I never escaped the violence: Fatima Bhutto on her new novel The Runaways
- The daughter of Pakistani political martyr Murtaza Bhutto draws on her own journey for her new book
When the world is on fire, it’s difficult to find your proper place in it. Fatima Bhutto’s new novel The Runaways faces that question from perspectives highlighting the many facets of modern Pakistan, inevitably encompassing issues of radicalism and Muslim identity.
Bhutto herself, the granddaughter and niece of prime ministers and daughter of a political martyr – leading many to wonder if she is destined for Pakistani politics – faces questions about her own place in a tumultuous world.
“You don’t get to run away from anything, really. You always return to it,” Bhutto says. “I used to think I was running away from the violence that I encountered growing up. But I never escaped from it because I’m always writing about it, thinking about it, replaying it, trying to understand it in new ways. I don’t think you ever really get to run away. You get to see things from different angles but you still battle them.”
Like Bhutto herself, The Runaways is something of a cipher. The book was not available when she spoke at Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali last month. Since then, the novel has been released exclusively in Pakistan. The rest of the world must await its publication by Penguin in March. During her on onstage discussion and our face-to-face interview, Bhutto jealously guards plot details.
Her 2010 family memoir Songs of Blood and Sword drew a lot of attention for pinning the 1996 killing of her father Murtaza Bhutto in a hail of police gunfire on her aunt, Benazir Bhutto, then prime minister, and her husband Asif Ali Zadari. Fatima Bhutto was 14 at the time. “I’m haunted by the violence,” she says. “Writing is a way for me to exorcise the violence, to expose it to air and shrink it.”
The memoir highlights Bhutto’s childhood during her father’s exile from Pakistan during General Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime. “Born in Kabul bearing a Pakistani passport, grew up in Syria … You don’t want to be in an airport queue with me,” she jokes.
Bhutto returned to Pakistan as a pre-teen before undertaking undergraduate studies at New York City’s Barnard College and a master’s degree at University of London’s School of Oriental and Asian Studies.
