When you start writing for a career — and especially if you started writing in the 2000s, when somehow there was more than one place to be published, you were often told (and then told others in turn) not to burn your bridges. Be nice, who knows when you might have to work with so-and-so again. Don’t be political. Don't be too political.

In hindsight, and as I turn 40 this year, I can safely say: what a useless pile of nonsense that was.

I’ve thought about this more though, this urge to safeguard your ‘career’ and to play nice, over the past two years since Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza began in October 2023, and about the role and response of Pakistani writers in all of this. I have struggled to identify my feelings, and have somehow landed on embarrassment. The response has been minimal, so not what it could have been. I think it is embarrassing; especially to come from a country with at least, on paper, a stance on Palestine, even if that has been degraded and subverted many times over the years. I am embarrassed of the many ways in which Pakistani writers haven’t responded: only a handful of writers signed on to any of the letters —standing in support of the writer Adania Shibli, a boycott of Israeli institutions. Even more egregious has been the lack of any substantive response to the Writers against the War on Gaza’s call to boycott the New York Times. I am embarrassed of myself, and my peers, I have cringed at people who sing resistance out of one side of their mouth and participate in a New York Times profile out the other. Couple this with the lack of protests, the lack of any response from literary “institutions” — publishers, newspapers, magazines, festivals, editors — the same institutions that are struggling for any relevance today, surprising no one. You will struggle to find a single work authored by a Palestinian writer in a Pakistani newspaper today, the word Palestine in the agenda for a literature festival, a Palestinian writer in a collection of writing produced in Pakistan, a Palestinian writing an op-ed. That is not to say there has been nothing; of note: Zuka Books’ anthology, ‘Koi Hai - Letters to Palestine’, the Feminist Collective organised to protest Ronya Othmann’s invitation to the Karachi Literature Festival, the facilitators of the LUMS Young Writers Workshop donated part of their fee to buying e-sims for Gaza, the writer Musharraf Ali Farooqui publicly rescinded EU sponsorship for the Pakistan Spelling Bee, the work of Kitab Ghar.

As writers from Pakistan, or who live or work in or write about Pakistan, it can be easy to say this has nothing to do with us, that signing a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli literary institutions doesn't matter, that there’s no reason to boycott the New York Times; after all, we’re never going to be signed up to a publishing house there, the New York Times will not feature our book or writing or art or poetry anyway. And perhaps that is true. It might not have anything to do with you, but then I have often wondered in the past two years: if you have nothing to lose, then why not? What is a career when you have to contend with tens of thousands of people dead? How do you have less to lose than writers in countries where there are real consequences to speaking up for Palestine? How are your politics so bad?

Now that there is a ceasefire — in name only — in place in Gaza — will people slink back to the festivals and cultural events organised by the same embassies that have supported the Israeli genocidal campaign in Gaza? (Even as I write this piece, there have been two cultural events in two separate cities organised by the same countries who have cheered on the war.) Will the people who did not sign letters or show any solidarity claim to always have been against this, as the writer Omar el Akkad noted? When the inevitable scourge of foreign writers arrives in Gaza, to write their longform pieces, and when they inevitably win their awards, will these foreign writers who have largely stayed silent as their colleagues have been massacred, who rely on translators, stringers, drivers, sources, to make their work happen, be invited to Pakistani literary festivals, to be feted and interviewed? Already, you can see the swell of support for some of them.

But I am asking the wrong questions. I am no one to stand on a high horse and criticise anyone. Until a few years ago, I could have made some similar, not-so-compelling argument that our work speaks for our values or some other trite nonsense; that open letters are futile in a country like Pakistan; that journalism and activism are separate endeavours; arguments and conditioning that have taken me years to unlearn. And as delightful as it can be to think of people's bad politics and hypocrisy, I have no way of knowing what the writers who are ostensibly silent are doing in their private lives, just as they have no way of knowing what I do (or don’t.)

Instead, as I have tried to understand how I feel — to move beyond this feeling of embarrassment and true cringe — I have thought a lot about legacy. Throughout the 1970s, Pakistani newspapers and magazines devotedly covered Palestine; there was almost daily coverage of Black September, a tabloid-like fascination with Leila Khaled, and leftist magazines covered the Palestinian resistance movement extensively. Speaking in 2023 at the Aalmi Urdu Conference, the writer Mustansar Husain Tarar described wanting to join the PLO in the ‘70s, noting dryly that at that time, people had different priorities.

Recently, I have returned again and again to the fantastic essay by the writer and translator Haider Shahbaz published in Jamhoor in 2024; looking at Pakistani writers’ work on Palestine and Palestinian resistance in the 1970s. I asked Haider how he would characterise that response now from writers in English and Urdu.

“I don’t know particular examples so that's the only reason why I’m a little hesitant,” he said. “But I think there’s a lot of investment in it that you still see. But there is less of a sense of political solidarity, and of the sense that we are part of some kind of a combined struggle, or of a similar struggle, or at least not as much as I think it was in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, where there was an active political consciousness that was guiding literature. The landscape of Urdu literature is very different now, and the idea of progressive writing is very much considered outdated. There is not as much of a sense of the political role of literature today in Urdu literature, I would say, than there was 50 years ago.”

But as Haider noted, there has also been an evolution in literary writing and forms, and even then, such voices only constituted a minority.

In Pakistan, perhaps much of the lack of work can even be attributed to just how much is happening within Pakistan at any given moment, that Pakistani politics takes up all the energy in a room; that it renders it impossible to imagine a world outside, that a real degradation of politics, and ethics, and human rights is happening at such speed in Pakistan that it is almost dizzying. But that would be a copout, because haven’t things always been unfolding in Pakistan at dizzying speeds? Why would that preclude our ability to write, care, respond?

Perhaps the fundamental question to ask is: what is our responsibility as writers - from Pakistan, writing about Pakistan — in the year 2025? Is it to gate-keep, to be in it for ourselves, to navigate the world only through a series of favours, an unending series of you scratch my back, I scratch yours, repost my work, blurb my book? Are we really limiting our idea of writing to what is currently on some prestigious longreads list or in the New Yorker or some such? Or is it our responsibility to imagine a world in which we could, just as easily, and just as well, have been sitting in the ruins of our home, writing on the destruction of our families and communities? That, at the very least, we must call it out by name: who is the aggressor, the coloniser - who is it committing genocide, starving a population, destroying a land many times over? We are not singular people writing with the breeze, holed up in our houses: our work stands on the legacy and shoulders of people before us; our language came from someone else.

Responsibility, perhaps, is the wrong word, because it can even construe some sort of burden. Instead, I would say we are privileged: to have homes not struck down by bombs, to have intact libraries. We are privileged to live at the same time as the Palestinians who are showing us how to write and resist, we are privileged that speaking up for Palestine does not put on us a watchlist at home and decimate our livelihoods. And even if it did, would that still not be a privilege, to have the ability to have something to give?

So perhaps, as a prescriptive instead of a laundry list of the ways in which we have failed, I can only offer this: we must demand more of Pakistani literary festivals and major publishers — instead of relying on foreign institutions to fly in one writer every five years, we must ask they invite more on their own dime. We must translate and make it possible for everyone to read the work of Palestinian writers and poets, and we must abhor events that are funded and supported by hypocritical governments and cultural institutions and their libraries and literary arms, because we must provide alternatives at home. We must ask why government funded events cannot find space for Palestinian writers. And as writers and editors, we must create something that lasts; not just stories on Instagram, our thoughts easily erased at the whim of a billionaire.

Because what does one say to younger writers who wish to protest or write, who want to translate, who truly believe that we are not free until all of us are free? Where does one direct them? If we have a legacy, we must build archives that last, not locked away in someone’s study, so we can learn. We must demand that editors do more; instead of publishing out of touch uncles, please clear your pages and make space for young writers to publish their work. But we must also not pretend that this has nothing to do with us. That if the history of writing includes the much-cited works of Fehmida and Faiz, we should also think about the years in which Pakistani writers did not say much: about Bangladesh, genocide, about the war on terror and extrajudicial disappearances, about Balochistan; and whether we want to continue to be the same as the generations past and present, one foot in, one foot out when it comes to criticism and principles. If we want to look at someone who has taken a principled stance, think of Kamila Shamsie, whose support of the BDS movement meant that she was stripped of an award in 2019. (Sometimes, when I look at the lack of response from Pakistani writers, I think, surely your career is not widely considered more significant than that of Kamila Shamsie?). We can recognise that we are part of something bigger, that we can stand in solidarity without expecting something in return, that even lending our names to a letter has meaning. That the fact that there is the inability to freely write and speak, that until there is Israeli-made surveillance in our phones, self-censorship and the ever-present fear of a lynch mob hanging over our work, we are, in every sense of the word, not free until all of us are free.