Fatima Bhutto is well aware of the impact of her surname and the expectations that go along with it.
Throughout her career Fatima Bhutto, 36, has fielded questions about whether she herself will follow in the footsteps of her famous grandfather - the former Prime Minister of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto or her aunt former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and enter politics. Every time she has either politely sidestepped the question or mentioned that she is content being political through her writing.
If you’re Pakistani, the name Bhutto will be familiar. But for those who don’t know the story, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was a popular and liberal leader of Pakistan, who was ousted by the Pakistani Army in a coup and subsequently executed in the late 1970's. Many see this as a major juncture in Pakistani politics and the country as a whole. The Army Chief Zia Ul-Haq, took charge of the country in 1977 and ordered Bhutto’s execution two years later, leading the country down a decade-long dictatorship.
Unfortunately for the Bhuttos, the name itself has become associated with danger. Three of Zulfikar’s four children have met untimely and brutal deaths. They include the famous Benazir Bhutto, assassinated in 2007 and her brother and Fatima's father Murtaza Bhutto, gunned down outside his home in 1996.
No one can say Fatima Bhutto has shied away from being political in her work. In 2010 her blazing family memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword, took no prisoners and implicated her aunt Benazir for causing her father’s death. She has also been very vocal about her thoughts on Muslim identity, Pakistani politics and politics in general. I asked her if being political was part of the course of being a Bhutto, or is it because she is Pakistani - as I well know, politics is a passion for almost any Pakistani you will meet.
“That’s being Pakistani. I think that unlike the West, in our part of the world, we have no shelter from the political. There’s no distraction you can take refuge in when you live in an environment where every action and every battle is for something much larger than yourself.”
I found it curious that for someone born in Afghanistan and who spent much of her childhood in Syria, she is so associated with the country of her father’s birth, because of his political lineage.
“Pakistan is my home - it’s just one of many, in my mind. I loved Pakistan long before I ever set foot in the country because it was the country of my father’s dreams and longings. I loved it because he did.”
It is Syria, however, that holds a special place in her heart and she describes her time living there as a child to be one of the happiest period of her life.
“I never left Syria behind, that was the country of my own dreams and longings. I think it’s strange that we are forced to be of one place or one idea or confine ourselves to one singular belonging. We can and should be at home in the world. This influenced the novel in quite delicate ways, perhaps most strongly with Sunny who is a first generation immigrant always being told to go back to where he comes from.”
Sunny is a character from Bhutto’s latest book, The Runaways, where she explores the draw towards Islamic radicalisation through three characters. The themes of alienation, anger and identity run strongly throughout the novel.
“[Sunny] comes from England, doesn’t he? He does and yet he doesn’t. He is forced to identify with a place he’s never known and it alienates him and isolates him greatly while at the same time it exists as this place where his life might have been different, might have been more full and more fully lived.”
Sunny is Bhutto’s favourite character from the novel.
“His journey was the loneliest in many ways. Sunny’s life has all the potential to go a different way and it doesn’t. It is profoundly waylaid by pain,” she says.
The feelings of pain and loneliness have possibly also haunted Bhutto through her own journey in life and for good reason. The Bhutto lineage has been impacted by violence and bloodshed and Fatima’s own life has been marred by the loss of her beloved father. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t hope.
In her novel, she says, “[Hope is represented through] the granular complexity of life and how there is no end point to the experience of living and being, it’s a never ending process. People make mistakes and realise it. People recover from obsessions just as there are those who are swept away by them.”
