As a student of modernism in the 1980s and 1990s, I was taught that the genre of manifesto literature, rich in declarative sentences and visionary ambitions, had petered out before my time; I was reading great prose in a dead language. Then came the culture of literary festivals, spawned by Oxford University Press in Karachi, and followed by the one in Lahore (a private undertaking cleverly feminised, corporatised, and may be pluralised, reviving modernist keywords) and subsequently the one in Islamabad -- an OUP enterprise again.

Within a short span, these festivals became an emblem of the collective and rebellious while acknowledging the institutionalisation of a modernist ethos in contemporary times. They acquainted us with many interesting names in the world of literature, and the work of numerous challenging, still relatively unknown authors from all over the globe. With the third instalment last week, it was only natural to expect a celebration of this peripatetic festival’s persistence, even at the expense of some of its initial insurrectionary spirit.

The 3rd Islamabad Literature Festival 2015 was less dispersed than its previous incarnations, and held, like before, at Margalla Motel. Likewise, the curatorial teamwork that animated KLF 2015 gave way to direction by solitary commissioners -- who were, however, no brash upstarts but the veterans Ameena Saiyid and Asif Farrukhi. Most significant, one could not argue that this edition consisted of relatively unknown writers. Under these circumstances, the ILF-tested practice of invading the other happenings in the town seemed less a confrontation than a convocation.

Ameena Saiyid’s (founder of literature festivals and CEO OUP) opening day speech most acutely stamped the festival. "The massive influx of brains from everywhere (has) soon (given) Islamabad the measure of prominence in the country’s intellectual and cultural scene", she declared.

Using an impeccably accented delivery that highlighted class, race, terrorism and insurgency, Anatol Lieven revealed the complexities of this country like no other. Listening to these arguments that human decency should yield to tradition, I was shaken by how often similarly euphemistic rhetoric is now used by writers of colonist descent of all colours and classes to describe the deleterious effect of ‘outsiders’ on a country, and how exceptionally complicated traditionalism and insularity are given Pakistan’s history of subjugation, tolerance, ravage, and rebirth. Lieven, author of Pakistan: A Hard Country, reiterated that literary events like these cannot be a success in failed states.

While a renewed investment in ‘reality’ as a means of countering literature and art’s entrenchment in insular, art-immanent and formal problems was straightforwardly proposed throughout the festival, yet the rapid-fire and often wanton deployment of the word reality mainly left a sense of this term’s fundamental opacity. In sessions entitled, ‘He, She, Or…’ and ‘Rights and Wrongs of Transgender Issues’ reality often meant the postcolonial, globalised, politicised world’s desire to bring into the centre the marginalised ‘other’. Against this background, the festival’s inclusion of Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, author of ‘Me Hijra, Me Laxmi’ was more of a conundrum than a historical anchor. A polemic along these lines could have been a fruitful starting point for a festival-size debate.

At the same time, unspoken themes intermittently emerged. Several sessions took up time-honoured inclination towards pedagogy. Most obviously working in this vein was Khushwant Singh: Among the Immortals. The late writer’s son, Rahul Singh, along with Ashok Chopra highlighted the ‘dirty old man’s’ mixture of social documentary with confessional, diaristic, intermittently therapeutic aspects -- as in a striking session The Heart Breaks Free: Dramatic Readings of Ismat Chughtai’s Stories -- devoted in part to the trivia of her life, by Zahida Hina and Intizar Husain.

Reworking of the documentary mode are not opposed but, rather, profoundly tied to the epitome of ‘art-immanent and formal problems’: the crisis, or even the failure of representation -- of communicating what’s ‘out there’. Indeed, this question of legibility was central to Ali Nobil Ahmed’s session, ‘Masculinity, Sexuality, and Illegal Migration: Human Smuggling from Pakistan to Europe.’ The majority of the festival’s participants working in the documentary genre rejected its pose of neutrality, even as they invoked historical left-wing sympathies.

If there is one thing more predictable than the inexorable expansion of the global literature festival circuit, it’s the litany of complaints that trails in its wake. Whether in Jaipur or Islamabad, so the refrain goes, these festivals routinely suffer from a fatal bout of sameness: same high-profile organisers/curators, same speakers (Intizar Husain, Zehra Nigah, Mustansar Husain Tarar, etc), same blather about the ‘world-class’ status of the host city, same jaded audiences. Critics have ample reason for their disaffection. With such festivals serving as yet more layovers in the ever-lengthening itinerary of internationalism, it has become increasingly difficult to see them apart from the mercantile structures of the art fair.

At first, the inaugural outing of the ILF 2015 would seem to provide another occasion for such hand-wringing, all the more so as it was timed to coincide with the National Book Day celebrations. Both consecutively opened during the same week -- an obvious bid to encourage their desired audience to take advantage of their relative geographic proximity.

Featuring some 175 authors to speak in nearly 60 sessions, the ILF 2015 tackled the timely subject of belief in an era of divided ‘values’, an era split between radical fundamentalisms of all stripes and progressively handicapped notions of secularism. However, in the case of Islamabad, a city-state whose pristine sidewalks and lush equatorial climes are matched only by the vehemence of its dictatorial policies, the impulse to ‘have it all’ reads as the unintentional point of the exercise, as if the two seemingly split positions on belief and practice are far closer than one might think.

Significantly, a particular concept of sitedness or rootedness was central to the session, ‘1947: The Blood-stained Dawn’. In her most recent book, ‘Partition: The Long Shadow’, the speaker Urvashi Butalia, remaps the present as a field of temporal and spatial dislocations. It is in this paradoxical notion of racinated mobility, perhaps, that Butalia’s concept of the modern protagonist as cultural nomad -- a global flaneur constantly moving across time, space, and signs -- acquires whatever actual newness it may possess.

Ultimately, it was the smoothness and rhetorical facility with which the curators projected their propositions onto the broad range of sessions in the festival that flattened many of them into simple modules thoroughly enmeshed in a heavily authored curatorial script. In other words, the curatorial value of their theoretical shorthand might have been limited by the clichés it resuscitated. Reduced as it was to illustrations of Kishwar Naheed’s ideas (‘Yeh Hum Gunehgaar Auratein’ rendered into a stilted performance -- an incoherent mix of Kathak and Bharata Natyam -- by Feryal Amal Aslam) and to a storm in the teacup in ‘Pakistani Cinema: Kal aur Aaj’, they were largely unable, in this context, to actively produce or negotiate notions themselves.

On the contrary, some sessions did manage to stage this tension as material for a productive dialogue. ‘Tales from Islamabad: City of Spies’ by Sorayya Khan, for instance, featured both literally and figuratively warped neurotic tightness of the conspiratorial worldview as a reading modality for contemporary experience. At the same time, ‘Why We Write?’ posited the authors’ (Shandana Minhas, Sorayya Khan and Paul Harding, in this case) workspace/studio as lab for itinerant thought and mythic production. Situated at the limits of legibility, the session insisted on the urgency of its implicit fictions. It forced making, reading, decoding, and obsessing into a joint performance in which each was always conditioning the others, and it pushed against the constraints of the festival’s own conceptual tightness.

Zaffar Kunial in ‘New Faber Poet’ similarly countermanded any straightforward account of interfaces. A kind of oneiric travelogue generated by growing up in Birmingham, England, the book translated the desire to decode experience and found narrative fragments into an arrangement of contradictory atmospheric triggers.

At the core of the festival, meanwhile, was a group of sessions that favoured postautonomous poetry in an increasingly airtight wonderland. Such modernist self-reflexivity was a key strand in the sessions, ‘Ahmed Faraz: The Poet as Witness to the Age’ and ‘Intakhab-e-Kalaam: Zahida Khatoon Sherwaniya’, inverting formalist perspectives by reading works back into the situations and frameworks from which they had emerged.

While the ILF 2015 demonstrated a welcome evolution beyond simplistic plays on political identity and anaemic gestures towards local context, some of the most powerful sessions remained those that thoughtfully probed the collisions of history, geography, and culture that defined the festival format itself. Writers rightfully felt a need to respond to the city’s unknowable contours, and while some results were penetrating, others were glib.

In his finale speech, the Pulitzer Prize winning American author, Paul Harding, concluded: "I always tell young writers to try and write something that you would want to read first and always assume that you are writing for audience much sharper and smarter than you are." Indeed, the ILF 2015 was a compelling demonstration of the literary world’s struggle to create a language capable of fostering a conversation on a par with the world’s complexity and in which each participant is adequately represented.