Subtle Realism

Only recently, when I finished reading HasanManzar’s book Habs, did I understand the term ‘writer’s writer’.
As Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, said, “A self is not something static … a self is always becoming.” So it is with one’s creativity. It keeps changing — with time, with fame and perhaps with readers’ and publishers’ demands. But writers keep their pace; they are always very careful (although not always mindful) of their writing.
They write because that’s what they love to do; they write exactly what they want their readers to read. There will never be any bias; neither will they put in extra effort to be sympathetic if they are not feeling it. They will tell you exactly, without undue harshness, what they believe in, what they think is true, and their insistence on writing their mind and soul is what makes them a writer’s writer.
Reading a writer’s writer is not easy. One must have a good grasp of history or the background of what they are writing about, otherwise one can feel like a fish out of water. The work may well be difficult to understand, so the reader should be learned or educated enough to understand the writer’s point of view.
Manzar may fittingly be called a writer’s writer, because even after having written for so long, and having published six novels and several short story collections, he manages to continue breaking the rules and keeping his writing free from general expectations. As critic and translator FaruqHasan rightly said, Manzar is very much a realist, inclining towards a traditional, old fashioned view of plot, character and narrative in his storytelling. But his realism is so subtle and his stories so true to life that while reading him, one often forgets to notice that a story is behind told. Manzar’s distinctive realism and broad range of characters and settings distinguish him from a host of other writers of realistic short stories in the subcontinent.
One aspect of Manzar’s fiction, noted by all his critics, is variety. Critical consensus of his work is that of all the Urdu-language writers creating short stories in Pakistan and India today, his canvas is the largest. A well-travelled man, he derives the plots and characters for his stories from his experience of the world at large. There are tales set in Pakistan, England, Scotland, South Africa, Nigeria, Iran, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). There are stories whose locales one recognises as distinctly non-South Asian, but that remain unidentified or unnamed often for thematic reasons. There are indeed few writers in Urdu who can make the world contiguous with home through the geographically creative setting of their stories.
It is this skill which makes Manzar’s novel Habs — a fictional account of the last eight years of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s life, as he lies in a vegetative state at the Chaim Sheba Medical Centre — approachable for Pakistani readers.
The novel begins with a brief introduction of Sharon. Born to Jewish parents but a complete antitheist, the red-haired, brown-eyed boy is called a ‘bulldozer’ by his friends because of his immense size. Manzar then takes readers directly to Sharon’s hospital room where, despite his physically immobile state, his brain continues to function. He can feel and perceive the living world around him and ponder on his health, his thoughts, his feelings at seeing his family photos hanging crookedly on the walls and the doctors and nurses taking care of him. Although the ‘Sleeping Giant’ — as he was known — is confined to his bed, he continues to open his eyes and is propped up daily to ‘watch’ television.
Clips from this television and snippets from newspapers form the theme and lay the groundwork for the story’s progression, as the writer imagines Sharon’s reflections on his past actions. As the novel moves forward, Manzar — himself a psychiatrist by profession — enlists the help of psychological analyses to revisit Sharon’s childhood memories and let readers know why and what circumstances lead to the rise of people such as him, who exhibited such dreadful fierceness in massacring Palestinians that Dutch film director George Sluizer claimed he had witnessed Sharon killing two Palestinian toddlers in 1982 near the refugee camp of Sabra and Shatila. According to Sluizer, the toddlers — merely two or three years old — were shot from a distance of 10 metres with a pistol, as one might shoot rabbits. As such, there is no possibility of pardoning Sharon for his heinous crimes, but knowing of his inner thoughts on his difficult childhood, as narrated by Manzar, does give rise to a very faint flicker of sympathy.
Interspersed with this narrative are scenarios from the vast history of the Jews, and how anti-Semitism led to notable instances of persecution, such as the Rhineland massacres in 1096, expulsion from England in 1290, the Spanish massacre in 1391 and expulsion from Spain in 1492, various anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire between 1821 and 1906 and the Holocaust in Germany.
In addition, the novel covers the dreadful sufferings of the Palestinian Muslims since civil war broke out in 1947, when the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution recommending the partition plan for Palestine. While this move was not initiated by native Palestinian Muslims or even Jews, it did turn them against each other. There is also mention of how the self-interest of countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and to some extent Russia, made them reluctant to bridge the gap between the two nations living in Palestine. All this information helps give readers a detailed background of the historical events and places that make Palestine so important for both Muslims and Jews, and also makes compelling arguments as to why the Jews cannot be the only rightful authority over this land.
Manzar’s novel is a lesson in history as well as one in human nature. At the end, it is a realisation that everything ultimately comes to naught: Sharon departs from this world and despite his grandiose delusions, his obituary in the newspapers — provided by his son, Gilad — reads, “He has gone. He went when he decided to go.”
Habs
By HasanManzar
Scheherzade, Karachi
367pp.