Abdullah Zubair (ID # 13702)

MS English Literature

Women Writing

CUSIT, Peshawar.

Date: 25th February 2023

Rewriting Third
World Women in
Kamila Shamsie’s
Broken Verses
 Intro to Author

• Kamila Shamsie is a Pakistani-British anglophone writer and novelist who is best known for
her award-winning novel Home Fire.

Intro to Work

• Broken Verses by Kamila Shamsie is in the first-person point of view of Aasmani Inqalab, a
thirty-something Pakistani woman. Her mother, a charismatic and prominent activist for
women's rights, disappeared and is presumed dead of suicide 14 years before the book opens.
 Summary

• Fourteen years ago, a famous Pakistani activist Samina Akram disappeared. Two years earlier,
her lover, Pakistan's greatest poet, was beaten to death by government thugs. In present-day
Karachi, her daughter Aasmani has just discovered a letter in the couple's private code—a
letter that could only have been written recently.
• Aasmani is thirty, single, drifting from job to job. She was left behind whenever Samina
followed the Poet into exile, she had assumed that her mother's disappearance was simply
another abandonment. Then, while working at Pakistan's first independent TV station,
Aasmani runs into an old friend of Samina's who gives her the first letter, then many more.
Where could the letters have come from? And will they lead her to her mother?
• Merging the personal with the political, Broken Verses is at once a sharp, thrilling journey
through modern-day Pakistan, a carefully coded mystery, and an intimate mother-daughter
story that asks how we forgive a mother who leaves.
• As compared to literature written by men, Pakistani women literature is a marginalized genre.
And as a practice female narratives are marginalized.

• We mostly encounter the situation that it is hard for females to express and talk about their
experiences in this so-called men-dominated (patriarchal) hostile environment, in Pakistan,
and specially in a language that is regarded as foreign (English).

• Here I have tried to explore the new feminine-consciousness which marks the narrative of a
woman character, in Shamsie’s novel, by defying the norms of the same patriarchal society,
succeed in creating a new feminine assertion, setting new standards along the way.

• Also, these third-world women are rewritten as beings with their own wills, rejecting the
feminine ideal. This course of action is trying to present the ‘new third-world women’ in
contrast to the other model characters, what western outspoken feminist say and write about
them, casting doubt on their claims.
 “Under the Western Eyes”
by
Chandra Mohanty
• Women from Africa and other parts of the so-called "third world" are frequently depicted in
Western feminist discourses as objects against which writers assert their supposedly liberated
status as Western feminists.

• Many feminist writers have created a singular, ahistorical image of the oppressed, powerless
“Third World Woman”, rather than questioning the social, historical, and economic
conditions that disadvantage particular groups of women in those societies.

• In her article "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses", Chandra
Mohanty deconstructs this stereotype that the ‘Third-World Women’ are oppressed, powerless,
and marginalized - and asserts the need to historicize (re-write) all analyses of women's
oppression. (Mohanty, 335)
• Women of the “Third World” are subjected to multiple forms of marginalization due to this
label of “third-world women”.

• In terms of gender, ethnicity, nationality, and race, they are the other and a part of the minority
discourse.

• Most of the literary narratives portray Third-world women as alienated due to their
marginalization either by choice or due to ethno-social hierarchies, making it difficult for them
to establish stable identities. In relation to these women, I have employed the theoretical
concept of third-world feminism, given by Mohanty, in her essay as a backbone to support my
arguments.

• My study is centered on contemporary South Asian women writers, who challenge

sociocultural hierarchies and their status as the stereotypical other. I have tried to investigate
how Kamila Shamsie's new-world experiences inspire independent women who defy
stereotypes by providing a novel viewpoint and alternative viewpoint on female realities.
• I have attempted to rewrite a new consciousness in order to find a balance
between honoring and disrespecting traditions.
 Analysis
• Shamsie has portrayed radical, nonconformist, and free-spirited independent female
characters. Aasmani Inqalab (the story’s protagonist and narrator), Samina Akram (Aasmani’s
mother and a women rights activist), are portrayed as the two educated independent women
whose lives are intervened in the narrative. And these two women are presented in contrasting
perspective to Shanaz Saeed (a famous actress), Beema (Aasmani’s stepmother), and Rabia
(Aasmani’s half-sister), who by choice has chosen to live their lives according to the
constraints imposed by patriarchal society and are unable to express their rage and
dissatisfaction with their circumstances unlike Samina Akram.

• Samina Akram (a Cambridge graduate) has defied the conventional notions of a wife and a
mother, both. And is one of the most independent female characters in Pakistani novels. And
because of her free-spirited and independent personality, later she decides to work for the
welfare of the women after witnessing the situation of lower-class women in Pakistan.
• It was Samina’s independent and free-spirited nature that she wants to contribute something
positive in society, as seen in these lines;

“Samina who could speak with passion and intelligence and flashing grey-green eyes.”
(Shamsie, 2005, p. 87)

• Samina falls in love with the thirty-six-year-old Poet. She feels thrilled at receiving such
attention from a renowned poet, but it doesn't take her long to recognize the damage being
done to her individuality. And in order to have “an identity that wasn't caught up in his
shadow” (Shamsie, 2005, p. 88), she makes a sudden decision to wed to demonstrate the poet
that she is in complete control of her life.

• But it doesn’t take long her to realize the striking differences between her and her husband, her
logic takes over, and their marriage ends after a few months.
• After her divorce she doesn’t want to engage in any type of binding and constraints as a free
woman, and to avoid that she starts living in an apartment next to her lover’s (the poet) door,
in relationship with him.

• And that’s how by defying conventions and norms of this patriarchal society, this
unconventional women exemplifies a liberated women in a Third World country defying and
challenging what western feminist claims about the women of Third World.

• The charisma of Samina Akram's fight for women's rights comes from her personality. Samina
is the pivotal woman who challenges Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's assumption that
subaltern cannot speak. Shamsie has disproved the notion that women cannot speak. One of
Pakistani literature's most prominent female voices is Samina.
• Aasmani, her own daughter, does not stop her from acting against her own will. The second
most important feminine voice in the narrative is of the daughter, Aasmani.

• Nostalgically she reminisces,

“I'd spent all those years shuttling between the picture-perfect normality of life with Dad,
Beema and Rabia and the utter unconventionality of my mother's house with its connecting
door to her lover's garden.”
(Shamsie, 2005, p. 102)

• The dominant social construct of femininity is the cause of her attitude toward her mother in
the beginning of the narrative which resolves in the favor of Samina at the end.
• Kamila paints an idyllic picture of Beema, Aasmani's stepmother, as a forgiving, nourishing,
caring woman who is only too willing to give up her individuality for the family. Beema's
lack of a female identity contrasts sharply with Samina Akram’s.

• In the end, Beema is only known to her family, unlike Samina who earns her name through
her struggle for her passion and refuses to give her actual identity and keep intact on what
she is.
 Conclusion
• In order to draw attention to the oppression of women that is prevalent in
patriarchal societies, Shamsie has portrayed all of these female characters as
Samina, Aasmani, Beema, and Shehnaz. Shamsie successfully develops a
counter-creed for third-world women to free themselves from the ideology that
has held women captive since civilizations and have subjugated them.

• I have examined the nature of characterization Shamsie has in respect to the

female characters. She deconstructs the stereotypes, as suggested by Chandra
Mohanty in her essay, that are perpetuated in Pakistani society and promotes
women's independence through the portrayal of Samina, as a strong, rebellious
woman.
• Kamila Shamsie, on being asked about being a woman in the world today, says,

“Wherever in the world you go, you’re living in the world’s oldest and most pervasive
empire, which is the empire of patriarchy. I don’t know a place I’ve been to where it doesn’t
exist.”

- (Piracha, 2014)
 Refrences

Mohanty, C. T. (1984). Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial

Discourses. On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism, 12;
13, 333-358. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/302821

Piracha, M. (2014, November 17). The Marital Groupthink - The Missing Slate.
Retrieved from The Missing Slate:
http://journal.themissingslate.com/2014/11/17/the-marital-groupthink/

Shamsie, K. (2005). Broken Verses. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Thank You! Any Questions?