Zain Saeeds debut novel asks if the American brand of freedom can mean release for some Pakistanis – Scroll.in

You know this man. He sits in the middle row of your classes, raises his hand meekly but talks in a voice akin to the sound of scratching on a blackboard. The man will ask you to please repeat yourself, please speak louder, erasing his privilege with an unutilised eraser. (If youre smart, you know hes choosing not to listen to you). Hes not a sexist; he says please, he asks you to repeat yourself because he values your voice, and hes not (not) like other men. Little Americas Sharif Barkati is such a man, and Zain Saeeds prose grants him a disintegrating pedestal.

Saeed exercises the epistolary form of storytelling through Sharifs letters to his favourite novelist Laal Ghazali. These letters are directions before they are stories. Laal, along with the readers, is told what to expect. Although Sharif writes from prison, he spends far too much time asking the reader (who, according to him, is only Laal) to listen.

His promise is of a story thatll sell in America. This story, my friend my story says Sharif, has everything, and it does. Saeeds perhaps purposeful sketch of Sharifs humblebrag outlines his character. It reeks of desperation, an exaggerated desire to amplify ones voice; Sharifs telling doesnt show, but Saeeds does.

This story, my friend my story has everything: there is blood, there is mystery, there is a man bursting through the chains of society, there is illicit love, there is suspense, there is sin and there is redemption; there are even lessons to be learnt. Scrap the rest of your books! They are saltless; it is time for the truth; that is why they will publish you here but not in America.

The cleverness of the prose lies in its evasiveness, its ability to unravel the bandages that gauze Sharif, like the Invisible Man after hes beaten to death by a mob. And Saeed has Sharif do all of it: the bandaging, the beating, the unravelling. For a story where the narrator is a character, and I know it seems like weve read many of those, Saeed gives the narrator only the illusion of controlling the telling. And he doesnt do this for an arguably insignificant trait as originality, but to underscore the significance of the epistolary: intimacy.

Most of the fiction is seen from the first-person point of view. But theres a fleeting shift after the arrival of Sharifs big break: a partnership with TJ, a moneyed Pakistani-American, in the form of a colossal compound on the Karachi coast, full of bars, cafes, clubs, and the people of Karachi strolling about, hand in hand. The opportunity to stroll hand in hand is an immoral marriage of leisure and markers of affection (read: fornication), whose understanding is particularly crucial to the novel because the compound, the Pyramid, protests the ambiguous and conditional recognition of obscenity in Pakistani law.

Sharif doesnt want America as much as he wants America inside Pakistan. Hes like that man who thinks starting a menstrual cup drive will solve sexism. (As if I want to hear how to put a cup inside my vagina from a cisman). Anyway, I digress. Saeed counters my annoyance with Sharif with one of the greatest gifts: a second-person POV prose that doesnt try too hard.

He introduces the reader to the Pyramid like a concierge who clears his throat with vehemence so that you tip him. But the concierge isnt juvenile, no; he coughs because he knows youll want to tip. As is often with this POV, it stirs the readers grounding in the fictional world, jarring them just enough to realise theyve reached the lift hill of a rollercoaster. Ill shut up; you should just read the quoted text.

It is overwhelming. You do not know what to do. Other visitors like you are scattered throughout this side of the compound, stationary, mouths hanging open. There are bright families walking hand in hand, licking white ice cream cones. Young men and women are sitting in circles, debating hotly. You catch the words sex and bodies being spoken loudly in those groups, and you tremble.

Desperate for some order, you look around, and see the one thing you understand a food cart and march towards it, bumping into shocked or happy people on the way, but you do not care. You understand food, it will make it all okay.

If I had to nit-pick, the only failure of the narrative is how it facilitates Sharifs pretended understanding of class as a young boy. Although he writes in the past tense, his letters fail to acknowledge that he (now) knows why his first love, Laila, doesnt sit up front with her chauffeur. (Even the characters name is appropriate because Sharifs obsession is akin to that of Majnun).

But he does acknowledge his obsessions and goes so far as to illustrate them as admirable confessions. And oh, Sharifs virtue-signalling makes the reader wonder why hes not a liberal arts student with a Twitter account.

It shouldnt come off as a surprise that Sharif is a broken record. He consistently confesses his abstinence (I did not drink or smoke up with them, but I did not judge either). This, coupled with his word choices (he uses the word appendages to acknowledge penises), his use of language reflects his inability to escape the prison of what is acceptable, whatever that means.

But of course, he does say fuck he must, or its a compromise on character. And Saeed refuses to do that, evident from the way the letters spend a sickly amount of words on why Sharifs story is one worth writing.

By god, dear Laal, write my story, and I swear to you they will come flocking, friends and readers both, and may you then come find me and grant absolution for the sins of my past.

The novel shatters the American Dream, untangling the knots of what makes a nationality a commodity. Salespersons who sell this commodity arent here for your money; theyre here for your freedom, to save you from the so-called weight of the veil (...please take my advice, think about casting these off your head soon. Theyll hold you back).

Saeeds dialogue cracks the exterior of the saviour: both domestic and foreign (You need our help for that). In his fiction, the media acknowledges any breach of religion as the return of colonialism, and perhaps it could be. But theres danger in shrouding all semblance of freedom under the umbrella of history.

Clerics, politicians and university professors debated for hours and hours a good thing, I guess, at least they were doing something on the merits and consequences of such an act, on whether something like this could even be allowed. Some news channels, particularly the English ones, ran black-and-white reminders of the British, our colonisers, set to melancholic music.

What I loved most about Little America was a paragraph that exposes TJs office, which, like a panopticon, allows him to watch everyone. The insanity of the saviour, his voyeurism, peeks at us through that paragraph. Im not going to ask my editor to quote it because you should read Saeeds book. Youll be doing yourself a favour if you read about something seemingly quotidian as freedom. But most of all, youll realise that the word freedom isnt interchangeable with American.

Little America, Zain Saeed, Penguin Viking.

Read more here:

Zain Saeeds debut novel asks if the American brand of freedom can mean release for some Pakistanis - Scroll.in