’t bike anywhere because it’s unsafe, you know the streets are unsafe for a Pakistani.

MG: How do you cope with the levels of violence?

FB: The one thing I always felt comforted by was a memory of one time in Karachi before these bombings started. One day I was supposed to go with my mother to run errands before going back to college, and then this huge suicide attack happened and it closed down a main road, and in my mind I immediately cancelled my life for the day and just decided to stay put. The next thing I know, my mother has her coat on and she says, “Let’s go.” I remember thinking, but the attacks have just happened in the city, and she said, “You know it will be safe now because they don’t normally bomb twice in the same place.” I guess that’s the survivor’s way of understanding violence.

Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir is published by Jonathan Cape and out now.
randomhouse.co.uk/


Source:http://www.tankmagazine.com/magazine/interviews/fatima-bhutto-80