What's Next?

During workshop today an interesting thing came up when I was giving feedback to another writer on the course; to explain, he'd read South Asian literature (he's British) and had written in the style of your usual SA writer (Roy, Rushdie, etc). My critique was that he'd done that typical thing where he's describing the environment and it seemed like he was doing it because that's what's "done"; we had a minor discussion on that where the point was to write what's been done. That brought in another dimension into my thought process that had probably been there, lingering under the surface but that I'd never particularly voiced aloud yet: the neverending descriptions. Why do all South Asian writers find it incumbent to describe the environment: its tastes, its sounds, its etherealness in lurid detail? I find it in evidence in nearly all of the writers of the generation preceding mine, like you're engulfing the reader into a plethora of culture, of trying to say 'this is who we are' and 'this is why we're different from you', drawing a line in the sand as it were.

I don't know when I realized that I didn't want to be that sort of writer, that I wanted to write about Pakistanis just like they were any other group of people: they do regular people things, they live their lives, they make mistakes, in most cases culture matters but it isn't in the environment or the monsoons or all the extraneous things: it's the details they carry with them that's a lot more important. I'm interested in humanity, wherever it is, rather than specifically South Asian humanity and culture. What matters more to me are the social problems inherent in our society, and "our" society isn't different from the world's society: these are problems encountered everywhere. I want people to read Gray and identify with this Muslim, Pakistani young woman who's maneuvering her way through a social quagmire. That isn't asking too much nor is it letting me off the hook as a South Asian, Pakistani, Muslim writer. I am arriving on the scene, proclaiming that I am a writer, that's it. First and foremost: I am a writer; ethnicity and all of it comes later. It does play a part, of course it does; I am not berating its importance or cultural heritage but neither am I saying limit your work to your geographical boundaries. There is a whole lot happening out there, a whole lot happening in Pakistan where portraying these people is portraying people with problems who just happen to be in a different country than you. Some of the world's most indelible classics hit the humane bone which is the sole reason why they stay with you; they don't waste time talking about the monsoons and the air after, laboring on paragraphs and paragraphs of futile (and endless) description. They stay with you because of their humanistic qualities, because what they're saying matters, irrespective of culture, irrespective of where you were born. There are certain things out there that transcend all that.

And that, that is the sort of novel I want to write. Those are the sort of people I want to reach. It's odd that literature past was a lot more 'globalized' than literature, present. It's something that's going to have to change as we move along in the twenty first century.

Unless (and I cannot believe this to be true), I am alone in this line of thought?