Ways to Survive: An Interview with Farah Ali
People Want To Live
By Farah Ali
October 2021
McSweeney’s
ISBN: 978-1952119293
A debut collection of short stories from a Pakistani writer who is writing in English is a rare thing. And to see the city of Karachi, for instance, through the eyes of a writer who weighs each sentence with deliberation and kindness is a revelation. I’m so used to reading about Karachi and other towns of my country through the lens of newsreels that to find it living and breathing in the fiction of Farah Ali filled me with an unexpected joy that has not left me yet.
As an artist, Ali is uncompromising in her craft and unwilling to abandon the work of mining hopefulness and joy in moments of great despair. When I became the editor of Narrating Pakistan, an annual anthology of Pakistani writing, Ali was the first writer I called. To me, her work is rooted in concerns of craft and style in a way that causes larger questions of whether she is writing for or about Pakistanis to recede. She seems uninterested in that problematic project of representing Pakistan to the rest of the world. Yet, this is the fiction about Pakistan I have long waited to read. I spoke to her via email over the course of about two weeks. Here is an edited version of our conversation.
Munib Khan: I really admire how you’re able to bring so much life and humor to stories where characters are dealing with hard luck and unfortunate circumstances. Sometimes narratives set in Pakistan become stories of victimhood. You sidestep that problem so masterfully. I’m thinking specifically of “Heroes” and “Bulletproof Bus.” How do you write about characters beset with misfortunes without making them victims? Do you think there are any particular challenges to writing about Pakistan?
Farah Ali: Thank you for such a generous reading. The people in my stories are really in their own heads even as they go through their days and talk to others. Their thought process, if it can be summarized crudely, would be, “Okay, this is bad, but....” In “Heroes,” the mother's grief doesn't have time to linger; anger and surprise take over. In “Bulletproof Bus,” Asif understands that things could be a lot better, but he just keeps executing his plans. Maybe my people don't have a sense of their ending. I have an obsession with wanting to see what a (fictional) person would feel all the way inside if such-and-such happened to them. Like running a dye to make their emotions visible and then doing a CT scan. That probably makes these characters less victims and more explorers of their psyches.
There isn't an easy answer to the last part of this question because so many factors are at play there. Writing about Pakistan or its people can be challenging if the writer is consciously moving away from a lived reality they want to talk about just to avoid a few “tropes.” Seeing your work through any outside lens is ultimately stifling.
MK: How does the setting inform your fiction? Some of the stories are so atmospheric, steeped in place, in local trivia. “Tourism” comes to mind.
FA: At the very least, what's around us affects us—real and fictional people alike—in small ways. And at the most, the place or something in the place can become almost like another character. “Tourism” is my most place-led story. I wrote it after I’d visited some of the northern cities in Pakistan and could not forget the mountains and the way day and night happened in those valleys. The writing that came out asked for all those details. But I would love to be able to do what Saadat Hasan Manto did—he pegged down maybe one or two things, a wall, the sea, a car—and that object carried the weight of the whole atmosphere of a story.
MK: Yes, I love what Manto does with his images. I feel like he brought this sensibility to his essays too.
FA: He does! In the middle of a passage there would suddenly appear a defining image, like a brighter brush stroke than the rest.
MK: Are there other Urdu writers who have influenced you?
FA: I joined an Urdu book club last summer and properly got to read work by writers I’d always heard about, and some I “met” for the first time. Of them, I loved the language of Mirza Athar Baig and Rafiq Husain’s stories, and of Naiyer Masud’s essays.
MK: How did the stories in People Want to Live come together? How did you decide on the order of the stories?
FA: A lot of these stories were the result of me trying to figure out the ways people survive and keep going on, and to try to figure out the people themselves. Also, of the stories I was writing in those years, I wanted to keep the ones that had taken place only in Pakistan for the collection. For the order, I (happily) used a color-coding system I came up with to see how the stories flowed from one tone and theme to another. It was the only way for me to be able to visualize the collection. I also worked with an amazing editor, Amy Sumerton, who helped give the stories their final order.
MK: What are some of the challenges of writing short stories for you?
FA: I think that in a short story it takes a longer time to find that difficult balance of what to hold back and what to tell. I don’t want the situations or characters to be vague; I want them sharply defined. It takes a while to do that in a few words. I don't know how often I've succeeded in doing that. In a novel, there's more space. You can still be sharp, but unlike a short story, a novel usually does not behave like a tightly coiled spring.
MK: Which of your stories was the hardest to write?
FA: In this collection, I feel “Loved Ones” probably was quite difficult to write. I wanted to shape into words the mind of this woman, which is a struggling, inward-looking mind. I wanted to do this without being maudlin or dramatic or, on the other extreme, hazy. Because even though there is a gap between her reality and those of others around her, to her it is a tangible thing.
MK: Tell me about your reading habits.
FA: I think I only get the longest, uninterrupted stretches of time to read during the summer. Otherwise I get about a half hour a day of time to read. As for what I read, I can sometimes be completely fine going through books or stories by the same few writers for months. I love short novels; there’s something about their going-for-the-jugular nature. In some ways, I feel as if short stories have been a recent rediscovery of mine but in reality I’ve been re-reading John Cheever, Daphne du Maurier, Chekhov for a very long time. I’d read a play like it was a short story.
MK: Your collection is primarily set in Pakistan. Will readers be able to buy it from Pakistani bookshops?
FA: The fantastic people at McSweeney’s and those they collaborate with are definitely working to make the book available in Pakistan. It would be a whole different feeling seeing it there.
Farah Ali’s (@farahali06) debut short-story collection, People Want to Live, was published by McSweeney’s in October 2021. She is from Karachi, Pakistan. Her work won the 2020 Pushcart Prize and received special mention in the 2018 Pushcart anthology. Her more recent stories can be found in Shenandoah, The Arkansas International, The Southern Review, and Kenyon Review online.
Munib Khan (@MunibAhmadKhan) is a Pakistani writer. He lives in Lahore.