Mohammed Hanif’s Red Birds set to steal the limelight at FGLF
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Though Mohammed Hanif was born in rural Pakistan to middle class parents who were highly respected- regarded as “pillars of wisdom” in the community- neither of them could read or write. Mohammed himself, though a high achiever, would leave home at 15 for Karachi. There, fate would send him to the Pakistan Air Force who put him through an avionics degree which introduced him to a cross section of Pakistani society – “urban and rural, posh and poor, a wide range of ethnicities”- as he was to later tell the Guardian newspaper. He would not however stay a pilot officer for long, because while takeoffs were fine, landing jets demanded doing things fast- “and I like to think.”
He began writing first for the local political magazine Newsline where he was fearless about castigating politicians. Mid 1990s-Karachi, however, was a highly dangerous place- “People being kidnapped for a few thousand rupees”- and he was forced to move to London with his wife, and worked in the Urdu-language service of the BBC.
In London he would moonlight on his first novel and complete an MA at the University of East Anglia.
Pakistani publishers were reluctant to take on his debut, A Case of Exploding Mangoes because of the deep political satire. The book was a send-up of an obsessively superstitious military dictator “infected with anal worms”. But after it was sold to Random House, India, the book would get long listed for the 2008 Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Guardian first book award, and then win the Commonwealth first novel prize in 2009.
His second novel Our Lady of Alice Bhatti contains the love story of the spirited convent nurse Alice and Teddy Butt, a “thigh-waxing, body-building, Mauser-packing lowlife”. They get married- in the style of best postcolonial satire- in a nuclear submarine.
In 2013, he collected testimony about enforced disappearances in the province of Balochistan in a short book, The Baloch Who Is Not Missing Anymore and Others Who Are. That was two years before his friend Sabeen Mahmud was shot dead for daring to host an event celebrating the disappeared.
Hanif’s latest book, published late this year, is Red Birds. It is the story of an American pilot, Major Ellie, who crashlands in the desert and takes refuge in the very camp he was supposed to bomb. He is found in the desert and taken to the camp by Momo, a teenager who has plenty on his plate: his brother left for his first day at work and never returned and his parents at each other’s throats, while his dog is having a very bad day and an aid worker has shown up wanting to research him- for her book on the Teenage Muslim Mind.
The satirist with a delicious bite never gave up on his journalism, being published by The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, The New Yorker and The Washington Post. His play The Dictator’s Wife was staged at the Hampstead Theatre while he also wrote the BBC feature film, The Long Night.
Mohammed looks forward to the Urdu translation of A Case of Exploding Mangoes next year while the Pittsburgh Opera will premiere the opera he wrote with composer Mohammed Fairouz- featuring the dramatic saga of the Pakistani dynasty, the Bhuttos.
At Galle, the limelight will, no doubt, fall on Red Birds, acclaimed as “a highly charged political chamber opera” and “a savagely surreal satire of US foreign policy.”