21 January 2011
Pakistani Novelist H.M. Naqvi — Writing in a Multicultural World
This is the third in a series of profiles of writers from South Asia who attended the 2010 program of the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa.
Washington — Let’s construct a sleek, late-model writer for the 21st century. Someone able to navigate the cultural complexities of East and West, North and South. Someone young, with a broad international literary education, who nonetheless has worked at a variety of jobs and experienced life in different countries.
And finally, someone able to embody much of the dizzying cultural richness, ambiguity and contradictions of our time in bold and innovative fiction.
Meet H.M. Naqvi — a Pakistani writer born in London who has lived in Europe, the Middle East and the United States, and who has worked variously as an international banker, performance-poetry promoter, creative writing instructor and literary editor.
Naqvi is the author of a first novel, Home Boy, that is on a short list of candidates for the new DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and has received widespread acclaim from critics in the United States, Europe and Asia. He probably was the best-known of the 38 writers who attended the three-month International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa in the fall of 2010. The U.S. State Department is a major sponsor of the IWP.
WORKS IN PROGRESS
Naqvi, 36, who now lives in Karachi, Pakistan, participated in the IWP during a strenuous international book tour for Home Boy that stretched from Pakistan and India to the United Arab Emirates, Great Britain and the United States.
“It has been a rollicking year,” he said in a lengthy interview with the arts and cultural blog, Three Quarks Daily, for which he once wrote.
“In Iowa City, a mostly charming urban oasis amid the windswept cornfields ... I managed to make meaningful progress on my second project,” Naqvi told Three Quarks. “After a frenetic year, it was good to sit and write again, good for the soul.”
In a paper he delivered at a panel in Iowa, he described both himself and his writing as “works in progress.”
“I think the production of prose is a negligible part of being a writer,” he observed in the mix of humor and provocation that characterizes much of his work. “Being a writer has more to do with negotiating days, weeks, months, years, negotiating life, summoning discipline. … It’s about managing your head.”
NAPKIN TO NOVEL
Naqvi recalls writing his first poem at age 6, but the road to his first novel was by no means direct. He has lived at various times in Washington, Islamabad, Brussels, and Algiers, Algeria. In Washington, he earned a degree in English literature from Georgetown University and edited its literary journal.
Naqvi, who has read his poetry on the BBC and on U.S. public radio, ran a poetry-slam site in Washington called the Fifteen Minutes Club, and he represented Pakistan at a national poetry slam in the United States in 1996.
For almost a decade, Naqvi worked in the financial services industry on Wall Street in New York, and in Pakistan on I.I. Chundrigar Road in Karachi’s financial and banking district. He quit as a banker in 2003 to begin his novel while earning a master’s degree in creative writing from Boston University in Massachusetts.
Home Boy, which originated as a note scribbled on a napkin in a New York nightclub, consumed the next four years, during which he wrote through much of the night and parts of the day.
The novel tells the tale of three Pakistani men in New York who decide to take a road trip in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001.
“I like to think that Home Boy resists easy taxonomy,” Naqvi told Three Quarks. “It is American, but Pakistani, South Asian but not South Asian, an immigrant novel that turns the trope on its head, a 9/11 novel in which 9/11 doesn’t take place.”
Naqvi has a direct connection to his story’s setting. He lost a friend in the September 11 attacks and had worked at 7 World Trade, a smaller building also destroyed in the attacks.
The novel’s language is an energetic combination of styles and sensibilities that are as contemporary as today’s headlines. “There is hip-hop and Yiddish and Spanish and Punjabi in the texture of the prose,” Naqvi said.
At the same time, Home Boy embodies more timeless literary traditions, including the immigrant saga and the picaresque road adventure. But perhaps its most important theme is the classic coming-of-age story, in this case of three young men who regarded themselves as “boulevardiers, raconteurs, renaissance men. … We were content in celebrating ourselves and our city with libation.”
Instead, as Naqvi observed, “They have to contend with history. … It’s not just a coming-of-age tale for its three heroes; it’s a coming-of-age tale for the Pakistani man in America.”
MULTICULTURAL WRITING
Naqvi, who has written short stories as well as poetry, sees South Asian writers coming into their own on the international stage, beginning with Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. “Pakistani writing is also very exciting, and it seems as if we’ve just appeared on the scene,” he said to BBC Asia.
Asked what he is working on now, Naqvi described his new novel as “a big, bawdy epic spanning the 20th century, set in Karachi. It deals with metaphysics, history, and a hermaphrodite.”
Naqvi's edgy, exuberant prose may draw on rap music, poetry, Islam and hip urban references from cities on three continents. But it is also deeply influenced by such writers as James Joyce, V.S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose Great Gatsby shapes an important theme in Home Boy.
“When I write, I want to tell a story, a good story, a story that transcends its immediate context and milieu. I want to create multidimensional characters,” he said to Three Quarks.
“I am not a scientist or a doctor or an activist,” he told an audience in Iowa. “I am a mere novelist. I will remain a work in progress.”
Learn more about the University of Iowa International Writing Program on the program’s website, and see a documentary about the 2010 IWP writers, Writing Iowa, on the photo-sharing website Vimeo.
(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)
