Star power at the LLF

Given that I haven’t lived in the city of my birth, Lahore, for almost 40 years, it’s always a mixed treat when I return on one of my sojourns, often to mix filial duties with some sense of service I have left to the country whose soil I grew up in. Thus, whenever here for any length of time, I end up teaching or giving lectures, as a university professor, at one of the several distinguished institutions of higher education here, and make an effort to stay in touch with my musical roots, continuing my vocal classical training and occasionally performing in the hallowed halls of Alhamra at the All Pakistan Music Conference as well as at other venues.

I mention this background as a way in to thinking about one important function that the annual extravanganza of literature and culture known as LLF performs for several of its participants and attendeesviz., those who have emigrated from its shores to distant lands in Western countries such as the UK and the USA, (like Dr. Azra Azra for example, who was a plenary speaker this year. originally from Karachi but living and working in the USA for more than 4 decades), others who are born in those other lands but have parental heritage ties to the “motherland” (such as the movie star Riz Ahmed), as well as local audiences whose swelling numbers (which seem to increase every year ) indicate, at the very least, that they are hungry for mix of lit/crit/culture that the LLF aims to provide.

Riz Ahmed’s appearance at the LLF this year was one of these phenomena that brought desi audiences of mixed class/gender/regional/ethnic/religious background, in close proximity (or atleast the illusion thereof!) with a Hollywood star, a rarity amongst people of our background. Indeed, Riz is the first and to date, only actor of Pakistani heritage to have won a prestigious Emmy award at last year’s Golden Globe awards in LA, for his role as a wrongfully-convicted man of Muslim background accused of murder in the popular HBO series, The Night of. He appeared as a guest on a session moderated by Shahid Zahid as part of a conversation between him and Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid.

The comfortable camaraderie between the now quite veteran and internationally renowned Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid, and the younger, Pakistani-British actor RizAhmed whose acclaim is of more recent vintage put a few interesting matters on display. First, gauging from the audience’s delighted whooping and hollering, screen creds seemed to appeal more than literary ones; secondly, what appeared to resonate most strongly with the overwhelmingly desi audience were Riz’s stories about his challenges with airport security as a Pakistani-looking Muslim male re-entering his native Britain or the US after traveling for film shooting in “suspicious” areas such as the border of Pakistan-Afghanistan, carrying in his possession a copy of Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist in whose film version Riz plays the eponymous hero. While humourously told, these stories underscored both the fundamental asymmetry of power between the West and the Muslim world that has hardened a sense of the clash of civilisations (however erroneous) on both sides, as well as underscoring the triumph of David over Goliath in this cosmic battle. If even a Hollywood Star like Riz Ahmed could be mistaken for or treated in a humiliating way as a potential terrorist, then we all are vindicated in our distrust and disgust for this undifferentiated entity called the Imperial West. At the same time, if despite such odds against us (yes, Riz becomes one of “us” in this scenario of identification)—this young brown Muslim man, can, like David, through the power of his individual talent, his education, his expressive abilities as an actor and writer, expose the stupidity of such racist, Islamophobic stereotyping, and in the process manage to win the highest laurels from an unabashedly racist and sexist industry such as Hollywood, well then, he helps challenge the sense of perpetual Muslim Victimhood that threatens to overwhelm us with a sense of powerlessness and anger.

What complicates such an oversimplified response, however, are the several layers of class and gender politics at play in the dynamics of both this session and the festival more generally, which in turn complicate questions of identification along any easy axes of identity. For one thing, Riz Ahmed is not Pakistani though, ofcourse, the fact of his having been born and raised by Pakistani immigrants to Britain predisposes him to a desire for some shared sense of identity or at least recognition/acceptance by natives from his parents’ homeland as he acknowledged during the conversation. But as a minority kid growing up in the UK whose parents, as he told the rapt audience, he came from a lower middle class background in Pakistan. His experience of alienation in the UK is very different from anything a native Lahori like Mohsin Hamid might have felt going from a privileged class background to study at Princeton in the USA, as described in fictional terms by Hamid in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. To collapse these important nuances of class difference as well as different histories of race consciousness and racist antagonisms affecting people of colour in the UK and the USA (including racism directed by South Asians against Black people in the USA, whereas South Asians are considered and see themselves as “Black” in the UK to a large extent) into a somewhat forced unity of experience between Riz, Mohsin and their interlocutor on stage, and thence to give the assumption of a similar shared space between them and an internally differentiated audience, points to some of the challenges that an event like LLF poses to critical observers such as myself.

For one thing, despite allusions made by both Riz to his own class background and Mohsin to the need for greater awareness and attention in literary and cultural discourse to issues of gender and sexuality, these urgent topics were given short shrift in this panel discussion that came across in the final analysis as a paen to celebrity – with celebrity standing in as the great equaliser.

But ofcourse, we all know that ain’t so, is it? What a panel such as this one suggests is that if you can become a globally recognised Hollywood Star, then you will be claimed as one of “us”— the “us” here being the cultural and financial male elite of the country, the ones who truly “matter.” What is being celebrated then, is a rags-to-riches narrative that fits a neoliberal capitalist model of individual rewards and honours to be reaped by those who rise to the “top” by dint of individual talent in an economy that recognises the right of the deserving individual to amass cultural and financial capital (the two are often, though not always, linked). Accumulation of cultural capital becomes, in this scenario, a marker of acceptance into the welcoming arms of the financial elite who represent the funders, backers and organisers of LLF itself.

This scenario is true of the 1 percent. Perhaps what carnivals like the LLF allow is an opportunity for the 99 percent to bask in the glory and glamour of the 1 percent? Given that high culture is indeed a rarefied preserve, I suppose that’s fine—although there is some delicious irony in the conflation of popular film culture with the “high” culture of literary production on display in this panel. But, given that much of what counts nowadays as popular culture in Pakistan seems to be in the hands of religious bigots who – as Raza Aslan (another popular presenter at LLF this year) pointed out – need to be challenged in their extremist ideology, so as to reclaim our right as Muslims to an individualistic interpretation of faith, panels such as the one I’ve discussed are emblematic of an ethos of individual adulation that at least provide a space for an alternative discourse (albeit a starry-eyed one!) to that of collective religious frenzy (with its own array of star clerics, etc). Individualism seems to be the zeitgeist of our times.

The closing concert by Laal Band, dedicated to the fierce women’s and minorities’ human rights defender Asma Jahangir, provided a somewhat different flavor to this dominant narrative. It won my heart as a symbol of the perfect blending of individual talent—that of its lead guitarist/singer, Professor Taimur Rahman, as well as the talents of his excellent bandmates including his wife on accompanying vocals (gender equality!)—together with the collectivist ethos represented by the ideological mission and work of Laal as a partner to the movements for peasant and labour rights across Pakistan. Taimur Rahman has all the trappings of an individual rock star (a persona he inhabits quite unabashedly!), accompanied by his serious political commitments to an egalitarian future for Pakistan’s citizens, which would uplift the most marginalised communities in the country. His shout-outs to members of a visibly non-elite-classin the audience representing all four provinces and ethnicities of Pakistan, was a call for revolution (Inqilab zindabad!), and created electrifying responses, getting all of us singing along and dancing to verses from folk songs rooted in the culture of the 99 percent, and the revolutionary poetry of Faiz and Jalib, leading up to a climactic moment where the divide between performer and audience disappeared in an orgiastic commingling to the verses of “Shahbaz Qalandar”—making spect-actors of us all, evoking the potential power of unity-amidst-difference, the precursor to solidarity of purpose and imagination where another, better world becomes possible.

I think Riz Ahmed’s rap lyrics, that point out the racial and class prejudices of British society that have helped create an alienated Muslim youth there who have embraced their political affiliations with a class/gender/ race-based politics of solidarity with other disenfranchised minorities of color in Britain, could create common cause with some of Laal’s choice of poetry from the pens of Pakistan’s most vaunted revolutionary poets. Such future collaborative opportunities between guests from abroad and local participants, requiring some more foresight and a recalibration of vision on the part of its organizers, in turn might help bridge some of the discursive and ideological gaps palpable at the LLF, leading, at least at the level of the affective register, to some new and productive affiliations between “us” and “them,” “home” and “abroad,” the West and the Rest and all that lies in between.