THE SATIRIST
Reality, writers have always known, is more ugly, more improbable, more distorted, more fantastic, and immeasurably more sad than any fiction could ever be. We turn to fiction as an antidote to despair. Of course, as the Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif has pointed out, human beings are able, in the direst circumstances—perhaps especially in the direst circumstances—to pretend they are immune to that which affects their compatriots. We carry on, live out what we regard as ordinary lives as everything burns around us.
Six years ago, in an essay published by the Pakistan Human Rights Commission, Hanif told the stories of the missing Baloch, young men and women who’ve been disappeared and whose families, stuck in the hellish limbo of not knowing, try to impress upon the courts, the press and their fellow citizens the horrifying urgency of their plight. In an echo of movements such as the ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’ in Buenos Aires, these families hold aloft pictures of their missing to shame the army and the politicians.
Hanif is a rare figure in Pakistan, a raiser of uncomfortable questions who does not appear to attract the ire of the country’s intelligence authorities or government. The former air force pilot is fortunate, perhaps, to have been the head of the BBC’s Urdu radio programming, to have lived in London for a dozen years up to the time his first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, was published in 2008. Fortunate to have a British passport and a substantial foreign audience, including in India, for his work. Arresting Hanif might attract too much negative commentary abroad. Not arresting Hanif allows him to alert the world to Pakistan’s venal, bullying, criminal leadership and their near total indifference to the people they govern. Not that his work doesn’t have consequences. His small book about the missing Baloch led in part to the murder of a friend, Sabeen Mahmud, who was shot.
“I don’t think I or any of my colleagues,” Hanif said in a recent interview, “have recovered from that shot.” Some of that grief has found its way into Red Birds, his strange, unsettling third novel. It begins with the falling to ground of an American pilot into the unnamed desert territory he has been assigned to blow into smithereens, a sort of reverse of the falling onto English soil of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha in The Satanic Verses. Major Ellie, the pilot, wanders this
Red Birds is for the large part a satire. It also veers into the supernatural
While Hanif’s satirical energy fades in RED BIRDS, there is something profound in his (imperfect) attempt to bring together the living and the dead
godforsaken land, eventually meeting the two other members of the discordant trio at the heart of the novel. Momo is a teenage hustler, a resident of the ‘fugee camp (the
‘r’ and the ‘e’ having long fallen off) living with his parents in a household driven to madness and sorrow by the disappearance of Momo’s older brother Ali. Mutt is Momo’s dog, his brains “fried” in an accident involving urine and an electricity pole. “God left this place a long time ago,” muses Mutt in his opening chapter, “and I don’t harbour any delusions about my own place on this earth, but I can imagine what he must have felt. He had had enough. I have had a bit more than that.”
Red Birds is for the large part a satire. It also veers into the supernatural, “When you are fighting ghosts, wouldn’t it help to have one on your side? But this is not how life works.” Rambling and ragged, it’s a departure from the sharp, angry, coal-black comedy of A Case of Exploding Mangoes. Sometimes, Hanif seems to be acknowledging, you can’t just laugh, however stoically. The heartache felt by Momo’s mother, for instance, does not lend itself to the sardonic aside. Hanif saves that for such easy targets as Lady Flowerbody, a USAID consultant working on a PhD thesis. “I intend to use this community as a laboratory,” is the kind of thing she is accustomed to saying, “for testing my hypothesis about how our collective memories are actually our cultural capital.” It was simple, Momo reflects, “they bombed us and then sent us well-educated people to look into our mental health needs... Our Camp was the tourist destination for foreign people with good intentions.” The opposite of Camp is the near-mythical Hangar, a mammoth now-abandoned simulacrum of the American good life.
While Hanif’s satirical energy fades in Red Birds, there is something profound in his (imperfect) attempt to bring together the living and the dead. Something consoling, in the midst of the futility, the random cruelty and injustice of life.