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Aamer Hussein
A pioneering generation of English Writers of Pakistani
origin
Aamer Hussein was born and brought up in Karachi, Pakistan in
1955. His father, Ahmed Hussein settled in Karachi, his family home, after
completing his studies at Oxford and Aligarh in the early 1940s. He married
Sabiha Malik, Aamer Hussein's mother, in 1948.
This is a photograph of Aamer Hussein taken at a reading
of his second collection of short stories, This Other Salt.
View catalogue item
Photograph of Aamer Hussein,
1999
Hussein grew up bi-lingual amongst a privileged
English-speaking minority, and was educated at an international school.
Although he spoke his native Urdu growing up, Hussein's grandmother in India
refined his language skills. This augmented his appreciation of contemporary
Urdu literature. At fifteen years old, Hussein left Karachi and flew to London
via Bombay with his mother and sisters to join his father who had already moved
to Britain. Not having officially completed his secondary education, Hussein
spent his teenage years in London. He embraced three vividly different cultural
contexts, the upper class Karachi of his parents, the feudal India of his
maternal grandparents, and his own adopted London.
Aamer Hussein wrote this two-page autobiographical
commentary describing his childhood influences and the social environments of
his youth in Karachi and London. Hussein also speaks about recognising his
identity as an adult, his own cultural hybridity juxtaposed with a frequent
stranger-like feeling, which so often influences his writing.
View catalogue item
Autobiographical piece by Aamer Hussein,
circa 1993
Being culturally inquisitive by nature, it was not hard for
the young Hussein to find his feet in the multicultural metropolis. Hussein
left his undergraduate degree midway, and travelled to Italy and Spain,
learning three new languages in his early twenties before deciding to return to
higher education. After a short period working in the banking industry, Hussein
returned to his studies. He graduated from the School of Oriental and African
Studies at the University of London aged 25, having read Urdu, Persian, and
History.
This is one of two tailored versions of Aamer Hussein's
"The Colour of a Loved Person's Eyes". In the story, the narrator learns the
key to the relationship between his idealistic dashing aristocratic father and
his proud literary and widowed mother in pre-partition India, by interpreting
an Indian miniature painting by her.
View catalogue item
"The Colour of a Loved Person's Eyes" in
Critical Quarterly by Aamer Hussein, 1990
Upon graduating, Hussein began worked as a researcher on
films and television documentaries for several years before he began writing
short stories in earnest. At university, he had come to deepen his appreciation
of Urdu poetry and the ghazals of poets Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Mirza Ghalib. In
the mid-eighties, Hussein began to write and to attend writers' meetings and
readings in London where he observed the discussions, works, and testimony of
writers who were born abroad and who dealt with cultural alienation and
personal experiences in their fiction. These writers included the Egyptian-born
Ahdaf Soueif, Fadia Faqir from Jordan, Japan's Kazuo Ishiguro, and Indian born
Salman Rushdie. Hussein's stories were published in anthologies edited by
writers such as Merle Collins and Joan Riley.
Literary and environmental influences
During this period, the Asian Women Writers Collective, which
is also featured on SALIDAA's digital archive, encouraged new writing talents,
and published pioneering anthologies. Aamer Hussein was influenced and affected
by several authors; the Urdu fiction writer Ismat Chughtai, Egyptian Naguib
Mahfouz and the Indonesian Pramoedya Ananta Toer. He looked to these writers
for an echo of his own experiences. In an article he wrote for the literary
magazine, Wasafiri in 2002, Hussein said, "I suppose writers begin by reading
themselves into other people's stories, to locate their own home in the world
of fiction...many of my London stories, coming from lived experience, couldn't
have come from anywhere else...it's in London that I read the books I read, met
the people I met and found a corner to put it all down on paper".
Hussein describes himself as "a product of modern Asia, with
its Partition and post national squabbles" and "not a child of Empire or
English Literature" (Cactus Town, viii: 2002) and interprets his own cultural
identity as set within the Islamic world, along side European, Middle Eastern
and South Asian cultures. In light of this, Aamer Hussein's fiction focuses on
inter-cultural experiences, migrations, and relationships. As Muneeza Shamsie
states in her article "At The New Threshold", in Dawn, Pakistan's daily
broadsheet, (2000) about the new generation of English writers of Pakistani
origin, "All Pakistani English writers live between East and West, literally or
intellectually and express it through their work. This is most certainly true
of Aamer Hussein's prolific short stories".
Hussein’s Novels and Short Stories
Hussein's fiction focuses on, and brings together a myriad of
cross-cultural experiences, which all draw on his love for the cosmopolitan
nature of London. A number of recurring themes have evolved in his short
stories, including exile, alienation, and loss. Many of the human relationships
he depicts illustrate estranged loves, lost homelands and frustrated desires.
Hussein writes about the political upheavals, which have led to multiple
migrations, from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Using poetic language and
imagery, events such as the division of India and creation of Pakistan at
Partition in 1947, and that of Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1971, are told
through individual lives and their particular circumstances.
In 1986, Hussein began publishing his fiction and reviews in
arts journals such as Artrage and Bazaar. He completed his first collection of
short stories A Mirror to the Sun (Mantra Publishing), in 1990; however, it was
not published until the year 1993. Since then, Hussein has published three
further collections of short stories. This Other Salt (Saqi Books, 1999)
develops the predominant themes of betrayal, bereavement, exile, belonging, and
the role of the writer. Cactus Town and Other Stories, is a collection of
sixteen stories published by Oxford University Press in 2002. It includes an
introduction written by Pakistani editor and literary journalist, Muneeza
Shamsie, and four semi-autobiographical stories, which explore the question of
cultural hybridity in a variety of international contexts.
Oxford University Press published Aamer Hussein's third
collection of short stories entitled
View catalogue item
"Cactus Town And Other Stories" by Aamer
Hussein, 2002
Hussein's most recent short stories are published in a
collection entitled Turquoise (Saqi Books 2002). The stories are set in
troubled times in Karachi, Lahore, and London - amid war, partition, and
military rule. Themes include the anticipation and anxiety of changing homes or
cities, the mixed blessings of family life and the hopes and failures of love
and work.
Aamer Hussein's short stories are studied within the
contemporary literature curriculum at universities across Europe, North America
and in Pakistan. He is a well-known reviewer and literary critic and a regular
contributor to English national newspapers such as The Independent and The
Times Literary Supplement as well as to several Pakistani national newspapers.
Hussein has also published translations of Urdu poetry and fiction in English.
He has co-edited Hoops of Fire: Fifty Years of Fiction by Pakistani Women (Zed
Books, 2000) including pieces by Mumtaz Shirin and Jamila Hashmi, and holds
several visiting posts at various universities including the University of
Southampton and the University of London. He is the Royal Literary Fund Writing
Fellow at Imperial College for 2003-2004.
Hussein is a contributing editor for the multicultural
literary journal Wasafiri and is currently working on his fourth collection of
short stories. He was recently awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Society of
Literature (FRSL) in May 2004
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