In her intellectual curiosity that has taken her to lands and peoples far from her home, Dr Claire Chambers reflects the spirit of the British scholar-adventurer in the last century that drove the likes of Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence. But that is where the comparison ends: Chambers wishes to reach out and embrace the world.
Not that there is a lack of adventure in her temperament. She told me: “When I was 17 I took a ‘gap year’. I taught English first in Mardan and then in Peshawar. I spent ten months in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and then travelled round both Pakistan and India during my two-month summer break. This was a life-changing trip, and everything I’ve read or written since has been colored by it. I also try to return to the subcontinent as often as possible.”
What interested Chambers was not the tribal politics along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier; rather it was serious academic inquiry into the writers and novelists of Pakistan. Having appreciated South Asian writing in English, Chambers took the adventurous step of transporting her knowledge of these writers to Britain. It is the introduction of writers with an Asian background to local ones in England that has become a passion for Chambers: “I wish to counter stereotypes with my work, and to highlight the diversity of writing by both Pakistanis and Muslims in Britain. I think writing, and education about that writing, can be a force for resistance, social justice and building bridges. If I could achieve even tiny steps towards that, then I’d feel my work was worthwhile.”
And there have been tangible achievements: “Last academic year I ran a project entitled Leeds Meets Shakespeare in South Asian communities and educational settings. The project empowered British-Asian children by seeing faces like theirs, in lead roles on stage, to decolonize Shakespeare. Leeds Meets Shakespeare has enriched these children’s understanding of their own identities, improved attainment, and raised aspirations for the future.”
Chambers retains an endearing soft spot for Pakistan, dreaming of “peace, a healthy and sustainable environment, and equality for all. The nightmare is that water will run out within the next few decades, bringing on an apocalyptic future. So I hope the politicians, business people, and social activists can come together swiftly to think of imaginative and sustainable solutions. And literature has a big part to play in dreaming up innovative solutions, as authors such as Mohammed Hanif, Bina Shah, and in India Arundhati Roy show.”
When I asked Chambers to identify the core theme of her impressive body of work, she replied, “my central theme has to do with the uneasy relationship between post-coloniality, globalization, and neocolonialism. Too often colonialism is complacently seen as receding into the past, and increasingly many of my country-people have a vague nostalgia for a time when Britain was Great. The racism and atrocities of the British Empire need to be confronted, and its legacies and the ongoing project of neo-colonialism confronted.”
In Rivers of Ink: Selected Essays, her recent collection of some 30 essays, she draws our attention to the point where South Asian and postcolonial literature intersect in discussions of colonialism, human rights and social justice. The title Rivers of Ink was inspired by “the Spanish idiom verter ríos de tinta meaning ‘to pour rivers of ink’” (xxi). One aim of her book was to “counter stereotypes” and “highlight the diversity of writing by both Pakistanis and Muslims in Britain.” “Contrary to what often gets portrayed in the mainstream media, in Euro-America,” she explained, “both the people and their literature are far from predictable or homogeneous.” “I dare to hope,” she concludes, “that less ink will need spilling in the coming years over basic issues of human rights and social justice” (xxii).
In this collection the author’s natural curiosity takes her to different subjects, events and peoples and she connects the dots for us across cultures and nations. She looks at Pakistan’s historic city of Lahore through the eyes of Bapsi Sidhwa and Mohsin Hamid in one essay. In another, she focuses on the Baloch and points to their “absence” in literature. She discusses writing by authors including J. M. Coetzee and Moazzam Begg in a powerful piece about torture. There is an insightful analysis of Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, who is better known for his The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’anbut also wrote 25 novels. Jamil Ahmad’s “The Wandering Falcon” which presents us with an all-too-rare picture of Baloch and Pashtun life is also covered. In “Islamophobia: Orwellian Newspeak or Racially Inflected Hatred?” she targets racism and the role of the right wing in stoking it. Even Steve Bannon does not escape her gaze in “Fight the Bannonality of Evil.”
In “‘To Love the Moor’: Postcolonial Artists Write Back to Shakespeare’s Othello,” Chambers notes: “I want to suggest that postcolonial recreations of Shakespeare have moved beyond ‘writing back’ to more creative and confident conversations across spaces and time periods” (17). To demonstrate this, she highlights the way that both African and Indian authors have refocused the “exoticizing gaze” of Shakespeare’s portrayal and “turn[ed] the scrutiny back onto the West” to “demonstrate that another way of seeing is possible” by offering alternative portrayals of both the white and non-white characters in Othello (32).
While many of her essays highlight emerging authors, she has the sturdy pillars of “third-world” critical literature firmly in place: Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. Through her work we are introduced to the prominent Pakistani writers, “the ‘Big Five,’ of Hamid, Hanif, Shamsie, Mueenuddin, and Aslam” (xvii). She rightfully acknowledges new literary Pakistani stars and highlights the significant contributions of female novelists like Bina Shah and Qaisra Shahraz. She found Bina Shah’s book A Season for Martyrs “defiantly modern, contrasting with earlier portrayals of Sindh as retrograde”, particularly due to the inclusion of the narrative of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination (61).
Towards the end she confesses her debt to Edward Said, “Were it not for Said, I would not be researching postcolonial literature, and Orientalism still informs and nourishes my teaching” (291). The final essay, “The State We’re In: Global Higher Education,” discusses the active role that Chambers has assumed in addressing the challenges facing the world.
As a professor who has taught across the globe, this last essay was of particular interest to me. She persuasively argues that three challenges in academia must be faced: the restrictions and lack of funding; the ways that social media serves “as both a positive and negative force in contemporary protests”; and the “pressing need to divest universities of racism, casteism, classism, sexism, and other oppressive forces” (320).
All those wanting to make sense of the world we live in and appreciate its rich literary and cultural diversity owe Chambers a debt of gratitude. A true ambassador between East and West, in this collection Dr. Claire Chambers has presented scholars and journalists, young and old, a treasure chest of wisdom, literature and knowledge.
