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Excerpts of an Interview with
the Author Cara Cilano Sorayya Khan and I began this conversation in March of 2005, and it continued for months via e-mail. The extended nature of our exchange allowed both of us to consider each other’s points at great length and even to revise our own questions and comments. Additionally, this conversation draws from presentations Khan gave to various audiences during her visit to the University of North Carolina Wilmington in March 2005. CC: I view the narrative mode you've employed in your novel as realism. At the same time, Noor herself defies "reality." Were you seeing Noor as introducing a magical-realistic element? SK: Someone asked Gabriel Garcia Marquez about his use of magical realism, and he responded that his work is absolutely and completely grounded in truth. There's not one thing in his books that comes from a fantastical source. People have said to me that there is a magical realism element in the novel NOOR. But, I don't think about it like that because the realm of war is so beyond our imagination that, unless you've gone there, there's no way to understand how mad it is, how insane it is, how horrifying it is. The use of Noor is the introduction of a character whose head is different from our heads in that she is able to understand or able to see the horror and insanity of something that you and I might not be able to see. So, her mind can stretch and open in ways that ours can't. Due to that elasticity, she can see something that we can't in this realm, that we don't know what it is. I don't think of her as being magical. She just has access to something that we don't have access to. She's real in that way. ********
SK: The interviews I conducted were paramount in helping me come up with my narrative. But let me say that very little of the minutiae, the details of what I learned in those interviews, actually made it into my book. I approached the interviews in this way. I had a writing teacher, Douglas Unger (without whom I might never have taken the prospect of my writing fiction seriously), who stressed that the purpose of gathering information for a piece of fiction was about determining possibility. That is, it doesn't matter whether something is true or not in fiction, it only matters if it is possible. When I set about trying to figure out how to approach my research, I kept hearing his words. My goal was simple. If I could only get one soldier to tell me his story, talk to me about his fears and motivations, reveal to me who he was, then I'd know what was possible and could write a novel around this (which is very different than writing a novel about this). As it turned out, I found several people who were willing to share their stories with me. I "used" those narratives by thinking of them as trajectories around which my own character's possibilities might derive. So, the conversations I had with interviewees were essential to my writing. Without them, I would not and could not have written NOOR. ******** CC: How would you characterize the growing tradition of contemporary Pakistani writing? SK: It's actually odd to think that I might fit into a tradition, although I don't have any problem being included as such. I think that quite clearly if I didn't have the heritage that I do have, I wouldn't be writing about Pakistan. Pakistan is a place where the personal and political are intricately woven together. People are interested in politics, even though they don't always have a say. My father belonged to a generation of people who fought for the right of independence, who rallied against the British. And most everyone in Pakistan of my age has a parent who was involved in the struggle in one way or another. Also, the act of Partition left millions dead, and there are countless stories about this reality as well; the shadow of those days hangs over us still. So there's a historical memory and political reality that binds us together. But I'm not sure that's what you're really asking. I don't know how to characterize this tradition. Except that it comprises a lot of people who've found their voices and want to vocalize their stories in a public way-and they all come from the same country, which means they've shared in some form or another something of what that means. CC: I'm interested in hearing more, particularly with respect to the various languages in which Pakistani literature is written and to where the literature is written and/or published. SK: I do think balance is important. In fact, it is wrong to characterize Pakistani writing as comprising only Pakistani-American or Pakistani-British writing because this ignores a whole crucial [element] of writing in local languages. I fear that Pakistani writing done in English is used to represent Pakistani writing to the West, and this is not honest. Those of us who employ the language of the West can engage in dialogue with the West, but this limits considerably the conversation by excluding a host of other representations of Pakistani writing. And I guess this is my discomfort with being labeled
a "Pakistani" writer, because I am perfectly aware that I have
led an utterly privileged existence in Pakistan, the type of education
I had (in the international school system) is not at all the norm, my
heritage is both Pakistani (father) and Dutch (mother), my Urdu is not
fluent, and I could go on and on. In principle, I don't have a problem
with being incorporated into some sort of category that includes both
Pakistani writing by outsiders and more indigenous Pakistani writing by
"insiders" because what does provide some connection is that
both subsets of writers have their experience of Pakistan at the core
of what they write.
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