Interview with Nadeem Aslam | Sound Authors Radio

December 18, 2008

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! It’s my great honor to have on the show the award-winning author of The Wasted Vigil. It’s a novel by Nadeem Aslam and welcome to the show.

Nadeem Aslam: Thank you very much for inviting me.

Dr. Kent: How are you doing this evening?

Nadeem Aslam: I’m very well, yes.

Dr. Kent: And are you speaking to us from?

Nadeem Aslam: I am studying in London.

Dr. Kent: So it is evening.

Nadeem Aslam: Yes.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about this book. It’s been such a success, were you expecting it to do so well?

Nadeem Aslam: No I think as a writer you just try to expose your own life, your own consciousness, but I as a writer always begin with the firm belief that I am an ordinary human being, that I am one of the six billion people on the planet. So if anything is true of me, it is possibly true of a lot of other people out there. So that is how books become successful or unsuccessful I think. So no, I was just trying to understand this more than political chaos that we, the world, seem to have found in the post 9/11 world. In the Wasted Vigil I trace the origins and head back to Afghanistan and I wanted to tell Afghanistan’s story.

Also because I thought that it had been forgotten and this is going to sound like a strange statement because Afghanistan is in the news every single day, how can it be that it is forgotten when you see it in the news everyday? But what it is doing to the rest of the world; so many American soldiers have died, so many Canadian soldiers have died, so many British soldiers have died. But what the world is to Afghanistan over the last 30 years seems to have been forgotten as I’ve said. It seems to be news to most people.

Never mind the involvement of the Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia and the United States and Pakistan in the 1980s and early 90s. Something as recent as the Taliban, which started 30 years ago; people read my book and then come to me and say we never realized the Taliban were that bad. So I think it was important to document things because the past was slipping away from peoples minds.

Dr. Kent: When you were writing this book, what goes into that process for you? How much of yourself goes in there, how much research goes in?

Nadeem Aslam: I often wonder if I do any research at all. All in all they are simply that interesting, it is in my mind the most; that is what goes down my arm and into my fingers and then onto the page. There are times that things I am interested in like jazz, painting, the making of perfumes, the natural world; I know them but I’m interested in the cycle of plants and things. But there are times when interests have to be deepened for the purpose of the novel. So in The Wasted Vigil, I wanted to go to Afghanistan and I know I would need a Visa.

So I began to talk to afghan refugees; I thought I would put their story together through their memories as it were. I talked to about 200 afghan refugees and I would ask them specific questions like tell me about the house you grew up in or tell me about your family? Also I had the idea and its something that’s very important to me being as I’m a writer. And that was I would ask them if it’s April, what kinds of birds are there in the garden? If it’s June, what kinds of flowers are there? What is the color of the sky in September? As a writer I need to know these things.

And of course, some of the stories these people told were horrifying because these were all refugees and you could see that parts of the vigil and some of the readers have said that. The book is very beautiful and that it is very terrifying also; it’s distressing. But you know, nothing in the book is made up and I would quote Tony Morrison who said “If they can live it, I can write it.” And I would go one step further and say that “if they can live it, you can read it.” I don’t see anything as a virtue that has to be extended in that innocence. There was a time for innocence; now I am an adult and it is my duty to look at the world and to pinpoint what is wrong with it and celebrate what is right with it.

Dr. Kent: Its such an honorable task to be able to write about the conflict that’s at the center of all of the news really, so central to the news in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Talk about the situation there and your feelings on it right now.

Nadeem Aslam: I don’t have these rigid ideologies and what can be the consequence of rigid ideologies and we see them at play. In the novel I have a character who is a war orphan in Afghanistan and who is in their 20s; who as a child was beaten and raped and who as a young teenager beat others and raped others. These are very objectionable things but then we think what would you expect for someone who’s had that kind of life? What did we think was going to be the result of all of that? And of course there are other rigid ideologies in the novel that men should think women should have in the society.

On a wider scale, two of my characters are Americans staying in Palestine inside of town and they do have rigid ideologies about Americas place in the world and how America should maintain its position in the world. The word vigil is a derivative of vigilant or vigilante and appears seven times in my novel and each time they are connected to one of the main characters. Each of those vigils is wasted but we cannot look at the world these sort of pastime beliefs and not be able to bend. In this book, I wanted to see what would happen if various people from various nationalities were forced to live together in a house for about a fortnight and I thought lets see what would happen.

How soon would our beliefs, and our nationalities, and our ideologies fall away and the common thing that we are under the clothes, which is a human being. How soon would that become apparent? And of course the other way around as well. How soon would our common humanity be sidelined because ideologies are at stake? So that is what I wanted to explore. And lastly what is happening in Pakistan and Afghanistan and of course we just had the attack in Mumbai and the terrorists came from Pakistan.

The Pakistani government must bear the responsibility. It’s not good enough for president Suhdai to say that Pakistan too is suffering at the hands of terrorists. Until the Pakistani government, until the Pakistani military, until the Pakistani secret service and Pakistani society has proved that it can do, that it has done everything possible to eradicate the terrorists, until they have done that, they are not allowed to say that. To say there is nothing, what can we do as a country? You know? I mean I was in Pakistan earlier this year and everybody there knows that one of these terrorist organizations ### Mohammed, who are responsible for these attacks in Mumbai, they are constructing a huge focus like Mandessa in the main town in Punjab, and this is an organization that has been banned.

Pakistan’s government says it has banned it and everyone knows. Its in the newspapers, I saw it myself, I know there are terrorist training camps; I know and every person like me, without meaning to manage to talk to more than a dozen young men who had been to terrorist training camps. How can the Pakistani government say we don’t know where their camps are? Of course they know where the camps are and more should be done.

Dr. Kent: And its such a difficult issue, I know I’ve spent time myself in Palestine and being in areas where people don’t feel good about an occupation or about the western world. There’s so much of that in your writing, there’s so much pain and suffering. How do you go about on a daily basis dealing with all of this material, putting it in your novel, and not internalizing it too much?

Nadeem Aslam: Well I think in the Mosul, as I said I hope that the difficulties that we are facing in the world, they are in the novel counterbalanced by the beauty that exists in this world; love, friendship, family. Something ordinary like going out for a drink with friends. I was talking about the connection that we human beings make. That is the message that I hope is revealed. Right at the end Lara, who is one of the main characters, when she goes back to Russia from Afghanistan; she’s a Russian woman.

When she goes back she takes away from the house fragments from one of a picture that has fallen off of the wall. The fragment that she takes away is where the skin, the bodies of the two lovers come together. That small piece is what we have to hold on to and as I said there are difficulties in the world that we human beings seem to be facing at the moment but intelligently, patiently we have to look at them and we have to analyze them and try to eradicate them. One of the things that we must make sure is we cannot confuse all Muslims as terrorists, that is the mistake I think we have to avoid because if you study the statements that someone like Osama Bin Laden or Al Qaeda #2 ### has put out way since the beginning, and if you study them sequentially, and you can go to the internet and have a look at them.

Nowadays there are a number of very good books which collect all the statements of these people. You’ll see that these people are in torment over the fact that the world has for better or worse managed to make a decision that it’s all Muslims and Islamists. What they wanted was that the whole world to stand up and say that every Muslim and Islamic on this planet is a troublemaker, but that hasn’t happened. I don’t agree with many things that President Bush has done during his time at the White House, but one of the good things that he did was immediately after 9/11 he took off his shoes and he went off and he went into that Mosque in Washington DC because it sent a clear message not only to the bigots in America, because if you remember, in the days following 9/11 a number of dark skinned gentlemen with long beards had been shot dead for retaliation as it were.

So that sent a message to the bigots in America saying that we understand that the people who flew those planes into those office buildings have nothing to do with people who come into this mosque. But it also sent a message to Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda that we understand that you are separate from these people, that we are actually going to stand side by side with these people and try to eradicate you.

Dr. Kent: There’s two things that brings to mind; one is Cat Stevens, one of my favorite singers who Yusef Islam who has come out with many albums and they’re all about peace and my experience with people of Islam say we’re the religion of peace and its such a shame that the world thinks of even the worlds Jihad the struggle as being a violent awful thing. How does that find its way into your work?

Nadeem Aslam: But this violence came to exist in the novel. For example, my book is set in this house in Afghanistan and when Lara the Russian woman enters in the house and the house is owned by an Englishman who had many years ago married an Afghanistan woman and it was their home. During the Taliban regime Marcus the Englishman and his wife had gone to fight in the Taliban, who said that only one book was allowed to exist in the world and that was the Koran. So nothing else was allowed to exist; from Homer to Makita to the Bible or John Updike, so Marcus’ wife moved her library to the ceiling so that every book in the house is nailed to the ceiling.

So when Lara comes into this strange house she sees that all the ceiling is covered with books and there is this gentle terrain as it was because there these books up there. But as I said, we cannot deny that a violent interpretation of Islam is possible and at the moment it seems to be the most visible one because the people that are doing this are the ones who have the weapons and the people who don’t are afraid of them. What would happen and it does happen in Pakistan when a newspaper writer is going against what the Taliban are doing. But the editor and the columnist need police protection so there is intimidation.

But as I said slowly and patiently, we mustn’t lose heart and in the meantime, one of my favorite poets is ###, the great English poet who won the Nobel Prize some years ago was his point about Stalin, who when Stalin had ### murdered, he wrote a poem. Saying you who wronged a simple man drew laughter at the crime. Get a pack of food around you to mix good with evil to blur the lines. Do not feel safe, the poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The word will come down; the deed, the date. So I think as a writer I see that as my responsibility. To write down the word, the deeds, and the dates and have that as a reminder, a memorial.

Dr. Kent: You are from Pakistan and you have written two novels. Your first two novels were about Pakistan. Did you see a big difference between setting a novel in Pakistan as say one set in Afghanistan?

Nadeem Aslam: No I think they were ###. We talk about human beings and throughout this interview I’ve been saying that one of my deepest beliefs is that underneath it all we’re all the same and that is that. It is political, ideological and a different social matrix that we draw. That is what bends our lives and our character and even our bodies differently, but ultimately we are all the same. In my first novel, I was writing about mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends; and in the second novel too and also in the third novel.

We are all human beings. You could say that the cast in the Wasted Vigil is like international; I have Americans, I have afghans, I have an Englishman and I have a Russian, but I was able to write them because I believe that there is a great deal of similarity. By that I don’t mean that here we have this bourgeois individual that thinks he can go into anyone’s history, any country’s history, and country’s story and say I am able to make anything I can with it, no? If I want to write about a Russian character I have to enter Russian history from a place of great humility. I have to try to understand it, I have to understand how our stories and our ideas form and how deeply connected we are with them. So I enter everyone’s story with great humbleness and if I make a mistake I apologize, and that goes to everyone. From Saudi Arabians, to Russians, to Americans.

Dr. Kent: One of the most powerful things in a society that is sort of split in any different way is to tell stories. Living in Palestine and in the middle east for some time, the stories I tell people are of sitting down to tea and staying with three or four hours with total strangers. Something that wouldn’t exist now where I live in New York and hospitality that people could never imagine and all you see on the news is violence or poverty and things like that. What’s so beautiful about your novels is that it brings people into that world.

Nadeem Aslam: Thank you very much. One of the things, I think at one point in the novel The Wasted Vigil, Marcus says stories are how we judge our actions before committing them. So I think stories can be a warning as well. I wanted to explore in the Wasted Vigil whether it was possible for us to show power, for us to go into another country and play its political games and expect there not to be any consequences. And I’m talking about what happened in the 1980s when first the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan and then the United States with the help of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia decided that they were going to defeat the Soviet Union.

Once the Soviet Union was defeated in 1989, once they withdrew, the United States withdrew its gaze as it were. It looked away but billions of dollars of work had gone into that country and there had to be consequences and those consequences were apparent for the afghan people immediately because a civil war began in 1990. Straight away the war lords began to fight for the spoils as it were but it took another 11 years until 9/11 happened for those consequences to become apparent to the rest of the world. So yes, now here we are in Iraq. The United States is in Iraq.

Dr. Kent: Its such a complicated web; just looking at the works of Michael Moore and other honest journalists alike, a lot of European journalists that have honest reporting that talk about that web between Russia and Afghanistan and Iraq and the political ties to the united states and all of this. Most people in this country are quite naïve because it’s not reported here.

Nadeem Aslam: Absolutely! I mean I think sometimes of July in Washington when it was said the spokes of this wheel that’s the sore spot of the earth. The United States is very intimately involved, has been over the past 30, 40, 50 years and have been interfering with their governments but I come from a country, Pakistan, where you can’t not be aware of politics because politics is visceral there.

I was in Washington DC earlier this year and I used to go walk around the capital building and the White House and I would think how in the 1980s, certain decisions, certain boring, quiet decisions made in those places, that we must defeat Iraq and Iran, the soviet union and enter Pakistan and get help from Saudi Arabia and what have you. How these decisions, which not many in America knew and when those decisions went to Pakistan, went to my part of the world, it became physical things like fists and hammers, who broke the bones of the bodies of people who were protesting against the regime there.

So in the west and in America perhaps, it is possible for human beings to live quite a good and decent life if he or she decides that he wants nothing to do with politics. But in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, we don’t have that luxury. We have to get involved with politics.

Dr. Kent: So is there hope in Afghanistan and Pakistan of new hope with Barack Obama being elected.

Nadeem Aslam: I think that remains to be seen. Nobody out there is innocent; I really think that the Pakistani government needs to do more. In the Pakistani Press, which I read every day on the net, President Obama isn’t very popular because he’s made statements which people are not happy with.

Dr. Kent: Right, he made the statement about crossing into Pakistan without Pakistan’s authorization.

Nadeem Aslam: Yes, indeed, yes but this whole thing I’m sure Pakistan’s government knows; they take care of raids every week. Houses are being destroyed and people are being killed. Some of them are Al Qaeda and Taliban but other people are dying throughout the region and they are drones who are firing missiles into the Kabul area. So as I said these people are actually damaging Pakistan as well. So a way has to be found out of this what I said earlier, this modern, political chaos that Pakistan is in, but patiently it has to be done. We mustn’t lose hope, there’s always hope.

Dr. Kent: You said you read the Pakistani Press everyday. Do you read it in Urdu?

Nadeem Aslam: I read it in Urdu every day, yes.

Dr. Kent: Wow, so you’re able to keep it up.

Nadeem Aslam: Yes, well I mean I was in Pakistan for the first 14 years of my life and really writing about Afghanistan was for me inevitable because it is so linked with my past life in that when the soviet union invaded Afghanistan and the united states went in, the CIA went in and began to pull weapons into Pakistan, there were people who were warning against the consequences. What would happen once the Soviet Union was gone? They were saying and these people were writers, poets, journalists and some of them were from my family. So things were getting hard for us and in 1982 we had to leave.

My father had to flee the country so actually I wouldn’t be here in England if it wasn’t for Afghanistan. So it’s that feeling of dealing with my life and once again not to go back and say that politics isn’t something gory, it is so deeply linked with our day to life, it shapes our life so I follow it. Whenever we think of the problems facing the world, the political dimension is always there in our understanding of the world as it were.

Dr. Kent: As a child on Wikipedia it says you published your first short story at 13. When did you start thinking as a writer? Were your parents writers?

Nadeem Aslam: My father was a poet and as a young man he wrote poetry, but being from the continent Americans have arranged for him and the children came very quickly and he had to go out and find a job. There has always been a kind of wound in my father, that he thinks that his real life didn’t happen; because of me I suppose. I was his son and he had to earn a living when he should have been writing I suppose, I don’t know. He goes under the name Ramik Saleem and in the universe of my novels, the great Pakistani poet is called Ramik Saleem and he appears in all three of my novels and he will make a small appearance in every single one of my future books as well. So I’ve done it for him for real in the world of my books what he couldn’t do in real life because of me.

Dr. Kent: Are you working on a new novel now?

Nadeem Aslam: Yes, I’m working on a novel centered in Pakistan so I will be dealing with these things that we’ve been talking about. These things seem relevant only because of what has happened over the last seven or eight years but 9/11 was a visual and spectacular manifestation of what was going on within the Islamic world anyway. The fight between military and the Muslims as it were. My first novel, which was published ten or eleven years before Al Qaeda became a word, and Jihad and before 9/11 happened. It was about these issues so I would still be writing the books that I’m writing if 9/11 hadn’t happened as it were. There are any number of writers who said that on the morning of 9/11 they looked at the TV and said the book I’m working on is worthless, that it really seems unimportant now. At that time, I was writing a novel called The Lost Lovers and I remember looking at the screen and thinking there is my novel on the screen.

Dr. Kent: Right, and having been in the middle east before it happened, it’s a horrible thing just because we’ve seen these images of the airplanes but the numbers coming out of Iraq that maybe more than 100,000 people have died.

Nadeem Aslam: No, you are absolutely; as I said, this thing has gotten worse over the past seven years. Of course I don’t deny that. Of course, but as a writer as I said I begin as only a human being and I don’t know why we went into Iraq. I don’t have access to the classified documents over there at the Pentagon and at the White House and what have you. So I can only articulate what my confusion and my grief. Absolutely you’re right; this thing has got worse over the past seven years, yes.

Dr. Kent: Well your writing certainly has not gotten worse over the past years. I can’t wait to see the next novel come out. This is a beautiful book called The Wasted Vigil. It’s by Nadeem Aslam and I can’t wait to continue reading your things. This has been a wonderful discussion; it certainly has made my week.

Nadeem Aslam: Thank you very much for having me.

Dr. Kent: And my next guest on the show is a world famous bluegrass musician, Del McCoury. We recorded it earlier today and I’ll play that in its entirety starting right after this little break. Come on back for that.

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