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!”
Fatima Bhutto does not hold back the punches
When the Sania Mirza-Shoaib Malik ‘yes-I’m-married-no-I’m-not’ controversy was raging, someone posted this on Twitter, ‘Now that Sania Mirza is going to Pakistan, can we have Fatima Bhutto in exchange?’
Humour aside, it’s easy to see why Fatima Bhutto is everyone’s darling—she comes from a powerful bloodline of a neighbouring country with whom our relationship has always been complicated, barring a fleeting envy for their cricketers and their culinary traditions. But our reaction to Fatima Bhutto has been different. She has a personal story that’s tormented by tragedy… the exile and subsequent bloody deaths of her family members, most of them untimely and gruesome and now, there is a brief flash of vindication, when she tries to resurrect her slain father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto’s image in her tell-all book Songs of Blood and Sword (SOBAS, Penguin).
In it she accuses her aunt the late Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari of murdering her father. That the alleged murderer of her father is now Pakistan’s President, makes Fatima’s unequivocal stand on her father’s killers a bold admission, one that fills her readers with both a grudging pride for this young 28-year-old and a little frisson of fear for her outspoken stance. Says Fatima, “At the launch of the book in Karachi, we had 700 people attending. We fought hard despite a lot of resistance to have it at the Clifton (the area where the Bhutto house is located and Murtaza was killed). That should say something for the citizens who came out in solidarity since the book accuses their President of murder.”
Fatima is not sure how her book is being received in Pakistan or if copies have mysteriously disappeared off the shelf. “I haven’t had time to check on that. I came to India as soon as the book was launched in Pakistan on March 30. It may not attract censorship yet since the book is in English and not so many people would read it in English. I’m trying to get it translated into Urdu, Baluchi and other local languages,” says she like a woman on a mission.
It’s a tough life for a young woman like Fatima in a country like Pakistan. She seems to be the lone spokesperson from the Bhutto clan to speak out fearlessly. “Who else is there? There’s just Sassi (Shahnawaz’s daughter), Zulfikar (Fatima’s younger brother) and me.” She hasn’t met Benazir’s children for many years now. “That door closed a long time ago,” she says. But then her life has been anything but ordinary. Her earliest memories are of living with her father Murtaza, who was in exile in Damascus. She was three then. “By the time I was three years old, I was aware of words like martial law, dictatorship and gallows. I thought they were part of every child’s vocabulary,” she says.
Like the heirs of many political families in South East Asia, Fatima has had to live with the ghosts of her family members, slain in Pakistan’s violent political history. A heavy price to pay for being powerbrokers in the then newly created state of Pakistan! She’s lost a family member every decade for the last four decades. The last two deaths of her father and her aunt will always haunt her. Her aunt’s death she can’t shake off, try as she might. She will always be Benazir Bhutto’s niece.
She speaks at length of her aunt, her father’s alleged nemesis, as if she’s studied her every action, recorded it for posterity and done a near-forensic examination. Fatima says in her book that Benazir reminded her of herself. It’s a resemblance that others have noticed too. Fatima was seven when she returned to Pakistan and the first thing that fascinated her was the “nuclear green fizzy drink” that she found there.
But even as a self-confessed precocious child, Fatima says she was scared of the crowds. “When I went back, I saw Benazir surrounded by crowds. In a way, they made her inaccessible to me and yet I was scared for her. She was my wadi, who read out stories to me when I was a child. But she made a lot of compromises with regard to our foreign policy and succumbing to IMF dictates. It was a very different trajectory that she took from that of my grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, my father and uncle Shahnawaz Bhutto. They were anti-American interference and Benazir undid a lot of my grandfather’s legacy.’’
Fatima dresses unlike her wadi. During the day, as she is giving interviews, she’s in a pair of blue jeans, a black t-shirt and a long sheer printed Afghani coat. For her book launch, she comes dressed in a dull-gold sari and a halter-neck blouse, scarlet lipstick and nail paint. “My grandmother, Nusrat Bhutto, always wore saris and short sleeved blouses for official events. We were brought up in a very liberal way at home. Politics is the practice of expediency. When Benazir was free from power, she was a brave woman, who travelled to remote places and made them forget she was a woman. When she came to power she wore a scarf over her head, the first woman in the family to do so, only to keep certain people happy. For the women in Pakistan, it was a big step back.”
SOBAS is crafted like a journalist’s report. Noting an instance when Benazir returned from exile and stepped out of the plane with a dove whose wings had been clipped, Fatima says, “There’s a lot of strange use of imagery in South East Asian politics. What Benazir did to that bird was what she did to democracy.” Fatima admits that she’s always wanted to be a journalist and her heroes have always been journalists. Fatima, who studied at the Columbia University and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, writes columns for the New Statesman and The Daily Beast among other publications.
If only she’s given a penny for every time she has been asked, ‘why not politics?’ “Legacy is a dirty word. The idea that only one line can possess history is so wrong. When Benazir was killed, we (Pakistan) started acting like 14th century France, believing that unless there was someone close to the family in power, the country would perish. They were not asking for platforms, issues, healthcare, food, water or load-shedding. They just wanted to co-opt someone from the family.” At that time, it was her 17-year-old brother Zulfikar.
Fatima avers that she is politically active and campaigns for her father’s party, Pakistan People’s Party—Shaheed Bhutto, that is now headed by Ghinwa Bhutto, Mir Murtaza’s second wife, whom Fatima calls ‘Mummy’. Fatima’s relationship with her estranged biological mother, Fowzia had been tenuous since the beginning and she now lives with Ghinwa and her half brother Zulfikar. Fatima who campaigned door to door to get women to come out and vote says, “I’ve always felt that there must be something wrong with people who campaign. It’s a tough job. But I do it since I like to travel and meet people.”
Fatima’s fight to bring her father’s killers to book through her writings has been dismissed by some of her critics as a naïve effort. When asked about this, she says, “Not at all. We see corruption everywhere. And where we see injustice, we have the freedom to fight it. It is our civic duty to raise our voice. I don’t think it is naïve at all. One should always hope for justice. Giving up hope for justice, is allowing justice to be denied to us. The road to justice is long. Mummy (Ghinwa) and I are very clear that we’re not going to use violence or revenge. We seek justice and truth. Mummy is Lebanese and she understands violence more than I do. We don’t believe in death penalty. We’re protesting the extra judicial killings of not just my father but many other people and hope that justice will be done.’’
Mir Murtaza was vehemently against American interference in Pakistan’s politics but present day Pakistan is a far cry from what he wanted. Says Fatima, “It is the new colonial power. But we have history on our side. SE Asia has a history of overthrowing colonial powers. And now with the Internet, You tube and other sources of information, more people are aware of political assassinations as game changers.”
Her tweets indicate that her reception in India has been overwhelming. “Governments have failed. People never do. We need more people to people contact. When authors come and build bridges, you realise that Pakistanis don’t have horns. I can’t remember my family portraying India or Indians as very different from us. All I remember was that there was lots of Bollywood at home, lots of Amitabh and Rekha movies, and achaar with every meal. We must see that what has happened will not happen again,” she ends hopefully.<<>
Courtesy: Society
Source:
http://www.magnamags.com/index.php/201005106179/society/society-says-so/fatima-bhutto.html
"I have been to dozens of book launches, but I have yet to see one on as grand a scale as this one,” said my daughter Mala Dayal as she came home from the launch of Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword (Penguin Viking). She continued “There must have been nearly 1,000 guests; it was a packed house. On the stage sat William Dalrymple in white kurta-pyjama and the Bhutto girl. She is a stunner. She was very craftily dressed to please her Indian audience and also maintain her Pakistani identity. She was draped in a sari instead of salwar-kameez and wore a red bindi on her forehead. That warmed the hearts of her Indian audience. Her sari was green — the colour of Pakistan. She spoke in flawless English about her country.”
My daughter had not read her book. No one in the audience had till after the launch. But some of her history is known. She introduces herself on book jacket in a few lines printed in red:
Grand-daughter to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto — executed 1979
Niece to Shah Nawaz Bhutto — murdered 1985
Daughter of Mir Murtaza Bhutto — assassinated 1996
Niece to Benazir Bhutto — assassinated 2007
On these four skeletons Fatima Bhutto fleshes out the saga of the Bhuttos.
Their forefather Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto, Diwan of Junagarh, migrated back to his ancestral town, Garhi Khuda Baksh in district Larkana. His son Zulfiqar Ali rose to power in Pakistan before being hanged. Zulfiqar’s daughter Benazir out-manoeuvred her brother to grab her father’s political legacy and acquired vast amounts of real estate in Europe and America, to which her husband Asif Ali Zardari added a lot more. He came to be known as ‘Mr 10 per cent’ because he is said to have charged this as commission for brokering deals between the government and investors.
The assassins of Benazir Bhutto remain unidentified. But Fatima has named Asif Ali Zardari for four murders and having himself acquitted by a subservient judiciary. She has invited trouble, as if she harbours a death wish. She is as gutsy as she is beautiful.
She did me the honour of calling on me before she took her flight to Karachi. I could not take my eyes off her. I kept gazing at the pin-head of a diamond sparkling on the left side of her nose and her long jet-black curly hair falling on her shoulders. I hope I see her at least once more before my time is up.
Fatima ends her book in memorable prose: “Amidst all this madness, all these ghosts and memories of times past, it feels like the world around me is crumbling slowly, flaking away. Sometimes when it is late at night, I feel my chest swell with a familiar anxiety. I think at these times, that I have no more place in my heart for Pakistan. I cannot love it any more. I have to get away from it for anything to make sense, nothing here ever does. But when the hours pass, and as I ready myself for sleep as the light filters through my windows, I hear the sound of those mynah birds. And I know I could never leave.”
Incidentally, I also added a new word to my vocabulary which fits both Pakistan and India. It is ‘saprophytic’, which means feeding on decaying organic matter.
Both nations rely on all that is rotten in their past.
India loves icons and Delhi loves visiting celebrities, and if they come from neighbouring Pakistan and are opposed to the government in power, then they are really feted. It’s happened in the past to the late former prime minister Benazir Bhutto when she was at her least-significant politically, and it happened to former president General Pervez Musharraf, who was hailed as some sort of sub-continental power guru once he was out of office.
This weekend it’s happened to Fatima Bhutto, 27-year old niece of the former Pakistani prime minister. She has been was in Delhi to promote her new book, “Songs of Blood and Sword, a daughter’s memoir”, which traces the country’s blood-letting and appalling governance as it tells the story of the assassination 14 years ago of her father, Murtaza Bhutto – in which her uncle Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s current president, was allegedly involved.
A highly self-confident journalist, the vivacious and attractive Fatima Bhutto has wowed newspaper and magazine editors in the US, UK and elsewhere for several years with the same ease that Benazir Bhutto charmed the same people.
Benazir conned them, along with many politicians, into accepting her as a significant political figure when she was out of power, even though her reputation as a capable politician was near zero.
Fatima’s success – and she is a capable writer – has been to persuade editors ranging from Tina Brown’s Daily Beast website in the US to the New Statesman in London to run her articles highly critical of Pakistan’s rulers as if she was an independent journalist, which she is not. What she is, understandably, is a committed campaigner out to avenge her father’s death and, therefore, to damn Zardari who, as Benazir Bhutto’s husband, is her uncle by marriage.
This hefty 450-page book is part of that campaign. It tells of a traumatic family history. Her grandfather, prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in 1979 by a military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq. Both her father and his brother died violently, and Benazir Bhutto was assassinated.
The physical similarities with Benazir Bhutto, who I first knew in the mid-1980s, are amazing. Watching and listening to Fatima on television the other evening as she fenced in lilting tones with her interviewer, it was if I was listening to her aunt protesting her and Zardari’s innocence of corruption, murder and other allegedly “trumped up” criminal charges.
Fatima, understandably, hates the comparison, which she says has been made since she was a child. “I was told I was much like my aunt, both as a compliment and as an admonishment. Now the comparisons are grating,” she says.
She certainly is much more directly focussed on detail than her aunt, who generally dealt in slogans and platitudes. This was evident at two book discussion sessions in Delhi where, in a more Americanised accent than on television, she dealt with questions openly and directly. “She doesn’t seem so much like a convent girl,” commented the wife of an admiring Indian politician, caustically.
I had planned to write this blog post on dynasty, noting how both Pakistan’s and India’s established ruling families now have relatives ready to challenge them. I would have set Fatima up as a future political challenger to Zardari’s and Benazir’s 21-year old son, Bilawal, in the same way that Varun Gandhi, a nephew of Sonia Gandhi, the current head of India’s Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and the Congress Party, has become a general secretary of the Hindu-fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party and thus a political opponent of Rahul, Sonia’s son and heir.
But Fatima Bhutto, who lives in Karachi where her book (amazingly) was launched a few days ago, will have none of it. She has denied political ambitions many times in the past, and repeated that when I spoke to her on Saturday evening. Might she be tempted, I wondered, if Pakistan were one day to return to some sort of peaceful politics?
“Definitely not!” she replied, adding that there was a need to “break the musical chairs” sequence of Pakistan’s feudal and military governments being passed from the Bhutto’s to the family of Nawaz Sharif and then to the army, and back again, as has happened for the past 40 years.
That certainly needs to be done – but I wonder whether one day, if or when Pakistan emerges from its current turmoil, she will be hoisted into politics as a new face with a new style, even if not a new name.
Asif Ali Zardari attempted to bribe his brother-in-law Murtaza Bhutto to swing a deal in the Middle East at a time when his estranged sister Benazir Bhutto was Pakistan's prime minister but was roundly rebuffed, Murtaza's daughter Fatima Bhutto writes in her just released memoir, "Songs of Blood and Sword".
Zardari was accused of plotting Murtaza's murder but had been acquitted of the charge.
The book, published by Penguin, comes at a time when Zardari is set to be deprived of his sweeping powers through a constitution amendment being tabled in parliament on Friday to transfer to the prime minister major powers like the appointment of armed forces chiefs and reduce the president to a titular head of state.
"During a state trip to Syria during Benazir's first government and while we were still in exile there, Zardari had gone so far as to ask Papa to facilitate a deal he was considering in the Middle East, offering him a cut of the profits," Fatima writes.
"Papa was sickened; he never liked his sister's husband. His corruption and the stories of his excess reached Papa's ears often and it hurt him that such a man would use Zulfikar's (Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Fatima's grandfather and Paksitan's former president) name and memory to bilk investors the globe over of millions. He was further annoyed that Zardari, hapless when it came to any understanding of what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's legacy meant, would be so crooked as to assume that the son of a martyr, who had been struggling in exile for over a decade at that point and who had never compromised on his beliefs, would jump at the sound of a cut in a Zardari deal.
"We don't do that, Zardari,' Papa said furiously," Fatima writes.
Murtaza was killed on Sep 20, 1996, when Fatima was 14, in a police gun battle near his Karachi residence. On Dec 3, 2009, a Karachi court acquitted 20 policemen charged with the killing.
After Benazir's government was dismissed in 1996, Zardari was detained for having a part in Murtaza's assassination. However, no charges were ever proved for want of evidence as the scene of Murtaza's assassination was wiped clean before police investigators could arrive.
On Zardari's acquittal, Fatima writes: "The day Zardari was acquitted of my father's murder, I was halfway around the world. I was on an assignment in Cuba to cover the past and present of the revolution in the lead-up to the fiftieth anniversary of Castro's takeover. I knew it was coming. Even when he had been incarcerated for the murders and the myriad cases against him, Zardari hardly spent time in jail - a serious mortally ill heart patient at the time, he had himself transfered to a luxury suite at his friend's private hospital in Karachi. That doctor friend was rewarded with the cabinet post of Minister of Oil and Petroleum after his chum miraculously rid himself of his heart problems and ascended to the highest post in the land.
"I had been visiting hospitals and schools, meeting officials and travelling the country. I was away from email. I had disconnected myself from Pakistan intentionally. I got a phone call one afternoon in Havana...It was Hameed (a guard), calling from home. 'I'm sorry, baba', he said. He didn't have to explain why. Zardari had bypassed the courts' standard procedures to have himself absolved of my father's murder. There was no point in appealing. He was going to be President legally or illegally. It was typical of the way he operated; justice was always the first casualty," Fatima writes.
She also relates another instance of her father's contempt for Zardari.
"When he gave speeches or interviews, Papa often called Zardari a chor, a thief. He coined the term 'Asif baba and the chalees chor', 'Asif Baba and the forty thieves' which became an instant hit (it remains part of the popular parlance to this day, I'm proud to note)," Fatima writes.
The Bhutto family has had to contend with violence for the last four decades, losing one member every decade.
Fatima's grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed in 1979 after what many consider to be a kangaroo trial. This was after he had been deposed as president by then army chief Gen. Zia-ul Haq.
Her uncle Shahnawaz, 27, was found dead in Nice on July 18, 1985, under mysterious circumstances and the Bhutto family firmly believed he was poisoned. No one was brought to trial for the murder.
Her father, Murtaza, Shahnawaz's brother, was killed Sep 20, 1996, and her aunt Benazir was assassinated Dec 27, 2007.
“Sometimes, when it’s this late at night (she writes in the Epilogue dated April 2009), I feel my chest swell with a familiar anxiety. I think, at these times, that I have no more place in my heart for Pakistan. I cannot love it any more. I have to get away from it for anything to make sense; nothing here ever does.
“But then the hours pass, and as I ready myself for sleep as the light filters in through my windows, I hear the sound of mynah birds. And I know I could never leave,” Fatima writes.
Murtaza was killed Sep 20, 1996, when Fatima was 14, in a shootout near his Karachi residence. On Dec 3, 2009, a Karachi court acquitted 20 policemen charged with the killing.
The Bhutto family has had to contend with violence for the last four decades, losing one member every decade.
"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
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