Love Is a Battlefield

Although this is a bold statement to make, I will go ahead and make it: Fawzia Afzal-Khan is one of the most overlooked creative nonfiction writers of our time. She has a linguistic gift that gives her prose a weight and depth that appear effortless yet is painstaking in its profundity. Lahore with Love: Growing Up With Girlfriends Pakistani Style is the story of Afzal-Khan’s life through the lens of her female friendships. It is also an emotional narrative of the growth of a fraught nation, and the intimate impact it has had on relationships teeming with both love and tragedy.

I was introduced to Afzal-Khan’s work in early 2003 when she sent me an essay that is now a chapter in this collection entitled “Hajira.” At the time, I was the editor of a small social justice magazine that sought creative submissions for its premiere issue. We were seeking groundbreaking work, and Afzal-Khan’s easily fit the bill. Her beautifully crafted story of a woman who chose to forgo her own success in order to support the career of her stifling husband blew me away in the same way Hajira’s self-inflicted bullet snuffed out her brief yet impactful existence. With stinging eyes, I accepted the submission posthaste and kept a lookout for more of her meaningful work.

Until now, Afzal-Khan’s writing has been found only in small doses — a response to Salman Rushdie’s erasure of Muslim feminist voices here, a meditation on the Swat valley there — with the exception of her scholarly work, which appears in numerous academic journals. (Afzal-Khan is a university professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey.) She even gave a glimpse of what was to come in her contribution, “Bloody Monday,” to 2008’s And Then the World Changed. But the scattershot pieces were not enough to satiate my appetite for the loveliness of her words or the personal way in which she writes the people (and country) she holds so dear. Lahore With Love has made up for lost time with inspired provision in excess.

A comfortable chair and request to remain undisturbed are required additions to this 145-page memoir, which will slide by all too quickly and beg to be returned to again and again. Consider Afzal-Khan's writings when you read the news stories of Pakistani women who are literally fighting for their lives in the face of social, political, and economic hardships that are made more complicated and devastating by the recent floods. Let her paint you a picture of her girlfriends' lives, and perhaps you will see a few familiar slivers in your own.

Photo credit: Kashif Mardani