America at 250: Love, doubt, and the debts we haven't paid

Birthday anniversaries are meant for celebration. When it is USA's 250th year of existence, it becomes problematic to overlook some not-so-popular policy decisions.

As a Pakistani, and that too devoid of diplomatic education and vocabulary, I too face a mixed bag of emotions and reflections. To me, this is an occasion that should also invite an honest accounting: of what a nation represents, what it still has not branded, and what it owes to those who trusted it.

This is less a birthday message than a record of a few heartbreaks and a few enduring debts.

In reflective mode, I cannot help asking: what defines a country? The heritage it protects, or the one that it has forgotten? The debt it still owes, or the one it is not willing to pay? These puzzling questions also turned me, more urgently, to a reckoning closer to home. My homeland, to date, remains riddled with contrasts and contradictions.

A larger part of our own civil society and parliamentarians court American diplomats at every high-profile gathering, a badge of status: dancing, drinking, and boasting of invitations from powerful capitals, Washington chief among them.

The poor masses, meanwhile, remain in doubt and largely unconsulted whenever policy or ideology is decided in their name. No community illustrates this neglect more starkly than the Biharis. More than half a century after 1971, some 324,000 stateless Biharis – the Pakistanis who chose Pakistan, fought for a united Pakistan, and paid dearly for that choice – continued for decades to live in the ghettos known as camps across Bangladesh. Pakistan repatriated a few thousand against a difficult-to-meet parameter, in the years following the blood-bathed "independence" of its majority part.

Somewhere between justice, diplomacy, mercy, empathy and ideology, humanity too quietly departed. Successive governments made promises. There has been no truth commission and no formal apology to our Bihari community. The sufferings and genocide of our community remain insufficiently acknowledged and continue to be contested. Neither our dignity has been restored, nor our own history fully understood. That failure belongs to us. It cannot be outsourced to America or anyone else. The same civil society and parliamentarians so eager to court American and other powerful diplomats have never spared even that much attention for the abandoned, stranded in Bangladesh's "camps". So why do I keep returning to the United States? Because, despite everything, America remains one of the few countries whose bitterest critics have also become some of its greatest writers. As a young girl, I thoroughly enjoyed Mark Twain's writings. From James Baldwin and Toni Morrison to Joan Didion, they taught me that love of a country is measured not by uncritical praise but by the courage to confront its failures.

I studied there and travelled through it without the sifarish of class or domicile that might have opened doors at home.

More importantly, its literature, more than its institutions, has often been more honest with me than the public discourse of my own country.

Before I ever visited America, I fell in love with its Hollywood movies and its literature. Here I want to pay my humble tribute to three extraordinary American women writers.

Toni Morrison, the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, built her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved around the ghost of a child killed by her own mother to save her from slavery. The haunting is not simply supernatural; it is history refusing burial.

Structurally, it is the argument I would make about "Geneva Camp", the largest settlement for the displaced, disdained and disowned people of my community: unmourned history does not disappear. It moves in with you.

Sylvia Plath taught generations of women that domestic confinement, ambition and mental suffering could be named in the same breath without apology. The Bell Jar remains an astonishing anatomy of a mind narrowing beneath expectation, its central metaphor capturing the suffocating distortions of clinical depression and social pressure with unnerving precision.

What I aspire to inherit from Plath is not despair but the ethics of confession: the conviction that truth, however uncomfortable, is worth the personal risk of telling.

On July 5, 1977, General Zia-ul-Haq's coup, Operation Fair Play, deposed Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a figure central to my own reckoning with 1971. Emily Dickinson is mine in a more private way, forged in the Islamabad that coup built. "The Soul selects her own Society - / Then - shuts the Door - / To her divine Majority - / Present no more —," she wrote, and as a teenager there, authoring English poems for The Muslim, then one of Pakistan's most respected English-language newspapers, known for its editorial independence and fearless journalism, I found in Dickinson a woman who inhabited her own intellectual room, published little during her lifetime, and answered to no one's expectations but her own.

Under a regime with very firm ideas about what women should write and become, that quiet defiance mattered. I did not need her to have shaped Urdu literature to need her.

None of this is a case for celebration. It is a case for reading a country the way one reads a person long admired but no longer trusted uncritically: alert to what it protects, honest about what it has still not named, and grateful, despite everything, for the writers who insisted on telling uncomfortable truths.

If America has given me anything lasting, it is not certainty about its institutions but faith in the intellectual freedom of those who challenged them. Nations, like people, are measured less by the myths they preserve than by the truths they are prepared to face. On that test, America remains unfinished. So does Pakistan. So, for that matter, do all of us.