psychoraag
reviews

Suhayl Saadi - Life of creative tension
By Asif Farrukhi (DAWN)

April 29, 2004 is the publication date for Psychoraag, the first novel by Glasgow-based author Suhayl Saadi, and by all accounts this marks the debut of a novelist well worth watching out for. Already the novel and its author are being talked and written about with a high degree of praise. The publishers are reported to be very excited by this book, described as "one of the most important releases for Scotland this year". He is being heralded as Scotland's answer to Monica Ali and Hanif Kureishi - British writers drawing inspiration from their Asian roots and gathering acclaim for their modern portraits of metropolitan life. Sheena McKay ushers in the writer as "a unique voice in Scottish literature". Scottish certainly but also Pakistani, very Pakistani!

I first heard of Suhayl Saadi a couple of years back when I was working on an anthology of English writers from Pakistan and was scouting around for new voices, specially from those living and publishing outside Pakistan. Suhayl Saadi's name and contact number were passed on to me by the London-based fiction writer Aamer Hussein.

Over the years I have learnt that Aamer's recommendations are not to be taken lightly. I started looking through printouts of the first few stories I could access and immediately realized that here was real writing, not the pre-packaged "multicultural" stuff which so many people are dabbling in to these days. By the time I finished reading The Burning Mirror, his book of short stories, I realized that here was an important voice of fiction and it was with this sense of discovery that I selected two of his short stories for the special issue of Pakistani Literature.

I was impressed by the stories which drew upon the experience of mysticism and the powerful narrative stories. Stories with the high Scottish accent may have won awards but I keep on thinking that if I could manage so much Scottish vocabulary, I would have been reading Hugh Macdiarmid. Perhaps some Scottish reader must be feeling the same in reverse with the overtly Pakistani bits in the novel.

Suhayl Saadi was recently in Pakistan and gave readings from his work in Islamabad and Lahore while a Karachi reading could not materialize. In Lahore, he attended the Saarc Writers Conference. The busy schedule of the conference allowed only snatches of conversation in between sessions. He had with him the uncorrected bound proofs and he kindly left one behind so that I could read it. The first few pages and you get the feeling of a window opening to let in a draught. A powerful and vivid style comes through:

"For a long time, he had wished that he was white. The aspiration of all good Asians, finally, was to be as pale as possible. To marry white, to generate white and to strive incessantly for depigmentation. It wasn't that he had wanted to become a true Scot or a real Englishman - whatever the hell those things were - but, rather, that he had aimed at some elusive quality of whiteness which probably had never really existed but which was all the more prized because of that. His image had chased him repeatedly through the days and the years until, finally, inevitably, it had always caught up with him and, every time it did, his eyes would be transfixed by the alien face in the mirror and he would die again."

The Scottish voice is unmistakable and characteristic:

"Namaste ji, salam alaikum, sat sri akaal, welcome tae The Junoon Show. Ah'm Zaf - zed ayy eff - an yer listenin tae Radio Chaandnii oan wavelength 99.9 metres frequency modulation. It's hauf past midnight an we're getting intae the groove! W hativir groove yer in, Ah'm in there wi ye. Whit a thought, eh? So switch aff yer mobiles, prick up yer ears - don't misquote me now - an get readsy to swoon an sigh."

This is the voice of an Asian DJ and it hosts the six broadcast hours, which make up the action of the novel. Zaf is the raga-rock DJ who finds the ghosts of his - and his family's - past catching up with him during his last night on air. For some strange reason, perhaps it's the rain or maybe it's a sense of freedom at the end of his assignment, Zaf decides that instead of the usual requests, he will play the songs his parents listened to in Pakistan; the pop records which became the soundtrack to his love affairs; the backing music to all his hopes and fears.

As the boundaries between Zaf's memories and his spoken broadcast begin to dissolve, a fascinating and compelling story begins to emerge. It takes you back to his parents' turbulent past in Pakistan and out on to the streets of Glasgow, where the disillusionment of the Asian community threatens to erupt into violence and heroin is the panacea for unfulfilled lives.

Music plays a fascinating part in the whole novel. Drawing deeper and deeper into the Scots-Asian world of Zaf and the other inhabitants of the Radio Chaandnii world, the author Saadi blends rhythm and language, the mythical and the everyday; the real and the surreal; the past and the present. It is described as "a ferocious, psychedelic rock song. A breathy Urdu ghazal. A bloody Caledonian lament." No wonder that Alan Taylor has described it as "a wonderfully audacious, linguistically elastic, verbally inventive, joyously irreverent work of literature".

Saadi has to his credit plays, poems and translations. His work ranges from plays commissioned for the stage and the radio to some naughty stuff done under a pseudonym. He is conscious of the diverse elements that have contributed to his making as a writer. Suhayl Saadi was born in Beverley, Yorkshire, in 1961. Alan Taylor in the Sunday Herald entitled "Fable bodied" describes his parents as having met while working in a refugee camp in Lahore in 1947. His father came to Britain in 1955 to "enhance his qualifications".

"They always intended to go back but never did. In the late sixties they decided they'd stay. They got enmeshed in the life here," he explains. For himself, Saadi wanted to be a musician but realized that "I was crap". He graduated in medicine from Glasgow in 1985. "There is a long and distinguished line of doctors who have become great writers, including Conan Doyle, Chekhov, Mikhail Bulgakov and William Carlos Williams. Doctors have privileged access to people. They see us into the world and out of it. But they must also be careful not to abuse trust. Patients are not a stock of characters but real people who deserve to be treated with respect. Codes of practice must be observed. In any case," as Saadi acknowledges, "writing is much more than simply reflecting life in the raw.

"It is how you model your experience into art that matters." Saadi would be closer in spirit to the distinguished line of writer-physicians from this part of the world, ranging from Shafiq ur Rehman and Hassan Manzar to Enver Sajjad and Anwer Zahidi.

He is equally clear about the Scottish definition. His is a case of plural identity and Taylor contextualizes this:

"Saadi once attempted to list all of his constituent parts - English, British, Pakistani, Indian, Afghan, black-ish, Glaswegian, middle-class, physician, music-loving, Left-leaning are just a few he came up with - but soon ran out of space and time and ink."

He is also fully conscious of the sense of the author's "responsibility" emanating from the book's "ethnic" flavour and status:

"That is a creative tension, yes. There is a tension between a freewheeling artist tapping into the mytho-poetic tradition in an uncensored way, and also representing a minority community which is often presented in stereotypical ways, and also the role of a kind of artistic ambassador, which will be foisted on you regardless. You have to deal with that more than the majority ethnic societies ever do."

Suhayl Saadi is being described as one of the finest young writers to emerge from Scotland. Pakistan is intertwined with his Scottish identity. According to Saadi, "Scottishness becomes a metaphor through which I perceive things. The ends of twigs catch in the stream."

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