Lahore With Love: Growing Up With Girlfriends Pakistani-Style - Softcover

Afzal-Khan, Fawzia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0815609248 ISBN 13: 9780815609247

Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr, 2010

Synopsis

For women growing up in Pakistan s patriarchal, segregated society, it is not surprising that female friendships take on a deep, enduring resonance. These relationships, formed in adolescence and nurtured into adulthood, give Afzal-Khan the strength to be defiant, a wry sense of humor to weather the contradictions in daily Pakistani life, and memories to sustain her as she continues to straddle two continents and two cultures.

In Lahore with Love, Afzal-Khan shares intimate stories of these young girls, and later women, celebrating the strong bonds that helped shape her character. She balances this coming-of-age memoir with a clear-eyed look at a country that evokes both fierce loyalty and utter despair from its inhabitants. The author recalls growing up in the sixties and seventies in Lahore, living in a time of war, attending a Roman Catholic school as a Muslim middle-class teenager, and enduring the constant political upheaval that threatened her freedoms. Afzal-Khan eventually leaves Lahore and moves to the United States to pursue her Ph.D. She recounts the complex mix of longing and alienation that she feels upon returning to visit her homeland and friends.

Lahore with Love offers a rich portrait of daily life in Pakistan. Afzal- Khan gives readers a welcome alternative to the often reductive, flat images of modern Muslim women.

About this title

About the Author

Fawzia Afzal-Khan is professor of English and director of Women and Gender Studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She is a published poet and playwright. Her books include Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel and A Critical Stage: The Role of Secular Alternative Theatre in Pakistan. She is the coeditor of Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out and The Pre-occupation of Postcolonial Studies.

Reviews

Not your usual memoir, this sharp, contemporary coming-of-age story swings back and forth over 30 years, from Afzal-Khan’s growing up in Pakistan in a middle-class urban family in the 1980s with her tight circle of girlfriends, through her coming to America as a graduate student, and now as an academic. Always, she weaves her personal conflicts and her country’s political history into the story: her fury at the extremists’ suppression of the poor, of women, and of religious minorities and her equally harsh criticism of her “bourgeois decadent” Westernized family (not for her the view of the U.S. as paradise for immigrants). She is a published poet, and her wordplay is wry and intense, both diatribes against “religious claptrap” and also at her “m/other,” who orders her daughter not to read so much or men won’t want her. Best of all is the irony of the Muslim daughter’s own conflict with her “s/kin.” Living abroad, an emancipated intellectual woman, how can it be that it is Hemingway’s machismo that gives her the courage she needs “to fly from home and back again”? --Hazel Rochman

Edition details

• Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0815609248
• ISBN 13: 9780815609247
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 145