“I took a deliberately blinkered trip to Peshawar”

The Friday Times: What inspired you to write ‘A God in Every Stone’? Was it something you’d always wanted to do, or did you have an “Aha!” moment?

Kamila Shamsie: By the time you’ve arrived at your sixth novel you are well past the ‘something you’d always wanted to do’ stage and scrambling for ‘what else can I do?’ If only the answer revealed itself in ‘Aha’ moments - but in fact it’s a slower accumulation of different ideas, interests, images.  I had been interested for some years in Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his Khudai Khidmatgar as a political movement that goes so against the grain of all stereotypes about Pasthuns and their guns - but I didn’t know that would make its way into a novel until I started to read up on the ancient history of Peshawar, and became interested in a traveller called Scylax who travelled along the Indus 2500 years ago. Somehow approaching the region of Peshawar via its ancient history allowed me to find my way into a story of early 20th century Peshawar, which then grew into a story that took in other locations of the First World War. This is a roundabout way of saying I have a slow, sometimes intuitive and sometimes desperate way of finding a storyline.

[quote]"The Khudai Khidmatgar movement goes against the grain of all stereotypes about Pasthuns"[/quote]

TFT: As a writer, how does one go about inhabiting events and situations so far removed from one’s own? In this case, we’re thinking of the First World War, the atmosphere in Brighton hospitals, the milieu of British-colonial Peshawar. Do you get your details — your sights, sounds, flavours — from books? Or do you make them up? 

KS: It really is a mixture of research, imagination and memory – the last may be the least obvious, but of course there are certain emotions and sights and sounds that can be transplanted from one place and time to another. But I do rely very heavily on research to allow me to visualise distant places I’m writing about. Photographs are particularly helpful – the British Library has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pictures of colonial Peshawar that were immensely helpful.  Though I think the part I enjoyed most was eating figs beside the sea in Greece and pretending that was a necessary part of novelistic research to help me write about a woman in 1915 who ate figs across the sea in Turkey. I think I could have written the scene quite happily without any actual fig-eating, but they tasted wonderful…

TFT: Vivian Rose Spencer, the protagonist of your new novel, is a white British woman. The protagonist of your last novel, ‘Burnt Shadows’, was a Japanese woman. What is it like to write from the perspectives of characters who come from ethnic and cultural backgrounds different from your own? What are the difficulties, the pressures, the particular pleasures?

KS: I had thought that writing about an Englishwoman wouldn’t be nearly as challenging as writing about a Japanese woman in ‘Burnt Shadows’ – not only because I live in London now and am surrounded by Englishwomen, but also because the early 20th century Englishwoman is a figure I know well from books and movies. I wasn’t prepared for the fact that I was so resistant to writing about someone who, at the start of the novel, believes so strongly in Empire. So the challenge was not to judge her by my 21st century Pakistani perspective but to understand the world she was living in, and how it was possible for her to be so appealing in certain ways and so wrong-headed in others. Having said that, I don’t know that a Pasthun soldier in the British Indian army in 1915 is any closer to me in terms of background than the English woman archaeologist. So there’s that to consider as well.

The pressure and difficulties involve just getting details right – does he speak Pashto or Hindko or both? How might a single woman at that time travel from England to India, etc.? The particular pleasures have to do with a world you don’t know becoming real to you through your imaginative engagement with it.

TFT: What was it like – as a woman, as a novelist – to conduct research in present-day Peshawar? Did you see the once-glorious city in its traumatized present?

KS: As the book ends in 1930, I actually didn’t want to spend much time in present-day Peshawar as I was worried that Peshawar-now would get in the way of me seeing Peshawar-then.  So most of my research was done in libraries, through books, old photographs, online, etc. I had a very brief, and deliberately-blinkered trip to Peshawar during which I went to those places that exist in my novel – the Peshawar Museum, Gor Khatri, the old city….

[quote]"I ended up with a book that was entirely different to the one I set out to write"[/quote]

But of course it’s impossible not to think of the traumatized present while writing about it. A good part of the reason I started to think of Peshawar as a place to write about was because I realised it was a city I knew so little about, and it was in danger of becoming nothing more than news stories of bombs and violence that I would read in Karachi as if reading about somewhere incredibly remote. So one of the impulses behind the novel was to allow myself to know the city through its history – the idea was that the novel would come up to the present day, spanning three generations, but as always happens with my novels I ended up with a book that was entirely different to the one I set out to write.

[quote]"The early 20th century Englishwoman is a figure I know from books and movies"[/quote]

TFT: ‘A God in Every Stone’ is, like ‘Burnt Shadows’, epic in scope and tone. This wish to touch upon several periods in history, to gesture at disparate strands of life, is combined in your recent work with what might be called an archaeological project: you want to dig up the past and put it in perspective. It’s as if you have to resist the conventions of time and space to tell a story! Do you think this is an accurate description of what you’re doing? And if yes, how much of this revisionism is an outcome of your exposure to Pakistan?

KS: I don’t know if it’s accurate but I like the sound of it.  It’s certainly true that I’m interested in the stories that get forgotten or are written out of official narratives, and I’m also interested in the repeating motifs of history. I think all that is certainly tied to how much there is of Pakistan’s history that doesn’t get talked about – we don’t know what to do with that part of our history that isn’t about Muslims (which means the glories of the Gandharan past get neglected, along with so much else) and we don’t know what to do with those periods of our history that are shameful (1971 is the most dramatic example of this) or anything that might come into conflict with one powerful institution or the other (so really, pretty much anything at all.)  The ‘who are we, who can we be, who could we have been, and how did we get here’ questions that so many of us have about Pakistan all lead you to history if you look at them long enough.

[quote]"We don't know what to do with periods of our history that are shameful"[/quote]

But there is, of course, also this: as a novelist I’m following character and plot into directions that strike me as having dramatic potential. And in the process I glimpse things out of the scorner of my eye and think, oh, let’s go there as well! So some of the disparate strands are the consequence of this setting off in search of a story and getting excited by all kinds of things along the way.

TFT: What is your process like? Do you write a draft and send it off to your editor? Or do you show it to friends and/or special readers first?

KS: I generally write a complete first draft, and then send it to my agent who has very good editing skills. She’ll give me comments on the places where the first draft needs the most work (it always needs a lot of work) and I’ll often work on a second draft before showing it to anyone else. The second draft usually goes to a few people - agent, editor, and a couple of trusted friends.

TFT: How do you occupy your time between novels? Do you know what the next one will be as soon as the first one is finished?

KS: In my fantasy world I occupy it with reading. But actually there’s a lot of writing I do other than novels; around publication that tends to mostly take the form of email interviews (yes, yes, you’re keeping me from Penelope Fitzgerald’s ‘The Blue Flower’ right now). Other than that, though, there are often essays, short stories, reviews and such things.  So there’s never a long stretch of time when I’m not writing something or the other.

And no, I don’t know what the next one will be as soon as one is finished. At the moment I have no idea what the next one will be and it’s been about eight months since I finished ‘A God In Every Stone’.

TFT: How do you feel about contemporary Pakistani writing in English? Is there anything that’s particularly heartening or disheartening about it?

KS: The best of Pakistan’s novelists are wonderful – and that’s always going to be the most heartening thing there is. It’s also pleasing to see that there’s increasing variety in the kind of work that’s being produced. But at the end of the day, it’s only going to go so far unless there’s a local publishing industry behind it. And I also really wish there were a lot more translation going on between all of Pakistan’s languages.

[quote]"The best of Pakistan's novelists are wonderful"[/quote]

TFT: What are you reading nowadays?

KS: Have you noticed these answers are getting shorter as I feel more impatient about getting back to the aforementioned ‘The Blue Flower’? When I’m done with that I want to re-visit Garcia Marquez, whose death has reminded me how much I owe him as a writer.

TFT: What’s next, Kamila?

KS: I’m hoping for sloth and indolence now that one book is out and the other isn’t being written. I will have to work harder on it, though...