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Photograph by John Marinelli
Lucy Ferriss has come a long way since her mischievious memoir, Unveiling the Prophet: The Misadventures of a Reluctant Debutante. That book was an intelligent analysis of the social codes in St. Louis during the civil-rights era, during her coming of age. Many acclaimed novels later, she’s a writer-in-residence at Trinity College, and she’s traveled to northern Pakistan to analyze far more complex social codes. She’s twined her insights into a tender, complicated love story—charming and disturbing in turn, and deeply human. Author Claire Messud describes A Sister to Honor as “vivid, compelling, as ineluctable as a Greek tragedy.”
You write about Afia, a reserved, studious, obedient young woman from northern Pakistan who falls in love with an American squash player, spilling confusion and violence into the jagged space between their cultures. The book is about the Pashtun honor code, but it’s also about American honor, as upheld (and later ignored) by the female squash coach. What started you thinking about this collision?
Well, it was the Trinity squash team. Also I have a son who’s an elite athlete, a tennis player. I’ve seen these kids who get recruited from abroad. And I’ve spent a lot of time sitting around watching coaches who are really really interested in the kids’ welfare but bottom line, really want to win. There’s a kind of conflict there.
I’ve always remembered Virginia Woolf’s essay, “Shakespeare’s Sister.” So I was thinking about these squash boys—what about their sisters? And I wondered where the best squash players in the world came from. That was easy to find out—that was a Google search—and I found they came from the Pashtun area of Pakistan. The area where the Taliban come from. And the honor culture of that part of the world is unrelenting and powerful and centered on women.
How did you begin to understand that culture?
Originally I was going to tell the whole story from the point of view of the coach. I’d met this 6-foot, amazingly confident female coach, and she really impressed me. But I realized my coach would be just as ignorant as I was. So after I got stuck, I decided the only thing I could do was go over there and learn something.
You don’t just walk into Peshawar and say, “Tell me about honor,” though.
First, I contacted a journalist who’d lived there for years and asked if she knew people I could correspond with. I talked to Hina Jilani, a United Nations elder who’s the chief defender of women’s rights in Pakistan. She and her sister have a shelter for women who are at risk for honor violence. And I contacted the friend of a friend. He wrote back, “Great! You are staying at my house. My driver will pick you up at the airport.” I said, “You don’t understand. I’m coming in at 3 a.m.” And he said, “That’s all right. My driver will pick you up.”
There’s this huge tradition of hospitality: “You are a friend of my friend, and you are now under my protection.” Which I did not understand at all. I didn’t realize I needed protection in the cities. I would have been a prime candidate for kidnapping! Then I thought, well, where I really want to be is Peshawar—which we all know about now because of the attack on the school, but at the time, I only knew was a big town and must have a university. I wrote and said, “I am an American academic researching a book, and I would like to correspond with a member of your faculty.” They didn’t know what to do with my email—they’d never gotten a request like that. One of the professors looked over the secretary’s shoulder and said, “Why don’t you send that to me?”
And that was Shazia, whom you thank in your acknowledgements.
Shazia is a wonderful and fascinating person. Her father was an engineer. When the Americans came in the 1970s to build the Tarbela Dam, they hired him, so she spent her first 10 years in the American town they built for the workers. And then the Americans left, and she was back in her own culture. At 15, she was dancing at a wedding party—it’s only attended by women, but the young men sneak in the back and take a peek—and she was seen by one of them. So her family was contacted by a cousin’s family. Marriage is generally within the clan. They came for tea and expressed interest. She was just 15. They said, “Well, our son,” who was 27, “really wants her.” She said, “I want to finish my education. I don’t want to marry.” They said, “He’s a doctor. He’s a member of our clan. You are not going to do any better. But you can wait until you are 17 and have finished school." He got a residency in England, and she got her Ph.D. at the University of London.
We corresponded, and she was eager to help. I said, “I’m coming to Pakistan, could you recommend a good hotel?” She said, “Are you out of your mind? You are staying with me!” I was completely frank with her about the book. She proceeded to think about who would be the best models for my characters and initiate dialogues with people who would give me the answers I needed. The power goes out all the time there, and she had a generator that would generate just enough power for her bedroom, so we would sit on her bed like sisters, talking for hours.
How did she, and the others you met, feel about the honor culture’s violence toward women?
This is a very delicate subject for Pashtuns. Here’s a different example of the code: Shazia’s brother came to visit. He’s a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, international businessman. He said, “There’s something I don’t understand. I know an American. He gets mugged on the street. He’s carrying his briefcase with his laptop. And all he does is apply to his insurance company, get the money, and buy a new laptop.” I said, “Yeah, that’s what you do.” He said “Not for me. That is a stain on my honor. Even if you rip my shirt, I must get revenge. That is our code.” He said that otherwise, he is not a man. He would not be able to live with himself as a man.
So how does personal revenge translate into honor killings over a woman’s virtue?
You never can know who a child’s father is. Only the woman can know. So the only way to control that is to control the woman. Because you have an extremely family-based system—it’s unbelievable how family-based it is, and you are talking networks of family—it is of utmost importance for men to know who their children are.
Honor in their culture is a purely male trait. Women don’t have honor, they have shame. The woman is the one who carries the honor of the family, but she does not have honor herself. Violence about it—my best parallel is to what we call crimes of passion. Just as our romance culture allows that sort of psychopathic murder, their honor culture leaves a way for husbands who have fragile egos, or fathers who are dishonored because they have no sons, or fathers who are anxious and don’t have enough money to commit psychopathic murders under the umbrella of honor killings.
The Pashtun people feel very unsure about this whole thing. They buy into the system pretty much—the arranged marriage, the revenge. But they recognize that they have a problem when it comes to honor violence.
So when you went home to write…
I had to regroup. How can I make this story work in a way that portrays the culture honestly? You can indict a whole culture if you want, but it’s a culture. It’s all connected. Take that girl who had her nose cut off. Our received wisdom here is, let’s go get her out of Afghanistan and fix her nose. Bring her to America, and everything will be wonderful for her here. Well, she’s apparently a mess, that girl. Because while what happened to her was terrible, there was a certain terrible logic to it. She understood how it worked in her culture. Snatching her out and taking her to Hollywood and saying let’s all be American—it’s not a solution.
Lissy, the squash coach, gives an annual speech about honor to her team. What was your own take on honor—even before you researched the Pashtun version?
That speech just came right out of me. It’s an amalgam of all the things people say to young people and you try to live by, and of course the coach eventually breaks every single one of those points. She dishonors herself, because she gets too involved with these people and because she wants to win. Any time I start hearing that sort of thing, I think, let’s just kind of tap on this and see how hollow it is. She gives a real bang-up little speech, and they love it. It’s not too long, and it gets ‘em where they live. But when we talk about honor in that way, we’re going to get all tangled up. What it does is make you feel like you have failed, over and over. I guess I’m not a big fan of honor as an ideal. It always seems like some big catchall that isn’t going to catch everything. Live a life of love.
I love how finely you drew the character of Khalid, who becomes radicalized.
At first I thought Afia was going to die. But I also had this vague feeling that the family wasn't going to go after her. People there love their children. Some did tell me, “If I saw my daughter holding hands with a boy, she would be gone to me.” But they didn’t say, “I would kill her.” I began to develop this sort of theory that the people who would kill her would be people who had other issues. I thought, besides some invented pure evil, what else would be going on? And I had to look at the family structure and think in terms of family dynamics. I’d already had the idea that one member of the family would become radicalized. But I started to think of him as a human being and experiment with his point of view. And I started to understand him, instead of just thinking, “Oh, these evil people, they commit honor killings.”
But that was months after I got back. It was a constant working out. I had started writing the early scenes over here, and I had people over there telling me that my plot was impossible because no Pashtun girl would fall in love in the U.S.
Did you believe them?
It gave me pause. It’s their culture, and they were convinced of it. And then a couple of girls told me that it had happened to them. Their parents didn’t know, and they didn’t want to tell them, but they thought I should proceed with my plot.
Those conversations must have been invaluable.
At one point, I was saying to a young woman that I imagined that when Afia was back in Pakistan, she would feel very foreign thinking about America, and she said, “Oh, no, not at all. When you are away from it, you shut a door, and you do not think about it.” When I would ask the young people, “How would you feel if…?” it was very hard for them to answer. It was very hard for young women especially to access or articulate their own feelings, and I often backed off. So in the book there are often times when Afia does not know how she feels.
Are you scared to have written this book? It’s a tense time…
Not really. I mean, I don’t insult the Prophet Muhammad. People are reading the book in Pakistan now—I have sent some copies. They are making inquiries at bookstores. I don’t know if they will sell it. So far, my friends there have said, “You seem to be getting us.” And that’s my main concern.
I worry a little about the reaction in this country. I struggled with the publisher, because the initial cover was exotic and alluring and sexy. I expressed extreme displeasure, and my editor really went to the mat for me. And I also fought on the jacket copy, which initially identified them as Muslim. It’s not that they are not Muslim, it’s that the chief thing governing their honor codes and their behavior has to do with their tribal traditions and their identity as Pashtun. Nonetheless, some of the early responses have been anti-Muslim. I hope Muslim readers do not feel I have added to the pile of anti-Muslim literature.
Do any particular scenes worry you?
The quasi-sex scene. To Americans, it is tame and sweet. He gives her a shower and wraps her in a blanket. I stopped short of actual sex. But I think there will be those among my Pakistani friends who will say, “That’s it. She’s done for. And that boy, if he dies, we don’t care.” Maybe some won’t. I honestly don’t know how they are going to feel. And I don’t think they will talk about it to me. I’m going to see Shazia—she’s in Canada—and I’m hoping we can sit on her bed and talk.
I won’t spoil the ending, but do you think a marriage to someone of similar background is preferable to a marriage across cultures formed in places as different as northern Pakistan and New England?
Well, I’ve tracked some of these young people. You have to remember what a young country Pakistan is, and that it was founded as a Muslim country. Their grandparents experienced horrific bloodshed in the separation from India. So the young people are still hoping that Pakistan will not be a failed state. They are really torn. They are either like, “Screw this. We are out of here,” or they are trying to make it work. And if they are going to make it work, that requires identifying as Muslim, in a “we’re in this together” way. They feel like nobody understands that. Because they feel so beleaguered, I think they probably will have a better chance of success with other Muslims.
I thought it was interesting that you bookended the novel with Farishta, the mother of Afia and her two brothers.
She is the mother. She is the counterpart to Lissy, who’s the stand-in mother. And I wanted to show her relationship with her husband. She’s going to get blamed, but he is going to come back to her, and that’s huge. I wanted that to be there, so we knew that although these people have rejected their daughter, they are not bad people. And I wanted Afia at the end to be not so alone. I wanted there to be a little bit of a lifeline back.
Having done all this listening and thinking about the two world views, do you think any rapprochement between the two cultures is possible?
There’s a wonderful Pakistani writer, Kamila Shamsie, and she gave a speech at Yale. She said what’s missing is for American writers to come to Pakistan and write about us. I didn’t know about this speech—somebody sent it to me after I came home. She was saying that because all we were getting was journalism. I guess my hope is that the more we can understand these structures as human-driven, as being about people and not just ideologies, the more we can work with them.
When I was in Pakistan, I kept being asked, “Why does Obama keep dropping drones on our wedding parties? And why can’t you stop him?” I said, “Well, Barack and I are not best friends—we don’t have tea.” And people there felt sorry for me. To them I was a figure to be pitied. When they heard about me, a divorced parent of sons, they said, “Where are their uncles? Why do your sons not live with you? Why do they not help you?”
I don’t think I’d go over there now. It’s really scary. But you have got to have human stories. Stories are the only way we have ever really understood anything.
Ferriss will sign and discuss her new novel, A Sister to Honor (Berkley Publishing Group, January 2015), tomorrow, February 4, at 7 p.m. at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid. For more information, call 314.367.6731 or visit left-bank.com.
