What Does It Mean to Be a Muslim Writer?: What Does It Mean to Be a Muslim Writer?

Some Notes Against the Burden of Representation

In the 2018 biographical film MANTO, directed by Nandita Das, the Urdu fiction writer Ismat Chughtai selects a pine nut from the handful in her palm and cracks it open with her teeth.

In the 2018 biographical film MANTO, directed by Nandita Das, the Urdu fiction writer Ismat Chughtai selects a pine nut from the handful in her palm and cracks it open with her teeth. She’s in a shoe store with her friends, the writer Saadat Hasan Manto and his wife, Safia Manto. While Safia tries on a pair of sandals to wear to an upcoming wedding in her family, Ismat and Saadat trade rueful jokes about their feet. The two Indian writers have gained renown for bringing a progressive outlook to Urdu literature, for their innovations on the modern short story form, and for their collaborative friendships with actors and screenwriters. The blunt social realism of their stories has drawn accusations of obscenity from the public, and each writer has recently defended their work in court. But in that moment, all is well. It’s a sunny afternoon in Bombay, in 1947.

I hesitate over, verge on dismissing, and keep coming back to this scene. Its contented, chummy mood stirs up some unvoiced longing in me. As I consider the grim to demoralizing range of possible approaches to the question of what it means to be a Muslim writer in 2019, large parts of my heart and brain would like to ignore the harder realities that have called this literary project into being. I wish I could dwell in those few minutes alongside the other writers in that beguiling and multilayered city, crunching addictively toasted-in-the-shell nuts, imagining that we had always belonged there, and always would.

But the film is concerned with the telling of plain truths, not wishful reverie. After a few seconds of idle banter and trying on slippers the three friends are crowded in by harder realities of their own. The brothers who run the shop argue passionately about where home is or should be—one fearfully insists they will only be safe with other Muslims in Karachi; the other says he can’t stand the thought of relocating as far as another neighbourhood in Bombay, let alone Pakistan. In the next moment, the two men leap to bolt the shop doors shut as a furious crowd comes banging and pounding through the street, shouting explicitly anti-Muslim slogans and threats.

Everyone in the shop goes quiet and holds their breath for a minute.

What does it mean to be a Muslim writer? Do we choose the label from personal conviction, or have we lost the right to make that choice? Is it a truthful label, or a bland and generic one that flattens our differences and strips our work of history and context? Can its use ever be just, sensitive, earned? In what context could the label be meaningless; irrelevant?

What does it mean to be a Muslim writer? Do we choose the label from personal conviction, or have we lost the right to make that choice?

Two of the most memorable literary portrayals of Muslims I ever came across were written by the American author John Edgar Wideman in his short story “All Stories Are True”, and the British writer Zadie Smith, in her novel Swing Time. Both authors write Muslim characters who are intimately connected to their respective narrators or main protagonists; in other words, it becomes clear that these characters and their faith practices are necessary to the world each writer creates on the page. Convincingly-wrought characters whose religious identity is evoked with subtle, moving, and poetic indications, strictly for the sake of plot, and not as conspicuous performance of “diversity”, came across to me as highly tonic. Because the characters in both instances are nothing like me (or like each other), I am both humbled by the privilege of getting to know them, and blessedly relieved of any need to feel seen or represented. Both these fictions have been deeply instructive to me of how to let go of the overwhelming responsibility to represent Muslims as a writer.

A recurring topic in my conversations with writers over the last year was the fear of failing to represent adequately, of not paying the right kind of tribute to community, place of origin, or inherited tradition, which could sometimes inhibit their creative process. I would argue that the burden of representation is just one of the effects of the decades-long war on terror on Muslim communities in general, whose impact on writers and artists deserves to be explored in greater depth.

This platform, “What Does It Mean to Be a Muslim Writer?” aims to provide several possible starting points for future conversations, and to help expand the community of writers and readers who might contribute to them. Do poets and writers who happen to be Muslim need a designated platform to bring a wider audience to our work? Would we seek each other out, talk to each other, read and support each other’s work, without it?

Part of the motive for this publication is rooted in mourning, in acknowledging the devastation of increasing anti-Muslim hatred in Canada and around the world. Alongside mourning endures an equally urgent need to support writers to seize control of language to anchor their own ideas and experiences, to make worlds we’ve never seen before. To work towards the making of an engaged and supportive community of Muslim writers, we can agree to read each other’s work, to be each other’s audience, and gradually earn the right to be each other’s constructive critics.

Part of the motive for this publication is rooted in mourning, in acknowledging the devastation of increasing anti-Muslim hatred in Canada and around the world.

When we consider the way Black Muslim histories in North America eloquently refute the overheated political divide between “Islam vs. The West”, we can realize how strange the burden of representation really is, how contingent it is on our isolation from each other. Twentieth century writers like Manto who relentlessly adhered to a style of social realism that could often make his readers uncomfortable, remind us that our work does not have to be a heavily aestheticized or dutiful performance of safe identities to be worthy of an audience.

The spirited and uncompromising work of fourteen very different writers appears in this publication. Perhaps the company of their poems and stories becomes the room where we barricade ourselves, indulge in reverie, or help each other sneak quietly out the back door, while rioters in the street shout for our blood.

 

About the author

Rahat Kurd, guest editor of this 2019 Puritan special issue, lives in Vancouver. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Literary Review of Canada, Rungh, The Walrus, and Maisonneuve. COSMOPHILIA, her first collection of poems, was published by Talonbooks in 2015, and her poem “Alkohol” was selected as a finalist in the 2019 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. Her libretto, commissioned by composer Brian Current for his oratorio The River of Light was performed in May 2019 at the Vancouver Opera Festival.