Memoirs written by women often tend to fall into neat demarcations of the ‘female’ experience: a traumatic tale of patriarchal hardship or the eventual triumph of finding one’s purpose and voice within a system rigged against ‘her’.
Aisha Sarwari’s Heart Tantrums and Brain Tumours: A Tale of Misogyny, Marriage and Muslim Feminism is distinctive and powerful because it is at once all those things and none of those things while subverting, well, all the notions of ‘womanhood’, ‘gender norms’, and ‘caretaking and loyalty.’
In complicating everything we know and feel about the ‘Pakistani woman stereotype’, which assumes certain privileges and hardships based solely on class, education and geography, Sarwari breaks down the monolith of women’s identity in Pakistan
Sarwari’s memoir is in equal parts a scathing critique of patriarchal Pakistani society and, frankly, a love letter to the perseverance and complexity of familial bonds that shape identity. It is a deeply honest, no-holds-barred retelling of a very unique and personal journey that doesn’t flow linearly, because the form matches the heart of the book: life and love are not straight lines but infuriatingly and heartbreakingly messy.
It is the first time the author interweaves the main relationships in her life that have shaped her identity but, in some ways, also how she has emerged as herself, despite the wreckage wrought by her most pivotal relationships.
“Women like me, we have no one. We don’t even have ourselves, because we’re already giving so much to others, like our tormentors, our husbands, our children and our bosses. But I have never had anyone to say to me: Aisha, it’ll be okay.”
This is an excerpt from the article by @Mavra.Bari Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 10th, 2023
