"Money is certainly a character"

A Q&A with Dur e Aziz Amna

In 2024, the writer Dur e Aziz Amna penned a Dispatch for The Drift about the colonial-era origins of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, reflecting on the destructive decisions whose repercussions reverberate to this day. Amna’s new novel, A Splintering, is set in and against contemporary Pakistan, telling the story of a young woman whose carefully managed life begins to buckle under the weight of social expectations and geopolitical realities. Associate Editor Zain Khalid spoke with Amna about inheritance, estrangement, and the forms, both narrative and political, we use to try to hold people together.

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In your 2024 Dispatch for The Drift, you wrote: “Who must face the consequences of imperial hubris, and who is spared? The U.S., Russia, and the U.K. have successfully evaded responsibility for untold numbers of people displaced by the turmoil left in their wake. One hopes this spell of indemnity will expire soon.” How did your thinking about imperial indemnity shape the architecture of the novel, how the characters refuse or internalize their complicity within Pakistan’s entanglement with the West (and Saudi Arabia)?

I grew up in Pakistan in the shadow of the War on Terror, and because I was a devoted newspaper kid, reading the daily paper front to back, the war was a constant presence in my childhood. By my teenage years, it was no longer restricted to the western hinterlands of the country but became a daily presence in the big cities. One dreaded the car stalling at red lights; there were daily suicide bombings; family friends died; it was what we talked about at school.

And yet, at the same time, as you point out, there was complicity. The military dictator at the time, Musharraf, had Pakistan officially join Bush’s catastrophic misadventures: the US controlled a major airfield in Balochistan, and Musharraf later admitted that he had secretly signed off on American drone strikes inside Pakistani territory.

In the novel, some of that complicity is addressed in the characters’ attitudes towards Afghan refugees from the war, in the mention of a failed attempt on Musharraf’s life, but the novel is much more interested in complicity closer to home, particularly in gender-based complicity. The protagonist Tara, for example, is haunted by the misogynistic violence of her brother, yet at times she mimics that same violence.

The novel suggests that the real negotiations of power aren’t simply happening in public or political arenas, but inside marriages, families, schools. Were you consciously relocating resistance into the domestic sphere?

Absolutely, yes. One of my models for A Splintering was Khadija Mastur’s novel Aangan (The Women’s Courtyard), which is set during the time of the Partition, and takes place entirely within a family courtyard. Men are thrown in and out of jail, the Independence movement is raging on outside the gates, but the lens never widens. It’s a very claustrophobic book — all petty love affairs, arranged marriages, and so on — and I had an uncomfortable time reading it. Part of that discomfort arose from the truth of how small and cloistered women’s lives can be, while still being affected by things happening at the global and national levels.

A Splintering refuses the sentimental return to Pakistan that we often see in diaspora fiction. Instead, it presents Pakistan as stratified, unequal, and already shaped by global capital. Was this a rejection of a legible Pakistan for Western readers?

I don’t — I can’t stress this enough — care what the Western reader thinks of Pakistan. More broadly, I don’t care what any reader thinks of Pakistan. That is out of my remit. I’m a Pakistani writer — it’s the only place that’s truly home, I hold a Pakistani passport, I can smell the place in my dreams — but in a novel, I become the characters, I am inside them, I feel and think as they do. And Tara is not a patriot. She’s a cunning, ruthless woman who’s trying to get rich. She doesn’t get goosebumps at the national anthem, even if I do. So, the country is represented in the novel as Tara sees it.

Money feels present in every part of the novel. Did you think of money as a character, or perhaps as a narrative engine?

The novel’s span roughly charts one of most dramatic expansions of the middle class in Pakistan. What’s interesting about Tara’s milieu is that many of its members — small businessmen from the provinces, property dealers in a booming real estate market — feel they have the opportunity to accrue wealth for the first time, in a province that is still the domain of feudal farm owners and landed industrialists. Tara is different because she’s a woman; in one scene, a man scoffs at her ambitions, telling her that “proximity” to money is the best she can hope for. Money is certainly a character for her — it jeers at her from afar and consoles her when it’s close. At least in one scene in the book, it even helps her climax.

Tara is understandably forward-facing. But the novel keeps insisting on the past, or at least the residue of the past. Did your thinking about nostalgia change while working on this book?

The Dagestani poet Rasul Gamzatov’s book My Dagestan came out in the late 1960s and is a cult favorite in Pakistan. It’s about the poet’s deep associations with his mountainous hometown, a fondness burnished by his years away in Moscow. It’s a beautiful book and likely appealed to men across the Asian continent who, in the 1970s and 1980s, were making the necessary, heartrending move from communitarian village life to the city, as economies shifted from agrarian to industrial. But it’s filled with the kind of nostalgia that Tara has no patience for. Her life changes dramatically for the better once she moves from the village to the city — she gets her own flat, works outside the house, learns how to drive, earns her own money. And yet the hold that home has on her is just as powerful as it is for the lovers of Gamzatov’s book. Instead of nostalgia and longing, home becomes the stuff of her nightmares, a constant reminder of where she could end up if she doesn’t play her cards right.

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Image credit: Dzanc Books