Uneasy lies the head

FATIMA Bhutto speaks with a plum in her mouth, more British than the Brits, a legacy of her education as one of the Pakistani elite. She is a little embarrassed, too, that she writes in English.

"I never learned Urdu reading and writing, although I speak it, but I learned Arabic script," she says. "I'm not trying to shirk responsibility here, but Urdu is not the language I think in. I'd love to."

Language and writing are important parts of Bhutto's life, and she would dearly love to be read, above all else, as a writer, not as she is often cast, as an aspiring politician. But she knows that when her third book comes out, in April next year, it will be scrutinised as a political memoir.

To be called Songs of Blood and Sword - a reference to a Persian poem and to her grandfather, whose name, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, contained this warrior image - the book will claim that Bhutto's aunt Benazir was, if not responsible for, at least complicit in the murder of Fatima Bhutto's father, Murtaza.

Fatima was 14 when he was shot outside their house in Karachi by hit men disguised as Pakistani police.

The day before, he had bequeathed his daughter the task of writing the book she is about to publish, 13 years later.

"It was one of the last conversations I had with my father," she says.

"We had a rare quiet family moment when there weren't a hundred people around and he was talking candidly, as he always did about his life."

Murtaza and his brother Shah Nawaz (who died of poisoning in 1985) had fled Pakistan in 1979, when their father (Fatima's grandfather) was hanged by the military dictator who had ousted him, Zia-ul-Haq. Fatima was born in 1982; her parents divorced when she was three and her father married a Lebanese woman, Ghinwa, "my mother" to Fatima and her younger brother Zulfikar Ali Jr, now 21.

"Things were looking strange," she recalls. The streets around their house were taking on the atmosphere of a siege.

"We knew something was happening, but we didn't know what. It was different, so I asked him if he was scared, because I was scared.

"He said no. 'Compared to what else I have lived through,' he said, 'this is champagne and caviar', and I remember thinking, 'What do you mean?' I had lived through it with him, but I was a child. I interrupted him and said, "Oh my God, you've got to write a book.' "

Bhutto describes her father as eloquent, a great reader and a man who wrote well.

But he said to her, "If I write a book about what I know, they'd kill me ... When I die, you can do it."

Bhutto tells this story with some hesitancy, allowing its import to fall lightly. Because she is so charming, so seemingly one of fortune's favourites, with her beauty, intelligence and connection to a powerful, moneyed family, it is too easy, if not to forget, at least to play down that she has inherited that threat.

And she has, nevertheless, written a book about it.

At the invitation of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, she travelled to Bali to begin the publicity for a book she says is not memoir, or completely political history, but a hybrid of the two.

Later, she will call her time in Indonesia "restorative", which is remarkable given the attention she receives and the manner in which she handles it.

She is generous, accepting with sturdy politeness the fawning attention (this by men, understandably rendered idiotic by her loveliness) along with the intrusiveness of journalists. Even as she was answering questions about the Pakistani reaction to Barack Obama, her country, once more, was experiencing the violence that is the real subject of her book.

"When I talk about my father's murder, that was easy," she says.

"But when it came to talking about Benazir, I had written her as a political chapter, about her government, and [the publishers] said, 'No, no, people are going to want to know more about what you think.' It was always a bit of a struggle. But I think - I know - that in the final product, violence is the issue, corruption is the issue."

Bhutto's first book was poetry, published a year after her father's death when she was 15; the second was 8.50am 8 October 2005, first-hand accounts by children injured and made homeless in the 2005 devastating Pakistan earthquake.

Now that she has a little distance on her father's death, she regrets being talked into publishing those grief-stricken poems. "I did it as a commemoration, but the occasion was a little larger than I was," she says.

She still writes poetry, but it's not for sharing.

A few days after she says this, at a satellite event of the Ubud Festival on the neighbouring island of Java, Bhutto reads two poems, two brief stanzas with short lines, a critique of contemporary Karachi life observed keenly, described with economy and wit.

The night, supported by the management of Borobudur, the ancient Buddhist monument an hour's drive from Yogyakarta, is surreal, and Bhutto, it seems, has anticipated the grand and quirky strangeness of the event. Wearing a frothy, creamy confection over jeans, standing on a makeshift platform behind which rises the spotlit stones of Borobudur, she says, simply, that "everyone must be sick to death of hearing about my family, so I'm going to read two poems". One describes corrupt lawyers chanting "maudlin slogans, pining for despots past".

She is off the stage in a couple of minutes, and is soon listening intently to a reading by Australian writer Tom Cho, whose poetic, experimental short story from Look Who's Morphing she calls a highlight of her Indonesian trip.

She is as charismatic, clearly, as her aunt, her father and their father before them, but her enthusiastic praise of fellow authors is more than politeness. She has a writer's passion for words.

"I carry notebooks in my bag and constantly scribble things down," she says. By the time she wrote about the earthquake, she had already started to write polemical newspaper columns in response to Israel's invasion of Lebanon and to Iran, where she went to investigate the everyday lives of women.

It was in the process of creating 8.50am that she began to think about voice and style. The editors told her "this doesn't sound good enough, let's edit it and make it sound more flowery", Bhutto says, but she "dug in". She won that tussle, sure that "getting the voices out there, as they were written" was vital, to keep in the minds of the Pakistani people the plight of the refugees.

Her criticism of the Pakistani government, now under the control of Benazir's husband Zardari, is uncompromising.

It was the elections that brought him to power that forced Fatima Bhutto's hand, to fulfil her father's prediction that she would write the family history.

"I was going to write a book about Karachi," she says. The proposal was written, two chapters drafted, "then the election happened, and it was deja vu ... I thought, OK, they are going to erase my father's history, his murderer is still being tried in courts, so it gave it an urgency, moved it forward."

The Pakistani government has recently passed a "national reconciliation ordinance", making it virtually impossible, she says, to bring corruption charges against politicians. She still believes that Zardari was behind her father's death, with Benazir's tacit approval, although she wrote a grief-stricken note, an anguished cry of "enough", after her aunt's assassination.

This book is not going to please many of her relations, although she hopes it will help her brother "reconcile himself to this very violent family he finds himself in as a male everyone expects very strange things of".

"Its not your average family, and you're always held accountable for their good qualities and their bad qualities," Bhutto says. "This book has [allowed me] to say, yes, I liked this, no, I didn't like that.

"There is always this perverse curiosity about any family, the Mitterrands, the Clintons ... And people don't like it when you change the plan," she says, about her decision to make Songs of Blood and Sword "a journey" into understanding the cyclical nature of the family's violent history.

"People want to keep you in a place they understand about you," she says.

"But I do hope that, with this book, I can come under [the description] writer, and stay there."

Rosemary Sorensen travelled to Bali as a guest of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.

Source:http://www.theaustralian.com.au