The Work Room Interview: Fatima Bhutto on The Art of Political Fiction + Narrative Reportage

Interview by Cassie Archdeacon

CA: In the description for the Art of Political Fiction, you write that "political fiction requires us to study the dark.” What a sentence! What does "the dark" mean to you, and how is that study essential in your own work?

FB: The dark is why I write. It’s every hidden place, every forbidden story, everything that is dangerous for us to know and touch and see and feel. I truly am one of those people who believes that all fiction is political and more so that everything we do is political – what we read, who we read to, how we dress and eat and live. Novels are how we tell the secrets of our states, societies and communities. It’s how we bring things safely to light, by enshrining them in stories.

CA: In the description for Narrative Reportage you also write that a reporter needs "to be alert to the granular." Do you have any strategies for accessing that state of alertness

FB: Harold Pinter said that writers lose something when they start taking taxis instead of public transport – they fall out of the habit of listening to people. He’s right, of course. Writers that are attentive to the granular can’t be lazy, they are always on duty, always alert. It’s not just listening either. So much of being a writer is learning how to see. We tend to think of writing as something we train the ear for – how does language work, how does a story sound, what is the most beautiful/terrifying/evocative way to describe something – but the best writers are hawks. They’re listening, but they are also watching everything. I’m going to send out some prompts to everyone who joins the Narrative Reportage workshop ahead of our first session that ask us to question what we are able to see depending on where we are positioned.

CA: Is there any overlap in the kind of headspace required of a writer who's working in both genres? Or put another way, do you consider narrative reportage and political fiction to be more like close relatives or distance cousins

 FB: There is absolutely overlap. All writing requires us to observe the world around us, to be in tune with the dust and the dirt more than the storm, and to be intimately tuned to the lives of others. With narrative reportage, you are not only questioning a subject but also observing them in order to understand if what they are saying is true. So as a writer you are operating on two parallel tracks: studying what someone says and also what they reveal. When it comes to fiction, you’re as much of a keen observer but you also have the freedom to employ your imagination. (This is a double-edged freedom, of course, because your inventions have to make sense. Your imagination, if it’s to be believed, always has to touch something true.)