Mohammed Hanif on ‘Red Birds’

Mohammed Hanif says Red Birdsis set in a war-torn and half-forgotten place located in his head

Plain truths: ‘Sometimes we wish there were symbols instead of bombs.’

Mohammed Hanif was catapulted to stardom with the publication of his first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes , in 2008, which documented the end of General Zia’s regime with his assassination in a plane crash. Three years later, he shook the conscience of society with Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, where he took on themes of minority religion, gender and caste through the story of a Christian nurse. Seven years after that, Hanif has come up with his new novel, Red Birds , that explores a never-ending war in a conflict-ridden country through the story of the family of a missing boy who joins the U.S. army. Excerpts from an email interview:

A Case of Exploding Mangoes had a military dictator at its centre. The Red Birds too has an armed forces man, a pilot, as one of the main characters. You are a trained pilot yourself. How much do you draw from your life for your stories?

I have tried to draw from my own life, but my life has been fairly dull and predictable in a middle-class kind of way. So I end up drawing from all the lives that I haven’t lived, or lives that I have witnessed or heard about or sometimes dreamt about.

Does your professional life as a journalist influence the choice of subjects for your novels?

We pretend that journalism is journalism and fiction is fiction but I am sure journalism shapes my world-view. When I was starting Red Birds , I was doing some reporting on the families of the missing people of Balochistan, so I am sure some of that seeped into it.

A U.S. military operation in a foreign, deserted land, the killing of the destitute, the destruction of their lands: these are rich topics for post-colonial studies. Would you agree with this?

I have not been lucky enough to do post-colonial studies in a university or any other formal environment. My ideas about it are quite vague. Only post-colonial scholars can decide whether it’s a good read for them. As a writer I can only hope it’s a good enough read for anyone who picks it up.

The post-9/11 world, terrorism and the like have been a favourite theme of many novelists, especially those trying to engage Western readers. Is your new novel an attempt to get on to this bandwagon?

I always try to be on any bandwagon that happens to pass by. But you might have noticed there is a usually a dog following the wagon. I feel I am that dog who is left behind, always chasing the bandwagon, yelping, saying please don’t leave me behind.

The setting seems like Afghanistan although it is not named. How much of the countries that witnessed U.S. operations under the so-called war on terror are a part of the novel?

I think the novel is set in a war-torn, devastated, half-forgotten place and that place is my head. We sometimes tend to forget that we have been at war for more than 40 years. The Afghan war started when I was starting high school and now my son is in university. We are still pretending that this war is happening only in Afghanistan and we have got nothing to do with it.

But we are perpetrators, collaborators and victims of this war. But sometimes, when we are sitting in the safety of our homes in Lahore or Karachi, it’s easy to forget that there is a war — but maybe we are living off that war, maybe we have made our fortunes from that war.

Red Birds seems symbolic, especially in its settings like Hangar and the Camp. The situation is surreal at times...

At the centre of the novel is a house destroyed and a missing brother. I don’t think there is anything symbolic there. Sometimes we look for symbols when there are none. Sometimes we wish there were symbols instead of bombs, or missing boys were allegories for something, but they are not. I am sure we have all had a glimpse of a refugee camp or an abandoned army base. Yes, ordinary life can be surreal at times.

The character of Mutt, the dog, is all-knowing but silent as nobody listens to him or to his warnings. Does he represent the intelligentsia and the voice of reason in a Third World country?

I don’t think the intelligentsia is going to like that comparison. But no, I wasn’t trying to represent the intelligentsia, not that they need it. Sometimes a Mutt is just a Mutt and our poets have been urging us for centuries to raise our game, to become more like dogs. Maybe I was following that theme.

Is the humour in your novels an attempt to lighten their political underpinnings?

I don’t know if I can make a book ‘light’ for readers but maybe I am trying to make it light for myself. There’s no recipe at work here — you don’t do a hard centre and then fluff things up for the reader’s comfort. The only thing that I can do for readers is make the book readable.

How much of Hanif is there in the character of Ellie, the pilot?

None in the character of Ellie. But since I am the author of this book, every character, every place, every emotion, every grain of sand, every little joke has something of me in it. Every word has something of me in it. Sometimes I feel these are not words, these are tears of blood. I am not joking.

The interviewer is a Lahore-based journalist who writes on culture and literature.