The things I write about do not hold true for all of Pakistan or all Pakistanis or all of Pakistani culture.
The only things I do know are what I have experienced since being married to my husband. You might be surprised how limited that is. Pakistan is an overwhelmingly diverse place, a rainbow gradient of all kinds of cultures; each step north between India and Afghanistan or east between China and Iran brings about a huge differences in every part of Pakistan and in the lives of Pakistanis. Each of these current influences and some historic ones have shaped Pakistani into a widely diverse place. I know one teeny, tiny speck of that, and even then only through the eyes of an outsider.
My husband's family has roots from the province of Bihar in India, and my in-laws were born there and spent much of their childhood there. I've been told by someone knowledgeable that he and his family have Bihari faces. They left India after Partition and lived for many years in Bangladesh, only leaving for Pakistan around the time of the 1971 war. My husband was raised in a "middle-class" family in a largely Mohajir area of Karachi. They still live there today. He came to America when he was 25 and has lived here for soon to be 10 years.
That is the tiny slice of Pakistani culture I am most exposed to. It is from that very specific baseline that I write about my life and my experiences with Pakistani culture. Even one different link in that chain would make for big differences. There are places in Pakistan where I would probably not know the first bit about life their, language or cultural practices. And not just far north, NWFP places, but even in Karachi, even in Pakistani-American homes in my own area.
There is so much history and diversity in Pakistan, I cannot speak for anything but my teeny, tiny slice of life in this long chain of modifiers: American-wife-of-Pakistani-immigrant-from-Bihari-one-time-Bangladeshi-Muhajir-middle-class family.
12 comments:
Oh, I've never taken any of your posts to be an all-knowing report on Pakistani life and culture. Even when you are a native of a country you **still** can't know everything because there are so many sub-cultures! This is what, in my opinion, makes the world SO fascinating!!
P.S. All of these different Muslimah blogs that I haunt are helping me brush up on my geography hehehehe
yeah I think ppl have been hard on you. My husband is Pakistani but his family is memon so they would do things differently than some Pakistani's. I mean I could write about my life in the US but it's going to be different than someone's in the south. Anyway I enjoy reading your blog. Maybe at the bottom of each post you'll have to post a link to this disclaimer. lol
I think the comments you got on the earlier post serve as a good example against generalizations and stereotyping. Frankly, while I enjoy your stories, I do think that you sometimes present yourself as more of an authority on Pakistani culture than you are - and that you often overgeneralize. When you're writing about culture, I've found, you should always put in "tentative" words and phrasing: "in my experience,..." or "I think that most..." or "... seems to be common".
I wrote a post awhile back on categorization, generalizations, and stereotypes (here), and came up with a checklist of sorts to run through before publishing any post, to make sure that I was being careful in my writing. It takes a bit of extra effort, but I think it's worth it. It's perfectly natural for the human mind to make generalizations, but careful social science research has shown us that many of these generalizations are poorly made due to various cognitive biases and basic statistics.
Thank you so much for writing this. I found the information very interesting. And this clears up a lot of why I often read your posts and think, "Really? *I* never experienced that..."
I feel bad, I hope you didn't think *I* was being "hard" on you in my previous comments? I enjoy your blog immensely, and, truth be told, I understood the context of your use of the phrase Pakistani culture to mean your personal experiences with it.
My only worry was that people who do not know that Pakistan is so diverse would not understand that.
Also, please revel in the knowledge that you, a Gori wife, often teach me about parts of Pakistani culture that I may have never known about.
That? Is pretty cool.
My housekeeper said they have Bihari faces, not me! LOL! I really don't even know what that means!
Not at all, Faiqa. Plus, now I have this handy asterisk - I even put the link to it in my sidebar! I definitely want a newcomer to the site to understand exactly where my stories come from, because I still think of my target audience as some random American girl who has just started dating a Pakistani guy and wonders what a life with him would be like. And that imaginary life would likely be very different from my experience and be defined by all the kinds of variables that have defined my own experience. So thanks for the asterisk.
It is true that your live in Pakistan, is very different from others. I'm from a village in PK, my hubby is from Rawalpindi...these areas are far from each other and when we got married it was like going to a different place!
I think it is nice that you are here to help people and share your experiences. I'm Pakistani myself, but I agree so much with the things you write about!
Wow! Like yesterday when I was talking to my dad I found out his family actually lived in Karachi for some years. And so many interesting facts about my grandfather! hmm Where and how they lived before the partition!
I stumbled on your blog today and I love it! Great job on the blog! :D
Thanks, Nida! Such a nice thing to say :)
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