New book captures 'messy yet meaningful' relationship Pakistanis have with their country

“I hate it. I love it. I can’t stand being here anymore. I can’t bear to be away. It is where my heart has been broken. It is where I found love. It is where I have witnessed the power of humanity; it is where I have seen the heart of evil.”

This passage from Omar Shahid Hamid’s A Letter to My Son strikes a universal timbre as the author sets out to describe his relationship to Pakistan. The varied emotions he describes are felt by many towards their home countries. But not many have led a life like Hamid’s. Besides his career as a novelist, he has served as a senior counter terrorism police officer in Pakistan for more than two decades. He has survived several attempts on his life, as well as the bombing of his offices by the Taliban.

As such, Hamid’s relationship with Pakistan is wholly unique and barbed – and even after his gripping 10-page essay, he still feels he hasn’t managed to accurately capture it for his son.

“I haven’t done a very good job of explaining my relationship with Pakistan. It’s because I don’t really understand it myself completely,” he writes. He decisively instead concludes A Letter to My Son with a fictional Facebook relationship status, writing: “It’s complicated".

A Letter to My Son is the first work in a new collection of stories and essays that capture the complex relationships many have with Pakistan. The book, Home #itscomplicated, gets its title from the concluding sentence of Hamid’s essay. The hashtag is a nod to the spectrum of feelings that many Pakistanis have towards the country.

“Pakistan is so misunderstood by people who are not Pakistani, but also by Pakistanis themselves,” says Saba Karim Khan, an author who led the project and is one of its contributors as well. “I think it's a question that a lot of us grapple with. It’s this messy yet meaningful relationship.”

Pakistan is home to about 250 million people, with several million living in the diaspora as well. There are between 70 and 80 languages spoken in the country. Its breadth and complexity, Khan says, is often “reduced to a breaking news sticker and cardboard cut-out caricatures".

“We've got to reclaim our agency in that situation and start telling those stories ourselves. Otherwise other people are going to do it,” says Khan, who is also an instructor in the Social Science department at NYU Abu Dhabi.

This was largely the impetus for Home #itscomplicated, and Khan wanted to ensure the collection touches upon various elements of Pakistan. The book’s contributors come from various backgrounds. Among them is Dr Azra Raza, an oncologist; novelist Zain Saeed; political commentator Nadeem F Paracha; actor Khaled Anam and author Aisha Sarwari, among others.

“The book has 24 contributors,” Khan says. “I wanted to really try and be genuinely inclusive about this. My curation was kind of two-pronged. I reached out to a bunch of people whose stories I sort of had a hint of, who had a voice that deserved to be platformed.”

However, Khan then considered that to be really inclusive, she had to put out an open call and let people propose their stories as well. “I put a public call for submissions,” she says. “Again, it won't reach everybody, but that's better than just me kind of cherry picking certain voices.”

As submissions came flooding in, Home #itscomplicated began to take the shape that Khan had in mind, presenting a panoply of voices and presenting a nuanced, layered depiction of Pakistan.

“If we're talking about people's relationship with Pakistan, we've got to look at scientists,” she says. “We’ve got to look at psychoanalysts, economists, actors, filmmakers, homemakers. Homemakers was a big one for me because I felt that voice barely gets heard because a lot of homemakers have internalised this sense, especially women who will say, ‘I don't have a story worth telling’.”

Khan was pleasantly surprised at how some of the submissions encapsulated a perspective of Pakistan. In Beyond Boundaries – The Cricketing Community, Ali Khan, an anthropologist, explores how his view of Pakistan was informed through a diplomatic household and the game of cricket. Sundus Saqib, an educator, unpacks her relationship through a trek in the north of the country, and seeing the mountain of Nanga Parbat for the first time. Other pieces, meanwhile, explore the resonance of music and poetry in Pakistan.

The essays are also in conversation with one another, Khan says. “It is issues of identity, displacement, disillusionment, yet hope, redemption and a pull to Pakistan that put the different pieces in conversation with each other.”

Some of the stories also touch upon feminist issues, however in a way that doesn’t import the concept from the western world, Khan says. “People are sharing accounts of feminism that feels a lot more localised, that can be quietly fierce, and that is characterised by resilience rather than rebellion. That meant a lot to me.”

“These are everyday stories,” Khan adds. “Everyday stories of how people's lives are, whether they live in Pakistan or they live outside Pakistan.” Khan also unravels her own sentiments of the country in her own piece, Where Stars Are Born Out Of Anarchy, which concludes the collection with a note of optimism. However, that’s not to say the rest of the pieces within are bereft of hope.

“The one thing I've distilled from the book is that Pakistan is a country with all of these problems, but it's a country where stars are born out of anarchy, and that's what my piece is called that,” Khan says. “Because I feel there's so much chaos, but really from all of that mess, stars are being born.”

Home #itscomplicated marked its official release at the Karachi Literature Festival in February, and has already gone into reprint. “I'm quite pleased,” Khan says. "I suppose it also means that the concept is resonating, which is exciting and gratifying.”

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