I started writing poetry when there was fear, says Fatima Bhutto

In times of trouble, children find their own ways to cope and come to terms with it. Fatima Bhutto who always loved the written word, sought poetry.

As a 14-year-old, she had hidden in a windowless room, shielding her little brother when there was shooting outside her home in Karachi. Her father Murtaza was murdered that day. It cost her dearly to be Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s granddaughter and niece of Benazir Bhutto, former prime ministers of Pakistan.

“I started writing poetry at a time when there was a lot of fear in the city that I lived in. Karachi was a city on fire in the early 1990s,” says Fatima.

“It was a time and place that was, as it is now in many similar ways, ruled by violence and by overwhelming fear. Poetry was a way of looking at it from a distance, all the while knowing how close it was. I suppose our way of expressing things that we'd rather hide shifts as we are constantly moving and adapting. Then it was poetry, now it’s prose.”

It would seem her poems, written years before she was even aware of the intense political atmosphere and tensions in the family, had sensed the tragedies that awaited her. Her first book of poems — Whispers of the Desert — was published when she was 15.

Fatima wrote again after observing the wreck caused by an earthquake in Pakistan’s northern areas in 2005 in 8.50 a.m. 8 October 2005.

She says, “As a writer you want to examine what moves you, what frightens you, what is most perplexing to you. I’m most attracted to a subject when I feel there's a disconnect between how the subject — whether it was the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, the war in Lebanon in 2006, or violence in Pakistan — is reported and how it is lived.”

Her third book, Songs of Blood and Sword tells the story of ‘four generations of a family defined by a political idealism that would destroy them’.

The 29-year-old writer who will be visiting Kerala to attend the Deccan Chronicle Kovalam Literary Festival 2011, loves quite a few Indian writers.

“I think some of the best writing at the moment is coming out of the subcontinent — out of India and Pakistan. As for Indian authors, Suketu Mehta, Aravind Adiga, Basharat Peer are all contemporary writers I admire and enjoy reading. Agha Shahid Ali is one of my favourite poets of all time and Naipaul and Rushdie are classics I keep returning to. It’s a hard list to narrow down!”

Source: http://www.deccanchronicle.com/tabloid/all-rounders/i-started-writing-poetry-when-there-was-fear-says-fatima-bhutto-630