An Exclusive Interview with Saba Karim Khan, the Noted Author & Award-Winning Filmmaker

Saba Karim Khan is an author, award-winning filmmaker and educator, whose writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, Wasafiri, HuffPost, Verso, Think Progress, DAWN, etc. Her debut novel, Skyfall, was recently released by Bloomsbury and her documentary film, Concrete Dreams: Some Roads Lead Home, produced by the Doha Film Institute (DFI), has been officially selected and won awards at global film festivals in NYC, Paris, Berlin, Toronto, USA, Sweden and India. She has read Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and works at NYU Abu Dhabi. Before joining the Academy, she worked as Country Marketing and Public Affairs Head at Citigroup. Born in Karachi, she now lives in Abu Dhabi with her husband and two daughters.

In an exclusive interview with Nitish Raj; Editor-in-Chief, The Literary Mirror the noted author & award-winning filmmaker, Saba Karim Khan talks about her latest book Skyfall along with her other vast array of works.

Q. What inspired the idea of your book ‘Skyfall’?

 

Ans. Skyfall, to me, is the soul of a Sufi love song—what inspired it was hope. I believe one of the gravest risks we face at the moment is a sense of deeply ingrained pessimism about the future, thus it has become politically imperative for us to seek out optimism. Skyfall is a tiny attempt to move in that direction, from darkness to light, an invitation to dance, an invitation for readers to imagine a less divided world, a cosmos where coexistence is the currency. In some ways, those ideas are timeless but, in many ways, also very timely, given we are occupying a world where people are rapidly retreating to their ideological woods.

The novel is set between Lahore, Delhi, and New York City, amidst a dogmatic, puritanical world order that resembles our current climate. Silhouetted against this backdrop is the story of a young girl from the choked slums of Heera Mandi – Lahore’s famous red-light district – who grows up seeing her father run a religious madrassah by day and peddle the flesh trade by night. Skyfall traces the story of how, in the wake of the “quiet desperation” she experiences, she’s still determined to unearth her “song” and carve out a different future for herself. The question that motivated the book was, what happens when a girl, who we see as occupying the margins of our society, who we cast as nothing but a dumbed-down prostitute, decides to transgress, to break free from the chains forged around her, to ask uncomfortable questions; in short, what happens when she becomes a “Troublemaker”. I was curious to unpack what price people pay when they reclaim agency in contexts where we assume there is none.

Of course, there are multiple stories woven within the story, love-jihad, the hushing up of women’s sexuality, and a desperation to show parts of Pakistan, and Pakistani women, which don’t fall into neat binaries—the greys. They all converge to illustrate the title of the novel, Skyfall, which means the last attempt you make against a group of people when outnumbered—it’s that spirit, the desire to keep something burning, to keep a fire alive, to put up a final stand when the odds are stacked against you, which crystallizes the world I’ve crafted in the book.

Q. What has been the most difficult part of your writing process?

Ans. A lot has been challenging but two hoops were particularly testing to jump through:

(a) Becoming comfortable with chaos and vulnerability

(b) Crafting an imaginary long-read universe, in the absence of guarantees

As human beings, we crave some sort of assurance – will we get a literary agent, will a publisher give us a contract, will there be tangible results for our efforts? Fiction writing rarely offers that sort of certainty!

So, the writing process for me was—and remains—highly experimental; crafting a story is akin to a field experiment, tossing everything into the mix, especially during the early stages, staying patiently with it for a few years, hoping it will metamorphosize into something. You birth, imagine, sculpt, and as the story evolves, the puzzle appears; you keep rearranging until the pieces get into place.

It takes time to embrace the fluidity and messiness of producing any sort of art, so, I guess, the closest analogy I can draw to my writing process is with music – for example, and Abida Parveen or Nusrat Fateh Ali song, or a Faiz Ahmed Faiz ghazal, which celebrates complexity and chaos but eventually you can distill from it, the simplicity and harmony of folk melody. In the same way, with storytelling, I seek to find a way of producing symphony, from the orchestra of conflicting voices within.

Q. How do you seamlessly blend the varied roles you play, that of an Author, a Filmmaker, and an Educator?

Ans. Through being a “storyteller”. The storyteller label resonates because everything subsumes within it in a medium-agnostic way – films, novels, Op-Eds, flash-fiction, black-out poetry, photos, graffiti, tattoos. For me, that’s the ultimate prize—telling the story. Why? Stories open windows, they enable me to touch people’s lives across geographies, religions, races; they help me unlock people’s minds, along with my own. You’re stirring audiences to question, feel, visualize, emote – that sort of critical thinking and affect is the biggest gift you can get or give. In a world filled with so much hate, such divisions, the ability to stop accepting things passively, to ask questions, to imagine coexistence – it can be life-changing. Our stories inch us closer to that goal and leave a legacy – they are going to outlive us.

So irrespective of whether it’s a film, a research project, or a novel, they’re each powerful mediums to hold a mirror to society, to punctuate fault lines of gender and faith, and class in places such as Pakistan. Whether I tell meditative and remedying stories or social autopsies, if they so much as to make people think or spark a conversation, that’s a good place to start. And somehow, with each role you’ve mentioned, I gravitate towards using the power of storytelling to talk about those at the margins without talking for the – people who aren’t spoken of enough, who don’t get a seat at the table – in some senses, to level the playing field of who has a voice, without speaking on their behalf, and so, issues of inequality and injustice are often inevitably tied into my creativity and craft.

Q. Having lived and travelled to various places, how has your life in these places impacted your perspective as a writer?

Travel, often even without going anywhere, has harnessed the impetus for my stories and in one word, offered perspective. I’m talking about travel through imagination and experience-sharing, which holds just as much transportive potential as getting on a plane to go somewhere—a book, a conversation, a visit to a local vendor, a street play, a ghazal. It’s similar to what Mohsin Hamid says about all of us being migrants through time.

But yes, physical travel has seeped into my positionality and inspiration as a storyteller. For instance, living in Abu Dhabi, much like the writing process, feels experimental, deeply evocative, and enriching. So much is waiting to be discovered, it’s diversified my vantage point significantly, widened the breadth of perspectives. The city offers a rare metaphor to illustrate how peace co-existence is possible – a theme central to Skyfall. The Gulf lies at the crossroads of so much: nationalities, languages, food, travel, arts, and culture permeating through its borders comingling transmuting. Given so much of my storytelling encapsulates a similar sort of syncretism, celebrating that diversity and quiet confidence that we see in Abu Dhabi has made its way into my work, especially into Skyfall.

Similarly, Lahore, which almost works as a protagonist in the novel. The sense of place, Heera Mandi, in particular, stands at such a departure from my world and that’s where travel helped. The years I spent roaming the streets of Lahore, not the sanitized, touristy version, but the raw, rough-around-the-edges nooks and crannies of the city. Visiting Heera Mandi and Cuckoo’s Café and Shahjamal – those days and nights are fundamental to Skyfall. I have distinct memories of the dancing girls, those gulleys in the Walled City, the neon light bulbs switched on in the dingy internet cafes. I was deeply immersed in this world, which helped me avoid the risk of dumbing down these women as only oppressed and magnetic. Rania, the protagonist in Skyfall, she’s fierce and curious; she symbolizes “real courage” in the face of adversity. All that travel helped me build an authentic realm and sense of place in the book and reduced the dangers of offering a stereotypical portrayal of the place as “a red-light slum” and nothing more.

Q. Would you like to tell us about your documentary film ‘Concrete Dreams: Some Roads Lead Home’, and what would you want your audience to take away from the film?

Ans. Concrete Dreams is about the transformational power of sports and of dreaming big. 1.5 million children occupy Pakistan’s streets today. They’re exposed to drugs, gangs, crime, and sexual harassment. They beg and wash windscreens to secure a meal. They place their shoes under their heads as pillows and tear banners off-street poles to use them as blankets in the winter. Yet, that isn’t the entire story. With Concrete Dreams, I tried to push the envelope tear it, to show how these aren’t completely rootless, adrift street kids. They are dreamers, go-getters, who in this case, went from having no birth certificates to winning Bronze for Pakistan at the Street Child World Cup in Rio. I wanted to hammer in the fact that dreaming big, working hard to grab those dreams, becoming “Somebody”, isn’t just the territory of the privileged. Shooting with young boys in these neighborhoods opened up windows into parts of my home city, Karachi, which had remained shut off from the realms of our private, air-conditioned drawing rooms. The experience was eye-opening as if I was being reacquainted with my place of birth and I’d never trade that feeling – finding hope, tucked in these crevices, where we imagined we’d only find despair.

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Much like the characters in Skyfall and Zoya Akhtar’s Gulley Boy, in Concrete Dreams too, these street kids operate in the face of “quiet desperation”, yet they refuse to let someone else dictate their aukaat. They are unwilling to downsize their dreams to fit their reality but are instead, looking to outstrip their reality to make it fit their dreams. That’s the full story. In short, directing Concrete Dreams was a chance to put Pakistan on the map for reasons beyond terrorism and gang rape– I wasn’t going to pass on such an opportunity!

Q. Would you prefer visual media or the print channel to express your ideas, thoughts, and viewpoints as a storyteller?

Ans. I don’t necessarily have a preference for medium, as long as the story touches someone’s life, pushes the fabric of society in some way. When choosing a medium, I prefer it if the type of story I’m telling drives whether it should be told visually or through the written word or through some other format, rather than the other way around.

Admittedly though, we are in a distracted world, where attention spans are diminishing and visual stories resonate with wider audiences. I’ve seen that with my doc-film as well – there’s an immediate connection. However, on the flip side, the novel is an act of co-creation, an invitation to take a walk, between readers and the story, you are welcoming people into this world without telling them how to interpret it, how to make meaning of it. Thus, I find that the power of words on a page, combined with the human imagination—such as in a written story—is limitless. Since there are no visual crutches, it leaves maximum space for individual reading. That immersive, interpretive potential, especially at a time when we are in the clutches of a frenzied attention economy, takes on magnified significance. That’s why contrary to popular opinion, I strongly believe the novel isn’t yet extinct; if anything, it enables us to rise above the clutter. Mohsin Hamid said this to me once and it’s true – the novel feels even more important now than it did before, especially when making sense of our world and its chaos.

Q. If you had to create a spin-off about a side character from your book, who would that be and why?

Ans. That’s a brilliant question and makes me value my editor’s emphasis on subplots and seemingly minor characters even more!

A spin-off – perhaps the friendship between Jahaan-e-Rumi and Roohi – in particular exploring how two (older) women, who have witnessed courtesan culture in its days of glory, when it wasn’t simply reduced to the sex trade, respond and adapt to modernity in Heera Mandi and this line of business. How they come to terms with the commercializing of the trade, with the dramatic shift in patterns through social media and technology, and how they try to remain relevant. I’d also be curious about both of them because we inhabit a very ageist society – where a lot of stigma and shame is attached to older women and their sexuality, what they wear, what they desire. How do Jahaan-e-Rumi and Roohi push back against these expectations, to illustrate empowerment and agency, without subscribing to a cookie-cutter, western mold of a female role model?

Q. Would you like to share with the readers about your work ‘Third Way’?

Ans. The Third Way is an ethnographic and interview-based study of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Imran Khan’s political party currently in power in Pakistan.

It explores the rise of Imran Khan as a Statesman and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf as a social movement in South Asia, challenging dynastic party structures and class conflict, mobilizing youth and women, allowing us to reimagine power elites and becoming a metaphor of hope for the country.

It doesn’t tackle the performance of the party after coming into Government but is more focused on its role in shaping Pakistani politics and everyday contention, especially when it comes to youth participation, before the 2018 elections.