In Britain, where every two-horse village has a book festival and authors have become stumbling, portly simulacrums of their rock-star cousins, forever touring their greatest hits, we’ve grown to take our literary get-togethers for granted. It’s hard to imagine that a festival might be revolutionary, politically divisive, that attending could be a matter of taking your life in your hands. The Karachi literature festival (KLF) is now in its sixth year, and welcomed more than 100,000 people through its security scanners last weekend. The festival ended with a lavish British Council-hosted dinner, where the only clue that we were anywhere out of the ordinary was the throb of police boats circling the dark waters of Chinna Creek nearby.
Karachi is one of the world’s most dangerous cities, with more than 20 million people living under the twin threats of militant Islamism and brutal political infighting. Reported murders are in the region of 2,000 a year, with the real figure likely to be much higher. It was in this city that journalist Daniel Pearl was snatched in 2002, his beheading a grisly message to those seeking to shine a light on the darker reaches of this troubled country. It’s not an obvious location for a thriving literary festival, a fact emphasised when I’m met off my flight by a gun-toting guard in an armoured car. It’s barely six months since the Taliban briefly seized control of the airport, and my hosts are understandably wary about my safety en route to the festival. The guard radios in our location all the way along the car-clogged airport road. My initial view of Karachi is through green-tinted, bulletproof glass.
In my talk the next morning, alongside the writer Mohammed Hanif and Malayalam author Benyamin (whose excellent Goat Days is translated into English), I speak about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s idea of the danger of a single story, the way that humans tend to form a single, exclusive narrative to capture their experience of the world. My idea of Karachi, of Pakistan as a whole, has been fed to me by media reports of bomb blasts and terror attacks, of a country where a significant proportion of the population was illiterate, where those that did read turned to journalism rather than novels to inform their view of the world. Yet here I am in a hall where there is standing room only, speaking to a crowd of enthusiastic, urbane readers, and I feel, rather to my surprise, very safe amid so many kindred spirits.
That afternoon, I sit down in the hotel’s floating restaurant – a barge bellying on the mudflats of the sluggish creek – with Ameena Saiyed OBE, the founder of the KLF (and head of Oxford University Press in Pakistan). She tells me that she established the festival to give a platform for Pakistani writers, but also to provide an alternative narrative about life in Karachi. “I think it’s very important to prove that Karachi is open for business. We want people to feel that Karachi is more than just bombs. And the answer to bombs is books.”
There are obvious security challenges in organising a literary festival in a country where people get killed for the things they write. Only a few months before my arrival, the dean of Islamic studies at Karachi University, Shakeel Auj, was assassinated for daring to suggest in one of his books that Muslim women ought, like their men, to be able to marry outside their religion. I ask Saiyed how she keeps her authors and audiences safe. “I must pay tribute to the Karachi police,” she says. “They help us a lot and particularly they supervise these waters.” She gestures to the brackish, mangrove-clogged creek. “There is an openness here which is potentially a threat, but it is all protected by boat patrols.” Saiyed also pays for a private security agency, whose guards carry absurdly large double-barrelled shotguns as they patrol the festival’s walkways.
While the security situation makes itself felt in certain inconveniences – there’s something of a hoo-ha when I escape the festival compound on my first night and take a taxi to meet friends in a less safe part of town; there are queues for the body scanners at the entrance; car-parking is, as you can imagine, unimaginable – the overall sense is of a festival doing its best to operate as normal. The events are free and most of the visitors are students and young professionals; there’s an incredible sense of energy and optimism around the place. It increasingly strikes me as something of a miracle that Saiyed, with the help of the British Council, has turned the KLF from an event hosting a few thousand visitors in 2010 to this sprawling, multilingual celebration of literature.
On the last day of my visit, I give a writing class to a group of 40 young female journalists, part of the Educate a Girl movement run by the Pakistani philanthropist Tara Uzra Dawood. Many of the girls are wearing hijabs and niqabs; they’ve been flown in from all corners of the country, including the wild north-western borderlands. I’m not sure what I was expecting from these girls but, after some initial hesitation, we begin a conversation that lasts all morning. They have read David Foster Wallace and get the New Yorker online; they have blogs and are making documentaries. One of them describes her niqab as a “Trojan horse – it allows me to see things others don’t see”. They all feel strongly the responsibility that comes with being the first in their communities to have an education, the first women with a voice. They queue to take selfies with me at the end of the session and soon my Facebook feed is full of thoughtful, sophisticated responses to the provocations of my class.
Later, as I make my way for the final time out of the KLF towards my armoured car, past security guards carrying pump-action shotguns, I turn for a minute to look back at the hotel. On the roof, surveying the hordes in his green beret, a sniper stands. His rifle is slung low across his waist. He catches my eye and I raise a wary hand in greeting. He smiles, a wide, disarming grin, and goes back to watching the crowds as they mill in and out of OUP’s mobile bookshop, the tents and talks and stalls and exhibitions. I think of a conversation I had with my friend Kamila Shamsie, one of the festival’s tutelary spirits: “There are few sights in the city more cheering than the crowds who throng the booksellers’ area,” she told me. “Testimony to the fact that KLF isn’t just spectacle; it’s engagement.”
In Love and War by Alex Preston is published by Faber
