Pakistan Diary: Meeting Bindiya

It’s taken almost a week to write this post because of the importance of representing Bindiya and her organization accurately.   Ideally this would be in her words, but my Urdu is not up to that. Once she starts speaking – she is eloquent and passionate, a true orator – we don’t want to interrupt her, so Usman has to paraphrase 3-5 minutes of speech at a time which he does with remarkable recall of specific quotes and details. We recorded the interview, and my transcription of Usman’s translation/explanation in english form the basis for this post.   It will have to do until I get a translation of Bindiya’s words from Urdu and Sindhi.

Bindiya leads us into her room and introduces us to Munnee and Sabna who have a bedroom upstairs. We sit on the sofa and Usman, Munnee, Sabna and Abbas sit on the bed with her (luckily it’s a double bed). B offers us juice, water, chai, checks the fan is not too much or too little for us.

Munnee & Sabna

This room is the Gender Interactive Alliance‘s base for the hospital – they are always on call, and if a member is injured or in an accident, they’ll go there and take care of them.

B tells us she’s extremely angry with people and organisations who come promising to tell their story, but don’t represent what is shown to them – they go away with their own script and angle. She’s also angry with organisations that come from America and England and throw money around, making them act in a certain way, to illustrate a particular aspect that interests them. She says it undermines her position as the president of an association because when she actually wants to protest over something or she wants to get transgenders to come together, they would ask ‘how much are you going to pay us?’ so it’s a bad habit that’s developed because of these documentary makers.

 

She wants to know why we are conducting this interview. I explain about my play and that one of my reasons for this trip is to gain insight into the experience of being transgender in Pakistan today, in order to more authentically represent my transgender character of 2000 years ago.   I also tell her that I also want to help her in any way I can, to promote her organization and raise awareness of the transgender experience in Pakistan.   I am also hoping that my play, whose main character happens to be transgender, might in some small way help to promote understanding and acceptance of khawaja-serás in Pakistan and abroad.   Aisha also explains her role: a audio-visual documenting of our trip and an artistic response in photographing transgender women and their lives.

Throughout our meeting, B’s phone goes off regularly, and she checks it and passes it to Abbas or answers it herself if it’s urgent. We are at the heart of the association, and she is sought after for advice and action.  She wants to know what questions I have for her.

Do you identify as a woman or a khawaja-será? I ask.

Look, inside, we are women…  But before I express that, of course I feel like a woman inside but there are limits. There are limits that I live in because I come from Pakistan.  She says that as a Muslim and because she lives in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, there are a lot of things that she can’t express and can’t do. If she was living in America or England, where it’s OK for 2 men to be married, it would be different.   But for her, even when she was with her guru (mentor/teacher), the only place where they were allowed to be themselves and to express themselves was when they would go to give blessings in a house where there was a newborn or where there was a marriage – that’s the only time. Otherwise, if she tried to express herself as a woman, her family won’t be supportive of it, and even the people around her wouldn’t be supportive of that.

I tell her that my play is set at a time when courtesans lived in grand residences and my character, a transgender courtesan, had a love relationship with a nobleman. ‘If you could do as you liked, with no limits, what would you wish for yourself, for love?’

 I can’t relate to this situation 2,000 years ago, I can only say my life. First and foremost the biggest problem is growing up you don’t get the support you want, you don’t get the support from your siblings you want. I wanted my brothers to treat me like a sister, but the way they treated me was like I was a hooligan… And then when it comes to love, or when it comes to someone having the choice of girls and expressing his love to her, I haven’t experienced that. There are people who are out here, even at their age, who would love to showcase their love to me, but can only do it within 4 walls. But if I want someone to hold my hand when I go for a conference, that’s not possible.

 

She says that for a young transgender of 14 or 15, they won’t really have much say in the matter of love, or expressing that love… You won’t be able to think ‘I am in love’, it’s more that when someone else says they love you, it’s just so powerful and empowering that you will go with it.

We are offered soft drinks and delicious Peak Frean biscuits with cumin seeds.  I ask about importance of pronouns – in the West most transgenders would be addressed as ‘she’ but others prefer a neutral pronoun, ‘hen’.

B is much more comfortable with being called third gender – she doesn’t want to be termed a woman.

I mention Miley Cyrus and how some people identify gender fluid – neither male or female, and how others consider themselves to be agender, choosing the pronouns they/them. B hasn’t heard of MC but Usman has.   [I discover later that YouTube was banned in Pakistan in 2012, and though the ban was reversed in January of this year, the Pakistan Television Authority enforces a block on ‘specific offending material’ – which would undoubtedly include twerking and MC].

B tells us about a girl who is a beautician – she’s a girl but she likes to hang out with them and go to their meetings, and she likes to be termed as a khawaja-será – she doesn’t want to be called a girl. I’m like her grandmother, Bindiya says.

In our way of life we can’t have any family ties in this country – we can’t get married, we can’t have kids – so when someone comes as an apprentice in our society, we call them our children, and their apprentice would be our grand-children, and their apprentice would be my great-grand-children, and that’s the only way we can make family bonds.

 Although the government recognizes transgender, although on paper they have given them more rights than the gay community or the lesbian community, what ends up happening, she says, is that you can’t really have a friend, being a transgender woman here.   I want someone I can talk to, who I can share my problems with, my companion.   She is a known name in the transgender community, so if she’s walking around with someone and says ‘this guy is my friend’, then people will accept it, because they know she’s part of an association. But if any other regular khawaja-será is walking around, even with her brother or father or uncle, the cops will stop them and ask ‘what are you doing? Are you soliciting?’ They can’t accept the fact that a khawaja-será has a friend, or has a platonic relationship with another man, just as a friend to talk to and share ideas.

I can do it because I have built a name for myself, but if it wasn’t for that, then there are no human rights and instances like this make you feel that you’re not even a human. You can’t even have a friend with you without being questioned.

 

She looks tired. So many people have come and promised things, and they’ve gone away and never been in touch, she says. They’ve told things with their agenda.

I tell her I’m different – I will be in touch, I will make great efforts for her group, try to link them with groups in the UK and promote them, raise awareness and tell their story so people can understand and accept them. I have no agenda except to understand and tell their story their way.

She begins to tell me about her association. The main work they plan to do right now, the funds they need, is to spread awareness in different provinces in the interior. The transgender community over there have no idea about the Supreme Court ruling.

They have no idea of what rights they have at present. They have no connections with healthcare facilities, they have no connections with human rights organisations, so what she wants to do is go around and spread awareness. For example, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly NWFT), khawaja-serás cannot even dress up and go out – they will be shot down, right there and right then. We would have to meet up with people over there, she says. Only they can convince – this is how it works in villages as well – the person who is of influence, if he says they can walk around like this, or that there’s nothing wrong with it, then they will be accepted.

Right now the movement is still in a nascent age, so they want to spread awareness more than anything else. And she wants to offer the sort of training that if someone takes a 3-hour workshop, they should know that they can get a job, so they don’t go out and start indulging in activities they were trying to get out of to begin with.

It looks bad on us when we go out looking for funds, when we go out looking for donations, she says. When a poor person does it, they call it begging. But when the leaders of the country are going out and asking for the exact same donations to get their policies implemented, then it’s perfectly fine.

Her organisation is limited when it comes to helping transgenders in this community when it comes to healthcare, because when they go to government hospitals, what happens is that they get their appointment at one place, and they have to travel somewhere else to get free medication. Transgenders can rarely travel by bus –because in some buses they would be asked to go and stand with the boys, and in some buses they would be asked to go in the ladies section. There is a lot of harassment on both ends

Also, if someone is sick and they show up and say ‘this is the medication I need and I have no money on me’ it’s difficult. They have to link themselves to different organisations. There are fair people everywhere, she says, so there will be someone who will help us out, but at the end of the day, that’s not a sustainable model, to have to depend on someone else’s kindness. Their association needs to be more empowered, so that they don’t have to go to different organisations.

Without the funds, without any financial support, it’s a toothless organization – they can’t really do much. Because she is the voice of GIA, she can walk around with people, she’s not afraid of anything. But the transgender standing on the road who gets raped, or who gets arrested, or has to lodge an FIR (complaint), gets hassled by the cops, by the person who’s the aggressor, and there’s no way to resolve it. So after a while they stop talking about it, because nothing will be done.

It’s strange, she says, because people will do a protest for anyone else, any other organization, they’ll go and protest, but when it happens to us, people feel embarrassed to come and protest with us, for our cause.

We talk more about her work with GIA and it’s clear that she this is her life’s work.   A charismatic orator, in 2013 she was one of Pakistan’s first transgender candidates to stand for election.  She continued despite death threats and the difficulties of campaigning with negligible funds.  She hadn’t expected to win the election, and considered standing for election a win in itself.

Our meeting comes to and end – Bindiya has already delayed another meeting she was meant to be at. We say goodbye – she gives me her card, and we become facebook friends.  I feel I am saying goodbye to a real friend, but I know this is the beginning of something rather than the end.

Me, Usman, Aisha, Bindiya & Abbas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Writing Process Blog Tour

Here we are on the deluxe tour bus with roofgarden, mini-bar and infinity pool.

Sophie Herxheimer, mutli-talented artist/poet, invited me to join this blog tour that asks four questions. Sophie’s thoughts on her process can be found here. Mine are below. I’m then handing the baton over to Laurie Gough, Anna Selby and Philip Cowell – I hope you’ll follow them.
Laurie Gough is an award-winning travel-writer in Canada, and long-time friend. You will shortly be able to see her response on her blog.
Anna Selby is a poet, dance collaborator, wild swimmer and Literature & Spoken Word Programmer at the Southbank Centre, London. I will be hosting her response here on my blog in the next little while.
Philip Cowell is a writer and part-time clown training in mindfulness. I will also host his response here.
I look forward to following this blog tour to get an insight into the processes of other writers. I hope you will follow it too – you can go backwards as well as forwards… maybe even sideways.

Comments are welcome, as always. You readers are such a quiet lot.

What am I working on?
I finally completed my first full collection at the end of last year. It’s been well over a decade in the making, with a lot of tweaking/adding/subtracting over the past 2 years. Stephen Knight, my mentor, gave me this very valuable piece of advice: “find the weakest poem and ask ‘would I be happy to stand by this, if this is what I was known for?’ Of course the manuscript is far from perfect but I am happy with those poems representing me. And I’ve started to think about possible themes for my next collection.

I’m also working on my first play, The Jasmine Terrace, which is an adaptation of my chapbook ‘The Courtesans Reply’. Playwriting was the last thing I expected to do, finding it hardest to write dialogue, but when I was writing the courtesan poems I kept seeing the characters on stage. The play as a form is exciting and demanding, with surprising paralells to poetry. A play is defined in Doctor Johnson’s dictionary as ‘a poem in which the action is not related, but represented..’ But once inside, it’s a completely different machine, and one I had little idea how to work. Thanks to some funding from the Arts Council, I had the support and guidance of a mentor, the wonderful Ella Hickson, who helped me to progress in a focused and supported way. The funding crucially allowed me to keep working on the play (instead of abandoning it for a badly-paid job as a half-rate secretary). I set myself the deadline of June 30th to finish another re-write – responding to feedback from the reading reading I had at Soho Theatre – before I look for a theatre who might help to develop it further. Hmmm… that’s tomorrow. So I’ll have to extend my own deadline.
When I’m working on the play, I have to get right in, like going into water over my head. Then I feel far from poetry. And when I’m working on poetry, the play feels far and unreal. So I constantly feel like a bit of a fraud – either playwright or poet, but not both at the same time, not actively.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I’ve always been interested in the shadowy terrain between forms.
With poetry, I think my poems that seem autobiographical very often aren’t – the I is not always me. Whereas the most autobiographical poem is one that is written as a fairytale. I like to play.
With playwriting, I’ve been told that my writing is very ‘very beautiful, very poetic’ – which immediately feels like a problem. It needs to be dramatic rather than poetic… which is what I’m working on fixing. I feel like Alice in Wonderland in the world of the play. It’s very exciting and new, but also disconcerting not to know for sure which way is up.

Why do I write what I do?
Subjects usually choose me, rather than the other way around. Something I’ve read or heard sticks its barb into me and niggles at me until I give it the attention it deserves. I came across the idea for my next play 3 years ago, and it’s been there on the back burner on a very low heat. It’s now coming to a simmer. The courtesans play is also on the heat, and nearly cooked. When I’m cooking, I find it hard to do several things at once – I do it but things are sometimes undercooked or burned. Can that happen to a play?
I once made my son sausages that were so burnt I tried to pretend it was intentional: ‘look, witches’ fingers!’. He obligingly ate 1 smothered in blood (ketchup) then said ‘I’m sorry Mummy, I can’t eat any more. It tastes like wood’. He was right – it did.

How does my writing process work?
See above. And I rewrite and rewrite. It’s hard to stop. Who was it that said ‘Art is never finished, only abandoned’? It was da Vinci (I just googled it) and not Andy Warhol as I read on someone’s t-shirt the other day.
When I’m working on something chunky like a play or a poem sequence, I tend to carry it in my head always, marinading, so that things I see – paintings, curator’s notes, flowers – can connect with it.
And now I must get out of bed (where I go to write and hide from the children) and hang up that wet laundry before it starts to smell. It’s a sunny day!

The Next Big Thing

My poet/writer friend Seni Seneviratne has introduced me to The Next Big Thing where I write about my new poetry book – The Courtesans Reply

Where did the idea come from for the book? 

It was inspired by a translation of The Caturbhani, four monologue plays written in Sanskrit and set in the courtesans quarter in India around 300 BC.

What genre does your book fall under? 

Poetry

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition? 

Actually, I’ve thought about this because I’m adapting the book as a play, and I can see it as a film… perhaps directed by someone like Samira Makhmalbaf.
I would love for the actress Manjinder Virk to play one of the courtesans. The characters are all Indian/from the Indian subcontinent, and all women, apart from Sukumarika, who is a MtF transgender character and would be played by a man.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
The Courtesans Reply is a long poem sequence imagined in the voices of Indian courtesans: women who were known for their skills in 64 arts including music, storytelling, dancing and the art of love.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? 

I began working on the first poem in about 2005/2006, but didn’t know it would be a sequence until about 2008. I redrafted a lot, working on individual poems, so I didn’t really have a full first draft for another three or four years.

Who or what inspired you to write this book? 

My biggest inspiration was Glimpses of Sexual Life in Nanda Maurya India: an english translation of The Carturbhani by Manomohan Ghosh.
I was captivated by the courtesans glimpsed through the narrow gaze of the male narrator, and as I began to imagine their lives, I found myself straying further and further from the original text. Given a voice, the courtesans had their own stories to tell.
I also drew inspiration from The Complete Kama Sutra and other historical texts, and although I believed my characters were real, that they were once living, it is fiction.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? 

What drew me to The Caturbhani was the erotic charge of the writing, and the way this was married to a subtlety and modesty that is characteristic of the culture of the Indian subcontinent. That the courtesans enjoyed their sexuality and took pleasure unapologetically was important to me… even in light of their situation in life and lack of choices.
I hope readers will fall under the courtesans’ spell as I did.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 

My pamphlet is published by flipped eye, an innovative press I admire for its ethos and for the quality and range of the work they publish.

Interviews coming up on The Next Big Thing:

Anna Stearman: http://annastearman.com
Meryl Pugh: http://furtive11.wordpress.com