An interview with Aamer Hussein
Yet the stories give back so much, even with pieces of the puzzle missing (as a result of my own iniquities as a reader). They evoke my emotional sensibilities so subtly that I don't realise how invested I am in his characters until I pause between stories and feel that my gut is coiled with a strange kind of desperation.
His stories are about the complexities of living; they are about platonic love, deep friendship; they are about being away from home for so long that you lose your sense of belonging; they are about the role of art in the political and personal spheres; they are about the unavoidable human condition of longing, the intense emotional pull of nostalgia. They are quiet stories. They will not jostle for your attention with cheap, punchy opening lines or hyperbolic characterisations. Instead, like a soft, delicate aria, they will slowly break your heart.
Aamer recently shared some of his thoughts with me about his collection Insomnia (reviewed here), and about his writing in general.
As I Read
Aamer Hussein
The collection took a long time to complete, nearly five years; and it wasn't until I wrote the fifth story, which was the title piece, that I had any sense of a book nearing completion. So I can't say I had a vision for this book; the only link is in the reappearance of the character Murad in three different seasons - winter, summer, and autumn (spring, somehow, went missing).Each story was an end in itself, until, as I reached the sixth story, 'The Angelic Disposition', I found myself in an echo chamber which I then went beyond by expanding the spaces around me.
There are recurring themes in these stories, of restlessness, of unease with the traditional comforts of life, of breaking away, even to an extent with the consolation of art in the face of such brute realities as war and natural disasters; themes that lead, in some way, to a tentative acceptance which I hope isn't quietist, or at its worst pessimistic. Much of the book is firmly set in the 21st century, but looks back constantly to WWII and to the partition of the South Asian subcontinent in the post-war years.
Yes, the book has some of my favourite stories in it, and works for me, I think, as a collection, particularly the last three stories: but I prefer my collections, and all collections, to be varied in subject and style rather than to embody any one theme, though one’s current preoccupations are likely to influence both the acts of reading and of writing.
AIR
I get the sense that the collection is bracketed by two distinctly different stories, stylistically speaking: 'Nine Postcards from Sanlucar de Barrameda' starts us off with a group of very bare snapshots that create a strikingly oblique depiction of a journey and a loss; and we end with 'The Lark', a story in which the characters seem altogether more energetic than in the other stories, and a story which comes across as more tense, more tightly wound. How do you feel about these two? What influenced them?
AH
The narrator of 'Sanlucar' is seen, in the third person and in another season, in ‘Insomnia’, so those are the stories that are linked, and in that sense seem to me to frame the collection – a journey from restless insomnia to acceptance and the solace of a remembered epiphany which will recur at another time. But 'The Lark', which is something of a coda to the volume, in fact has structurally more in common with ‘Insomnia’ than with ‘Sanlucar’- they’re third person accounts, take place over a very short period, of about two days, figure groups of characters in conversation, and return to the recent, or fairly recent, past in flashbacks. And yes, much of 'The Lark' takes place in real time; it is very externalised, almost like a film, until the long internal monologue at its climax, while 'Insomnia' is very interiorised from the beginning. ‘The Lark’ is actually inspired by, though not based on, my father's student years in England. 'Sanlucar' evolved from a poem I scribbled in my diary one morning in Andalusia. All three texts are influenced by my own journeys in Spain, Italy, Kent, Sussex and Dorset, though I'm not the greatest of travellers.
AIR
You've mentioned the seasons twice already. Is the time of year important to the stories?
AH
‘The Book of Maryam’ is based on a Christmas dream I had, and the contrast between the season of goodwill, the year’s shortest day, and the atmosphere of the impending war against Iraq are crucial to the story: in a way, they are the story. Similarly, ‘Insomnia’ is autumnal, with the narrator recollecting remembered seasons as leaves fall around him. ‘Sanlucar’ is drenched in Andalusian sunlight, and the transience of summer pleasures.
AIR
You are very good at creating characters with very real back stories, and in depicting your characters' lives as though you were writing a biography. I assume you take much literary licence and that in fact the stories are not as autobiographical as they sometimes appear to be. Is this something you are conscious of? Do you borrow heavily from real life and your own experiences?
AH
Am I conscious of borrowing from real life? Of course, with the license you mention. Though less from my own autobiography than you might think. I didn't have a rivalry over a Japanese girlfriend, and I haven't yet fallen off to sleep on a friend's bed in a strange hotel room. More seriously, my central characters are introverts while I’m quite gregarious and sociable, though shy: you could say Murad is my fraternal twin, not my mirror-image.As for other stories: I wasn't around in the 30s or 40s, and no single real life prototype exists for Saadia, who narrates 'The Angelic Disposition', or for Lydia, whose phantom haunts the lake resort in the title story along with that of her lover.
I’d like to say something here about received wisdom. You can be told to write from experience if you’re in a life writing class, and to read a lot of everything if you’re studying poetry or fiction, but purely confessional writing on the one hand, and contrived intertextuality on the other, are pitfalls we need to avoid at all stages of our writing.
AIR
What is your favourite story from the collection?
AH
'The Angelic Disposition' and 'The Lark', because you can see the present in their mirroring of the past The title story is, in many ways, a key to the entire collection. It’s set in the moment in which it was written, and chalks out a trajectory I might have – or probably have – inherited from Urdu poetry. In the 19th century, you’d find something along these lines: ‘I find no release from the sorrows of love: how can I then worry myself about the world?’ but by the mid-twentieth, one of Pakistan’s greatest ever poets, Faiz, is telling his beloved he can longer love her as he once did, as there are sorrows (or pains, to translate him accurately) in the world, that exceed those of love. It’s a constant commute between the private and the public domain. I don’t often set myself the task of chronicling the travails of a particular period, but on the other hand most of my stories are firmly rooted in their historical background and many wouldn’t exist without the political events that shape their characters’ destinies. Would Saadia ever have left Delhi, if not for the partition of her country? Would Hasan abandon his studies in Oxford, if not for the threat of the coming war? What amuses me is when politics come in through the backdoor in a story that’s meant to be interior, as in ‘Sanlucar’ in which Andalusia’s Arab past is recalled through the callous eurocentric dinner conversations of incidental characters.‘Hibiscus Days’, about life in military rule in 80s Karachi, took twenty years to reach its final form, as it was originally too close to the events it described. It really was found in a drawer, and I feel that it’s still unfinished.
‘Maryam’ is another old story, among my first; it’s inspired by a dream, but it seemed to lack a specific context until the invasion of Iraq when the poet’s protest suddenly became relevant. It hinges on a trick: the poet Tahira is actually reciting the story of Mary’s annunciation from the Quran, so a reader, for example a Catholic, who gets that reference sees what she’s doing: bringing together Christians and Muslims at Christmas, with an immortal parable about motherhood, at a time when political wars are being given a religious colour. (In my original dream-draft, a folk singer was chanting a Latin hymn). The irony is, her listeners don’t get it, and interrupt her with their own apocalyptic visions of a veiled world. And if the reader doesn’t get it, s/he’s reading another story, which is equally valid, about the way we unwittingly muzzle poets and writers by refusing to listen. .
AIR
There is a deliberate, careful and lingering feel to your prose. Is this how you write - slowly and carefully? Do you sit down to write every day or only when you get an idea?
AH
My stories gush out of me most of the time, though I do pause as I write, to get the precise meaning I want rather than for a word or image. I am very conscious of sound, though, because of my musical ear: I listen as I write, and I also like my stories to have the rhythm of speech, which needs work. Most of my stories usually emerge in a few hours or a couple of days, it's the redrafting that takes time, and that process is to expose the inner structure to the reader as far as I possibly can, though the stories are often minimal even as they first emerge. I rarely do multiple drafts, just several revisions of the same story, which often means adding details of time, place or history. That process comes from having retyped one manuscript of my stories on a typewriter from handwritten manuscripts for the first five years of my writing life, usually very close to a deadline!No, I'm not at all slow when I'm actually writing, and I work on a laptop. But there are often long periods of silence between each story, and I have no desire or compunction at all to write every day unless I'm enmeshed in a piece of writing, and that goes for all genres. I'd much rather read a book in one sitting, see a film or an exhibition, go for a walk. As for ideas, I write a column every 6-8 weeks for a Pakistani Sunday book supplement, which has made me good at plucking out ideas from any possible source: it’s a very good mental exercise, and writing the column keeps my machine well-oiled.
AIR
In the title story, it is said that, 'Poetry or prose, it was all, in the end, a matter of working with pain, turning its blood and bones into something beautiful.' Is this the way you feel?
AH
If memory serves, that was my character, Murad the Melancholy, reflecting. As I said he is more of an introvert than I ever was. Having said which, those lines were written in the terrible months in which we had the massacres of 7/7 in London, and then the earthquakes in Pakistan, all less than a year after the tsunami, so they may well reflect my feelings at the time. But I have written from joy as well.Am I ‘glad to be a writer’? Until I’d published my third book, I wouldn’t even have called myself that. Now, looking back, and looking at the articles, essays, reviews, introductions and even translations I’d already done by my mid-forties, and the sea of critical words I’ve produced since then in addition to the fifty-odd short and two long narratives I’ve published, it just seems inevitable that I did become what I was to become; rather than being glad, I’m just content that I did what I had to. I’m also very much a teacher of literature and history, so even after deciding, after some thought, to give up my tenured post, I feel I teach through some of my writing; it’s never just self-expression for me.
AIR
I think of you as a short story writer, yet you have also written a novel, The Cloud Messenger. How does novel-writing differ from short story-writing? Are there any more novels on the horizon?
AH
I might one day write a long story like ‘The Angelic Disposition’ again, but at present my fictions have grown even more brief. I used to feel, before I wrote Gulmohar, that there was nothing that couldn’t be said in ten thousand words, but Gulmohar found its own ideal length at seventeen, and couldn’t really be shorter. After TCM, I managed to tell an entire life story in about two thousand. Ultimately, a story’s a story, whatever its length.
By the way, I turned to writing in my native language, Urdu, a year after my novel was published, and that was, in a way, an exercise in relearning the craft of writing succinctly, which I felt that four years of 'thinking long' had tarnished. A couple of those pieces covered only about a page or two. I was primarily educated in English, and later picked up Italian and other Romance languages, so calling Urdu my mother tongue is a claim I only make emotionally because it’s always been my second language in practical terms. But I’d often been asked about using a ‘second language’ to write in, and about what I borrowed from Urdu, which seemed odd to me because English has always my first language of expression. And then the time came to see what changes using Urdu - which I’d call my natural inheritance, like, I suppose, like Gaelic is for the Irish writers who choose to write bilingually - would make to my technique. Did the switch transform me? Yes, because I realised that my displacement was physical, not linguistic, and writing in Urdu was only a partial homecoming, though there was something visceral about the process of writing in a language over which I had less conscious control. However, my Urdu stories weren’t ever considered by my readers to have been written by any other than a native speaker, so you could say, with or without attendant ironies, that I finally got my tongue released from a postcolonial clamp. And I gained an entire new audience at ‘home’.
AIR
Your stories from other collections - This Other Salt in particular - use aspects of fable and myth. How would you describe your approach to telling a story? And how are you influenced by the old forms of storytelling?
AH
Yes, I am influenced by 'old forms', oral forms too, as much as by modernism or even 
AIR
Which writers have influenced you and your work?
AH
As a younger writer: Tanizaki, Lu Xun, the two Marguerites (Duras and Yourcenar), Beckett, Cesare Pavese, Najib Mahfouz. I read a lot in Urdu. My favourite writer in my own or probably any other language is Qurratulain Hyder, who also wrote in English. I think she's acknowledged in Insomnia and actually appeared as herself in This Other Salt. She died a few months after Insomnia was published. I'm not aware of any direct influence over the last two decades, except that, indirect though enormous, of Maulana Rumi's French translator, Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, who was also a wonderful anthologist of Persian tales and parables to which I often return. I came across her at a crucial stage, while I was writing Insomnia, and of her retellings found its way into ‘The Angelic Disposition.’ By the way, I seem to have mentioned too many novelists, but these days I’m rereading stories by the Iranian writer Simin Daneshvar nearly three decades after I first came upon her work, and wondering whether they influenced me in subliminal ways as I find them very moving on rereading them, viscerally so. I think voracious readers absorb so much unconsciously, not just points of craft, but entire emotional burdens, too, from their reading. I recently realised how much I’ve been influenced by Urdu poems I heard recited and sung when I was a child.
AIR
I'm interested in how writers make their money, and I know you taught creative writing (among other things) for a long time. How did that impact on your writing, if at all?
AH
I started as a researcher and reviewer, then taught Urdu grammar for ten years, Creative Writing (with an emphasis on close reading, not practical exercises) for nine, and arching over both English and world literature for about sixteen years. I wrote three books in the nine years I had tenure in CW, so no complaints, though I wrote fiction during my summer and winter vacations. And as I’ve said, I loved teaching, though the constant editing of very rough drafts, and marking, could be an occupational hazard I eventually decided to do without.What I found disruptive and distracting was regular reviewing. I have a friend in my hometown, Karachi, who says 'those of us who read a lot write little'. She's right. I’m one of that breed, and feel that without the books I’ve read I would never have learnt my craft, since I’ve never attended a writing class as a student. But the amount of ephemeral writing I’ve had to produce over the years – after reading long novels I’d otherwise have thrown across the room, and trying not to tear them apart - was a drain of writing energy. Otherwise, for many years, I treated all forms of writing I wanted to do – a story, a memoir or an assessment of a favoured writer’s craft – as different aspects of my craft, to be approached with the same degree of dedication. I’ve always held that there’s nothing magical about writing prose, as opposed to writing rhyme or composing music; though I will admit now that creating stories raises one to an emotional level which can actually be an epiphanic space. After all, there’s a degree of feeling you have to convey to the reader. Criticism is cerebral, fiction emotive. When I look back at my pace, it’s always been slow to variable – I’d say an average of four years between collections though I broke that rule once, with Turquoise. I have a feeling it’ll be another two years before my next, as my stories are shorter than ever and, unless I publish a collection that’s as brief as a volume of poems (I’d love to), I’m going to have to produce a lot of them in order to justify a book. But I’m not yet jaded enough to contemplate the thought of a future without another book. So I do, increasingly often, consider my publisher’s idea of gathering all my scattered incidental recollections together as a book of memories. At 61, I'm old enough.
- Born and brought up in Karachi, Aamer Hussein moved to London, aged 15, in 1970, to complete his schooling. He took a degree in South Asian studies from SOAS, and later studied French, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. He began to publish short fiction, reviews and articles in journals and anthologies in 1987. He has published five collections of stories, Mirror to the Sun (1993), This Other Salt (1999), Turquoise (2002), Insomnia (2007), and The Swan's Wife (2014) – and two novels, Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) and The Cloud Messenger (2011). His latest work is 37 Bridges and Other Stories (2015). He writes in both English and Urdu, still lives in London, and travels frequently to Pakistan.
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