Written by: Mahnaz Shujrah
Posted on: August 22, 2023 | 
| 中文
Books by Sorayya Khan
As someone who grew up in two separate, distinct worlds, the title of the book is what caught my attention. As I held it in my hands, I knew immediately that I wanted to read it, almost with a sense of urgency, as if this is what I had been looking for all along: someone who knew what it meant to belong to a place, yet not belong at all.
Written in the form of a memoir, “We Take Our Cities with Us” is Sorayya Khan’s latest book. She is an award-winning writer of Pakistani-Dutch heritage, and her previous novels include City of Spies, Noor and Five Queen’s Road. Her memoir, published in November 2022, explores the broad themes of multiculturalism and identity, as well as more intimate topics including loss, grief and complex family relationships. The book is very subjective in nature, almost like an internal dialogue between one’s conscience and memory, or as written in the book “Meeting memory or coming face to face with a scrap of someone else’s, changes it…”
Author Sorayya Khan
The book takes the reader on a journey, starting from Khan’s time in Pakistan: the leisure of childhood spent in her grandparent’s home in Lahore, and then to her own coming of age in Islamabad as the daughter of a Dutch mother and a Pakistani father. Then, the landscape changes as she switches to her present home in New York, happily married to a Pakistani man and a mother of two young boys. The author also travels to Vienna, the city of her birth and the city of her parents’ death. On her complicated relationship with Vienna, Khan writes “I, on the other hand, excised the city from my life as if I had no history with it—as if I hadn’t been born there nor been a childhood resident nor visited as an adult. I threw it out of my life like the children’s outgrown clothes.” After her mother’s passing, Khan dives deeper into her own past and finds herself seeking people and places from her mother’s life and story, which take her back in time to Amsterdam and Maastricht.
In a Q&A session published by Longreads, Khan says “Writing rooted me. Drawing on different worlds and gathering them in a single place — on the page — helped me make peace with my in-betweenness. In fact, my mixed background (and all those cities!) gave me my subject matter. As a writer, I explore the interconnectedness of our world, how place and history shape us. My novels and memoir reflect on what it means to belong, whether neighbors in post-Partition Lahore, a soldier returning home from war, a young girl coming of age, or parents who’ve raised children far from their homes.”
Photo of the author with her family, taken at the author's grandparents' home in Lahore
Khan has a solid grip on the people and places she is writing about, hence, allowing her to tactfully traverse across five generations and multiple continents in the short span of 150 pages. The memoir is both event and character driven, making the reader vested in the actions and reactions of the different personalities as the book progresses. Another noteworthy aspect of the memoir is that it is extremely well-researched, especially when it comes to references of the many cities that Khan is describing.
An interesting point in the book was when the author narrates a conversation where her mother, who had mistaken an event from one of Khan’s novels as an actual event, and the author had to correct her that it was from the book and not real life. This intermingled connections between writing and reality comes through in the memoir, as Khan describes how certain places and occurrences inspired her books and characters. Even though she wrote fiction, her mother, an avid reader, could see glimpses of herself in Khan’s stories. As a writer, I also draw a lot of details from the map of my own life, and this part in the memoir made me realize how much of my writing process lay along the thin and invisible line meandering between truth and imagination.
In 1990, Sorayya went to the International School of Islamabad to research the 1979 events and came across a school bus.
This was my first time reading a book by Sorayya Khan, and I found her writing style and expression to be quite admirable and well-crafted. It is not an easy task to intricately fit in so much detail in such a short read, but she makes use of each small word and every long pause. I found the book to be like a person’s thought process, bouncing around, yet connected. However, the writing does get dense, and at times I recall having to take a pause even after reading just a couple of pages. Just as everyone’s thought process is the most natural thing for them, but for an outsider it may be difficult to follow. Similarly, I first had to accustom myself to Khan’s “voice”, so to speak, as she untangles multiple stories on paper. Also, the story is not limited to Sorayya Khan’s life, the memoir shares reflections and recollections of her parents, grandparents and even her great grandparents. Even though Khan stitches together these different stories by going back and forth in time, sometimes the connection seems forced. The possible reason for that can be, as Khan shares in an interview, that initially, writing this memoir was not a planned decision and that it started out as a collection of different essays, which she later used as a basis for her book.
A bundle of old newspapers from 1971 (photo shared on author's website)
Overall, the book gives a person enough context to follow in the direction that Khan has outlined. I personally found it to be an enjoyable read, and I also believe there was a method to the madness when it comes to the confusing chronology of the memoir. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, however, I do feel that there is a difference in how the readers perceive places and the impact they have on their own lives after reading the story, and that change in perspective is what makes the book worth reading.
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