Before her conversation with Ezra Klein on Wednesday, April 21 for 92Y, writer and actress Mira Sethi talked to us about breaking out of binary systems of thought, the challenges of writing about Pakistan for a Western readership, and her acclaimed debut story collection Are You Enjoying?
What creative impulse connects the dots, for you, between acting and writing fiction?
The desire to tell stories — through the television screen, by writing fiction — stems from the same impulse: to understand, and be understood. Fiction, whose currency is ambivalence, provides a comfortable space in which to exist. It was only after I finished writing Are You Enjoying? that I realized many of my characters chafe against the violence of conformity. Some of the characters in my book are professional performers. Those who aren’t actors or actresses are skillful chameleons, too. Why? To live in a country that has a history of weaponizing religion — and therefore identity — means, as a citizen, having to alter and contort one’s authentic self in order to survive. Some good things — namely, a kind of toxic resilience — come of this ability to adapt. Ultimately, it threatens to distort one’s reality, one’s moral framework. Malleability is good; a careening faithlessness not so much.
But the ways the West is used to looking at a country like Pakistan are equally outdated. After 9/11, American publishers wanted writers from places like Pakistan and Afghanistan to help them make sense of Islam. We were expected to churn out novels that enlightened American readers on “radical Islamism.” We were expected to answer questions like, “Why do they hate us?” I have nothing against novels that take on the Big Questions, but I don’t burrow inside the mind of a jihadist. As the cover of Are You Enjoying? suggests, the book peels back the big picture to go deep into the intimate. In many ways, it’s a book of secrets. What’s it like living and loving — often in secret — in Pakistan? My stories are about the comedy and pathos of what it means to transgress in a surveilled space. I didn’t want my stories to lose the street aspect, the local flavor, the intense specificity and subjectivity that is the hallmark of good fiction. As a non-Western writer, you have to ask yourself a question early on in your career: above all, do I want to be a bridge maker? Above all, do I want my culture to be easily accessible to Western readers? If I use a vernacular term without footnoted translation, I want my reader to put in the minimal effort of looking it up. I believe in readers engaging honestly, not reading literature as if it were a tweet. In order to write explanatory literature, you have to dumb down, or resolve, a lot of weird-seeming subjectivity. I’m not really interested in that.
Many of the stories in Are You Enjoying? explore the nexus of class, sexuality, and power in Pakistan — characters in these stories seem to operate under different sets of rules, especially when it comes to matters of love and attachment. What interests you about this dynamic?
My stories are about characters in transition. I am interested in lives lived “between” and “around” the rules. In non-Western societies, there can sometimes be a lot of different rules: the abstract rules mandated by law; the burdensome imperatives of family and tribe and clan; and the “new rules” a young individual might improvise while negotiating the above-mentioned rules with a smartphone in hand. In short, the characters in my book are constantly hustling and moving through identities in order to survive. My book is about the vulnerability of people negotiating individualism vs. collectivism, modernity vs. past, old vs. young, “liberal” vs. “conservative.”
Class works similarly in the US, of course, in many respects — people who live with different levels of privilege here seem to operate under a different set of rules. But what’s one respect in which you think this dynamic plays out differently in Pakistan than it does in America?
In Pakistan class protects the haves and have-mores up to a point. But because of the compulsions of geopolitics and religion, class offers protection only up to a point. A declared atheist or an openly queer person, no matter how wealthy or connected, would not fare well in Pakistan. However, they would be offered layers of protection in informal ways, through sneaky networks of solidarity (as the stories show).
Another way in which class plays out differently is via language. In Pakistan, English is a marker of class. One frustration I have to contend with is that my stories will not be easily accessible to a vast majority of Pakistanis (folks who don’t speak or read English). One of the ways in which I traverse this difficulty is by communicating through other forms of media (acting in Urdu, a talkshow in Urdu).
Who are your literary heroes?
Arundhati Roy, Alan Hollinghurst, the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
What have you learned during the pandemic that you’d most like to carry forward with you as life begins to offer glimmers of a return to normalcy?
I want to be in and around nature a lot more than I used to pre-pandemic. I also thought I was an extrovert through-and-through. Turns out, I am more introverted than I like to claim, and I’d like to carry that quality forward.
Don’t miss Mira Sethi in conversation with Ezra Klein on Wednesday, April 21.