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From childhood, willful, intelligent Saira Qader broke the boundaries between her family's traditions and her desire for independence. A free-spirited and rebellious Muslim-American of Indo-Pakistani descent, she rejected the constricting notions of family, duty, obligation, and fate, choosing instead to become a journalist, the world her home.
Five years later, tragedy strikes, throwing Saira's life into turmoil. Now the woman who chased the world to uncover the details of other lives must confront the truths of her own. In need of understanding, she looks to the stories of those who came before—her grandparents, a beloved aunt, her mother and father. As Saira discovers the hope, pain, joy, and passion that defined their lives, she begins to face what she never wanted to admit—that choice is not always our own, and that faith is not just an intellectual preference.
Haji traces in her impressive debut the fortunes of a family divided by secrets and lies as much as by the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent. Saira Qader, an American teenager of Indo-Pakistani descent, lives a sheltered life in California with her older sister, Ameena, and their overprotective and fiercely traditional parents. Saira's view of her family changes dramatically when she attends a wedding in Karachi and learns that her mother had lied to her about Saira's grandfather: he is not dead but living in London with a second family. As she learns more about her grandfather's work with Gandhi and the independence movement, Saira dreams of going to college instead of marrying early like her sister, and later carves out a life as a war journalist. But an unforeseen tragedy makes her choose between her peripatetic existence and the more traditional (and perhaps more desirable) setup awaiting her at home. Haji achieves an effortless commingling of family and social history in this intricate story that connects a young woman and her family over continents and through generations. (Mar.)
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Barry Oakes
reviewed The Writing on My Forehead on June 17, 2009
The Writing on My Forehead
For the majority of the past year, I've been searching for novels written by Pakistanis, about Pakistanis. As someone who both identifies as a writer and South Asian, I figure that any future personal projects would be strongly influenced by my background. I was curious to see how other writers, those who identify similarly to me, would navigate this kind of task especially with consideration to the audience. I fear that Nafisa Haji hasn't really given readers a well-crafted story here and so I have been disappointed. While I believe that Haji had a strong story lurking somewhere within the pages of The Writing on My Forehead, it appears that she could not reign it in. It's not that I don't believe that a novel can have interchanging themes, but I don't believe Haji connected the themes of her story convincingly or fluidly. I would think that most readers appreciate a story that is circular in some way, or at least one where the ends meet. And though life rarely works out that tidily, I find that it is the job of the author to guide us in such a way that the story appears to find an inclusive, comprehensive end. The Writing on My Forehead presents readers with a lot of questions without ever really coming up with resolutions or conclusive purposes for these questions. It for this reason that I felt uncertain about most aspects of this novel. Most especially, I wanted there to be some beautiful and profound revelations or observations, but most of these moments fell short. Additionally, as someone familiar with the Urdu vocabulary, Haji's italicized words and explanations of Pakistani tradition felt clunky and they disrupted the text. While I understand that these explanations are necessary, I feel that they would have been better situated if they were integrated into the context.
All in all, I really wanted this novel to be a lovely one, but it simply wasn't. And I'd certainly be willing to read Nafisa Haji's next publication, but The Writing on My Forehead was poorly organized and I think it is for this reason that it did not resonate with me.
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