She can run an entire motel, cook halwa puri, take care of her childish drunk husband, go to the mosque and still find time to knit a sweater. So Misbah is your typical desi mother patient, suffering, caring and self-sacrificing. But unfortunately, this was just the start of the book's problems.Īll three main characters- Sal, Noor and Misbah- feel like placeholders and appropriations of other people their age. The biggest off-putting thing for me is the english translation after every punjabi or urdu word Puttar,son. Misbah and her husband speak in Indianized Punjabi which feels forced in to give some ethnic vibes to the plot I guess. Set in Juniper, California, the story unfolds in the background of a desert-mountain terrain giving dusty, scorching vibes not dissimilar to Pakistani urban landscape. I don't know if these are from a diary she kept, or just act as a convenient exposition device to explain the past of certain characters. ![]() We get flashback accounts by Sal's mother, Misbah. There is Noor, his childhood friend and obvious soulmate who loses her entire family in an earthquake in Quetta and is brought to the US at age 6 by her secular Uncle who hates everything Islam, desi and independent. We get first-person narrations from three characters: There is Salahuddin or Sal, a highschool senior and US-born Pakistani who is grappling with the demise of his mother, and an alcoholic father. The art of losing isn’t hard to master so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. The poem is about the art of losing, stuff, people, emotions etc and highlights the supposed theme of All My Rage. But alas, my suspicions on both fronts (YA, Overseas Pakistanis) were confirmed from the first page onwards well, second because the first page bears the first stanza of Elizabeth Bishop's poem, “One Art”. But the book won the National Book Award for YA Literature last year so I braved through. My nearly 30-year-old self can't tolerate teenage angst and bluntness. It's been ages since I read young adult fiction. Sabaa Tahir's All My Rage is a YA fictional story (mostly) about US-born and raised characters. ![]() A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza was a minor exception. Maybe it's because distance has blurred the perception of these authors, conflating humans with clean surroundings they write in. Their stories give me a version of Pakistanis who seem too created, too curated, too neat for a Pakistani. I approach the works of overseas Pakistanis with some trepidation.
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