The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan
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Description
A memoir of Karachi through the eyes of its women
An Indies Introduce Debut Authors Selection
For a brief moment on December 27, 2007, life came to a standstill in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto, the country’s former prime minister and the first woman ever to lead a Muslim country, had been assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back in Karachi—Bhutto’s birthplace and Pakistan’s other great metropolis—Rafia Zakaria’s family was suffering through a crisis of its own: her Uncle Sohail, the man who had brought shame upon the family, was near death. In that moment these twin catastrophes—one political and public, the other secret and intensely personal—briefly converged.
Zakaria uses that moment to begin her intimate exploration of the country of her birth. Her Muslim-Indian family immigrated to Pakistan from Bombay in 1962, escaping the precarious state in which the Muslim population in India found itself following the Partition. For them, Pakistan represented enormous promise. And for some time, Zakaria’s family prospered and the city prospered. But in the 1980s, Pakistan’s military dictators began an Islamization campaign designed to legitimate their rule—a campaign that particularly affected women’s freedom and safety. The political became personal when her aunt Amina’s husband, Sohail, did the unthinkable and took a second wife, a humiliating and painful betrayal of kin and custom that shook the foundation of Zakaria’s family but was permitted under the country’s new laws. The young Rafia grows up in the shadow of Amina’s shame and fury, while the world outside her home turns ever more chaotic and violent as the opportunities available to post-Partition immigrants are dramatically curtailed and terrorism sows its seeds in Karachi.
Telling the parallel stories of Amina’s polygamous marriage and Pakistan’s hopes and betrayals, The Upstairs Wife is an intimate exploration of the disjunction between exalted dreams and complicated realities.
An Indies Introduce Debut Authors Selection
For a brief moment on December 27, 2007, life came to a standstill in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto, the country’s former prime minister and the first woman ever to lead a Muslim country, had been assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back in Karachi—Bhutto’s birthplace and Pakistan’s other great metropolis—Rafia Zakaria’s family was suffering through a crisis of its own: her Uncle Sohail, the man who had brought shame upon the family, was near death. In that moment these twin catastrophes—one political and public, the other secret and intensely personal—briefly converged.
Zakaria uses that moment to begin her intimate exploration of the country of her birth. Her Muslim-Indian family immigrated to Pakistan from Bombay in 1962, escaping the precarious state in which the Muslim population in India found itself following the Partition. For them, Pakistan represented enormous promise. And for some time, Zakaria’s family prospered and the city prospered. But in the 1980s, Pakistan’s military dictators began an Islamization campaign designed to legitimate their rule—a campaign that particularly affected women’s freedom and safety. The political became personal when her aunt Amina’s husband, Sohail, did the unthinkable and took a second wife, a humiliating and painful betrayal of kin and custom that shook the foundation of Zakaria’s family but was permitted under the country’s new laws. The young Rafia grows up in the shadow of Amina’s shame and fury, while the world outside her home turns ever more chaotic and violent as the opportunities available to post-Partition immigrants are dramatically curtailed and terrorism sows its seeds in Karachi.
Telling the parallel stories of Amina’s polygamous marriage and Pakistan’s hopes and betrayals, The Upstairs Wife is an intimate exploration of the disjunction between exalted dreams and complicated realities.
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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
02/03/2015
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780807003374
ASIN:
B00MKZ0PXA
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)
Rafia Zakaria. (2015). The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan. Beacon Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Rafia Zakaria. 2015. The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan. Beacon Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Rafia Zakaria, The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan. Beacon Press, 2015.
MLA Citation (style guide)Rafia Zakaria. The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan. Beacon Press, 2015.
Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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| Shared Digital Collection | 2 | 1 |
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Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 17:59:16
Date Updated:
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Rafia Zakaria is an author, attorney, and human rights activist who has worked on behalf of victims of domestic violence around the world. She is a columnist for Al Jazeera America, Ms., Dissent, and DAWN, Pakistan’s largest English-language newspaper. Zakaria was born and raised in Karachi and now lives in Pakistan and the United States, where she serves on the board of directors of Amnesty International USA.
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- A memoir of Karachi through the eyes of its women
An Indies Introduce Debut Authors Selection
For a brief moment on December 27, 2007, life came to a standstill in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto, the country’s former prime minister and the first woman ever to lead a Muslim country, had been assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back in Karachi—Bhutto’s birthplace and Pakistan’s other great metropolis—Rafia Zakaria’s family was suffering through a crisis of its own: her Uncle Sohail, the man who had brought shame upon the family, was near death. In that moment these twin catastrophes—one political and public, the other secret and intensely personal—briefly converged.
Zakaria uses that moment to begin her intimate exploration of the country of her birth. Her Muslim-Indian family immigrated to Pakistan from Bombay in 1962, escaping the precarious state in which the Muslim population in India found itself following the Partition. For them, Pakistan represented enormous promise. And for some time, Zakaria’s family prospered and the city prospered. But in the 1980s, Pakistan’s military dictators began an Islamization campaign designed to legitimate their rule—a campaign that particularly affected women’s freedom and safety. The political became personal when her aunt Amina’s husband, Sohail, did the unthinkable and took a second wife, a humiliating and painful betrayal of kin and custom that shook the foundation of Zakaria’s family but was permitted under the country’s new laws. The young Rafia grows up in the shadow of Amina’s shame and fury, while the world outside her home turns ever more chaotic and violent as the opportunities available to post-Partition immigrants are dramatically curtailed and terrorism sows its seeds in Karachi.
Telling the parallel stories of Amina’s polygamous marriage and Pakistan’s hopes and betrayals, The Upstairs Wife is an intimate exploration of the disjunction between exalted dreams and complicated realities. - reviews
- premium: False
- source: New York Times
- content: "The Upstairs Wife" does manage to cover so much ground so skillfully, casting a sharp eye on complicated personal politics and affairs of state alike."
- premium: False
- source: CounterPunch
- content: "The Upstairs Wife weaves emotion, historical fact, and a young person's wonder at her world into an exquisite tale of patriarchy, conflict, love, hope and hate... The story that unfolds is both memorable and magnificent."
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- source: Kirkus Reviews
- content: "A dense, carefully rendered work of minute, memorable detail."
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- source: Ms. magazine
- content: "Zakaria captures polygamy's emotional toll on wives: the depression, self-doubt, and jealous calculations that poison the politics of intimacy."
- premium: False
- source: Sampsonia Way
- content: "If it weren't for the personal bravery of women like...Rafia Zakaria, and the countless other Muslim women fighting hard to reclaim their rightful space in public and private, as well as --personal and political arenas, the no-go zones for Muslim women would continue to expand."
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- content:
December 1, 2014
One woman's personal agony reflects the enormous chasm of inequality between the sexes in Pakistan.A Pakistani journalist and human rights activist now living in America, Zakaria tells the disheartening tale of Pakistan's history of military rule and Islamist misogynist oppression through the stories of her own family members, especially that of her Aunt Amina, who was forced to accept her husband's marriage to a second wife in 1986. A clan of Kokani Muslims from Bombay who migrated to Karachi in 1950, just after partition, Zakaria's family lived in a close-knit community that kept largely to itself within the strangeness of the new country, where the military was exalted above all and women first voted in the election of 1970, which brought Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to power in an ethnically divided polity. Amina was the first of her family to attend college at that time, when the country erupted in ethnic war between East and West Pakistan and Bangladesh emerged from the ruins. An arranged marriage to Sohail promised stability and prosperity, yet no children arrived after a decade; Sohail met a woman at his bank, added a floor to his house, and installed Amina at the top and his new wife on the floor below. A week-on-week-off schedule alternating with the new wife became the humiliating compromise for Amina in her status as "half a wife," scandalizing the community and disgracing the family. Nonetheless, the strictures of tradition prevailed, much as they did for another tragic daughter of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, who wed a Sindh landlord and attempted to rise above the feudal expectations of a woman of her class and lead her country fearlessly into the modern era. Zakaria chisels away chronologically at this relentless, cyclical history, and while readers continue to hope for a glimmer of positivity for these heroines, it does not come. A dense, carefully rendered work of minute, memorable detail.COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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An Indies Introduce Debut Authors Selection
For a brief moment on December 27, 2007, life came to a standstill in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto, the country’s former prime minister and the first woman ever to lead a Muslim country, had been assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back in Karachi—Bhutto’s birthplace and Pakistan’s other great metropolis—Rafia Zakaria’s family was suffering through a crisis of its own: her Uncle Sohail, the man who had brought shame upon the family, was near death. In that moment these twin catastrophes—one political and public, the other secret and intensely personal—briefly converged.
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