Songs of Blood and Sword

"This, again, is a book written from the inside about a family, in this case the Bhutto family. Fatima is Benazir Bhutto’s niece. Both her father and her uncle were killed. What I like about the book is that, again, it’s very well written. It is unflinching in terms of exploring the family dynamic. At the same time, it really gives you an insider’s perspective on, in this case, a very feudal family – how the family really rule the country. Fatima is very young. She’s a very courageous woman, to write this book. In both these books – Dear to Behold and Songs of Blood and Sword – what you come away with is the complexity of the family dynamics and how women are placed within that. How they exert their authority and the psychosocial dynamic of how women function in that system come through very well. On the one hand, it’s clear the Bhutto family is a very privileged one, educated and westernised – including Fatima herself. She is a very privileged person, actually. On the other hand, it’s also extremely feudal. It describes that westernised, localised feudal family setting within which women leaders emerge. She describes this idea of the act of remembering and of making sure you don’t make the same mistakes again. She describes when they go to a party at a hotel for her father’s birthday. And in the guestbook, they see the signature of another VIP, and that VIP happens to be Zia al-Haq, the man who killed Fatima’s grandfather. And then later her father gets this phone call [which ends up leading to his own murder]. It gave me this chilling sensation. The other thing she describes is the aunt that she loved, Benazir, who also gets killed, the mixed emotions she has about that."