Literary festival: ‘Good fiction all about storytelling’

LAHORE:

“I do not write specifically for a Pakistani audience. I think the situations I write about in my fiction are human situations and they have no specific significance for a Pakistani audience,” said novelist and translator Musharraf Ali Farooqi speaking to The Express Tribune. Farooqi’s latest novel, Between Clay and Dust, has been shortlisted for the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize. He has also translated, The Adventures of Amir Hamza and the first volume of Talism-i-Hoshruba.

Starting his writing career in 1990 Farooqi said that in the beginning everything was an effort. “Writing [in the beginning] is a very self-conscious exercise with silly worries about meeting daily quota of words and the panic about whether one can find the story.” The real journey of a writer begins, he said, when one reads more and thinks about why one is writing and what one should be writing about.

He said this takes its time. “And this consciousness also keeps getting revised throughout one’s writing career.”

He lists his influences from contemporary writers such as Afzaal Ahmed Syed, Muhammad Khalid Akhtar to those in popular digests. “In Urdu my biggest influence from classical literature is the dastan genre from which I have translated a couple of works.” “Good fiction only need concern itself with storytelling. That is its only justification,” he added.

Farooqi has also translated Urdu classics and poetry but says he is no harfun maula (master of all trades). He said the phenomenon of working in several fields has much to do with the limitation of a writer’s identity in this part of the world and our times.  “Writers historically have been translators, authors, poets, essayists, and it was all considered part of a writer’s work.” His works in English fiction are The Cobbler’s Holiday Or Why Ants Don’t Wear Shoes, The Amazing Moustaches of Moochhander the Iron Man and Other Stories and his recent fiction for children Tik-Tik, The Master of Time. “Writing for children is far more challenging than for adults in the sense that it has to be constantly engaging.”



While certain traits of real life characters sometimes inspire fictitious characters, many a times they are wholly imagined, Farooqi said. “It does happen though that one seeks the justification of a fictitious character’s actions in how real life characters, who are like them, would act in a given situation.”

He said that in his work the story dictates everything including the kind of language and narrator’s voice. “A character or characters may inspire the idea of a story but once the story is conceived, it dictates how a character would act within it,” said Farooqi.

“Historically the biggest export from this region has been stories.” From the collection of Alif Lailah to German folktales stories have left their imprint and traces in the world. “With a mediocre narrative replete with half-digested wisdom being increasingly seen as edgy that strength is being increasingly undermined today,” he said.

Farooqi said that this year he would complete two new novels, one of which, The Goat-Spy, is about the Dajjal (Anti-Christ).

Farooqi will be speaking at the Lahore Literary Festival this weekend.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 22^nd, 2013.