A daughter’s song - Fatima Bhutto

[fawwaxs]

Halfway through her recently released memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword, Fatima Bhutto asks, ‘Why was everything in this family so complicated? Why was it so ugly, so violent?’ The same questions can be asked of the reaction to her book, which in Pakistan has comprised condemnations and refutations of the facts she presents.

Indeed, rarely has a book received more attention in the news and op-ed sections of papers than on the literary pages.

Songs is a first-person narrative that aims to memorialise Murtaza Bhutto’s life. To that end, it traces three generations of the Bhutto family and in broad brushstrokes recounts the political history of Pakistan from the late 1960s to the present.

Primarily a daughter’s attempt to piece together her late father’s tumultuous life, the book has earned criticism for stirring controversy on several counts: the claim that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto asked his sons to avenge his death; the assertion that Murtaza played the role of mediator, not instigator, during the 1981 hijacking of a PIA plane by the Al-Zulfikar Organisation (AZO); and the implication that Benazir Bhutto may have been complicit in her younger brother Shahnawaz’s death.

Speaking at the Asia House Festival of Asian Literature in London, Bhutto stood by her claims, insisting that all the details and anecdotes in the book have been cross-checked and double-checked over the six years it took her to complete the effort.

Rather than engage her critics, she pointed them to the 15 pages of sources listed at the end of Songs and told her audience that those speaking out against the work were ‘cronies’ who had benefited immensely from the governments of Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari. ‘The reaction to the book has been violent and angry,’ said Bhutto, ‘and it has changed my life in terms of my security and access to my country.’

What is not being said, however, is that Songs is a historical account of the Bhuttos, and that history is a necessarily interpretive act. Historical tomes posing as objective retellings of ‘the Truth’ have always been saddled with biases, presumptions, and preconceived notions.

In the case of Songs, those biases are laid bare. The book is subtitiled ‘A Daughter’s Memoir,’ and through most of the narrative Murtaza is referred to as ‘Papa.’ It should come as no surprise, then, that Bhutto’s narrative is sympathetic to her father’s experience and critical of her aunt Benazir and Zardari, who she has long held responsible for her father’s death.

Armed with this knowledge, any astute reader can enjoy Songs for the unique peek into the lives, loves, letters, notebooks, and photographs of the Bhuttos that it offers. Speaking at the Asia House, Bhutto said that she finds it difficult to refer to 70 Clifton as ‘home’, ‘because it is bigger than a home. It’s a monument in which generations [of Bhuttos] have lived, worked, and suffered. There are remnants of the confusing and difficult history of the family all around.’

In essence, Songs throws open the Bhutto family archives stored at 70 Clifton, and emerges eminently readable because it treats the Bhuttos as people rather than political figures. Readers get a sense of Zulfikar the patriarch, hell-bent on educating and grooming his children; of Benazir’s girlishness as a teenager who read Mills and Boon and coveted Versailles; of Benazir and Murtaza’s time at Harvard; of Murtaza’s unflagging sense of humour, whether organising resistance in Kabul or imprisoned in Karachi; of the Bhutto brothers’ romantic nature as they courted different women (the love story between Murtaza and his Greek girlfriend Della is, in turns, charming and tormented); of the tedium of exile for AZO members, forced indoors after curfew was imposed in Kabul with no one to talk to except the telephone operators; and, of course, of Murtaza’s unflagging paternalism.

Bhutto also captures the dark side and emotional toll of being a Bhutto: There are descriptions of how the family communicated through smuggled notes and whispered messages in the late 1970s, and how political machinations came to replace familial bonding by the 1990s. We learn that Murtaza slept on the floor for weeks after his father was hanged, and hear morbid accounts of how the brothers kept vials of poison with them, which they were to take if apprehended by Ziaul Haq’s agents.

The retellings of the deaths of Zulfikar, Shahnawaz, Murtaza, and Benazir are all shocking and moving, with a focus on the human aspect which has long been buried beneath the fear, cynicism, suspicion and politicking that defined the events. Bhutto recreates Nusrat Bhutto’s distraught reaction to news of her youngest son’s death, and recalls how her mother, Ghinwa, wept at her husband’s blood-soaked deathbed.

That said, some sections of the book are too self-indulgent, painstakingly providing descriptions of things that only a grieving daughter would find interesting. For example, Bhutto not only recounts Murtaza’s habit of collecting newspaper clippings about his father, but also describes the Hamdam Book Binding Works notebook in which he pasted them. She also wastes pages recounting interviews that add nothing to her narrative about her father’s life — Samuel Huntington, for instance, is quoted saying he remembers little of Murtaza at college.

On the controversial point of the PIA plane hijacking, too, Bhutto falls short. Her account relies solely on interviews with two people: Suhail Sethi, Murtaza’s closest friend, and Dr Ghulam Husain, a former secretary-general of the PPP who was one of the political prisoners released as a result of the hijacking. The fastidious footnotes and citations from newspaper articles and other histories are missing in this case.

Explaining why she wrote the book, Bhutto told the Asia House gathering that she doesn’t believe in the ‘Bhutto curse.’ ‘I don’t believe that we’re fated for violent deaths, we need to examine why [each of the Bhuttos] died, and learn from it… The nature of politics is transformative, and it doesn’t leave anyone immune.’ Her point was that the actions and choices of all the Bhuttos — including Zulfikar and her father — should be analysed and debated to better understand Pakistan’s political history.

For all its flaws and controversies, Songs — despite the tenor of its title — could help debate triumph over death, and demonstrate that the pen could emerge as a mightier force than the sword in Pakistan’s brutal and bloody political history.