Author: Sara Suleri Goodyear
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 121
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143031317
Description
Sara Suleri Goodyears’ Meatless Days, recognized now as a classic of postcolonial literature, is a finely wrought memoir of her girlhood in Pakistan after the 1947 partition, set around the women of her family-her grandmother, mother and sisters. In Boys Will Be Boys, she returns-with the same treasury of language, humor and passion-to her childhood and early adulthood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z A Suleri (known as Pip, for his patriotic and preposterous disposition).
Taking its title from that jokingly chosen by her father for his unwritten autobiography, Boys Will Be Boys dips in and out of Suleri Goodyear’s upbringing in Pakistan and her life in the United States, moving between public and private history and addressing questions of loss and cultural displacement through a resolutely comic lens. In this rich portrait, Pip emerges as a prodigious figure-ardent agitator against the British, founder of the times of Karachi, editor of Pakistan Times, for a brief time director of the Pakistan military intelligence service, and a frequently jailed antagonist of successive Pakistani leaders. Through it all, she invites the reader into an intimacy shaped equally by history and intensely personal detail, creating an elegant elegy for a man of force and contradiction.
Contents
Boys will be boys
Love demands patience
Ask of Kohakan's heart the reality of existence
There is a wilderness within the wilderness
My golden town, Kasur!
Give birth to your own world, if you are among the living
Why ask about Mir's religion and beliefs? He has long since drawn a line on his forehead, sat in a temple, and renounced Islam
There are many brothers here, but few friends
You are with me, as it were, when no other can be there
The pious keep going to report to the authorities: That Akbar actually names God, in this very age!
Don't trouble me, you perfumed wind, take to your road! You have frivolity on your mind while I sit here in despair
We are the lover, they the impatiently disdaining: Dear God! What kind of business is this, anyway?
Long live, you purest land!
The point of the tongue