Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

I can pick my nose in front of the pope. Doesn’t mean I should.

You don’t like memoirs?

If I like reading them, then I should want to write one, too. Right?

No, I said, exasperated. If you don’t like reading them, I continued, that’s an argument for not writing one.

One should never do anything one doesn’t like.

No. One should probably not write a memoir if one doesn’t like memoirs. Why not write a novel? I asked, opting for another tack.

All novels are autobiographical.

That’s not true. All novels are fictional.

Philip Roth didn’t write about colonial Europeans traveling up the Congo river into the heart of Africa, Conrad didn’t write about an Indo-Trinidadian settling postcolonial England and Naipaul certainly didn’t write about immigrant Jews in the northeast of America.

What do you have against memoirs?

Memoirs are stories of redemption, said Zafar, half of them about a tragic childhood finally overcome, the rest about fleeing the working treadmill for the romantic Tuscan hills or the countryside of Provence and finally discovering what life is actually all about. Look at what I’ve survived, or see how I’ve changed: I’ve taken risks and now I know what’s really important. I have nothing against memoirs, but what if there’s no redemption to speak of? A manual on failure and dissatisfaction, how to be unhappy, the secret to unhappiness — now that I could write.

You’re unhappy?

I exaggerate. But I’m only exaggerating. Or how to lose one’s faith. I could write that.

What faith?

How many memoirs do you know where the reader likes the memoirist less at the end than at the beginning?

Maybe, I suggested, it’s what happens when you listen to someone’s story long enough — you become sympathetic. Did you know that the more information juries are given about the felon, the shorter the sentence they recommend? Apparently, even telling the jury where the criminal lives — doesn’t matter where — reduces the sentence.

Is a memoir a case for the defense?

Maybe it’s the writing itself that brings what you call redemption. Isn’t it cathartic just to figure things out, on the page, laid out in front of your eyes?

You’ve read a lot of memoirs?

No. Can’t say I have.

Even if you had, you still wouldn’t know.

Know what?

Know whether writing a memoir is cathartic. What about all those memoirs you don’t get to read because they don’t get finished? Started with all the hope in the world but abandoned halfway through because the author realized that writing it was dragging him down or because writing it killed him or just drove him insane. Spare a thought for those half-finished memoirs lying in drawers, like bloody daggers, memoirs that, far from delivering catharsis and closure, opened up old wounds.

I’m talking about writing , not hara-kiri.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

What about those notebooks?

Emily used to urge me to write. About what? I’d ask. About anything, she’d say. But one day when I suggested it might be interesting to write about us, about her and me, even to write about her family, she gave me a look of horror. There might even have been contempt in there.

I’m not surprised. They’re a secretive lot, that family.

Meaning you think they have secrets?

Maybe secretive isn’t the right word. Paranoid.

What if they have secrets to keep?

Wouldn’t be a secret if I knew the answer to that.

Can’t call them paranoid if you don’t.

They just don’t talk straight.

I suppose they might be paranoid in wanting to hide something of no interest to the rest of the world.

Aren’t you overthinking this? I said, my frustration returning.

When I was a boy, said Zafar, my parents told me that my birthday wasn’t what was shown on any official documents. I didn’t have a birth certificate — certificates weren’t a priority in rural Bangladesh. My parents told me it was on a different day, a different month and year from the official British records, different from what they’d filled in on application forms for welfare benefits and school enrollment and library membership. But the next day, they told me not to tell anyone my real birthday, never to mention it to a teacher. My father explained that if the authorities got wind of it, we’d all be sent back to Bangladesh. I was very young, and for some years I thought that we were frauds in Britain, that our very presence in the country was based on a lie. Do you think my father was being paranoid?

Coming from Bangladesh, I replied, your father would have had little idea what the authorities would or wouldn’t care about. That’s not paranoia; that’s prudence. But what about staying here and writing something?

Why are you banging on about this writing?

You could stay and write a book. The flat at the top of the house is there to be used. Why not?

I’m touched.

Don’t be facetious.

No, really. I’m touched.

Why not write about your father? You could write about Bangladesh, you could teach people about a part of the world they know little about.

Of course, replied Zafar. Yes, it’s very important that people learn about that, very important. Never mind the financial crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, never mind global warming and the imminent peak oil crisis. Did I miss anything?

That’s not all they’re thinking about.

You’re right. What the world needs now is answers to all its questions about Bangladeshi history. And it especially needs to hear these answers from me, an alien in his native land and interloper among his hosts, because I know so much about Bangladesh, I’m a bloody authority, that’s what I am, a leading international luminary on the history of Bangladesh.

Calm down, dear.

Many people do know quite a lot about Bangladesh. They happen to be living in the region. I don’t think Indians and Pakistanis are quite as ignorant about Bangladesh as the people you have in mind, and they make up a fifth of the world.

What about writing for a Western audience? I asked.

Bridging two cultures?

Why not?

You know what Naipaul said about Indian literature?

Tell me what Naipaul said about Indian literature.

Indian literature written in English is astonishing because nowhere in history has a literature been produced that is written by one people about the same people but for another people to read, a literature sustained by a market abroad, the book readers of the West. Naipaul may lament this, but it is only a natural step from what came before to conscript now a generation of native intermediaries. Travel books were always written by the outsider, even if that outsider had a piss-poor command of language and customs. How well will a book about modern India sell to a Western audience, a nonfiction book about this shocking economic trend-bucking phenomenon, if it were written by an Indian? You have to wonder whether these writers Naipaul’s talking about, whether they end up playing to Western stereotypes. The fact that they get good reviews, that some of the writing is regarded as excellent, the fact that characters are said to be well drawn— so accurate, so true to life , how would they know? — none of that is actually evidence of the contrary and could actually be evidence of the same.

You could write against that, with one foot in the East and the other in the West.

Yes. There’s a good market for that, isn’t there? A thick book with a lovely cover, a silhouette of a minaret and dome, a view of the hills. Lace the edges with the pattern of a henna tattoo or a sari border. Very nice.

Markets don’t lie, I said, ignoring his facetiousness.