Children of Dust

"I like Children of Dust because I think it is authentic. I think what we see so much with these immigrant stories coming out of Pakistan are these very basic narratives of third world meets the big city and the big continent. There is a crisis of identity and a questioning of their upbringing and then they come back and are completely destroyed as a human being! And that for me is a very one-dimensional way of writing about this experience. So what I like about this book is that it is an incredibly brave story of that journey. Here is a young man who was brought up in a conservative environment where he attended a madrassa in rural Pakistan and spent his days memorising the Koran and enduring harsh beatings for his mistakes. Then he goes to America and, as one of the reviews put it, there is this amazing sense of religious whiplash. And what I like is that he isn’t afraid to talk about these issues, the sense of shame about what it means to be a Muslim in a foreign country, because he ended up being relocated to Alabama during his adolescence. He is good at describing this complicated journey and, unlike these obnoxiously popular novels that attempt to condense a migrant’s experience in 150 pages, he really gives you an insight into this world of conservatism. But it is also about resistance to a system and the evolution that he goes through. But that doesn’t mean he has to be one or the other. He is not a rabid fundamentalist or a liberated Westerner. It is about that space in between that he has to traverse through this journey. Many of us living here think one of the problems with Pakistan is that our history is written for us by foreigners. If you go to any library and look at any history books on Pakistan, or any political books, they all seem to be written by outsiders, by middle-aged white men. And what is so important about Eteraz is that he is perfectly well placed – much more so than a foreign correspondent who has spent two summers in Pakistan – to talk about issues like fundamentalism and disillusionment, and he is able to discuss this evolving religious language that we now use when speaking about Pakistan. We are a country that allows foreigners to speak for us and these are two very important books written by our own."