Qaisra Shahraz's Short Story: A Pair Of Jeans

On the other hand, Qaisra Shahraz is also a Diaspora writer who focuses on Pakistani women in both of her novels and her writing features can be compared with Bapsi Sidhwa. She was born in Pakistan and then she moved UK with her family. Shahraz also shows her strong association with her country through her writing. She unfolds the domestic issues of Pakistani women living in the West. She searches for women’s identity and explores the issues like cultural identity, sexual repression and victimization of women through her experience as a Diaspora writer. In her short story, A Pair of Jeans she points out the clash of Muslim values within the context of Western culture. In her interview with Munira Siddiqui (2011) concerning the publication and

The diasporic identity has its own advantages… the abundance of experience Pakistani and Western… she redefines feminism for Pakistani society, call it Islamic feminism… her target is the agrarian system, some oppressive customs in Sindh and the subversion of Islam to serve one’s own interest (Siddiqui, 2011,p. 2).

As Spivak and Mohanty in post-colonial article on feminist studies and Colonial Discourse, Under Western Eyes (1993) have argued that women of the Third-World countries are portrayed as colonial stereotypes. “Stereotypes either depict Muslim women as exotic, oppressed and almost totally enslaved by men in Islam, or as defending the virtues of Islam and the status and rights accorded to women “(2005: 755). Spivak, in her essay, “Can Subaltern Speak?” has expressed her views regarding the colonized subjects including women:

To what extent did colonial power succeed in silencing the colonized? When we emphasize the destructive power of colonialism, do we necessarily position colonized people as victims, incapable of answering back? ... if we suggest that the colonial subjects can ‘speak’ and question colonial authority… in what voices do the colonized speak- their own, or in accents borrowed from their masters? … it is impossible for us to recover the voice of the ‘subaltern’ or oppressed subject (qtd in Loomba

Following review offers a comparison between the contemporary Postcolonial writers including Kureishi, Nadeem Aslam and Monica- Ali. In Kureishi, it is noted that Islam is a book of rules that constrains human life. In Kureishi, Shahid is the protagonist who is temporarily attached to the fundamentalist Islam, finds it too constraining because it does not allow diversity in life. Thus instead of sticking to Islam, he moves on with his girlfriend to the so called life of liberation i.e. full of alcohol, drugs and sex (qtd. in Holmes, n,d. p. 296-13). Nadeem Aslam is both Pakistani and British and has grown up in the country of the former colonialists, therefore cannot be considered to be part of either; East or West. He is considered to be the part of both worlds. Like Nadeem Aslam, Monica Ali is also hybrid and ethnic in her cultural roots as she is the product of three different correlating societies; Bangladeshi and British, born in Pakistan, and grown up in a former region of British India and therefore cannot be considered to be part of one or the other, the east or the west. Robert Young regards hybridity as an influential term in imperial and colonial discourse. Young believes that hybridity has been seen as part of tendency of discourse analysis to de-historicise and delocate cultures from the temporal, spatial, geographical and linguistic context