The New York Times

Bina Shah

Bina Shah became a contributing opinion writer for The International New York Times in the fall of 2013. Ms. Shah is a fiction writer and journalist in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the author of four novels — “Where They Dream in Blue,” “The 786 Cybercafe,” “Slum Child” and “A Season for Martyrs” — and two collections of short stories. Her work has been published in English, Spanish, German, Chinese, Vietnamese, Urdu, Sindhi and Italian. She writes a monthly column for Dawn, the largest English-language newspaper in Pakistan, and a blog, 21st Century Woman. She has contributed essays to The Guardian, The Independent, the literary magazines Granta and Wasafiri, and the journal Critical Muslim.

 

 

 

 

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A ‘Homeland’ We Pakistanis Don’t Recognize

 

 

By

BINA SHAH

 KARACHI, Pakistan — When I heard that the fourth season of Showtime’s “Homeland” would be set in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I awaited its season premiere with anticipation and trepidation. A major American television show would be portraying events set in my country, but I knew those events would be linked to the only thing that seems to interest the world’s eye: terrorism and how Islamist extremism affects Americans and the West.
   As advertising for the season premiere was heating up, a short essay by an American writer and activist, Laura Durkay, appeared on The Washington Post’s website under the headline “Homeland Is the Most Bigoted Show on Television.” Ms. Durkay wrote, “The entire structure of ‘Homeland’ is built on mashing together every manifestation of political Islam, Arabs, Muslims and the whole Middle East into a Frankenstein-monster global terrorist threat that simply doesn’t exist.”
   The show’s reputation along those lines had kept me away, even as I longed to examine Claire Danes’s portrayal of Carrie Mathison as a conflicted C.I.A. agent immersed in a male-dominated world, and engaging with Middle Eastern and Muslim characters. How could the show’s creators have dreamed up such a complex protagonist, while depicting the sociopolitical milieu in which so many of its characters exist with so little nuance?
   Yes, Hollywood isn’t known for historical accuracy or impartial portrayals of any fictionalized “other.” But I still couldn’t resist trying to see what Pakistan, my homeland, looked like through its eyes. I’m a writer of fiction, so I know about imagined worlds. You look not for complete truthfulness, but for verisimilitude — the “appearance of being true” — so it can give your art authenticity, credibility, believability. And we in Pakistan long to be seen with a vision that at least approaches the truth.
   Pakistan has long been said to have an image problem, a kind way to say that the world sees us one-dimensionally — as a country of terrorists and extremists, conservatives who enslave women and stone them to death, and tricky scoundrels who hate Americans and lie pathologically to our supposed allies. In Pakistan, we’ve long attributed the ubiquity of these images to what we believe is biased journalism, originating among mainstream American journalists who care little for depth and accuracy. By the time these tropes filter down into popular culture, and have morphed into the imaginings of showbiz writers, we’ve gone from an image problem to the realm of Jungian archetypes and haunting traumatized psyches.
   Whenever a Western movie contains a connection to Pakistan, we watch it in a sadomasochistic way, eager and nervous to see how the West observes us. We look to see if we come across to you as monsters, and then to see what our new, monstrous face looks like. Again and again, we see a refracted, distorted image of our homeland staring back at us. We know we have monsters among us, but this isn’t what we look like to ourselves.
   There have been previous international attempts to portray Pakistan on film: “A Mighty Heart,” about the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl; or “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the assassination of Osama bin Laden. The Pearl film was shot largely in India, with some scenes in Pakistan; the Bin Laden film was shot in Jordan and India; in these and other films, streets and shops in India were given nominal Pakistani makeovers, and Indian actors were hired to pass as Pakistanis. In them, I have seen India’s signature homemade Ambassador cars traveling down Pakistani streets; actors who play tribal Pashtuns but look Bihari; Western women wearing chadors where they don’t have to, or going around bareheaded when they should be covered.
   In the season premiere of “Homeland,” Carrie Mathison orders an airstrike on a terrorist compound in a Pakistani tribal area bordering Afghanistan. It is utterly surreal for a Pakistani to watch a fictional imagining of the dreaded strike from the viewpoint of the person ordering it in an American control room: the disconnection, the studied casualness, the presenting of a birthday cake afterward. It’s not clear who the monsters are in this scene, even before it’s revealed that the strike hit a wedding party, killing women and children. It’s a moment of obvious reversal, but also of nuance, when I wasn’t expecting it.
   Still, the season’s first hour, in which Carrie also goes to Islamabad, offers up a hundred little clues that tell me this isn’t the country where I grew up, or live. When a tribal boy examines the dead in his village, I hear everyone speaking Urdu, not the region’s Pashto. Protesters gather across from the American Embassy in Islamabad, when in reality the embassy is hidden inside a diplomatic enclave to which public access is extremely limited. I find out later that the season was filmed in Cape Town, South Africa, with its Indian Muslim community standing in for Pakistanis.
   I realize afterward that I’ve been creating a test, for the creators of “Homeland” and all who would sell an imagined image of Pakistan: If this isn’t really Pakistan, and these aren’t really Pakistanis, then how they see us isn’t really true.
   A verse in the Quran says, “Behold, we have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another.” Even after everything that’s happened between us, we in Pakistan still want you to know us, not as you imagine us, but as we really are: flawed, struggling, complex, human. All of us, in the outside world as well as in Pakistan, need art — film and television, story and song — that closes that gap between representation and reality, instead of prying the two further apart.
     Bina Shah  is the author of several novels, including “Slum Child,” and short-story collections.  ■

PUBLISHED OCTOBER 15, 2014