And the World Changed Read Online Free PDF Page A

provides a lively insight into her dual inheritance as the daughter of a Pakistani father and a Welsh-born mother and knits together the public and the personal, past and present, across Pakistan, Britain, and the United States. Her first chapter from Meatless Days , “Excellent Things in Women,” reprinted here, revolves around the personality of Dadi, her paternal grandmother, but the kernel embedded within is the quiet presence of Suleri Goodyear’s mother and the spaces she negotiates. The whole is interwoven with small, telling glimpses of family life, particularly Suleri Goodyear’s relationships with her sisters Tillat and Iffat, who act as both foil and echo to her own personality. The unity of sisterhood across the patriarchal structures of family, nation, race, and creed is a familiar theme in women’s writing worldwide.
    Another U.S.-based academic of Pakistani origin, Fawzia Afzal Khan uses creative prose interspersed with poetry to universalize her experiences in the memoir, “Bloody Monday,”which contrasts the intense passions and fervor of a Muharram procession in Lahore and a bull-run in Spain with daily domestic life in the United States, but suggests a multitude of subtexts on gender and myth. Her use of poetry and prose creates a multiplicity of images that reflects her desire to cross boundaries and break down barriers.
    Maniza Naqvi’s story, “Impossible Shade of Home Brew,” is an assertion of diversity as unity. The rich multicultural fabric of Lahore, its street life, old traditional buildings, and colonial monuments provide a vivid contrast with touristy Epheseus in modern Turkey. In both these cities, however, the intermingling of East-West narratives, literature and lore, and the theme of “twins” and duality becomes a metaphor for the narrator’s subversion of gender definitions and gender roles.
    Talat Abbasi has written many intense, feminist stories set in Pakistan, which have been extensively anthologized and used as texts in the United States. Her poignant and haunting tale of a mother and her handicapped child, “Mirage,” reprinted here, won first prize in a BBC short story competition and explores with great honesty a dimension of pain that is seldom discussed.
    In the last decade, Pakistan has been strongly affected by political events in neighboring Muslim lands, including the rise of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the politicization of religion, exacerbated by Western rhetoric of Crusades, and the clash of civilizations. Humera Afridi’s story, “The Price of Hubris,” set in New York on 9/11, and Bushra Rehman’s, “The Old Italian,” which takes place in Queens, New York, in a working-class, diverse immigrant neighborhood, both touch on ideas of religion, identity, and otherness.
    With great clarity, another contributor, Feryal Ali Gauhar, brings to light the disadvantaged lives of the poor in Pakistan, due to powerlessness and an inequitable legal and social system in her poignant story, “Kucha Miran Shah.” She portrays the ancient tribal custom of killing of women in the name of honor,a victimization sanctioned by a village jirga —an informal gathering of village elders (men) who mete out a rough-and-ready punishment—and which exists in rural areas as a parallel system to the laws of the state and its courts of law. Aamina Ahmad further explores the diminished rights of the poor in “Scar,” where a young maidservant is falsely accused of theft and has no recourse to justice.
    The works of major novelists such as Sidhwa, Suleri Goodyear, and Kamila Shamsie have created important landmarks in Pakistani English literature, regardless of gender. Sidhwa, who wrote her first two novels in virtual isolation in Pakistan because she had no other contemporary English-language writers there, made an enormous breakthrough with the international recognition her novels have received.