And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women, and: African Women Playwrights, and: Heroines of Jiangyong: Chinese Narrative Ballads in Women's Script (review)

Muneeza Shamsie's edited collection And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women opens with the compelling words: "What you hold in your hands is the only anthology of creative texts originally written in English by Pakistani women, ever" (1). Such a pronouncement establishes the significance of this new volume, yet it also raises some questions. Why did these Pakistani women choose to write in English, the national language of Pakistan under British rule? How does this choice shape the stories these writers tell? Does language change the voice of these stories—would they be told differently in a native language, for a Pakistani audience? Shamsie argues that "Pakistani women who employ English as a creative language live between the East and the West, literally or figuratively, and have had to struggle to be heard. They write from the extreme edges of both English and Pakistani literatures" (1). In other words, these women write from the margins.

To set the stage for these stories, Shamsie's introduction provides an overview of the political history of Pakistan that is densely packed with dates and names and that focuses on women's education, activism, and writing. The themes of the stories range from politics to place, race to religion, sex to storytelling, violence to the veil, parda (veil) to Partition, war to Westernization, feminism to family, migration to marriage. Many of these stories are emotionally powerful, and all offer a message, whether subtle or overt, about gender and nationality.

Several stories stand out as particularly incisive regarding contradictions between and across cultures. Fawzia Afzal Khan's "Bloody Monday" mixes memoir and poetry in a manner evocative of Adrienne Rich, but its movement from the Lahore Moharrum mourning processions to the Pamplona bull runs—and its comparison of the overwhelming masculinity in both—is decidedly original. "Defend Yourself Against Me" by internationally known Bapsi Sidhwa addresses how various characters embody the intersectionality of gender, race, class, and economics, particularly capitalism. These characters include the white American woman who is simultaneously a "computer programmer in an oil corporation" and the "very image of dutiful Brahmin wifedom" in her marriage to a Hindu man (30); the narrator Joy, "an English-speaking scion of Anglican Protestants from Lahore" (ibid.) and English professor at the University of Houston (31); and the recent female émigrés with "their jewelry glinting like armor" (30). Despite their differences, these women discover commonality in gendered experiences of war: "Women are the spoils of war . . . no matter what you are—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh—women bear the brunt" (40).

Shamsie writes in her introduction that the goal of this volume is "to reveal how Pakistani women . . . challenge stereotypes that patriarchal cultures in Pakistan and the diaspora have imposed on them" (1). Many of the stories, such as Sidhwa's, do just that. Shahrukh Husain's "Rubies for a Dog: A Fable," which we might liken to the Chinese story of Mulan, includes a woman who dresses as a man in order to save her father. A dark view of war is depicted in Roshni Rustomji's "Existing at the Center, Watching from the Edges: Mandalas." Like Sidhwa, Rustomji laments the useless spiral of endless wars and decries the effects of war on women and children.

Bina Shah's "The Optimist" tackles patriarchal culture by writing from the perspective of a privileged male narrator. The narrator's new wife overturns his sense of complacent superiority. She despises him, having been forced into this arrangement by her parents, and abruptly leaves him...