Irony is nothing new in contemporary practice. It is a well-traversed trope that has informed and directed both the production and consumption of culture and society in Pakistan in recent times. However, the familiarity of the mechanics of irony has ensured that its effect is somewhat diluted in recent years and, as such, artists and writers today have shifted their gaze from this once destabilising concept towards a more rigorous interpretation of time, space and place.

This is not to say that irony has no validity in contemporary practice, but rather that the critiquing of a society caught in the clench of a ‘post-Partition’ and ‘post-9/11’ world requires new strategies to ensure that spaces are made available to explore and comprehend these modalities.

The seventh edition of Karachi Literature Festival 2016 ensured one such platform where writers could delve into specific issues quite intensively. This approach moved the festival’s core concerns beyond the vague thematic catch-alls that characterise most international festivals. Even if it rendered some speeches as mutely stylistic, the multiple group discussion model was a risk that was ultimately rewarding for the viewer, drawing nuanced and unexpected connections between words and images.

Judith Butler famously wrote that gender identity "is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its results." Adapting her observation, I wonder if the collective identity of the global art crowd is not constituted by the many festivals that have proliferated in the past two decades? In Pakistan, the festivalist impulse arose as an immediate consequence of post 9/11 political transformations and the growing need to fill the public sphere with content hitherto unavailable or even forbidden. Thus, the establishment of interdisciplinary and multimedia festivals like the LLF and the Faiz Foundation Festival.

There are other initiatives, such as the Khayal Festival which has attracted thousands of enthusiasts providing them with an ambitious reflection on the arts. KLF is smaller in scope and range but it provides the city and its art crowd with the opportunity both to listen to writers and to look at each other listening to the speakers. 

KLF 2016 began on a note of silence. Ameena Saiyid, Managing Director of OUP and her cohort, Asif Farrukhi, paid tribute to the octogenarian author, Intizar Husain - the doyen of Urdu literature and the father of literature festivals - by attributing him to the assembly of immortals, where he joined ranks with fellow authors like Abdullah Hussain, and Nasreen Anjum Bhatti. While a major chunk of this year’s festival went into remembering friends of Urdu literature, posthumous tributes were paid to Ismat Chughtai with ‘Kaghazi Hai Pairahan’, to Eqbal Ahmed with ‘Critical Outsider and Witness in a Turbulent Age’ and to Khushwant Singh with ‘Train to Pakistan’.

Sexuality and the emergence of a more profoundly acknowledged transgender identity was achingly articulated in the sessions: The Dilemmas of the Transgender, Facing Wrongs and Seeking Rights, and Transgender Rights: Are There Any?  Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, author of ‘Me Hijra, Me Laxmi’ lamented our reliance on English language sources on the one hand while, on the other, she questioned the use of mythology, Gandhian ideology and psychoanalytic theory in formulating decisive knowledge of masculinity and femininity in the contemporary scenario.

Together with Bindiya Rana -- the first member of the community to contest elections -- Tripathi called for new knowledge frameworks instead, urging that public idealogues and narrowly textual analysis shouldn’t usurp complexities of practice. While mapping and theorising androgyny, the activist/author quipped that it was the coloniser who cast the transgender aside by imposing discriminatory laws on their gender.

As a corollary, at the eponymous session centering on ‘River of Flesh: The Prostituted Woman in Indian Short Fiction’, the editor, Ruchira Gupta, spoke extremely eloquently and clear-mindedly about the entrenched inequalities that force the sub-continental woman into prostitution and abuse. Being a writer, feminist campaigner and founder of the anti-sex trafficking organisation, Apne Aap, she stressed the need for new laws to protect and strengthen women across the board while acquainting the audience with certain windows in the Indian Penal Code.

Among the themes played out as the sessions unfolded across additional floors and halls, were Fiction, Memory and Colonialism, moderated by Framji Minwalla. While the element of critique presaged by the title was constantly present, the efforts made by H M Naqvi, Sadia Shepherd, Christoph Peters and Kamila Shamsie to address personal and public issues through individual and collective engagement framed an exploration of the process of conflagration and transformation, a cycle of obliteration and renewal.

"How do we remember a past that has been colonised?" "How is personal memory subsumed by national narratives and how is a sense of amnesia, trauma and rupture portrayed?" were some of the questions framed. According to Naqvi, recollection is always a communal endeavour, and that fiction is a lie that tells the truth. Seconding him, Peters added that the ability to reconstruct blurs the line between memory and narration.

"My personal state always affects my moods and images of my memories, and when I write from experience, I realise I have so many realities -- some true, some misremembered and some de-remembered," he ended. "There is tremendous fiction in memoir", cited Shepherd while recalling the discovery of her grandmother’s Jewish ancestry at the age of 13. It was Shamsie who put the lid on historical memory by explaining that empathy with historical moments is important and will be shaped by what separates history we know from the outside compared to the one that prevails inside us.

‘Diplomatic Calisthenics’ is the term of art applied to the outcome of diplomatic processes between India and Pakistan. Every single time, the envoys or the heads of the states meet, the sentiment that both the adversaries are natural allies in a range of commitments from political freedom to tolerance, representative government and the fight against terrorism, is endorsed and reiterated ad infinitum. And in their excitement at this quirk of geopolitics, they mix metaphors with complete abandon. At the book launch of Barkha Dutt’s ‘This Unquiet Land’ and Salman Khurshid’s ‘The Other Side of the Mountain’, Kashmir and its conflict loomed large.

The audience, grappling with scarcely concealed reservations with the prospect of a new upward spiral in the nuclear arms race, looked on in bemusement as the Indian authors publicly tore up India’s long-standing commitment to the cause of disarmament.

Parallel to literary sessions, ran the gamut of talks and presentations on fine arts, organised entirely by Art Now Pakistan - an online magazine initiated by Fawzia Naqvi -- accompanied by an exhibition of emerging artists News From Tomorrow, curated by Sameera Raja on Red Terrace. Terrace Talks did not only make the voices of countless artists and curators who have continued to be relevant over the last few years heard, they also made evident the important developments in curatorial practice since the 2000s. Musing over LBF in the session, Art as part of Public Engagement, Qudsia Rahim and Osman Khalid of Lahore Biennale Foundation (LBF) proclaimed, "Over the decades, we have had forced narratives that have taken art out of the social space; extremism has taken its place. LBF is an effort to bring art back into people’s life and spread humanity; art can be truly transformative."

In Art as Witness to Memory and Erasure, Camilla Chaudhary along with Nilofur Farrukh and other panelists alleged that the purpose of KLF 2017 is to break the stereotype of elitist art and engage the public in community-based art, in what she referred to as ‘enforced engagement’.

While some of the speakers re-trod extremely well-worn tracks, others like the photographers in the session entitled Photography in the Age of Art contested the role of photography in the digital age. It was rather disappointing, if not outright shocking, to discover that those who’d been fed on the belief that ‘true’ photography implies manual dexterity, and that, as the old aphorism goes, ‘Photography begins the moment you enter the darkroom’ were now cajoling and flouting digital photography and its manipulation as the real thing. Eman Rana went a step ahead in proclaiming that regardless of the technology what makes the photographer an artist is his intent.

The sheer scale and visceral texture of Karachi is often overwhelming for the presentation of literary art. The city exerts a steady gravitational pull, drawing the visitor into this most complex of localities. In spite of the fact that the organisers marshalled a festival that explored and expanded potential of their earlier iterations, much touted names as Anupam Kher, Nandita Das, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Aasim Sajjad Akhtar and Rakhshanda Jalil never showed up. Consequently, KLF 2016, held at Beach Luxury Hotel, was a show almost entirely detached from its locality.

Critics complained that there was a dearth of the new in this year’s KLF offerings, perhaps due to the organisers’ lack of resource or conviction or excessive vigilance and political constraint. But is the new necessarily more daring than something old that has not yet been adequately recognised and considered? Here, the look backward was not about the valorisation of artifacts, nor was it a nostalgic meditation on the good old days. I see this historic turn as the act of addressing the present while remaining conscious of the weight of the past.

KLF 2016 was an exhibition of contradictions, binaries and seemingly incompatible methodologies. The abstraction and aestheticisation of complex political ideas was problematic, while the venue design was often distracting and suffocating, leaving the participant with the feeling that he had digested something that was undoubtedly worthy but rather absent of flavour. And yet, for the most part, the writers’ proclamations were able to move past the strictures of the festival’s dogmatic structure.