Mohammed Hanif is a Pakistani writer, journalist born on November 1964 in Okara district of Pakistan. Hanif has written films and stage plays such as “The long Night”, “The Dictator’s Wife”etc. His first novel “A Case of Exploding Mangoes”, was an acclaimed comic novel which won the best First Book Award in the Commonwealth Book Prize in 2009. The novel was based on the plane crashing which killed General Muhammad Zia-ul-haq, former President of Pakistan. Hanif’s second book “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti”, published in 2011 made Hanif’s reputation among noted English novel writers. The book balances between seriousness and comedy very well – with the pinch of romance in all the botched up situations.
“Our Lady of Alice Bhatti” is a cultural fiction novel. According to the author the novel is a love story. The main character of the story – Alice Bhatti, is a Catholic nurse who has just been released from prison. Alice might be shown to be tenacious woman, but she is also victimized. Mohammed Hanif, rather than showing the readers the skyscrapers, highways or mosques of Karachi, brings the French Colony of Karachi which is a home to many choohras or untouchables into the limelight. Hanif uses the words like Choohras, Muslas to create differences between caste and religions to bring forth the stereotypical thinking about them in the novel.
Alice, newly graduated from “Brostol” prison for women and children in Karachi, gets a job in a corrupted hospital named Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments of Karachi with the help of her friend Noor – whom she met in Brostol. She is also keen to help Noor to find remedy for or to take care of his mother who is struggling with cancer. Alice’s outspokenness leads her to take the blame for a mishandled operation – making her way into the Brostol prison for women and children. The story is set in the hospital and it mostly revolves around this place. The hospital is considered to be the place full of shit with garbage and urine all over the place – with no one to clean up this mess.
Alice is consumed with her womanliness. She is over and over again humiliated in her life by someone which has left her infuriated. Alice is aware of her being an untouchable, so she sticks to her assigned job. Alice’s father is a sweeper or drainage cleaner, but he has some kind of talent to cure stomach ulcers without any medicine – he is not any wizard, he just knows how to cure that problem. As we can see through the book the light is being thrown on the world of the oppressed, living a life of struggles and with all those struggles Hanif tries to depict the lives of people living there. facing tyrannies just like Alice’s character.
There are only three main female characters depicted mostly in the novel, others are only nameless characters who are sidelines – who have either got shot, killed or are abandoned. Alice is being shown as a poor helpless girl for whom every path of happiness comes with struggle. But Hanif has made sure to portray her weaknesses also as her strength from time to time. For example, when she goes for an interview for the job, she is scared to death, but still she sits confidently in front of the senior doctors and Sister. Another time when she is harassed in Begum Qazalbash’s VIP room by her second son, Alice uses her razor blade to cut his private part.
Qazalbash’s role in the story is nothing more than of a rich woman dying, but her life is much more than that as per senior Sister Hina Alvi. She is a convent educated, self-made woman in the family where the sixth generation of men does not even work. Women living a life like Alice in the slums have a different kind of confidence, they are normal to the fact that they would be touched in a wrong way or harassed at any time in their life. Second main character Sister Hina Alivi, is now at a point in her life where she has understood that she has to always live below the patriarchy of men. Sister Hina Alivi does know that Pakistani women can never question their places or positions in the patriarchal society.
Sister Hina Alvi, according to the author, is a symbol of how to adjust one’s eye with the darkness. Sister Hina Alvi is called in the novel, the queen of ‘Charya ward’ of the Sacred Heart hospital. Another woman who is shown in the novel is Zainab. She is present in the story, but only in complete unconscious state. She has given up her fight against the despotism. The temporary unconscious state which we saw in Alice when she was lost in the hanged lizard during her interview is seen permanently in Zainab. She cannot even remove the flies hovering over her face. Zainab is completely dependent on Noor, her son.
The world shown the in the novel in today’s era of Pakistan is totally different – which one expects. The patriarchy dominates everywhere making women feel that they have no worth in this world. There isn’t a single day when Alice does not see a woman who being poisoned, sacked, hanged or shot, jilted or burnt, even worst buried alive by her own husband, brother or father. When Alice’s father told her that he found a two-day girl in a drain, it can be understood what the condition of women in Pakistan is. It’s not just about the condition of women in Pakistan, same condition can be seen in many other developing countries such as India and Bangladesh. Women are harassed or exploited all their life while some might be aware of their situation, some are not even aware of the fact that they are being wronged.
Mohammed Hanif has portrayed this situation very strongly in the novel. When Alice and Noor were sleeping together during her night shift, Noor being in his teenage years with all his hormones high, looks at Alice in a completely different way. He tries to know her, her thinking about life and death, he feels at home and amorous at the same time. He looks at Alice’s breasts with doting eyes and thinks of them as two abandoned puppies confusing each other to be their mother. When he sees Teddy Butt and Alice in love and walking hand in hand, he feels jealous of them. These acts in some way or the other exploit Alice’s privacy. For men it’s easy to get what they want just by placing a gun on women’s head. When Teddy Butt tried to explain his feelings to Alice, he puts a gun on her temple and expresses what he feels about her – only to get shunned by her. After being repudiated by Alice, Teddy fires his Mauser leading to a three-day violence spree. According to the people there, it was normal to have such violence.
Everything which would be not normal in the view of educated people, was normal for people living there – even the “literate” people of the society. Hanif tries to use his characters to expose all the traditions and norms of the society with their complexities and contradictions. According to The Express Tribune, Hanif being a cultural anatomist, using various sardonic literary motifs highlights the hierarchical structure of the society and its prejudices. According to New York Times, the novel shows the socially sanctioned butchery of girls and women in Pakistan. Author ends the book with the uncertainty over the question raised by him during the course of the novel about the conditions and treatment of women in Pakistan, and whether the Muslims and Catholics will ever be able to find common grounds making Pakistan a better place to live in harmony. Although the ending of this second novel by Mohammed Hanif is not as neat as his first novel “A Case of Exploding Mangoes”.
The book represents the Pakistani women living in the nub of religious, political, cultural and social violence. Author uses the word choohra for Christian community living in the slums. These expression exhibit prejudice in society for people belonging to different religion and caste. Hanif has definitely created a dark humorous tale in “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti”. The novel is the obstreperous work of the writer which describes the story of a specific place yet the story has a familiar dissonance all around the world. I found the tone of the novel “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti” to be compassionate and humanist and it’s a sack full of emotions, slapsticks for those who think and a mishap for those who feel.
References:
https://tribune.com.pk/story/257182/book-review-our-lady-of-alice-bhatti-alice-in-charya-land/
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/books/review/our-lady-of-alice-bhatti-by-mohammed-hanif.html