A Troubled Family History Life, but Not As You Know It

12 Friday, April 16, 2010 www.thenational.ae The N !tion!l the review The N !tion!l the review Friday, April 16, 2010 www.thenational.ae 13 This week’s essential reading ‘Turnaround of India State A look at how Bihar, one of India’s ‘failed states’, once a byword for poverty Could Serve as a Model’, by and corruption, has become the country’s second fastest-growing economy books { Lydia Polgreen, New York Times } new paperbacks " A troubled family history The Locust and the Bird tells the true story of Hanan al Shaykh’s mother, Kamila, who was born in 1925, secretly betrothed at 11 and married off to a man twice her age Ghost at 13. Rebellious and strong-willed, Kamila took a lover, conducted a brazenly public affair, got di- vorced, remarried and left her children behind. The action begins with a wed- ding and ends with a funeral and in between Shaykh sets up an emotional roller-coaster, where wars murder, abandonment, betrayal, starvation, theft, adultery are mixed with the spectacle of a teenage bride desperately trying Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword should not be read as is, after all, geared to an audience to escape a forced marriage. looking to understand Pakistan, or Except for a prologue and epi- The Locust and the Bird a work of history, writes Manan Ahmed, rather a deeply personal have it explained to them, by this tel- logue, Shaykh casts the entirety Hanan al Shaykh hagiography of Pakistan’s most famous political dynasty egenic representative of a troubled of The Locust and the Bird in her Bloomsbury Publishing dynasty. mother’s voice and the book is Dh50 “Pakistan was an ever-present ghost Her project is a recuperative one: Zulfikar Ali’s meteoric rise from Songs of Blood and Sword can rightly impressively subtle, although Ka- in our house. As was Zia. And Zulfikar. she wants to rescue the memory of Sindhi feudal to President of Paki- be seen as the latest in a line of mem- mila does not always come across And Shah Nawaz. My father and I car- her father Murtaza and to claim for stan is portrayed here either hagi- oirs like Benazir’s Daughter of the as likeable. She is selfish, lazy and er, remains something of a mys- ried invisible baggage with us, both him the status of a nation’s saviour. ographically or casually: at his better East and Pervez Musharraf’s In the obdurate. tery. A few years after they later loved and feared,” Fatima Bhutto She wants to tear away the skein of moments Zulfikar Ali is remembered Line of Fire – each of them devoted to Her first husband, Abu Hus- marry, Muhammad was killed in writes in Songs of Blood and Sword. hagiography that now covers the as being destined for greatness; dur- uncritical presentations of their au- sein, changes over time, soften- a car crash. It’s a sign of compas- General Zia ul Haq was the dicta- memory of Benazir Bhutto, to expose ing his weaker moments he is the thors or their families, made to stand ing from a brute to a humble old sion that Shaykh lets this tragedy tor who put to death Pakistan’s first her corruption, her culpability, her victim of poor advice. The most egre- in for the history of an entire nation. man. rise above all the others, includ- elected prime minister – and Fati- blind ambition. Above all, she wants gious omissions concern his politi- The tale of the Bhutto dynasty, from Only Muhammad, Kamila’s lov- ing her own. ma’s grandfather – Zulfikar Ali Bhut- to unburden herself of the sorrow of cal response to Bengali demands for its feudal base to its populist claims to in 1979. His son Shah Nawaz was losing her father at the age of 14. equivalence in East Pakistan (which and now to the stranger-than-fiction found dead in Paris in 1986. Their None should deny Fatima Bhutto broke away to become Bangladesh stewardship under Zardari (where ghosts have since been joined by the right to remember her loss – but after a civil war in 1971); it was the else in this world can one bequeath a Life, but not as you know it those of Fatima’s father, Mir Murtaza that is not all this memoir aspires to. accord between the military regime political party in a will?) still deserves Bhutto, killed on the street in front of In her preface, she casts a familiar pic- of General Yahya and Zulfikar Ali’s to be told, and told properly. his home in 1996, and his sister Bena- ture of Pakistan aflame, devastated newly founded political party – the This is not that book, and it should In Emergency, we follow Neil zir, assassinated in 2007. from outside by drones and missiles, Pakistan People’s Party – to disen- neither be sold nor judged as such: it Strauss – whose previous cred- As a young woman, Fatima witness- plundered from within by cronies franchise the winning Awami League Songs of Blood and Sword is merely another primary document its include The Game, the story es the violent and unnatural deaths and corruptions: “How have we come after the 1970 elections that sparked Fatima Bhutto for that unwritten history, alongside of a group of men who devise a of her dear uncle and her father. She to this state of affairs?” she asks. the conflict that led to Pakistan’s re- Jonathan Cape the papers of her father, grandfather quasi-scientific method to se- hears whispers that her own aunt This book is her answer. But it is a partition. Similarly, Fatima puts a na- Dh115 and aunt – which remain in the fam- duce women – as he loses faith was involved – directly or indirectly simplistic, uncritical and benighted ive and benign spin on Zulfikar Ali’s ily home in Karachi. in the ability of the American – in those deaths. She grows up with one. pan-Islamic policies – ignoring the In the meantime, however, the system of consumption to nour- the sadness of a family cleaved into The Bhuttos, landed elite from 1973 constitution that he promulgat- She is held responsible for every- book will sell and sell: the author’s ish him, and prepares for what factions. She writes to remember, Sindh, can claim a long and check- ed, which deliberately set the country thing from keeping Fatima away criticism of Zardari’s regime and of he believes will be the inevitable she writes to accuse, she writes to ex- ered history of entanglements with on the path toward Sharia law, dealt from her father’s college friends, to his role in her father’s murder, her collapse of civil order. plain. At the heart of this memoir lies power – first the British colonial a deadly blow to minority rights, and separating her from her cousins, to at triumphalist Pakistani nationalism When that dark day comes, the pain of a deep loss. She notes her administration, then the new post- enabled General Zia ul Haq’s sub- least covering up, if not ordering, the and complaints against American Strauss tells the reader, “I don’t father’s perfume, his laugh, his hu- colonial state. Among “Sindh’s larg- sequent Sunnification of Pakistan. murder of Shah Nawaz, to murder- imperialism, and her last name want to be hiding in a cellar (or) mour and joy at living, his previous est landowners,” they exerted great Zulfikar Ali’s brutal crackdown on Sitting in a chair in the study of her family home in Clifton Karachi, Fatima Bhutto holds a poster depicting her murdered ing or looking away from the murder are all catnip to the British, Ameri- fighting old women for bread.” loves, his undergraduate thesis, his influence, controlling and directing Balochistan in 1974 is also excused: father Murtaza and the six aides who died with him in 1996. Alexandra Fazzina of Mir Murtaza. There is little doubt can and South Asian media, which The goal, he determines, is “true college friends, the music he loved, hundreds of thousands of rural fami- then he was merely a pawn of the feu- that Benazir’s governments were have already lavished considerable sovereignty” or self-sufficiency the revolutionaries he admired, the lies. Fatima does not linger long on dals and the army. The voices of his corrupt – and Fatima’s summation coverage on the book prior to its re- in the face of any eventuality. places he lived and people he met. It this early history – except to point out detractors are not entirely absent, but sunning themselves in Russian-occu- gave up. A New York Times story dated in her father’s life; contrary to his of the innumerable charges against lease. Fatima has stayed aloof from By the book’s end, Strauss Emergency is an exhaustive remembrance told how “debonair”, “dashing”, “hand- there is no attempt to engage critical- pied Kabul. They called it al Zulfikar April 19, 1981 quotes Mir Murtaza own admission, she describes the Benazir and Asif Ali Zardari is master- politics – and for that she should be has answered his own fears by Neil Strauss reverentially, lovingly and at times some”, and “beautiful” every one ly with her grandfather’s legacy; true (the Sword) and Mir Murtaza rallied saying that members of his organi- hijackers as not having been mem- ful. There is also ample evidence that commended – but this is only one learning how to “find water in Canongate Books clumsily – and all the more touching was. Her grandfather, Zulfikar Ali, is culpability always lies elsewhere.

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