Lyric maps and the legacies of 1971 in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography

Abstract

This article examines how recent Pakistani literature in English negotiates the legacies of Partition and the 1971 civil war, focusing on Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2002). I argue that Shamsie engages with Urdu literary culture to explore the complex dialectics of memory and forgetting, intimacy and estrangement that affect Pakistani subjectivities in the post‐Partition, post‐Bangladesh period. Shamsie fuses two non‐narrative forms, Urdu lyric poetry and maps, to produce what I call “lyric maps” of Karachi, to interrogate the multiply layered “cartographic anxiety” that affects contemporary Pakistani subjectivities, and to disrupt national narratives that censor – or seek to forget – the loss of Bangladesh. Drawing together questions of narrative form with those of national forgiveness, I end by exploring the novel’s “mapping” of Karachi as a conflicted, but potentially productive, site for processes of reconciliation structured by difference and discontinuity.