And the World Changed Read Online Free PDF

Suleri Goodyear’s creative memoir, which employed the techniques of a novel and divided chapters according to metaphor, was another milestone, as was the quality of her prose. The thirty-five-year-old Kamila Shamsie has published four critically acclaimed novels of remarkable diversity, breadth, and vision so far; her fifth novel will be published in 2009. Her story, “Surface of Glass,” though an early work, makes an incisive comment on Pakistan’s stratified class system and the circumscribed life of a servant woman, who believes her enemy, the cook, has put a curse on her.
    Kamila Shamsie speaks for many aspiring young writers in Pakistan when she says that she had great difficulty as a child placing Pakistan within a literary context because at school in Karachi, she had no exposure to English literature beyond that of the United States and England. This changed when she read Suleri Goodyear and then Sidhwa as a teenager, but she had to go all the way to college in the United States to discover the wider world of English writing—and her own voice.
    The critical acclaim that Shamsie and another young writer included here, Uzma Aslam Khan, have received, has generated tremendous interest in the possibilities of a literary careeramong a younger generation. An increasing number of young, published writers have given readings in schools and colleges, and have conducted creative-writing workshops, which were rare in Pakistan until recently. Aslam Khan, who grew up in Karachi during the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, vividly captures a sense of the city’s festering violence in her story “Look, but with Love,” which simmers quietly with an undercurrent of desperation and ethnic tension. Her work also comments on gender roles in Pakistan.
    In 2004, the British Council in Pakistan held a nationwide competition for students as part of the “I Belong International Story Chain” project, to select five writers for a creative workshop in Karachi, conducted by Kamila Shamsie. Nayyara Rahman’s story, “Clay Fissures,” was one of the winners. Though a student work, it has been included for its originality, its promise, and its vision of the future.
    Reflecting on the texts included in this anthology, I have become particularly fascinated by how one story touches upon or fleshes out ideas in another, creating a flow, a unifying cycle that reveals many dimensions of Pakistani life through the perspective of women.
    I have found that Sidhwa’s description of the Partition riots in her story, “Defend Yourself Against Me,” is reflected in Sorayya Khan’s Partition story, “Staying,” and in Rustomji’s memoir account, “Watching from the Edges,” which links Partition to the divisions and suffering she has seen across the world. In Uzma Khan’s story, “Look, but with Love,” the painting of a voluptuous woman in an all-male subculture has obvious associations with male myths about prostitution and red-light districts, which Feryal Ali Gauhar attacks in her story. The sexual exploitation of women implicit in Ali Gauhar’s narrative becomes explicit in Fahmida Riaz’s “Daughter of Aai,” while the recourse to magic and superstition in a village finds an echo in very different stories by Kamila Shamsie and Tahira Naqvi. KamilaShamsie’s and Tahira Naqvi’s portrayals of a maidservant and a middle-class woman, respectively, revolve around a crisis of self, as does Humera Afridi’s “The Price of Hubris.” My story of a postwar migration to Britain and the intermarriage between an Indian and an Englishwoman in British India provides a contrast with the cultural commingling in Sara Suleri Goodyear’s “Excellent Things in Women,” about her Welsh-born mother and Pakistani grandmother, which also contains the composite history of Pakistan within it. The interpretation of history is central to