Munib Khan holds an MFA from Purdue University and a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. His fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, American Literary Review, The Normal School, Barcelona Review, Southword: New International Writing, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the National Society of Arts and Letters, Key West Literary Seminar, and Vermont Studio Center, among others. He lives in Lahore and is currently working on his debut novel.
I have followed Pakistani writer Munib Khan’s writing career since I was a college student. He has published some of the most unusual fiction about Pakistan in the last decade. In Kurram Valley, a jirga in South Waziristan brings together two warring families and the point of contention is a horse. In He Was a Friend of Mine, a teenager in Lahore navigates a sexual awakening in the backdrop of a climaxing Cold War. In Shah Hussain, a foreign-returned college professor contends with alienation, his city’s fraught cultural history and the invisible state censorship. I began to correspond with Munib via email in 2022. Here is an edited excerpt of our conversation, which took place, on and off, over the course of two years.
Mishal: What are you thinking about these days?
Munib: Mostly the father in Gaza running around with his children in shopping bags. What does it mean to witness such brutality or to speak about it? To think about it, to grieve it, to dream about it?
Mishal: Pakistani writers have a long tradition of expressing solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle and speaking up to state overreach at home. There is a rich vein of protest literature in the Pakistani canon.
Munib: That is true for Urdu writers. Pakistani writers in English have, for the most part, not engaged in domestic politics. Many of them live abroad. I don’t blame them.
Mishal: Many Pakistani writers are doing translations of Urdu literary texts making the Urdu canon accessible to a new western audience. Are you interested in translation?
Munib: Yes, there is brilliant work being done. Personally, and perhaps a bit selfishly, the project of translating Urdu literature for someone else does not appeal to me as I can always go back and read any Urdu text in the original. Why should I work so hard to accommodate people who cannot read Urdu? And I think Urdu resists translation into English because there is a natural lyricism to Urdu which drives a great deal of the poetry and fiction in it. My sense is there will have to be another language to bridge the gap. Sure, it would be nice to champion Urdu literature or literature in any other Pakistani language but that seems to be a project for social change that someone better suited to it must undertake. For me, the work I do is private and centered around satisfying my own desires and interests.
Mishal: But don’t you think community is important to literature?
Munib: Yes. The workshop is a place I respect and there I find community and the opportunity to support others.
Mishal: The question of translation is also brought up by many writers who feel they are translating their experiences into English when they write.
Munib: I cannot speak to this experience. I imagine that if you are preoccupied with the burden of translation, literal or cultural, that would make writing difficult.
Mishal: I have heard that some of your recent fiction is autobiographical. Is your novel going to be based on your own personal experiences?
Munib: That’s the contract with the reader, no? That I’m going to tell you a story and I will make you believe it. At least that’s what my first writing teacher in college used to always say to me. Maybe there is no contract. There probably isn’t, she must have lied. I like the kind of fiction that deals with our lived reality. I like to write about real cities and people and real religions and politics. I am writing about Pakistan, I am writing about other places too and I like my characters to interact with real history and be self aware and express the world as they see it as clearly as possible. And even if they are liars, some truth comes out this way, I think. Also, I don’t think there is ever any one story, the real story is all the different stories placed together thrumming to some internal rhythm.
Mishal: I was actually thinking about your last piece, “Shah Hussain,” which appeared in American Literary Review. One of the characters seems to be based on the university lecturer, Junaid Hafeez, who has been in a Pakistani prison for ten years on charges of blasphemy.
Munib: Blasphemy is something I only read about in newspapers before I began to live and work in Lahore. I don’t think most Pakistanis are thinking about it. But the moment I started teaching literature, this warning came up from a colleague. Tread carefully. People in universities of Lahore are more afraid of the state than most Pakistanis. There are many professors in social sciences, even people who are doing data driven research, who don’t want their work to be widely publicized. Something must have happened somewhere to create this unnatural state of affairs. Anyone who has worked in Pakistan for a few years carries these scars with them. So many writers are self censoring. And we have recently seen what the state is capable of, the state has done to certain public figures what it thinks is the worst thing that can happen to a human. And I think people fear the state even less as a result. In reality, there is no state, most days I experience only the absence of a state. No one knows what Junaid Hafeez did or said. His family won’t speak about it. But he is probably useful to the state as a reminder for the rest of us. If he comes out of prison, someone might kill him, then the whole country will realize that there is no state. By remaining in prison, he serves many uses. Personally, I have not had any encounters with the machinery of the state. I don’t feel that my fiction is directly confronting the state in any way, at least not right now. I don’t have that kind of overtly political aesthetic or stance in my fiction. I don’t think engaging in specific politics is very beneficial to the process of making art. In my fiction, I don’t like bad things to happen to characters. I don’t like people getting harmed. This is one of the reasons I stopped writing short stories: the tension, that almost immediate waiting for something to go wrong. In my novel, I am much more interested in thinking about things that have already happened. The actions I like my characters to perform are sleeping, dancing and eating. I like to have them sitting and watching things unfold instead of participating in the action. Momentum is a thing that makes me uncomfortable. I like the idea of killing any forward momentum of the story from the very beginning. I want to return to the beginnings, to make everything new feel old again.
Mishal: Why don’t you want bad things to happen? Isn’t that a cop out?
Munib: Maybe. If that is the case I would like to come to that realization through my work. I have read so many novels where brown bodies are just there for torture, rape, murder. I read a novel recently, written by one of the most accomplished Pakistani writers, someone I have followed closely for many years. Many bad things happened to humans in that novel. By the end, I wanted to never read a book again. I wanted to learn to play the guitar or go to the mountains. Everyone has their own aesthetic, I don’t privilege my way of looking at things over someone else’s but I have the right to make my own decisions about my art. I can’t be making these decisions out of other people’s craving for journalistic writing about Pakistan. I have suffered for my writing. Why should people who read my work suffer as well?
Mishal: I want to ask you about the university as a setting for some of your recent work. What is the place of university in your life, especially now in Lahore, and what do you have to say about the intellectual milieu of Lahore?
Munib: The university is where I have spent my entire life. I have never had any other work outside the university. In my adult life I have never not been attached to a university. I resisted the space to begin with but over the years I have come to appreciate the constancy that universities can offer, their institutional sturdiness, and of course I have acquired the skills to better negotiate the space as a writer. In Lahore, the universities have welcomed me, in some cases they have gone out of their way to make room for me, made accommodations for my writing. That said, Pakistani universities are nothing like universities elsewhere. The systemic institutional problems of the country have also seeped into the framework of the universities.
As for the intellectual milieu of Lahore, I have met some of the most interesting people in the universities here. There are enough characters here for a library full of novels. My students understand the lies they have been told, they want to escape this country, they have no illusions. I have learned much from my students. Their stories have shifted my understanding of the city and the country. I was missing this piece in my writing.
Nothing could have prepared me for the Pakistani academics, the ones who have spent their lives here, working and teaching at the universities, molding the institutions and being molded by them. I find that you need a high order cunning to survive here, you have to be a bit like Odysseus, always plotting something. Of course, I am generalizing. Integrating myself into Pakistani university life has been an education for me.
Mishal: Is the university setting a major part of the novel you are working on?
Munib: No.
Mishal: Will you tell me about your novel?
Munib: I’m working on a bildungsroman. There are many shapes such books can take and mine is still forming itself. I am not stubborn about it. I have made progress in the past year and I hope I can make some good decisions this year.
Mishal: What is your teaching life like? Do you teach creative writing?
Munib: I teach creative writing at the university but the university has rules and policies which I must follow, and this makes teaching a writing workshop impossible. I run a writing workshop privately, which is free of cost, where I get to make decisions without any outside intervention. I enjoy teaching the workshop and meeting the young Pakistani writers.
Mishal: How do you view the current political crisis in Pakistan?
Munib: It’s a continuation of the crises that the country has seen since its inception. Until we speak the truth about what our country has done to its citizens, there will be no end to this. I returned out of choice but that choice will become less and less viable for people. Yesterday, I read Wikipedia was banned and today, the coverage of a rape that happened in a famous park in Islamabad. Only dysfunction can come from people not facing the truth, any writer will tell you this much.
