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“Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends Pakistani Style” is like The Joy Luck Club meets David Copperfield meets Beloved. Horrors such as honor killing and suicide are counterbalanced by the playful, vivacious bonds between close girlfriends. Though this rich, panoramic memoir explores social injustices and the resulting personal tragedies that such oppressions engender, the book itself is neither depressing nor didactic. The witty young narrator deemed “Madame Sin” by her vibrant female companions vacillates between giddy colloquialisms and mature political observations and insights, seamlessly merging the thoughts and ideas of two distinct narrators—one a fresh-eyed girl and the other a fully grounded PhD-educated mother and teacher.
Chapters that succinctly capture the lives and personalities of the narrator’s childhood companions also weave for the readers a thoughtful and abundant portrait of the socially-minded narrator herself as well as her native Lahore. Some characters like “Sam” embody ideals of femininity and prettiness that tend to cross cultures, while the tough, abject sensuality and forthrightness of “Madina” challenge all cultural definitions of what it means to be a Muslim woman or a woman in any patriarchal culture. Structurally tight, poetic, funny, and completely lacking any sentimental impulses, it is nonetheless poignant— mostly because it resists the urge to be so.
Please post your comments, questions, and queries on this page.
Margaux Fragoso
Nyla Ali Khan
University of Oklahoma, Norman
Fawzia Afzal-Khan engages in reflective action in her memoir to examine her own locations of privilege. Afzal-Khan tries to self-actualize and intervene in patriarchal national history by seeking in the interaction of modernity and communal memory not a vertical relationship producing totalized notions of nation, gender, class, race, ethnicity but intersectionalities between different cultural times, spaces, and ways of knowing the self in relation to the family, society, and the cosmos. She speaks from her location about the political realities that have woven the web of social relations she inhabits or has inhabited. Like feminist scholars Hazel Carby, Valeri Smith, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Barbara Smith, Afzal-Khan considers how race, nationality, class, religion, and gender intersect in the social construction of subjectivity. Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s work gives the clarion call for an increasingly materially grounded, historically aware, and yet also theoretically sophisticated feminism. It must be read and widely disseminated.
Junaid Ahmad, LUMS
PK
I just heard about this travesty and I support mentor and colleague Fawzia's brilliant intervention here wholeheartedly. And I am totally appalled at this heavy-handedness of the publisher, which is just shameful.
But Fawzia's voice will not be silenced; neither she nor her supporters and fans will allow it!
But Fawzia's voice will not be silenced; neither she nor her supporters and fans will allow it!
Dr. sam Shihada
Southern Methdoist University
Dear Dr. Fawzia,
I just lend my strong support for Lahore With Love to be republished.Working on gender and cultural studies for years, I understand the important message conveyed in Lahore With Love which is" breaking silence , unveiling minds and speaking truth to power." . I must say that I feel so sad to know how freedom of speech is not respected through the the way Syracuse publishing house acted, in a way that gives support to dark forces which , in vain, try to gag the true voices of public intellectuals like Dr, Fawzia Khan, to please certain social and political structures. Finally ,I would also like to sum up by quoting Edward Said and Nawal El Saadawi respectively in their defense of public intellectuals.
"Thank god , we have internet nowadays so the truth can spread in one second to millions of people .(lecture at UCLA 2003)
"The truth sometimes shocks, or shakes the tranquility of set ideas. But sometimes a good shake can awaken minds that rest in slumber, and open eyes to see what is really happening around them." ( Introduction to the Hidden Face of Eve.)
Dr. Isam Shihada
Associate Professor of Gender Studies
Scholar in Residence , SMU, Dallas , Texas
I just lend my strong support for Lahore With Love to be republished.Working on gender and cultural studies for years, I understand the important message conveyed in Lahore With Love which is" breaking silence , unveiling minds and speaking truth to power." . I must say that I feel so sad to know how freedom of speech is not respected through the the way Syracuse publishing house acted, in a way that gives support to dark forces which , in vain, try to gag the true voices of public intellectuals like Dr, Fawzia Khan, to please certain social and political structures. Finally ,I would also like to sum up by quoting Edward Said and Nawal El Saadawi respectively in their defense of public intellectuals.
"Thank god , we have internet nowadays so the truth can spread in one second to millions of people .(lecture at UCLA 2003)
"The truth sometimes shocks, or shakes the tranquility of set ideas. But sometimes a good shake can awaken minds that rest in slumber, and open eyes to see what is really happening around them." ( Introduction to the Hidden Face of Eve.)
Dr. Isam Shihada
Associate Professor of Gender Studies
Scholar in Residence , SMU, Dallas , Texas
Sehba Sarwar
I'm glad to know that you're going forward with re-publishing your memoir. Your story deserves to be published and read.
Jim Nash
Bloomfield, NJ
Fawzia, I hope this ugly incident will result in your beautiful memoir becoming immensely popular. Jim
Shreerekha Subramanian
University of Houston-Clear Lake
Dear Fawzia,
What a gift it has been to speand time with you and know you at the latest NWSA (National Women's Studies Conference). Your determined and eloquent articulation of the book's heart inspired me to purchase one of the last available copies of Lahore with Love in its current form. I have decided to go ahead and assign it in my spring WMST seminar. It is a most gorgeous, powerful, and enlightening account of growing up "Pakistani Style" - I feel really fortunate to have had such a personal introduction to this text, you, and all the gifts you have to share with the world at NWSA. I was impressed with the multiplicity of voices inside you - the scholar, the poet, the playwright, the sufi singer, the academic, the critic, the interviewer, the feminist/activist - I think this dazzling array inside you is the very richness that proliferate the pages of this powerful memoir. Thank you! We support you!
Rekha
What a gift it has been to speand time with you and know you at the latest NWSA (National Women's Studies Conference). Your determined and eloquent articulation of the book's heart inspired me to purchase one of the last available copies of Lahore with Love in its current form. I have decided to go ahead and assign it in my spring WMST seminar. It is a most gorgeous, powerful, and enlightening account of growing up "Pakistani Style" - I feel really fortunate to have had such a personal introduction to this text, you, and all the gifts you have to share with the world at NWSA. I was impressed with the multiplicity of voices inside you - the scholar, the poet, the playwright, the sufi singer, the academic, the critic, the interviewer, the feminist/activist - I think this dazzling array inside you is the very richness that proliferate the pages of this powerful memoir. Thank you! We support you!
Rekha
Sajid Iqbal
Desk Editor, BBC World Service, London
I fully support Fawzia in getting the book re-published after a rather cowardly act by the Syracose University Press which, in my view, amounts to gagging a writer and denying him the right of freedom of expression. Myself and many others in media were dismayed when the SUP had stopped the distribution of the book. I shall look forward to the publication of the book and hope that it will be received well by all those who have interest in Pakistan.
Carole Stone
East Hampton, NY
Dear Fawzia,
You have my complete support for the continued publication of your book. As I wrote in its foreword, "We have this deeply layered, wondrous story." It must be read.
You have my complete support for the continued publication of your book. As I wrote in its foreword, "We have this deeply layered, wondrous story." It must be read.
Richard Schechner
Professor, New York University
Dear Ms. Pfeiffer,
When I learned that you/Syracuse University Press, was going to withdraw pulled Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s memoir, Lahore With Love: Growing Up With Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style (2010), I was – to put it mildly – shocked. I was shocked by your disrespect for freedom of expression; I was shocked by the apparent cowardice of the Press in refusing to defend one of its authors under attack; I was shocked by the fact that without a thorough investigation of all the circumstances involved, you/The Press would take such an action.
I am personally and professionally concerned because as editor of TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies and as a University Professor at New York University’s Department of Performance Studies, I know well Professor Afzal-Khan and her work. She is a Contributing editor to TDR and TDR has published her writing. I also know Lahore With Love. In my opinion it is an important, excellent book.
From discussions with Professor Afzal-Khan I know what the issues are from the Press’s point of view: fear of a lawsuit brought by Madeeha Gauhar alleging slander from a piece of sardonic and parodic fiction that is part of Lahore With Love. Although I agree with Professor Afzal-Khan that character of Madina in Chapter 4 is not provably based on Ms. Gauhar; and I agree that the “portrayal is not offensive and damaging to her reputation,” the question from my point of view is about whether or not a major university press will stand by its authors or not. After all, you read and accepted Professor Afzal-Khan’s manuscript; published her book; and were, I suppose, happy to find out that the book has been well received by both academics and scholars.
