The idea for this book began in 2011 when I was working as an interpreter among Swat Pashtuns in the U.S., and became immersed in their lives, in the struggles of immigrants’ life in general. I already had an intimate knowledge of Swat Valley and people’s life there and was discovering what it took to uproot that life to a new location and give it new meaning. The more people I met, the more I knew I had to somehow make their cause and story known. I decided to take all those people I knew, both from my years of ethnographic fieldwork in Swat, Pakistan, as well as all those I knew living in America, and create a single fictional character whose story would tell both sides. Trained as a social scientist and determined to make this a fiction novel.
|
|
“No Westerner knows Pakistan’s Swat Valley better than Benedicte Grima. Her novel of exile and multi-sided peril is a triumph of ethnographic insight. We learn not only of the Pashtun people in Swat but also of their immigrant culture in America and, painfully, of America’s treatment of them.” |
“Grima, one of America’s few Pukhtun scholars and an extremely keen observer of Pukhtun culture, both in its homeland and in the diaspora, follows an ordinary Pukhtun family as it survives in its native area, beleaguered by Taliban and the Pakistani military, and as some of its members seek fortunes but not assimilation in places as far as America. Their story ends with their cultural identity intact but their aspirations defeated in many ways by the modern post 9/11 world.” |
“Novelist Benedicte Grima has taken an under-represented world she knows well from her own work over several decades as folklorist and ethnographer and offered up the reader a rare and stunning glimpse of those islands of immigrants who survive abroad while not assimilating to their foreign surroundings. Seen through the eyes of the well-meaning, bumbling, unprepared and deeply culturally entrenched family patriarch…this is an important story for our times and should be read by anyone who wants to understand more deeply what it means to belong in our vastly interconnected world.” |