MananAhmed_FatimaBhutto
2
In Emergency, we follow Neil Strauss – whose previous cred- its include The Game, the story of a group of men who devise a quasi-scientific method to se- duce women – as he loses faith in the ability of the American system of consumption to nour- ish him, and prepares for what he believes will be the inevitable collapse of civil order. When that dark day comes, Strauss tells the reader, “I don’t want to be hiding in a cellar (or) fighting old women for bread.” The goal, he determines, is “true sovereignty” or self-sufficiency in the face of any eventuality. By the book’s end, Strauss has answered his own fears by learning how to “find water in the desert, extract drinkable fluids from the ocean, deliver a baby, fly a plane, pick locks, hot-wire cars, build homes, set traps, evade bounty hunters ... kill a man with my bare hands and escape across the border with documents identifying me as the citizen of a small island republic.” In Strauss’s hands, survivalism exposes its great irony: that the individual who survives only for the sake of it will inhabit a ru- ined world. It was of such peo- ple that Herman Kahn, the ther- monuclear war theorist, once asked: “Will the survivors envy the dead?” TheNtionl thereview Friday, April 16, 2010 www.thenational.ae Friday, April 16, 2010 www.thenational.ae TheNtionl thereview 1 3 1 2 “Pakistan was an ever-present ghost inourhouse.AswasZia.AndZulfikar. ndShah Nawaz. My father andI car- ried invisible baggage with us, both loved and feared,” Fatima Bhutto rites in Songs of Blood and Sword . General Zia ul Haq was the dicta- tor who put to death Pakistan’s first elected prime minister – and Fati- ma’s grandfather – Zulfikar Ali Bhut- to in 1979. His son Shah Nawaz was found dead in Paris in 1986. Their ghosts have since been joined by thoseofFatima’sfath er, MirMurtaz a Bhutt o,killedon thestreetinfrontof hishomein1996,andhissisterBena- zir, assassina tedin2007. As a young woman, Fatima witness- es the violent and unnatural deaths of her dear uncle and her father. She hears whispers that her own aunt as involved – directly or indirectly – in those deaths. She grows up with the sadness of a family cleaved into factions. She writes to remember, she writes to accuse, she writes to ex- plain.Attheheartofthismemoirlies the pain of a deep loss. She notes her father’s perfume, his laugh, his hu- mour and joy at living, his previous loves, his undergraduate thesis, his college friends, the music he loved, the revolutionaries he admired, the places he lived and people he met. It is an exhaustive remembrance told reverentially, lovingly and at times clumsily–andall themoretouching asaresult. Shewritesthatshehoped, throughthisbook,tomake“mypeace ithmyfather...finallyhonouringmy last promise to him –to tell his story –andthen,tofinallysay goodbye.” Her project is a recuperative one: she wants to rescue the memory of her father Murtaza and to claim for him the status of a nation’s saviour. She wants to tear away the skein of hagiography that now covers the memory ofBenazir Bhutto, toexpose her corruption, her culpability, her blind ambition. Above all, she wants to unburden herself of the sorrow of losingherfathe rattheage of14. None should deny Fatima Bhutto the right to remember her loss –but that is not all this memoir aspires to. Inherpreface,shecastsafamiliarpic- ture of Pakistan aflame, devastated fromoutsidebydronesandmissiles, plundered from within by cronies andcorrupti ons:“Howhavewecome tothisstateofaffairs?”sheasks. This book is her answer. But it is a simplistic,uncriticalandbenighted one. The Bhuttos, landed elite from Sindh, can claim a long and check- ered history of entanglements with power – first the British colonial administration, then the new post- colonial state. Among “Sindh’s larg- est landowners,” they exerted great influence,controllinganddirecting hundredsofthousandsofruralfami- lies. Fatima does not linger long on thisearlyhistory–excepttopointout how“debonair”,“dashing”,“hand- some”, and “beautiful” every one was. Her grandfather, Zulfikar Ali, is soonofftoBerkeley,Califo rniawhere someonemist akeshimforaMexican – this awakens in him the spirit of egalitarianism and equity. Or so it is remembered. Zulfikar Ali’s meteoric rise from Sindhi feudal to President of Paki- stan is portrayed here either hagi- ographically or casually: at his better moment sZulfikarAliisremembered as being destined for greatness; dur- ing his weaker moments he is the victim of poor advice. The most egre- gious omissions concern his politi- cal response to Bengali demands for equivalence in East Pakistan (which broke away to become Bangladesh after a civil war in 1971); it was the accord between the military regime of General Yahya and Zulfikar Ali’s newly founded political party – the Pakistan People’s Party – to disen- franchis ethewinningAwamiLeague after the 1970 elections that sparked the conflict that led to Pakistan’s re- partitio n.Similarly, Fatimaputsana- ive and benign spin on Zulfikar Ali’s pan-Islamic policies – ignoring the 1973constit utionthathepromulgat - ed, which deliberately setthe country on the path toward Sharia law, dealt a deadly blow to minority rights, and enabled General Zia ul Haq’s sub- sequent Sunnification of Pakistan. Zulfikar Ali’s brutal crackdown on Balochistan in 1974 is also excused: thenhewasmerely apawnofthefeu- dals and the army. The voices of his detrac torsarenotentire lyabsent,but thereisnoattempttoengagecritical- ly with her grandfather’s legacy; true culpabilit y alwayslieselsewhe re. Zulfikar Ali wasdeposed by General Zia in 1977; in his 1979 prison tract, If I Am Assassinated , he wrote: “My sons will not be my sons if they do notdrinkthebloodofthosewhodare to shed my blood.” After his murder in 1979, his sons Mir Murtaza and Shah Nawaz took up his call, launch- ing a self-avowedly violent resistance against General Zia’s regime – while sunningthemselvesinRussian-occu- pied Kabul. They called it al Zulfikar (the Sword) and Mir Murtaza rallied thesupportofMuammer Qadafiand HafizalAssad. In March 1981, a Pakistan Interna- tional Airlines flight, PK-326, was hijacked en route to Peshawar from Karachi. It was diverted to Kabul where Mir Murtaza negotiated with the hijackers to release the women and children. The plane was next taken to Damascus where it lingered foranotherwee kbeforethehijackers gaveup. A NewYorkTimesstory dated April 19, 1981 quotes Mir Murtaza saying that members of his organi- sation were the hijackers and that it was committed to reacting “bru- tally” against Zia ul Haq’s regime. The hijackers murdered a diplomat, TariqRahim. “I feel secretly proud of my father for abandoning the offer of a bland but comfortable exile in London to fight what he believed was an unjust system”, Fatima writes. Her pride coloursher treatmentofthis“phase” in her father’s life; contrary to his own admission, she describes the hijackers as not having been mem- bers of al Zulfikar, and says that he never admitted as much. Mir Mur- taza, in her depiction, preferred the pen to the Kalashnikov – it was the youngerSha hNawazwhotookonthe trappin gsof theproto-Mujahidee n. Where Mir Murtaza does no wrong, Benazir does no right. She hovers aroundtheedgesofthetext, only sur- facing to have another bit of blame pinned on her silenced shoulders. She is held responsible for every- thing from keeping Fatima away from her father’s college friends, to separat ingherfromhercousins,toat least covering up, if not ordering, the murder of Shah Nawaz, to murder- ing or looking away from the murder of Mir Murtaza. There is little doubt that Benazir’s governments were corrupt – and Fatima’s summation of the innumerable charges against Benaz irandAsifAli Zardar iismaster- ful.Thereisalsoampleevidencethat Mir Murtaza’s murder was carried out with her approval, or sanctioned on her behalf. But these are matters better adjudicated by persons other than the daughter of the deceased: here the familial, the personal, the conspira torialandthelegalarehope- lessly indistinguishable. The three ghosts examined, Zulfikar, Mir Murtaza and Benazir, we must turn to Pakistan. The book is, after all, geared to an audience looking to understand Pakistan, or have it explained to them, by this tel- egenic representative of a troubled dynasty. SongsofBloodandSword canrightly beseenas thelatestina lineofmem- oirs like Benazir’s Daughter of the East and Pervez Musharraf’s In the LineofFire – each of them devoted to uncriticalpresentation sof theirau- thorsor their families, madetostand in for the history of an entire nation. The tale of the Bhutto dynasty,from its feudal base to its populist claims and now to the stranger-than-fiction stewardship under Zardari (where elseinthisworld canonebequeath a politica lparty in awill?) stilldeserves tobetold, andtoldproperly . This is not that book, and it should neither be sold nor judged as such: it ismerel y another primary document for that unwritten history, alongside the papers of her father, grandfather and aunt – which remain in the fam- ily homein Karac hi. In the meantime, however, the book will sell and sell: the author’s criticism of Zardari’s regime and of his role in her father’s murder, her triumphalistPakistaninationalism and complaints against American imperialism, and her last name are all catnip to the British, Ameri- can and South Asian media, which have already lavished considerable coverage on the book prior to i ts re- lease. Fatima has stayed aloof from politics – and for that she should be commended – but this is only one branch of the family business; the perpetuation of a dynasty requires myth-making as much as election victories,andherbook, whateverits aims, succeeds only in draping an- other skein of hagiography around the Bhuttos. MananAhmedisahistorianof PakistanatFreieUniversitatBerlin. HeblogsatChapatiMystery. Ghost wars Fatima Bhutto’ s Songs of Blood and Sword should not be read as a work of history, writes Manan Ahmed, rather a deeply personal hagiography of Pakistan’s most famous political dynasty new paperbacks Songs of Blood and Sword Fatima Bhutto Jonathan Cape Dh115 books From page 257 But I knew, from experience, that anything is possible in the Bhutto family Sittingina chairinthe studyof herfamilyhomein CliftonKarachi,FatimaBhuttoholdsaposter depictinghermurdered fatherMurtazaandthe sixaideswho diedwithhimin1996.AlexandraFazzina The Locust and the Bird tells the true story of Hanan al Shaykh’s mother ,Kamila,whowas bornin 1925, secretly betrothedat11 and marriedofftoamantwiceherage at13. Rebellious and strong-willed, Kamila took a lover, conducted a brazenly public affair, got di- vorced, remarried and left her childrenb ehind. The action begins with a wed- ding and ends with a funeral and in between Shaykh sets up an emotional roller-coaster, where murder, abandonment, betrayal, starvation, theft, adultery are mixed with the spectacle of a teenagebridedesperatelytrying toescapeaforcedmarriage. Except for a prologue and epi- logue, Shaykh casts the entirety of TheLocus tand theBird in her mother’s voice and the book is impressively subtle, although Ka- miladoesnotalwayscomeacross aslikeable.Sheisselfish,lazyand obdurate. Her first husband, Abu Hus- sein, changes over time, soften- ing from a brute to a humble old man. Only Muhammad, Kamila’s lov- er, remains something of a mys- tery. A few years after they later marry, Muhammad was killed in a car crash. It’s a sign of compas- sion that Shaykh lets this tragedy rise above all the others, includ- ing her own. A troubled family history The Locust and the Bird Hanan al Shaykh Bloomsbury Publishing Dh50 This week’s essential reading A look at how Bihar, one of India’s ‘failed states’, once a byword for poverty and corruption, has become the country’s second fastest-growing economy ‘Turnaround of India State Could Serve as a Model’, by Lydia Polgreen, New York Times } { Life, but not as you know it Emergency Neil Strauss Canongate Books Dh65
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In EmergeStrauss – wits includeof a group quasi-scieduce womin the abilsystem of cish him, anhe believescollapse of When th
Strauss tel want to be fighting olThe goal, hsovereigntin the face
By the bhas answelearning hthe desertfluids froma baby, flyhot-wire catraps, evadkill a man and escap
with documas the citizrepublic.”
In Strauss
TheNtionl thereviewFriday, April 16, 2010 www.thenational.ae TheNtionl thereview12
“Pakistan was an ever-present ghost inourhouse.AswasZia.AndZulfikar.
ndShah Nawaz. My father andI car-ried invisible baggage with us, bothloved and feared,” Fatima Bhutto
rites in Songs of Blood and Sword .General Zia ul Haq was the dicta-tor who put to death Pakistan’s first
elected prime minister – and Fati-ma’s grandfather – Zulfikar Ali Bhut-to in 1979. His son Shah Nawaz wasfound dead in Paris in 1986. Theirghosts have since been joined by thoseofFatima’sfather, MirMurtazaBhutto, killedon thestreetinfrontof hishomein1996,andhissisterBena-zir, assassinatedin2007. As a young woman, Fatima witness-
es the violent and unnatural deathsof her dear uncle and her father. Shehears whispers that her own aunt
as involved – directly or indirectly – in those deaths. She grows up withthe sadness of a family cleaved intofactions. She writes to remember,she writes to accuse, she writes to ex-plain. Attheheartofthismemoir liesthe pain of a deep loss. She notes herfather’s perfume, his laugh, his hu-mour and joy at living, his previousloves, his undergraduate thesis, hiscollege friends, the music he loved,the revolutionaries he admired, theplaces he lived and people he met. It is an exhaustive remembrance toldreverentially, lovingly and at timesclumsily –and all the more touching asaresult. Shewritesthatshehoped,throughthisbook,tomake“mypeace
ithmyfather...finallyhonouringmy last promise to him –to tell his story –andthen, tofinally say goodbye.”
Her project is a recuperative one:she wants to rescue the memory of her father Murtaza and to claim forhim the status of a nation’s saviour.She wants to tear away the skein of hagiography that now covers thememory ofBenazir Bhutto, toexposeher corruption, her culpability, her
blind ambition. Above all, she wantsto unburden herself of the sorrow of losing her father attheage of14.
None should deny Fatima Bhuttothe right to remember her loss –but that is not all this memoir aspires to.Inherpreface,shecastsafamiliarpic-ture of Pakistan aflame, devastatedfromoutsideby dronesandmissiles,plundered from within by croniesandcorruptions:“Howhavewecometothisstateofaffairs?”sheasks.
This book is her answer. But it is asimplistic, uncritical and benightedone.
The Bhuttos, landed elite fromSindh, can claim a long and check-ered history of entanglements withpower – first the British colonialadministration, then the new post-colonial state. Among “Sindh’s larg-est landowners,” they exerted great influence, controlling and directing hundredsofthousandsofruralfami-lies. Fatima does not linger long onthisearly history –excepttopointout how “debonair”, “dashing”, “hand-some”, and “beautiful” every one
was. Her grandfather, Zulfikar Ali, issoonofftoBerkeley,CaliforniawheresomeonemistakeshimforaMexican– this awakens in him the spirit of egalitarianism and equity. Or so it isremembered.
Zulfikar Ali’s meteoric rise fromSindhi feudal to President of Paki-stan is portrayed here either hagi-ographically or casually: at his bettermomentsZulfikarAliisrememberedas being destined for greatness; dur-ing his weaker moments he is the
victim of poor advice. The most egre-
gious omissions concern his politi-cal response to Bengali demands forequivalence in East Pakistan (whichbroke away to become Bangladeshafter a civil war in 1971); it was theaccord between the military regimeof General Yahya and Zulfikar Ali’snewly founded political party – thePakistan People’s Party – to disen-franchisethewinningAwamiLeagueafter the 1970 elections that sparkedthe conflict that led to Pakistan’s re-partition.Similarly, Fatimaputsana-ive and benign spin on Zulfikar Ali’span-Islamic policies – ignoring the1973constitutionthathepromulgat-ed, which deliberately setthe country on the path toward Sharia law, dealt a deadly blow to minority rights, andenabled General Zia ul Haq’s sub-sequent Sunnification of Pakistan.Zulfikar Ali’s brutal crackdown onBalochistan in 1974 is also excused:thenhewasmerely apawnofthefeu-dals and the army. The voices of hisdetractorsarenotentirelyabsent,but thereisnoattempttoengagecritical-ly with her grandfather’s legacy; trueculpability alwayslieselsewhere.
Zulfikar Ali wasdeposed by GeneralZia in 1977; in his 1979 prison tract, If I Am Assassinated , he wrote: “My sons will not be my sons if they donotdrinkthebloodofthosewhodareto shed my blood.” After his murderin 1979, his sons Mir Murtaza andShah Nawaz took up his call, launch-ing a self-avowedly violent resistanceagainst General Zia’s regime – while
sunningthemselvesinRussian-occu-pied Kabul. They called it al Zulfikar(the Sword) and Mir Murtaza ralliedthesupportofMuammer Qadafi andHafizalAssad.
In March 1981, a Pakistan Interna-tional Airlines flight, PK-326, washijacked en route to Peshawar fromKarachi. It was diverted to Kabul
where Mir Murtaza negotiated withthe hijackers to release the womenand children. The plane was next taken to Damascus where it lingeredforanotherweekbeforethehijackers
gaveup. A NewYorkTimesstory dated April 19, 1981 quotes Mir Murtazasaying that members of his organi-sation were the hijackers and that it was committed to reacting “bru-tally” against Zia ul Haq’s regime.The hijackers murdered a diplomat,TariqRahim.
“I feel secretly proud of my fatherfor abandoning the offer of a blandbut comfortable exile in London tofight what he believed was an unjust system”, Fatima writes. Her pridecoloursher treatmentofthis“phase”
in her father’s life; contrary to hisown admission, she describes thehijackers as not having been mem-bers of al Zulfikar, and says that henever admitted as much. Mir Mur-taza, in her depiction, preferred thepen to the Kalashnikov – it was the
youngerShahNawazwhotookonthetrappingsof theproto-Mujahideen. Where Mir Murtaza does no wrong,
Benazir does no right. She hoversaroundtheedgesofthetext, only sur-facing to have another bit of blamepinned on her silenced shoulders.
She is held responsible for every-thing from keeping Fatima away from her father’s college friends, toseparatingherfromhercousins,toat least covering up, if not ordering, themurder of Shah Nawaz, to murder-ing or looking away from the murderof Mir Murtaza. There is little doubt that Benazir’s governments werecorrupt – and Fatima’s summationof the innumerable charges against BenazirandAsifAli Zardariismaster-ful. Thereisalsoampleevidencethat Mir Murtaza’s murder was carriedout with her approval, or sanctionedon her behalf. But these are mattersbetter adjudicated by persons otherthan the daughter of the deceased:here the familial, the personal, theconspiratorialandthelegalarehope-lessly indistinguishable.
The three ghosts examined,Zulfikar, Mir Murtaza and Benazir,
we must turn to Pakistan. The book
is, after all, geared to an audiencelooking to understand Pakistan, orhave it explained to them, by this tel-egenic representative of a troubleddynasty. SongsofBloodandSword canrightly
beseenas thelatestina lineofmem-oirs like Benazir’s Daughter of the East and Pervez Musharraf’s In the LineofFire – each of them devoted touncritical presentations of their au-thorsor their families, madetostandin for the history of an entire nation.
The tale of the Bhutto dynasty,fromits feudal base to its populist claimsand now to the stranger-than-fictionstewardship under Zardari (whereelseinthisworld canonebequeath apoliticalparty in awill?) stilldeservestobetold, andtoldproperly.
This is not that book, and it shouldneither be sold nor judged as such: it ismerel y another primary document for that unwritten history, alongsidethe papers of her father, grandfatherand aunt – which remain in the fam-ily homein Karachi.
In the meantime, however, thebook will sell and sell: the author’scriticism of Zardari’s regime and of his role in her father’s murder, hertriumphalist Pakistani nationalismand complaints against Americanimperialism, and her last nameare all catnip to the British, Ameri-can and South Asian media, whichhave already lavished considerablecoverage on the book prior to i ts re-lease. Fatima has stayed aloof frompolitics – and for that she should becommended – but this is only onebranch of the family business; theperpetuation of a dynasty requiresmyth-making as much as election
victories, and her book, whatever itsaims, succeeds only in draping an-other skein of hagiography aroundthe Bhuttos.
MananAhmedisahistorianof PakistanatFreieUniversitatBerlin. HeblogsatChapatiMystery.
GhostwarsFatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword should not be read asa work of history, writes Manan Ahmed, rather a deeply personalhagiography of Pakistan’s most famous political dynasty
Songs of Blood and SwordFatima BhuttoJonathan CapeDh115
books
From page 257 But I knew, from experience,that anything is possible in the Bhutto family
Sittingina chairinthe studyof herfamilyhomein CliftonKarachi,FatimaBhuttoholdsaposter depictinghermurderedfatherMurtazaandthe sixaideswho diedwithhim in1996.Alexandra Fazzina
The Locusttrue story omother, Ka1925, secremarriedoffat13.
RebelliouKamila tooa brazenly
vorced, remchildrenb e
The actioding and enin betweenemotionalmurder, abstarvationmixed witteenage brtoescapeaf
Except fologue, Shayof TheLocumother’s vimpressivelmiladoesnaslikeableobdurate.
Her first sein, changing from a bman.
Only Muh
A tro
This week’s essential reading
A look at how Bihar, one of India’s ‘failed states’, once a byword and corruption, has become the country’s second fastest-grow
‘Turnaround of India StateCould Serve as a Model’, by Lydia Polgreen, New York Times{
Life,
