On Desire, Ambition, and Complex Female Narrators: A Conversation with Novelist Dur e Aziz Amna

In Dur e Aziz Amna’s debut novel American Fever, Hira, the sixteen-year-old female protagonist, has no second thoughts when her mother asks her, “If you could be anyone in the world, who would you be?”

“A Pakistani man,” she replies.

This terse exchange had a spectral presence in my mind as I read A Splintering, Amna’s second novel, which tells the story of Tara, a young woman who dreams of leaving the squalor and claustrophobia of her small town in Punjab, Pakistan and her brother’s oppressive gaze. An arranged marriage to an accountant in the city is her ticket to a prosperous life in a glittering metropolis but she soon realises that her ambitions reach far beyond the modest comforts of middle-class existence. The kinetic novel traces how far Tara is willing to go in pursuit of the life she desires after she arrives in Rawalpindi at the turn of the century.

Tara is the kind of protagonist I cannot get enough of: a woman who doesn’t cloak her envy; a woman who is unapologetic about her desire for more and who has little qualms about exercising her agency in morally ambiguous ways. This is a novel preoccupied with female desire and how it is shaped by class and inequality. This is not desire that attaches itself to a person but rather capital in its many forms – financial, sexual, and social. Amna crafts Tara as a character who defies any sort of binary of heroism or victimhood. In her I see the many women in South Asia who are shaking the patriarchal structures of exclusion and censure not necessarily by protesting on the streets but by renegotiating the rules within their marriages and relationships. The realm of familial relations can be a vital site of resistance – where aspirations, power dynamics and biases are revealed and challenged often with disastrous consequences. I have rarely seen these ideas tackled with such precision and sensitivity in English-language fiction from Pakistan as they are in A Splintering.

As established in American Fever, Amna is a gifted storyteller of the worlds she knows intimately –whether the experience of emigration from the East to West or from the periphery to the centre within a nation. The novel’s power lies in holding open two perspectives at once: on the one hand, the social milieu that gives rise to a woman like Tara; on the other, the narrator’s inner monologue simmering in candour, imagination, and ambition. The propulsive pacing gives the novel a back and forward movement, from long shot to close-up, while also representing the intensity of the textures of living contained within the frame of history, social change and class mobility across two decades in Pakistan.

Amna and I spoke a few weeks ahead of A Splintering’s publication in the UK about desire, rage, and writing complex female narrators.

Rida Bilgrami: Let’s begin with the narrator Tara who has an electrifying presence on each page. Her dogged determination to transcend the material realities of where she grows up and the strictures of a misogynistic society make her a riveting character. How did she arrive for you?

Dure Aziz Amna: I have a specific memory of how she arrived. I was walking in New York with my husband past these beautiful townhouses in the West Village, and the curtains were pulled back so we could see the lamps and the art on the walls. I remember saying to my husband, what would I give for an apartment like that? And he said, well, what would you give? We started a thought experiment of what our limits are. What would we do to achieve the level of wealth required to live this way? That is how I envisioned a character who would stop at nothing, not only wealth, but also class and power and all these other things that she is desperately craving.

RB: Did she come to you fully formed or did you figure her out on the page?

DA: My first novel American Fever was fairly autobiographical, and the protagonist was more or less my age. With the second novel, I intentionally wanted to go back a generation and write about someone who would be around my mother’s generation. The very initial draft had her as a news presenter on state television because I was thinking of someone who moves from the village to the city and is trying to be part of the professional class, but I decided against that choice of profession based on research and speaking to women who had been news presenters – the realities of their life deviated from the story I wanted to tell.

I’ve spoken with a couple of other writers from Pakistan and we’re all confronting the fact that it is only in the last two or three decades that so many women joined the workforce and began participating in public life and how that shaped society at large. I was interested in situating the novel within this context, and then I had this idea of a woman who would stop at nothing to get rich.

RB: You have stated in your Substack newsletter that you are drawn to a certain milieu of European postwar writers— Elena Ferrante, Annie Ernaux, Jenny Erpenbeck – who were describing the shift from scarcity to abundance, the movement of provincials into the cities, and how that transformed women’s place in society. What did you glean from these writers in how you wanted to tell Tara’s story set within the socio-political context of Pakistan?

DA: The first writer that crossed my mind was Ferrante. The Neapolitan Quartet is her most politically attuned work. When I read it, I remember feeling like what she was doing was almost magical – how she weaves in the discussion on socialism and fascism but what really pulls the reader in is still the interior lives of the two girls. It wasn’t as if these were privileged armchair conversations about the world. Their lives were unfolding as a result of their socio-political context.

I wanted to see how I could pull this off in a Pakistani setting. Pakistan is a very young country, a fledgling democracy and the 1990s especially were a fascinating time because in the West that’s known as the end of history – referring to how ideological battles between the US and USSR were over, and that western liberal democracy had triumphed. But the ’90s in Pakistan were a period of immense flux politically and socially that had a profound impact on how society evolved. At the same time, I didn’t want to be didactic. I didn’t want someone to reach out for the novel only to learn about the history of Pakistan.

RB: Speaking of Ferrante, I am reminded of how her exploration of corrupt, impoverished, postwar Neapolitan life is infused with a decidedly feminine rage. In the opening paragraphs of A Splintering Tara says: ‘So, let my story begin with rage’. I’m interested in how you decided on the tenor of feminine rage and obsession when writing this novel?

DA: I tend to think of the trauma plot as a weak narrative tool where every single flaw that a character has can be traced back to a very primal trauma that they had as a child or as an adolescent. I wanted to avoid that, so I was treading a fine line because a large part of who Tara is can be attributed to her brother’s cruelties towards her as a child and as a young woman, but I also didn’t want to absolve Tara of her own responsibility as a pretty crappy person. There is a lot that is justified in her rage, but she does have agency, and she ends up exercising it.

RB: As the reader we get to be privy to the darkness of Tara’s interior thoughts, which gives her immense complexity. It did make me wonder – both of your books are told from the point of view of female narrators who can be seen as acerbic. Are you ever concerned about writing so-called “unlikeable” women characters, a term that is often used to describe protagonists who act in ways that subvert normative expectations of womanhood?

DA: Ultimately it is up to the reader how they perceive my characters, but I have so many sympathies towards Tara, which is why I think I’m caught a little off guard when people call her unlikeable. The rage that I see in Tara or the questions that she puts forward reflects what I’ve observed in women around me my entire life. I have felt the vigour of the aspiration to materially change your life. My family made the move from the village to the city and they were cognizant that unless you work very hard, you’re not going to make it in the city because there is no generational wealth to fall back on. I was thinking the other day about Tony Soprano who is extremely unlikeable, yet a beloved male antihero. Unlikeable male characters can still be loveable. Conversely, it’s very hard to love an unlikeable woman and I don’t know if there is a reason for that beyond misogyny. It is just very hard to get the audience or a reader to root for a woman who is flawed.

RB: Early on in the narrative we are introduced to Mazinagar, the place Tara grows up in, which is somewhere in Northern Punjab, Pakistan. It didn’t strike me immediately, but I realised a few chapters in that the name literally translates as ‘town of the past’ in Urdu. Can you say more about why you chose a fictional name and how you characterised the kind of place that created a woman like Tara?

DA: Originally, I had considered choosing the name of an actual place in Pakistan. However, I decided against it since Tara’s feelings towards the place are so virulent I didn’t want any one place to get all the blame. It felt unfair to name a specific place and then have her denigrate it so much when most readers would not know anything about that place to begin with. The other reason was because so much of it is non-descript. Mazinagar can be a stand in for so many small towns in that area. There would be differences from other small villages in other parts of the country but overall, it just stands in as this place of limitations that Tara wishes desperately to escape and a place that continues to haunt her for the duration of the novel.

RB: Your book is set in a pivotal moment in Pakistan’s history – a military dictatorship, the 2005 earthquake that claimed thousands of lives, and the American War on Terror. Echoes from that time period in history still feel exceedingly present in Pakistan today. What drew you to this as the setting for your book?

DA: I don’t know if I chose any other two decades in Pakistan’s history if it would have been much calmer at that time! Part of the reason for choosing it is because these are mostly events that I have lived through. For example, I vividly remember the earthquake and its devastating effects. The novel is bookended by two deaths of political leaders. I don’t want to say much further without giving away the plot but there were some parallels there and a sort of neatness to that being the time frame of the novel.

RB: A Splintering pays a lot of attention to power, inequality and class. Tara’s marriage to a middle-class accountant doesn’t fulfil her ambitions. Later in the novel when one of Tara’s clients and lover tells her the middle place is where creativity and ambition die. How did you decide to approach these topics?

DA: The initial opening passage I wrote was much more focused on class and envy. However, I got feedback from my agent, and my editor that it didn’t work too well at the beginning. I then decided to open with her swelling with rage at seeing all these people who are richer and feeling a deep sense of unfairness because it felt like it was a more universal sentiment. This idea of class envy and rising extreme wealth inequality is all around us. Television shows about the exploits of the ultra-wealthy such as The White Lotus and Succession are incredibly popular. In the U.S. working people now know that it is a fallacy that if you work hard enough, you’ll achieve a decent standard of living.

In Tara I intentionally wanted to create a character who is unstoppable in her desires and part of that is also having a lot of blind spots. Her husband is a lot more attuned to the larger socio-political context. He knows what wealth inequality does to cities but when he talks about it, she shuts him down. She is not politically liberal or a socialist by any means and there is a lot she chooses not to see because she’s so blinded by her desire for economic prosperity and doing whatever it takes to achieve it.

RB: You’ve written extensively about your relationship to language and growing up speaking and understanding multiple languages. Your characters are also inhabiting multi-lingual spaces – Potohari, Punjabi, Urdu, English. How does this inform how you write dialogue?

DA: With American Fever I was a lot more aware of that. I would intentionally think if a character is speaking Urdu, am I keeping that cadence in English?

In The Splintering Tara is a character who doesn’t have a lot of pride in her own language and in her own history. She’s trying to shed the baggage of where she comes from in order to get ahead. She’s not invested in preserving culture and history for her children, so it didn’t make sense for this character to be invested in her dialect. Furthermore, as a writer I also got tired of having to do constant justice to everything that exists within me. When I started writing A Splintering, my goal was to have not a single non-English word in there. I don’t think I was able to fulfil that because there were a couple of words (such as dupatta and charpai) where it just would have been very awkward to translate.

RB: I was reading an interview with the novelist Devika Rege, author of Quarterlife, where reflecting on the task of the novel she says that for great novels of any era, an attribute that cuts across is their ability to observe human motivation in their times with exceptional clarity. I think A Splintering is a great illustration of that. You have written short stories and essays, also dabbled in translation and now written two novels. What does the novel form enable for you as a writer?

DA: It is true I have worked around with a few genres, and for a long time I was convinced that non-fiction would be where I would stay long term. I’m less sure of that because the novel does attract me more and more now for the reason that it enables you to develop characters – this is unparalleled across genres. However, the lines between fiction and non-fiction are often blurry. A lot of great non-fiction works can often have the characteristics of a novel. Recently, I’ve been enjoying the work of Patrick Radden Keefe. His book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2018) is meticulously researched with many pages of footnotes, but the rigour doesn’t take away from its narrative power – it reads like a novel. And so, again, that can also get to character. The other reason fiction appeals to me is how you can approach the passage of time.

RB: My final question is a little playful. I could see A Splintering adapted into a teleseries or a film. Who would you like to play the role of Tara?

DA: Tabu (The Namesake, A Suitable Boy) – she is quite canonical for those of us who grew up watching her in Hindi cinema or Sobhita Dhulipala who plays Tara Khanna in the Amazon web series Made in Heaven and whose characterisation is also somewhat similar to Tara in A Splintering.

Rida Bilgrami is a writer based in London. Her work spans poetry, essays and reported features with a focus on travel, books, visual culture and cities. Read more of Rida’s work on Something Curated here.

Header photograph and portrait by Nelson Pinheiro.