Feryal Ali-Gauhar is a culture heritage manager, writer, filmmaker, actor and teacher, mainly concerned with history and theory of film and the theory and practice of political economy. Her work has been described as visual, poetic and lyrical – a far cry from the themes she addresses, which are startling and disturbing, laying the ground for her concerns as a human- and animal-rights advocate. Her first novel, A Scent of Wet Earth in August (Penguin 2002), was based on her second feature film (Tibbi Galli, 1997), focusing on the lives of the inhabitants of Lahore’s Shahi Mohallah. In No Space for Further Burials (2007), she creates a vivid landscape of beauty in a war-torn Afghanistan and peoples that forgotten place with characters who struggle against despair and neglect, rising to heroic heights of resilience. Her recent novel, An Abundance of Wild Roses (Canongate, 2024), links the spirits of hunted animals with men and women who struggle to escape predators that exist only as a construct in their minds. This novel and Feryal’s work as a writer are being featured at this year’s Oxford Literary Festival in Oxford, UK.

In an interview with The News on Sunday, she reflects on writing as an act of resistance, the power of storytelling rooted in lived experience and how her mother’s life and values continue to inform her work. Excerpts:

The News on Sunday: Do you see writing as sculpting – removing material until a shape appears – or like weaving, where the pattern forms gradually as you work?

Feryal Ali-Gauhar: It’s more like architecture to me. Not weaving, because weaving is very two-dimensional; there’s a width and a length. Architecture is three-dimensional, and time and space are dimensions that are very difficult to handle in writing. I was trained as a filmmaker. I’ve never studied literature. I’ve never been taught the craft of writing. So I sort of lumber through it. But I know that you build the story from something you’ve imagined, which takes shape like an edifice with spaces inside and beneath the ground. Beneath the ground are possibly the backstories, the foundations upon which the story you’re telling rests. But the architecture that I subscribe to is an unending form – it’s a never-completed building.

I don’t have a process because I don’t think about it. It’s not an intellectual exercise for me. It’s not about craft. It’s not about fashioning something. It’s about relieving myself of many, many burdens.

TNS: Like catharsis?

FG: Not even that. It’s more like unravelling. If you use weaving as an analogy, it’s like unravelling the carpet. You know, like taking it apart, taking all the threads apart. Instead of putting them together.

TNS: And then putting them back together as a story?

FG: Yeah, as a story. And it’s not just one story. Because, I mean, as a child, I used to [do this] before going to sleep. This was a nightly ritual. You see, it was so quiet in the ’60s that you could hear the lion roaring in the Lahore Zoo. I used to imagine that the lion was roaring with the pain of loneliness. And it just seemed haunting to me. Then, if a car drove past, the lights would move across the walls in these massive bedrooms. And there I was, this child, 6 or 7, listening to this lion’s very lonely roar and watching the light hitting the walls and then moving. It was as if I were in a cubicle with its own volition. So, in my childhood, that room, my bedroom, was my circus; it was my arena. I used to imagine all these stories that used to play out because of the light falling on the walls, and I would see shapes in the plaster of the walls. The house I was born in, grew up in, and would probably be dying in, is now almost 200 years old. It had these uneven surfaces of plaster. So when the light fell on these surfaces, shadows would be cast. And I imagined them as animals inside the plaster, all telling their stories. I would make up conversations. I was a loner as a child, and I still am. And for me, the process of writing, I think, comes from just this very vivid imagination.

You build the story from something you’ve imagined, which takes shape like an edifice with spaces inside and beneath the ground. 

TNS: When did you realise that language is more than just communication?

FG: I must have realised it when I read the writings of my late mother, Khadijah Marsina Ebrahim. She was a brilliant writer, but unfortunately, this country never acknowledged her. Her novel was published during her lifetime. I want to republish it. She used to write poetry. I found her collection of poems after she died because she never shared them with us. She had a beautiful voice; and it was seamless: her speech, her communication.

TNS: You also dedicate An Abundance of Wild Roses to your late mother. Tell us a bit more about her influence on your work.

FG: She was born in Cape Town to Gujarati Muslim parents and was educated at Kinnaird College, Lahore, and the London School of Economics, London. She was an extraordinary woman who lived her life according to her principles – she shunned wealth, she encouraged learning, compassion, sharing and integrity. And she lived with all of those.

Choosing to turn away from a life of privilege, she set up a home in Skardu almost fifty years ago, when there were hardly any roads leading to remote villages where she would walk and climb to visit women and children living in dire poverty. She was extremely well-read, very erudite, highly developed intellectually and extremely compassionate. These are values I hold in high esteem. Through this book, I pay tribute to her efforts to help those who others have left behind.

TNS: Your female characters often carry pain passed down from previous generations. What does it mean for you to write about that inherited sorrow?

FG: Actually, one of the reasons I chose not to have a child – when I was still able to and in a position to make a conscious decision after all I had been through – was this very phenomenon of generational trauma and how it makes us quite neurotic and how that neurosis doesn’t stop with us. It’s transferred to the children we bring into the world. And I just wanted to put a stop to it.