A Writer’s Delicate Hope for His Native Pakistan

On a day when the world was watching Pakistan to see how effectively its leaders would support America’s effort to bring Osama bin Laden and the Taliban to heel, Pakistan’s leading dissident playwright was veering along the Pacific Coast Highway in a beat-up Volvo, singing his version of “Mack the Knife” in Punjabi. It was the only lighthearted interlude as Shahid Nadeem talked about the complexities of a region whose fate has become violently bound with that of the United States. He expressed his hopes that the military leaders who run his homeland will seize the moment to suppress Islamic militants whose threat to stability there has escalated into a global nightmare.

“There will be a very heavy price to pay if the United States uses Pakistan to wage war against Afghanistan, but it may be a chance for a new start for the country,” said Nadeem, who has also worked as a TV director, journalist and human rights activist.He is in Los Angeles for an eight-month residency sponsored by the Getty Research Institute and other organizations. He stands at the crossroads of art and politics, but he never planned to be judging the prospect of a Pakistan asked to join an American war. He worries about a backlash in the Arab world but has anxiously concluded that “if they do it the right way--not over a long time, not reckless, to get rid of these people and get out--it will help.”

The Taliban has influence on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border and intimidates more moderate elements of the population in Pakistan, Nadeem said. “But Islamic people must not be humiliated by a prolonged war that forces them to absorb images of cities filled with other Islamic people being destroyed. We must feel as if the U.S. understands that a Muslim life has as much value as any other life. If they can manage to convey that, yet still get rid of Bin Laden, many people in the region will be happy about it. It will be hard.”

Nadeem is no messenger of easy hope. In work that has been performed widely in Asia and Great Britain, he gives a frank yet sympathetic view of life and politics in Pakistan. His play “The Third Knock” received a staged reading in English (Nadeem writes in Punjabi) on Monday night in Santa Monica. In simple, poetic language, it uses tenant-landlord relations as a metaphor for conflict between those who have power and those who don’t. One character, driven mad by his poverty, sings a well-known patriotic song that takes on the quality of a madman’s confused aria:

“Come Children, let us go on a tour of Pakistan

The land for which we sacrificed a million lives

Come children, come sparrows, come little birds

Let us tour Pakistan.”

Nadeem uses theater to fight fundamentalism and encourage women’s rights and democratic ideas in a society that has been ruled by military leaders for more than half of its life, since being partitioned from India when India won its independence in 1947. He has been here for five months as the recipient of a Feuchtwanger Fellowship, awarded to writers forced to live in exile or who suffer oppression in their home countries. (Nadeem has been jailed for his work three times.) The fellowship is co-sponsored by the Villa Aurora in the Pacific Palisades, Getty Research Institute, the 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica and the PEN Center USA West/Freedom-to-Write Program.

The Villa Aurora was the home of the German emigre novelist Lion Feuchtwanger after he fled Nazi Germany during World War II and now houses a cultural foundation. A large, airy house in the Spanish Revival style, it is where Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann and other emigres regularly met to talk about writing and politics.

It is where, once the Nadeem steered us there in his Volvo, we talked about the same subjects under the shadow of current events.

Nadeem, born the year Pakistan was created, says his is a desperately poor country. “It has a weak economy, a weak state apparatus,” he said. He believes the country’s fragile hold on social progress could be helped by an improved Pakistani-U.S. relationship spurred by a war on terrorism--but only if it extends to a broader commitment to improving economic and social conditions. “I hope Pakistan’s leaders will take this opportunity,” he said. “I urge them to do it for the sake of our people, for we must try to rid ourselves of these zealots. If they do use these events in such a way, we may find that it was worth it.”

But that is a lot of “ifs,” he admits. He described how the United States used Pakistan as a staging ground to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. “The Pakistani people had faith in the United States as a friend, as a protector. But then the U.S. essentially abandoned us.” To successfully fight terrorism, he said, a new phase of the relationship would have to fend off the demons of poverty and perpetual political disruption.

Nadeem and his wife are the founders of a theater group called Ajoka Theatre, which he describes as a “theater for social change.” It started in 1983, when the military dictatorship of Gen. Zia ul-Haq was at its oppressive height, and all forms of expression challenging the regime were outlawed. The troupe has continued to face the objections of government officials and nongovernmental fundamentalists, Nadeem says.

“We in Pakistan are threatened every day. Our theater group is one of the sufferers of these fundamentalist zealots. There is a section of the press, sometimes sustained campaigns, that work against us. They say that, in the interest of Islam, we should be stopped. They say that we are not patriotic, that we are immoral.”

The two greatest influences on his work have been Bertolt Brecht and the films of the great Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, both of whom used art to penetrate political and social realities.

The poetic naturalism of “The Third Knock” bore clear traces of both. Before a full house of about 80 people at the Highways Performance Space, Nadeem read a part in the drama, about a group of poor urban tenants on the day their landlord comes to evict them to build a hotel. They kill the landlord, but he returns. They must kill him repeatedly. Each time, they relive the fantasies of owning the building themselves. Each time, it is as if some terrible, fatalistic machinery is at work. Finally, they are caught and are taken away.

Leading an audience discussion after the performance, Nadeem said the landlord could represent all kinds of power that people dream of removing, only to experience their ultimate return.

“It seems as if you are saying there is no hope,” one audience member said to Nadeem. “I watch this play about Pakistan, and I wonder, is it really all so hopeless as you portray? Do you have any hope for the future?”

Nadeem seemed a bit sheepish, not quite ready to declare that her sense of his work was right.

“Well, yes,” he said. “There are these cycles in Pakistan. We have had hope so many times. Each time, we hear the oppressor is gone, and then the new one comes and turns out to be just as bad.”

An actor who played one of the tenants spoke up. “It may seem hopeless, the play, but just that there is a writer who is able to describe these things, I believe, there is hope in that.”

Nadeem sat listening as if he were interested in the possibility of hope but was not ready to put faith in it. A long discussion about the prospects of a war in the region ensued. All kinds of opinions--to bomb or not to bomb--were expressed. But Nadeem sat mostly silent now, a polite smile on his face, and the overwhelming sadness of his play’s portrayal of human individuality amid repetitive misery hung in the air like a fine gray dust.