SWANA collective member sits down to discuss The Empty Room with Author Sadia Abbas. Set in Pakistan from 1969 to about 1979, the novel tells the story of Tahira, a woman who is a painter but finds herself trapped in an unhappy marriage facing hostile in-laws. Her story coincides with a crucial period in Pakistani history, the uprising in Bangladesh that would lead both to brutal repression by the Pakistani army in which half a million or more people are estimated to have been killed and to the independence of Bangladesh, formerly Pakistan’s eastern province. This was a period of political possibility—for which Tahira’s left-wing brother Waseem struggles—but also one that laid the groundwork for the subsequent brutal dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq.
Sadia Abbas is a Professor of English and of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. She is also the author of At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament (Fordham University Press, 2014), which won the modern Language Association’s First Book Prize. Her commentaries on contemporary Pakistan and on Europe’s treatment of refugees and migrants can be found in Dawn, Counterpunch, Tank Magazine, and other publications. She is co-editor of the Ideas and Futures blog: https://ideasandfutures.com/
