Send my roots rain…

— Gerard Hopkins

Every now and then we come across some relative returning from the UK and get amused by their hysterically quick exchange of Punjabi and English vocabulary. While such interactions are usually taken in jest, we fail to understand the struggles people undergo in terms of financial as well as emotional troubles abroad. We paint them all in the same colour. The word colour spells voodoo for the people in the diaspora; it being the root cause of xenophobia people have to face once away from home.

Some of the finest Pakistani Anglophone writers from the first generation expatriates have profusely talked about the diaspora conundrum. Reading about which, one cannot help but come to the realisation that just as their vocabulary was divided, perhaps so were their hearts, minds and even bodies between the geographical stretches of two continents.

This series is but an attempt to gain an understanding of these people away from their roots through literature, and how roots forever beckon them back. The desire to return to the motherland is always thwarted by a phenomenon called ‘native alien-hood’, a term coined by Zulfikar Ghose, famous Pakistani poet, novelist and critic. The writer has countless poetic anthologies and fiction as well as non-fiction writings to his credit. His renowned autobiography is called The Confessions of a Native Alien. No phrase can do more justice to encapsulating the conflict of belonging, dispossession and rootlessness than this. While the emigrants are aliens in the new land they call their own, their native land they leave behind becomes alien to them in no time. Acceptability in either place is a challenge for them. Ghose writes, “This distinction between two countries of my early life has been the schizophrenic theme of much of my thinking; it created a psychological conflict and a pressing need to know that I do belong somewhere…”

For the migratory souls, the thought about belonging is forever their dark shadow; hard to leave behind, even harder to grasp.

This particular diaspora tale began when Zulfikar Ghose was born in 1935 in Sialkot, then a part of British India. His father was a trader. The entire family moved to Bombay in 1943. His father expected him to join the family trading business once he grew up. But as the author came of age he grew more interested in literature. Slowly, as the father’s business expanded they had to move farther away from their roots to England. This happened in the year 1952 when Ghose was 17 years of age. Ghose has often raised serious questions about his fluctuating identity at that time. He says that they left India because it “half tolerated them and not even that… Toleration is the condition of belonging. If the people tolerate you and you can tolerate whatever conditions you get in a certain place, then you belong there”. He clearly never belonged in India. It was a passing phase.

Once in England, Ghose set out on a new journey of self-discovery. He says about the initial period: “I hated to look at people for I felt that they were watching me, questioning my presence… I looked longingly at all and turned inward to myself.”

The British colonial past has been quite unforgiving. VS Naipaul in his book, Enigma of Arrival, delves into a similar state of being away from home in post-imperial England. He says: “… in the other man’s country, I felt my strangeness, my solitude”. Writers are sensitive people, and once uprooted from their baseline, the enigma of their identity heightens.

Ghose writes: “‘Some images of that time persist as obsessions... then how absurd the body is in seeking identification with a particular piece of land! Nostalgia, sentiment possess one merely. Go back, go back.”

He became a loner, an introvert and started to stammer. Even his name was under scrutiny. “The combination of ‘Zulfikar’ and ‘Ghose’ is very odd. Who are you?” Zulfikar is a Muslim name whereas Ghose is Indian in character. “...I can be native only in one, and yet I do not want to be alien to either,” he writes.

Growing up in a place with a rudderless prejudice for a Muslim Indian boy, Ghose developed a psychosis that only writing proved to address. His aggravated mind found a temporary relief when he went to Keele University where he did his bachelors. He recollects the undergraduate years with zest. He made friends with writers and that helped him with his career.

“If love and work, one’s attachments and preoccupations, give one a sense of belonging to a place then I belonged to England in 1960.”

Therefore, it seems that even belonging is a fluid concept. One could feel at home and away from it as well, all at the same time. His narrative questions the relevance of nationality as an agent of unity among a certain group of individuals.

“... a writer only incidentally belongs to a particular group at a particular time. For above everything else, a writer is an individual whose deepest attachment is not to his or her country but to art.”

Interestingly, the author came up with different approaches to his self: a desperate lover, a silent poet and a worried alien. His personas are despondent, yet they all provide the framework for an escape from an identity crisis in the end. He calls his quest a cause of nausea and sentiment.

“So, does it all come down to this? Mere sentiment? This talk of discovering identity, roots, a country to call one’s own. Is it all sentiment? The facts are turning up as nausea, as sentiment.”

This is how Ghose defines the identity quest, which Sara Suleri – another stalwart among the Pakistani first-generation of Anglophone writers – calls an ‘honourable place to be’ in her book, Boys Will Be Boys. For Ghose, the quest for identity is gruesome due to its evasive nature. Therefore, he soon departs from it to carve out a third space for himself.

When Ghose visited Pakistan and India to report for The Observer, his observations gave way to a larger discourse.

“…East is no worse than the West” and one just has to choose “…because you are tormented by not belonging…” He goes on to say, “Look, look at this world and despair. This search of mine can only lead to a pocket of isolation.”

Edward Said says in his book Orientalism that the West has always been the opposite of the Orient, and that is what preserves the Orient. According to Said, “The relationship between the Occident and the Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony…” This battle works to confound the mind of the person living this dichotomy of calling one place his own, and yet being mentally associated with another. Said says that it is extremely ‘dehumanizing’ for an individual to survive this and that is why it is a ‘uniquely punishing identity.’

Ghose’s years of freedom at Keele University were life-changing. The writers he came across gave him the idea that art has no borders.

“Because of the common pursuit of experience, one’s nationality did not count. We were all together… The trees grew around us, the weather splashed sunshine and rain and snow as the seasons changed, the distant hills of Wales seemed to float in the air we breathed, the birds sang as the dawns broke; this was the meaning of the native, for people belong to each other always, to countries only in a time of crisis.”

He further elucidates this thought in his famous article, Nationalism and Individual Artist, published in Pakistan several years later. Ghose writes: “… the human face torn to pieces, that yet when the apparent fragmentation re-arranges itself as a new form, settles in our imagination as beauty.”

There is beauty in diversity. Humans were designed to live in a complex society, and so writers must learn to live in the grand opacity of existence. Writers’ role is that of a mirror. Their work reflects the denouement of the human condition. Reading their works is often cathartic to the readers and lightens their own psychological burdens.

“However, a writer only incidentally belongs to a particular group at a particular time. For above everything else, a writer is an individual whose deepest attachment is not to his or her country but to art.” A fine closure to Ghose’s agonising identity crisis and ultimately, the quest.

The final home for an artist is his or her art. Therefore, the artist always creates a third space for himself even as he inhabits an alien soil. Sometimes in the shape of a desperate lover, other times a worried alien or a sad poet. He is neither a native, nor an alien, but a third force – a force often more powerful than the other two.

The writer is a columnist and an author of A Child of the New Millennium Stories and Essays from Pakistan (2015)