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London, UNITED KINGDOM - My life as a traveling writer has alternated between long stretches spent entirely alone, writing, and peripatetic, vivid, often exciting and fascinating periods spent "in the field" or "on the ground" in places like Haiti and Cambodia and Zimbabwe and Pakistan, imposing my curiosity on local people minding their own business. In such a life, evenings like this one come few and far between and are good for the soul, so I'm delighted to be here.All the time spent traveling has exacted a price, not least in loneliness. But travel has also given me great blessings. The greatest of these is expressed by the title character of one of my favorite Graham Greene novels, Travels with My Aunt. Of the narrator's Uncle Jo she says, "He wanted to slow life up and he quite rightl y felt that by travelling he would make time move with less rapidity." That is, he wanted to live longer by living more. When I first read the novel in Bangkok 12 years ago, Aunt Augusta's notion rang true, though I understood it less well than I do now. On the cusp of 40, it gratifies me: my life has been full to the brim with richly human encounters and friendships.
None have been more richly human than in Pakistan. An invitation to spend a semester teaching journalism at the new Beaconhouse National University in Lahore in 2003 gave me the proximate occasion to write and publish Alive and Well in Pakistan. My ambition was to write an accessible nonfiction book capturing the Zeitgeist for a general readership and updating the story told by Emma Duncan in Breaking the Curfew, published in 1989, and by Christina Lamb in Waiting for Allah, published in 1991. A lot had happened, in Pakistan and in the world, since those heady post-Zia days. I secured a contract with the fine and enterprising independent publisher Vision and off I went. I had greatly enjoyed my earlier visits, in 1995 and 1999. But since then, to put it bluntly, the World Trade Center had been blown up. Would I still like Pakistan and Pakistanis? Would th ey still like me? Would I be and feel safe, especially as an American? I need not have worried on any of these counts: Pakistan hadn't changed a bit.
My method is to listen closely -- anyone who has done this for a full day, much less for months on end, knows how exhausting it can be -- and to remember and record people's exact words. Paul Theroux argues that people's exact spoken words are telling in a way no paraphrase can ever be, and he's right. My recording device is called a pen. One chapter in the book recounts my spending the Eid holiday in November 2003 with the Minallah family in their village home in the North-West Frontier Province. A few months ago I got an email from Fauzia Minallah, a wonderful woman who first interested me because, when she was very young, during the Zia-ul-Haq regime, she published playful and subversive cartoons in the newspaper The Muslim. Fauzia wrote to me:
I have finally read your book and I for one am very happy about what you have written about me. What has amazed us all is how accurately you have recorded what we had said, even the expressions. I will confe ss to you that when you were here we were a bit sceptical, and didn't take you seriously because one expects an American writer/reporter more well equipped like a tiny voice recorder or other such fancy gadgets. But it is amazing how you have recorded everything so accurately with just one pen and a small notebook. I hope your book is selling well despite taking such a difficult step of not sensationalizing Pakistan.My working premise is that human beings of all backgrounds deserve to be heard with respect and patience and on their own terms. The gap between where I'm at and where you're at is where we find our common humanity. Respect implies difference and distance, and we bridge the gap by listening with respect, just as we burn the bridge when we're too quick to express or impose our own point of view. Reviewing Alive and Well in Pakistan in the Harvard International Review, Munis D. Faruqui honored me by calling the book... a multi-layered portrait of a country that is uncomfortable in its own skin, unable to live up to its founding ideals, and desperate to improve its image in the world. Yet it is also a country [he went on] that is proud of its achievements, good-humored about its foibles, and hopeful that the future will prove better than the past. This complex picture challenges the all too common impression of outsiders that Pakistan only qualifies for our sympathy or fear as a fai led state with nuclear weapons or as a country that cannot decide whether to explode or implode.Pakistan is chronically on the brink, which is one reason it's of interest to the outside world. But it also certainly is, in Faruqui's apt phrase, good-humored about its foibles. In the bumptious general enclosure at Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore during a one-day cricket match between Pakistan and South Africa, a young man named Naeem Khan told me, with mixed chagrin and pride, "Pakistani people are so much naughty." When the curtain opened on a student performance of the play The Importance of Being Earnest, the raucous audience shouted and whistled. My student Ahmed Usman Chaudhry explained to me in a whisper: "It's something normal in the culture of Lahore." In Rawalpindi early last year, at the home of my young friend Hassan Iqbal, I watched President Musharraf's press conference following the arrest of the nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. "Do you think this is a major crisis for Musharraf?" I asked Hassan."Oh yes," he said. "He is the man of crisis."
Cheerfully, Hassan's mother added: "Every year he has crisis. Two years before, Taliban crisis. Then last year, Iraq crisis. Now this Qadeer Khan crisis."
I guess when you've got as many foibles as Pakistan has, all you can really do is be good-natured about them. There might be a lesson in that for some of the rest of us.
Faruqui writes that "Alive and Well in Pakistan's greatest strength lies in its ability to humanize Pakistanis by letting them speak for themselves." This is very kind praise, but it also entails a literary and moral problem. An American friend, Larry Hartsell, wrote me a thoughtful letter recently in which he considered the risk a Western writer runs of "miniaturizing" the people he or she encounters. Larry cited the imperfect and idiosyncratic English in much of the dialogue in Alive and Well in Pakistan -- the exact spoken words I referred to a few minutes ago. "I have a soft spot for Nepal instead of, say, China," Larry wrote, because there is a kind of innocence -- paradoxically, no matter how corrupt -- or simple social trust, often violated, that's very appealing, in contrast to the massive (non-miniature) brutality of Chinese politics and social imperatives. Miniaturizing expresses affection, sort of, but I think it worries us as progressives as to whether it's a patronizing affection.
I share Larry's worry. In explanation, if not defence, I can say that the only perspective from which I can observe and write is my own. A writer who enjoys the prerogatives and presumpti ons of a powerful, stable and secure society has an added measure of responsibility to be attentive and respectful. In Haiti there is a saying: Bay kou blie, pote mak sonje. It means, "He who gives the blow forgets; he who bears the bruise remembers." Our world's many human beings who bear bruises grow up knowing truths that Europeans and especially Americans teach ourselves too late in life, if then.
I'm fond of Pakistan not only because it wears its heart on its national sleeve, but also because it's much smaller and more vulnerable than India. Whenever a person or country is systematically demonized by more powerful people or countries, you can be sure there's another side to the story. It was to hear the other side of the subcontinent's story, specifically in the context of the Kashmir tragedy, that I first visited Pakistan in 1995. Alive and Well in Pakistan is a summation of much that I feel I've learned about the country and the world since then, and a tribute to some of the most interesting and hospitable people I've had the privilege to call friends.
Thank you.
ETHAN CASEY (pecasey@mindspring.com) is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan (Vision, 2004; Penguin India, 2005) and former Editor of the prestigious Web site Blue Ear.
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