Master Class: Why Write While the World is Burning? with Fatima Bhutto
Master Class: Why Write While the World is Burning? with Fatima Bhutto
2 Sessions: Saturday + Sunday, October 25 + 26
12:00-2:00pm ET
Fatima Bhutto
Fatima Bhutto’s books include the novels The Runaways and The Shadow of The Crescent Moon, longlisted for the Women’s Prize and winner of the 2014 Prix de la Romanciere. Her non-fiction books include Songs of Blood and Sword and New Kings of the World.
Language has been robbed of all of its meaning. It doesn’t matter where in the world you are, media and government have abused language to the point of absurdity. What does “cease-fire” mean when you can keep killing? What do “human rights” mean when they only apply to certain groups, based on the color of their skin? What does “war” mean when only one side has an army? Beyond politics, how are we to convey the fragile business of living if words have lost their meaning?
If language is so degraded, how can our writing mean anything? In this master class we will study writing that brought the full force of its meaning onto the page and therefore out into the world including texts by James Baldwin, Ta Nahesi Coates, Mahmoud Darwish, and others. There will be a reading pack and time for Q&A.
In the second session, we are grateful to have guest speaker Eman Basher. She is former English teacher for ninth graders, a Gazan mom of two boys and a girl, and a creative writer. Her work has been published in Vice Magazine, Electronic Intifada, The Washington Post, and Vittles.
Workshop Highlights:
Discussion of the degradation of language and writing in a political climate where words have ceased to have meaning
Discussion of how writers can convey the joys and betrayals of ordinary life purely through the written word
A reading list of classic texts that not only elevated language to its fullest form but also impacted culture
Scholarships are available. Please check back for more application details to come.
Fatima Bhutto is the author of the novels The Runaways (Viking, 2019), praised as “astute and searing” by Kirkus Reviews, and The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (Penguin Books, 2015), longlisted for Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her most recent nonfiction book is New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-Pop (Columbia Global Reports, 2019, which argues that the West’s cultural influence is diminishing across the globe. Her first book is Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir (Nation Books, 2010) which deals with her father’s murder and the Bhutto family's history in Pakistani politics. Her father Murtaza Bhutto, son of Pakistan's former President and Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and an elected member of parliament, was killed by the police in 1996 in Karachi during the premiership of his sister, Benazir Bhutto. The Guardian wrote, “In clear and unpretentious prose it gives a vivid impression of the brutal and corrupt world of Pakistani power politics, which has resulted in the violent deaths of four members of the Bhutto dynasty in the past 31 years.” Bhutto’s journalism and essays have appeared in New Statesman, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Nation, Literary Hub and elsewhere.
In an interview with PopMatters on New Kings of the World, Bhutto was asked about her switch from fiction to nonfiction: “As a reader, I love both fiction and non-fiction. As a writer, some topics are only doable as fiction and others are clearly made for non-fiction. I’ve always been fascinated by the topic of culture, especially the politics of popular culture and soft power. I wanted to write about the rise of Asia and the politics behind its rising cultural giants because it seemed to be something we need to be watching at this moment in time.”
Bhutto was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up between Syria and Pakistan. She graduated from Columbia University in 2004, majoring in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London in 2005 with a Masters in South Asian Government and Politics.
