The aim of this paper is to re-explore and reconstruct the historical narrative of Pakistan depicted in Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s Lahore with Love (henceforth LWL) from a feminist perspective. To achieve this objective, we draw on Robin Morgan’s (1941 ) concept of herstory and female identity in delineating the experiences of the female characters in memoir. This approach helps in presenting an alternative, holistic analysis of Pakistan’s socio-political history through analyses of the various herstories of Afzal-Khan's girlfriends in LWL. Each vignette of her friends’ voices lends a different vantage point that reflects the major events in Pakistan’s history the effect of these events on her girlfriends. We dismantle the socio-political ambiance and class structures of the 1970s, followed by Zia’s Islamization in the 1980s, to propose an alternative, feminist point of view. Moreover, we trace the metamorphosis in each character by analyzing the herstories that subsequently reveal the construction of an alternate female identity as a defense mechanism to survive the phallocentric norms. The metamorphosis unravels the construction of alternative identities in order to strive for liminal spaces as the female haven. Furthermore, we deconstruct the characters’ nicknames to substantiate the prevalence of a third space for all female characters in LWL. Overall, this critical exploration of the memoir from a feminist herstorical standpoint strives to showcase and problematize: a) the experiences of women who had been silenced in the erstwhile historical accounts; b) Pakistani and South Asian women’s memoirs as significant feminist writings from the Global South.
The severance of India and Pakistan in 1947 politicized not just religious identities but linguistic identities as well. I would argue that in her book Siren Song: Understanding Pakistan through Its Women Singers, Fawzia Afzal-Khan explores the constitutive elements of the post-independence sense of the nation. She delineates internal hierarchies entrenched by nationalism in relation to an array of matters: political power, ethnicity, religion, religious prejudice, and other problems permeating the subcontinent.
Crime is a socio-cultural phenomenon which is in dialogue with a number of nuanced and polyvalent variables such as economy, culture, politics, topographical fabric, to name only a few, and therefore bears telling significance in the society. Since time immemorial crime has been persisting in the society and has been ceaselessly evolving in commensurate with socio-cultural developments in general and particularly with spatial and topographical alterations. It is sometimes supposed that crime seems at times to be a consequence of disjunctive and disruptive sharing of worldly resources conditioned by certain geopolitical status quo and at once a means for questioning ontological stability of certain a priori epistemological and sociological strands. At this point, one may be reminded of that contextual specificities play pivotal role in drawing the contour of crime and thus are of profound pertinence. Due to the liberalization of economy happened during 1990s, the overlapping trajectories of space and place inured by the irrevocable and irresistible forces of globalization have problematized stereotypical assumptions of crime and as a consequence of it, a number of aporias including the problematic interface between crime and space induced by changing topographical specificities, within the paradigm of crime have been triggered.1 Ensuing contradictions, on the one hand, insist that one needs to reexamine the negotiation of crime with space and place in the postglobalization scenario in order to expound the changing nature of crime, and on the other hand, induce that critics are supposed to engage themselves in examining the problematic interplay among crime, space and place. There are some Pakistani novelists who have begun to deal with problematic negotiations of crime with space and place conditioned by social, cultural, economic, political, and religious alterations in the context of Pakistan. This article is intended to intervene into select Pakistani novels incorporating Akbar Agha’s The Fatwa Girl (2011), Omar Shahid Hamid’s The Prisioner (2013), and Bilal Tanweer’sThe Scatter Here Is Too Great (2013) to question the representation and ontological stability of crime in the select fictions and to lay bare some inherent loopholes in
