January 04, 2009

NO stranger to this part of the world, the internationally acclaimed novelist, poet and critic Zulfikar Ghose was in Karachi recently for the formal launch of his new book of selected essays, Beckett’s Company. The Sialkot-born novelist has made his home in Texas where he has been teaching, but an interesting point in his journey is Brazil where his triology The Incredible Brazilian is set. A volume of his selected poems is due to come out in 2009, also from Karachi.

Sitting comfortably at the beautiful premises of his publishers, the Oxford University Press, Ghose spoke about his immediate plans and his disillusionment with the publishing scene.

‘The news is that I retired from teaching at University of Texas at Austin after 38 years, two years ago. Since then I have been engaged in writing a long essay on Marcel Proust which has turned into a book. I expect to be engaged in this for the foreseeable future. I have read the novel three or four times, in three different translations, which I have read along with the original. This has kept me preoccupied so I have not paid attention to the contemporary scene. After a certain age, one becomes absorbed in philosophical issues and looses interest in contemporary. You will remember W.B. Yeats’ poem ‘Among Schoolchildren’. At the time when he wrote this poem he was 60 and I am 73 now.

‘I have in my computer three or four things. I start some and then begin to forget these. I have some poems too’. He mentions that some new poems will be included in his forthcoming collection.

Commenting on the publishing scene in Pakistan, he talks about his recent workshop in Lahore. ‘I am glad that there are a number of fine writers from Pakistan. I am happy to have met some of them at a workshop in the University of the Punjab. Some of them sent me their work earlier but even then the workshop lasted for hours. Of the six participants, two were extremely talented. This should not be taken to mean that I have some ill feeling about the other four. They have to learn more. What I am suggesting is that talent is there. They lack books and people to suggest books to read. It is not enough to write about socio-political matters in an enlightened way. It has its value, but it is transient literature. It plays a role and then it vanishes. I prefer writers who have a more universal quality and what I value is a quality of prose.’

Ghose highlights what he considers to be the real intellectual problem in Pakistan. ‘The intelligentsia here is often not open to any kind of discussions and dissent which is vital to the development of any society. The world would become petrified unless ideas are not challenged. The earth would still be flat,’ he says with a smile and reaches for his cup of tea. His experience of what is published in Pakistan is limited.

His well-known novel The Murder of Aziz Khan was published here but ran into problems. ‘The novel came out some years ago. I don’t know what happened except what I have heard. At some university a student questioned some passage and the teacher sent it to somebody who censored it. OUP let the book die out. Even if there is some interest in the book, it should have been there. The state has no business to censor books in this manner.’

Talking about audience and marketing, he said that ‘I am told that university students are an audience, it helps the press sell books. This was happening in the US when Grove Press was publishing some high literature but they stopped because the universities lost interest. Now it’s the Third World, post-colonial category which has university appeal,’ he said. ‘The best writing comes from the small presses. When I started, writers from the colonies were a new category, a new kind of poetry. I was exploited for the sake of category,’ he says but this is no longer the case.

He is not happy with narrow categorisation. ‘In such places, the idea of literature is backward and despicable,’ he says and then adds: ‘Nobody wants my work anymore. It does not sell, it cannot be branded, it does not fit a category. So there is no publisher.’ When asked if he has written any short stories recently, he replied in the negative. ‘Nobody wants to buy short stories anymore,’ he said bluntly. ‘At one point new books stop being gratifying. You are liable to be misunderstood.’

Ghose feels that we are on the verge of major changes as far as book habits go. ‘There is going to be a transformation in reading. Soon there will be video-screens instead of bookshelves. This building will become a monument,’ he says. What will not change is the process of writing, which he pronounces to be ‘very easy’ and goes on to explain: ‘You put down words.

The problem with many people is that they wait for an idea. That is where they get stuck. My advice to anybody who wants to write is: willpower and stubbornness,’ says Ghose as he gets up to go to the stage from where his name is being announced. The formal proceedings are about to start.