Saba Imtiaz's Blog, page 2

Pakistan / Guantanamo in Pakistani courts & legislature

I am reading through old reports on Pakistani prisoners at Guantanamo. During the early 2000s, a number of petitions were filed in high courts by the relatives of detainees, seeking to know their whereabouts. (This, for example, is from a hearing in a petition filed by Majid Khan's wife.) The petition reports do not have much information, but are useful in trying to understand how these cases were emerging at the time. (This is a petition in the Islamabad High Court by Ahmed Rabbani's family...

Art from Guantanamo

I wrote a piece for Dawn's Footprints column on the Art from Guantanamo: Ode to the Sea exhibit in New York, and the art produced by eight current and former detainees of the prison. There are still Pakistanis detained at Guantanamo, whose names and cases have disappeared entirely from the social discourse.

 

 

Reading (and rereading) the ‘60s guide to single life

 Sex and the Single Girl was published in 1962. I first read it last year, and every few months I get back to it. I reread books a lot, but this isn’t the book I read to kill time before an appointment or eating alone. This is the book that I read when I feel uninspired and sad and in the opening-last-bag-of-chili-chips throes of misery, and every time I read it, I go away wanting to do better, be better, dress better, and to just get to work.

Sex and the Single Girl was revolutionary when it...

Dust, danger, and the TV trolley

If you’ve ever owned a TV in Pakistan, you might have also owned/encountered/been told to dust a TV trolley. 

What is a TV trolley? It is the fancier iteration of the stationary shelved TV ‘rack’ and the wood glass-fronted cabinet to place the TV on. But the TV trolley was really the same cabinet but on wheels. It held the VCR, the VCR ‘cleaner’ tape – a scam if there ever was one – the protective plastic cover for the VCR, and the selection of video cassettes you were lucky enough to own / “...

Crime v. Terrorism

This is a great piece in the LRB on how one defines "credible fear" in order to establish eligibility for asylum.

The complexities of women’s lives can be overlooked by the legal system. But the more time I spent at the detention centre, the more I saw it was systematically prone to the dynamics of evasion and rhetorical slipperiness of the phrase ‘credible fear’. The name ‘Family Residential Center’ is disingenuous, too. Owned by a private prison company, the centre – a collection of pre-fabr...

On anxiety, airports, and the 22-hour stopover.

Photo by Oliver Wendel on Unsplash

I love flying. It is truly one of my favorite things. I love the food, I don't even mind twisting myself in the seat to nap. I love falling asleep right before the plane takes off and waking up to discover that i am already floating away, that I am going somewhere. Everything else about flying can be so unpleasant: but not this, this moment of buoyancy, of finally being in the unknown.

Time and regular routines are suspended. You land at an airport. It is 4...

A reading list of reporting, on reporters.

Around the world, journalists have long struggled to report against hostile governments, in times of censorship and  and war. But what does it mean to be a writer in a place where being a journalist can feel like being public enemy number 1, 2, and 3, where there is often no institutional support and funding, little acknowledgement, and where as "local journalists", there is little of the prestige or awards or opportunities that writers in the U.S., for example, often can access. Local journa...

A dinner from Herat, via Beirut

While in Beirut recently, I went to Makan - a lovely space that does global cuisine events - for its three-night western Afghan set menu [apparently prepared by a Sri Lankan chef!]

Herat is beautiful, but I visited in 2013 in the dead of the winter and don't recall much of the food, other than eating a massive heap of rice and chicken one afternoon that I could barely make a dent in. Though I consumed enough bolani and mantu in Kabul to last a lifetime. [Also, people: "Kabuli pullau" is not wh...

So happy for you! (Not.)

When I meet people for the first time, I usually don’t tell them that I’ve written a novel – let alone that it’s being turned into a film. This is because I don’t see myself as an ‘author’, or that I think this was the single greatest achievement of my life. I would hope that this is one small thing in a list of many things I’ve done – mostly with minimal to zero degrees of success – and that it’s not the only thing I’m going to do in life.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think it was an achievemen...

WhatsApp messages for the fed-up soul

Please make time to read, very useful:

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Researc...