Home Free: An American Road Trip
Readers of my books Alive and Well in Pakistan (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010) know that what I do is a kind of journalism in the form of narrative travel writing. I’m doing something similar, albeit with a wider canvas and a longer timeline, in the book I’m currently finishing for March 2012 publication, Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in the Context of Haiti.
These books and my other writings have garnered some gratifying praise, which I take as validating my approach, telling me that I’m doing the kind of writing that I should be doing. Edwidge Danticat, for example, was kind enough to call Alive and Well in Pakistan “Wonderful … a model of travel writing. So worldly yet personal.” The Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa calls Overtaken By Events “compulsively readable.” About my June 1, 2011 TEDx speech “What Does Pakistan Have to Do with Haiti?”, Paul Farmer told me: “Your thesis about the myopic narratives assigned to both Haiti and Pakistan by the U.S. is a consideration whose day is long overdue, and I appreciate your bringing it to the forefront.”
A common thread in all my writing is an aspiration to see the world as fundamentally borderless – “The author’s real journey is a search for common humanity,” as The Daily Telegraph put it – and an emphasis on meeting people where they live, both literally and figuratively, and on telling their stories (plural) through attentive listening and conversations. When I told a New York literary agent once that I had published a book on Pakistan and he asked me, “What’s your argument?” my response was: I’m not making an argument, I’m telling a story.
Pakistan and Haiti both are countries in perpetual crisis, so while my books aspire to be entertaining and to have literary merit, they’re also topical as well as inevitably political. Now there’s another country in incipient crisis, perhaps even on the verge of upheaval, that I’ve decided I must write about in the same way: my own country, the United States.
Such a book has been in my mind for several years, but events of this year have left me feeling an urgency to document this extraordinary time. There’s too much going on for me to discuss or even list it all here, but if you live in or follow events in America, you’re aware of all that’s going on. Earlier this year I felt compelled to write about the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson and the occupation of the state capitol in my home state of Wisconsin. Those two articles of mine, as well as some installments of the weekly column I write for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, suggest some of the themes I’ll be following in the book.
The title will be Home Free: An American Road Trip, and my methodology will be to buy a cheap but reliable car and drive around the periphery of the continental United States, starting and ending in Seattle, where I live. I’m planning chapters on Wisconsin; on Detroit, where I lived during a formative period twenty years ago; and on Florida, New Orleans, Texas, Arizona, and California. I’ll also, of course, be spending time in New England and New York as well as other places both metropolitan and provincial. And I’ll be writing about immigrant communities, including (but not limited to) Pakistanis and Haitians.
Because of other commitments, I can’t make the trip until the summer or fall of 2012. That timing will put my travel in the midst of the presidential election, though, and for a project this ambitious a bit of lead time and planning is helpful. In the wake of the 2012 election – whatever the result – there will be a great need for us all to understand America’s national situation and its impact on the world.
Before, during, and after the U.S. road trip I’ll be actively continuing to promote my Pakistan and Haiti books and doing article-length writing on www.ethancasey.com and elsewhere. I will be asking contacts around the U.S. for hospitality, speaking invitations, topic and interview suggestions, and other forms of support. I am also offering Home Free for pre-sale, for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping:
Your copy will be shipped to you as soon as Home Free is published, sometime in 2013, and you’ll be kept updated on its progress in the meantime.
Pre-sales and sponsorships of Overtaken By Events and Bearing the Bruise also support my livelihood and the budget for Home Free, as well as helping those books continue to reach their intended audiences: students, libraries, and opinion leaders around the U.S. For more information, visit the book sponsorship program page.
What I’m asking for starting now, if you want to support Home Free, is that you please do three things:
- Post suggestions and ideas on this page, as comments on this posting. I’ll read them all and follow up on whatever I can.
- “Like” my Facebook page and invite others to do so. I’ll be posting links and seeking interaction about this project regularly there.
- Spread the word by sharing this page’s link, interviewing me or asking me to write an article if you have a website or other media outlet, and contacting me privately if you want to share contacts or ideas that way. If you’d like to be added to my email list, please let me know.
Thank you for your interest and support, and I hope to see you somewhere down the road.
August 23, 2011
What Does Egypt Mean for Pakistan?
One of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received for my work was when a Pakistani journalist, a young woman, told me I’m not afflicted by what she called “Have pen will write syndrome.” I write when I have something to say, or a story to tell, that I believe others will find helpful and worth reading. Lately I’ve been itching a little to write about Egypt, but so far I’ve concluded that the world doesn’t need my gratuitous drop in the ocean of commentary, particularly given that I’ve never been to Egypt.
But I have been to Pakistan, many times since 1995, and I’m going there again for three weeks starting February 18. And I can’t help wondering what kinds of conversations I might have there in the wake or context of the Egyptian revolution.
This will be my first trip to Pakistan since the visit almost exactly two years ago that resulted in my book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. I flatter myself that, whatever its other merits, my book has a well-chosen title. As Zaka Shafiq, a young man I met in Karachi, told me at the end of the trip and the start of the book: “It’ll be out of date by the time it’s published.” But I’m not worried about being overtaken by events, because I’ve resigned myself to it as a condition of being alive in this world, especially these days. I figure my job is to listen, pay attention, and take notes. There’s a lot to be learned about where we’re at and where we’re headed, if you stay alert.
My coming trip hasn’t even started, and it’s already been overtaken by events. When I began planning it several months ago, its purpose was to witness and write about the grossly under-reported effects of last summer’s historically severe flooding – and that remains an important goal. But then, in early January, Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer was assassinated and, in a shockingly parallel incident, US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Tucson. And, now, Egypt is in upheaval.
But what does Egypt have to do with Pakistan? Well, I’m hoping you can help me answer that question. Particularly if you’re Pakistani, but even if you’re not, I invite you to post a comment on this article or on my Facebook page or, if you prefer, to write to me privately with your thoughts. And please forward this article far and wide. I want to read and hear as many voices as you can help me gather about Pakistan’s future and the implications – for Pakistan, for the Muslim world, and for all of us – of the Egyptian revolution.
My starting point is that, in what I’ve been reading, Western writers are starting to speculate – ominously and/or hopefully, depending on their loyalties – on the wider implications of Egypt for the Arab world. Even factoring in the Western public’s fuzziness on the distinction between Arabs and Muslims, it’s striking to me that few seem to be wondering, in this context, about Pakistan. The American public has had a lot on its plate lately, what with Egypt, severe winter weather, and the Super Bowl all happening at the same time, but Frank Rich’s bracingly unsparing February 6 column acknowledges the stakes:
The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia. The “Ground Zero” mosque melee has given way to battles over mosques as far removed from Lower Manhattan as California. Soon to come is a national witch hunt — Congressional hearings called by Representative Peter King of New York — into the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Given the disconnect between America and the Arab world, it’s no wonder that Americans are invested in the fights for freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to a point. We’ve been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso facto a jihadist.
Rich notes the release of Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir and remembers that, like the events in Cairo, the bombardments of Iraq that Rumsfeld ordered
were spectacular to watch from a safe distance — no Iraqi faces, voices or bodies cluttered up the shots. We [Americans] lulled ourselves into believing that democracy and other good things were soon to come. It took months, even years, for us to learn the hard way that in truth we really had no idea what was going on.
So there is a lot of work to do, to continue educating the American public – I include myself – on our steep learning curve about the Muslim world in general and Pakistan in particular. What do Americans need to know about Pakistan? And, most pressingly at the moment, what are the similarities and differences between Pakistan and Egypt? And what might the events in Egypt portend for Pakistan?
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime of Learning from Haiti, to published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
OBE on way; Facebook fan page; to Haiti and back
It’s been nearly a month since I posted here, but it’s been a busy month. Since March 17 I’ve been to Haiti and back and have also spoken on behalf of my new book, Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip, in Tampa and San Jose, with other engagements scheduled in April and May in Seattle, San Diego, Santa Monica, San Francisco, and other cities. (I plan to visit the East Coast, Colorado and the Midwest in the fall)
Overtaken By Events is now in print, with about 3000 copies (out of 5000 in the first printing) currently sitting in my garage. I want the hundreds of you who pre-purchased it to know two things: that I’m grateful for your crucial early support, and that your copy will be in the mail to you within the next two weeks. I’m currently finalizing some printed cards that I want to enclose with pre-purchased copies along with a handwritten personal thank-you note from me, and to use for other purposes. Those should be ready by the end of next week.
If you haven’t yet purchased Overtaken By Events or Alive and Well in Pakistan, or pre-purchased my Haiti book in progress (to be published next spring), please support my work by doing so, from this site’s Books page.
I have plans to revamp this website, and I also will be launching a new companion www.ethancasey.com site to promote my public speaking and as a more appropriate long-term online home for my Haiti book and other projects. Stay tuned for more on these over the coming weeks.
In the meantime, if you’re on Facebook, please join the new Ethan Casey fan page being developed by my friend Asim Razzaq in Silicon Valley, which will be another way to keep up with my work:
http://www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Facebook is an excellent way to spread the word about creative projects and independent writing around the Internet and the world, so please do help in this way if you can.
Many thanks,
Ethan
Pakistani-led group returns from Haiti
Ethan Casey with Todd Shea, Dr. Farzana Naqvi (front row, second from left), Dr. Salman Naqvi (back row, next to Todd), and other members of a Pakistani-led group that provided medical relief after the earthquake in Haiti, at a reunion in Irvine, California, February 28, 2010.
If I haven’t posted a blog entry in more than two weeks, it’s because – as usual – I’ve been busy with other things. I spent a successful week in Colorado in early February, speaking at two churches and three colleges, including the Air Force Academy. And I just returned from a busy weekend in Orange County, California, whose main event was a fundraiser for Todd Shea’s organization SHINE Humanity (see its excellent new website). The short speech I was able to give there was very gratifying, because I’m very proud of and grateful to Todd as well as Pakistani friends for responding so promptly, intelligently and compassionately to the earthquake in Haiti. Haiti is a very old friend of mine, so my gratitude is personal. Here’s a short excerpt:
Todd is not the only American in this room who has worked in Haiti since the earthquake. I want to single out two others: Dr. Farzana Naqvi and Dr. Salman Naqvi. The story of how Farzana, Salman and others have stepped up as physicians, as Muslims, as Pakistanis who know the devastation an earthquake can cause, and not least as Americans, is a powerful message that the American public needs to hear.
I’ve published the full speech on this website under the “Speaking” tab, along with some photos that I showed that evening.
My new book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip is at the printer and will (inshallah) be published later this month. I’m looking forward to introducing it at events in Chicago on March 27 and Tampa on March 28. More on those, and other travel and promotion, as the publication date nears. If you haven’t yet purchased your copy, now is a great time to ensure that your copy comes signed and with a personal letter from me by pre-ordering it from this website. I’ll be sitting down in early April to send out all pre-ordered copies.
More soon!
When history hits home
Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (to be published in March 2010). Cover design by Jason Kopec: http://www.jkgd.biz/
Interim update: The Haiti earthquake is compelling me to kick into higher gear on all my work. For a bit of updated information (which I’ll supplement with fuller info here soon), kindly see the Books page of this site.
When history happens in a place you know personally, it messes with your head. I visited Haiti for the first of many times in 1982, as a teenager; when the crisis over Aristide and the Haitian boat people hijacked the world’s front pages during the excruciating early months of the Clinton administration, I endured an agony of helplessness far away, in Bangkok. The place name Guantanamo Bay took on personal meaning for me then, as the place the U.S. Coast Guard took Haitians they intercepted fleeing to Florida. When the semi-revolution came to Kathmandu in 1990, it hit home because I had lived there as a student in the mid-1980s.
Those early experiences reinforced a predilection for taking history personally. Much water had yet to flow beneath the bridge in Haiti and Nepal, and in other places I traveled inflicting experience on myself: Burma, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Detroit. During the later Bush years, I returned full circle and saw truths I had learned elsewhere at play in my own country. You keep going back to places where you’ve experienced history because you feel that, somehow, there’s sense to be made of it. But when a place has been your home and something terrible happens there in your absence—well, it hits home.
So the feeling was familiar when Kurien walked into his flat in Mumbai and told Pete and me about the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore.
Nayaa Saal Mubarak: Alive and Well in 2010
Ethan Casey with Pakistani friends in Minnesota, November 28, 2009. Photo by Munir Abid.
Well, 2009 is finally over and it’s time to turn the page, with big plans and hopes for 2010. As my mother likes to say, life is a constant leaf-turning process. It’s an anxious and melancholy moment in our world, but we’ve gotten used to those, and I think the only effective way to combat the otherwise inevitable, and all too understandable, despair and paralysis is to insist on living in hope – by which I mean not just sitting around choosing to feel hopeful, but turning hope into meaningful and concrete action.
For me, 2009 was all about researching and then writing my new book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. It feels as though it’s been a long, hard slog, but at the moment I’m feeling tired in a pleasant and gratifying way, with a big load off my shoulders. If you’re on my email list, you know that throughout the fall I was writing the book while also taking daily Urdu language classes and starting a master’s degree program in South Asian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I live, as well as traveling a lot to promote the book project in both mainstream and Pakistani communities across the United States and Canada. November in particular was a crazy month for me, with trips to Orange County and San Diego; Portland; Fort Worth (speaking along with my colleague Fawad Butt at Texas Christian University); and Minneapolis/St. Paul.
The point of all the travel has been to raise awareness of and support for the book ahead of its publication this March, and the point of the book is to encourage – and to participate in – a much-needed conversation between the Muslim world and the West, and specifically between Pakistanis and Americans. From fifteen years’ worth of direct personal experience of Pakistan, I know not only that it’s a country that faces severe challenges – everyone knows that – but that those challenges are different from what most Americans suppose them to be. And I know that Pakistanis are resourcefully rising to the occasion in meeting them, and other Americans need to know that too. And they’re challenges faced by Pakistani people – parents who worry about their children’s education, health and safety, for example, just as American parents do, geopolitics and religion notwithstanding. But of course those things can never quite be notwithstanding; they impinge too much on all of us, especially these days, especially in Pakistan.
If 2009 was, for me, the year of the book, 2010 will be the year of the blog. It’s understandable enough that I haven’t posted on this blog since November, but with the book finished and its publication coming soon, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to blog weekly. Authors I admire, such as James Howard Kunstler, whose important book The Long Emergency I recommend highly, do this very effectively. From reading Kunstler weekly, I’ve come to see how a blog can supplement and complement a book and vice versa. If, as I say, it’s all about initiating and continuing a needed conversation, then there can be few better ways to do that today than by blogging frequently and on a reliable schedule. For several reasons, I plan to publish a new entry every Tuesday.
I’ll be doing other things too, including plenty more travel around North America. My travel schedule is public on Google calendar as “Ethan Casey’s travel calendar,” or visit the Calendar page of this site. I’ll be in Southern California in late January, visiting several colleges in Colorado in the first half of February, in Texas (Dallas, Houston and hopefully Austin) in the third week of March, and in San Jose and Fresno in early April. If I’m coming to your city – or if you’d like me to – please drop me a note.
Ethan Casey in Port Angeles, Washington, September 12, 2009. Photo by Jim Dries.
There are several concrete ways you can support my work. By all means, invite me to your city if you can – and, if your group’s budget is limited, we can work together creatively to make it worth everyone’s while. I’m starting to schedule my calendar for fall 2010 now. Also, now is a great time to pre-purchase your copy of Overtaken By Events, if you haven’t yet. There are buttons in the upper right corner of this page, and you can buy it singly, or in a package with my previous book Alive and Well in Pakistan, or multiple copies to give to family and friends. All pre-sold copies will be shipped, with a thank-you note from me, in late March or early April, immediately after the book is published.
You also can help by sending the link to this or any other blog entry far and wide, and by otherwise encouraging people you know to visit this website and follow my work.
That’s all for this week – talk to you again next Tuesday!
