Women have to keep demanding a better world: author Sadia Abbas

Women have to keep pressing for a better world even though the hardest part sometimes is to keep the demand alive, says author Sadia Abbas whose debut novel "The Empty Room" revolves around a woman stuck in an unhappy marriage in 1970s Karachi.

Abbas, who is based in the US but grew up in Pakistan, has centred her story around a young Pakistani woman dealing with a cheating husband, inconsiderate in-laws and a regressive society that makes it near impossible for her to leave.

"The Empty Room" is shortlisted for this year's DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

That it is set half a century in the past should be a relief except that women's struggle with patriarchy is a sad reality today as it was then.

 

"We haven't made nearly enough progress and, given the authoritarian turn in global politics, we seem to be squandering the gains that have been made, but I don't think progress is a linear thing and we most certainly can't give up the fight for equality and justice," Abbas told PTI in an email interview.

"We (women) have to keep demanding a better world. Sometimes keeping the demand alive is the hardest part," the US-based author said.

Abbas, a professor of English at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said she was admittedly "raised with misogynistic values".

Although not autobiographical, the novel draws heavily from the author's personal experiences, and the milieu of her growing up years in Karachi.

"I used to meet these astonishing women -- talented, educated, super thoughtful -- and wonder how they managed to make it with these men with their completely unselfconscious and unearned sense of superiority and unthinking everyday cruelty. So I wanted to understand that.

"Also, I was raised with these misogynist values and broke with them quite dramatically, but I wanted to try to understand how somebody might live them," the author, who in her late 60s, said.

Abbas has set her story, about Tahira who struggles to adapt to a world of stifling conformity, in the volatile times of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's "authoritarian" regime when student and left politics were on the rise in the country.

The story captures the lives of those inhabiting a corner of Karachi where displaced people from Uttar Pradesh, like Abbas' own father, congregated after Partition.

"Tahira's story is part of that historical moment and is very much inflected by it -- especially as it's at the end of the sixties which is a moment of possibility and potential transition for women.

"That not enough has changed is our tragedy, but the feminist fight continues even if the historical inflections and particularities have changed," she said.

Abbas' novel, among other things, is also an exploration of what choice means for women.

According to the author, desires, social norms and ideologies can't be completely disentangled.

For instance, Tahira's mother Mariam knows of the ill-treatment meted out to her daughter by her husband and his family but chooses to let her suffer, fearing that divorce might come in the way of the marriage of her two other daughters.

Tahira herself chooses to continue in the loveless relationship because of "propriety". At a certain point in the book, Abbas shows her heroine murmuring to herself, "...I will understand the triviality of my pain."

Tahira thus teaches herself to come to terms with her oppressive life, first for the future of her sisters, and then for her children.

But Abbas' novel is not all dark and bleak.

In the face of a hostile life, her protagonist finds comfort in art, a passion that is shared by the author.

For the book, Abbas said she read up on painting, on colour, and more.

"It was an opportunity to learn more about things that already interested me but I hadn't had a chance to concentrate on," she said.

Abbas' research to bring alive the narrative and the Karachi of the 70s entailed a thorough exploration of "Behishti Zevar" (Heavenly Ornaments), a conduct book for brides, which is also incidentally the book Tahira's husband gives her to read soon after their marriage. It also involved reading up Deputy Nazir Ahmad, who wrote what is considered the first Urdu bestseller, also a didactic novel for wives.

"I had heard about them but didn't realize how much they permeated society and how much I had heard, bits and pieces quoted, until I started researching the discourses of marriage," she said.

She also researched extensively on the Bhutto era and interviewed people involved in student politics.

The author's next novel is about Britain's repression of its colonial history set in the UK and the United States, which, she said, is strikingly different in terms of subject, locale, language and tone.

"It's early days though so I expect changes. And I have an idea for what might become the third novel, which will probably be set in Greece where I spend a lot of time," she said.

Abbas is also working on her next academic book, which connects Greece and South Asia.