“Who said I wanted them to understand where I came from?” asks Tara, the protagonist of Dur e Aziz Amna’s A Splintering, of her husband’s desire for her to speak to her children in Panjabi, the language she grew up with. Gesturing to the heart of the tensions that shape Tara’s psyche—a desire to leave home once and for all, to look back with cold reason rather than childhood nostalgia—A Splintering tracks with precision and sharpness class and mobility in postcolonial South Asia. Later too, Tara says of Mazinagar, once she has left and made her like in the city: “I hated how scaffolded my life remained by this place. Everything I did was a rebellion against it, a desire to transcend it, and this desire itself had become a prison.” A Splintering is a thrilling, propulsive reflection on the places that shape us, and the way a landscape of childhood remains in our memory, remains in the way we understand and move through the world.
Opening with Tara’s childhood, the novel tracks her through her education, which her mother insists on, despite her older brother’s reluctance. Amidst the changing socioeconomic landscape of postcolonial Pakistan, the nation-state clawing out its own identity in the wake of independence, Tara too finds her way out of the claustrophobic grasp of her hometown, the village of Mazinagar, and of her brother Lateef.
She marries middle-class accountant, Hamad, and moves to Rawalpindi, finally having transcended the village, having achieved the city. “But how long could one live in opposition to an idea, as the negation of something?” Tara asks, at one point in the novel of her own construction of self in opposition to Mazinagar. This tension shapes her experience in the city, which in its early representations in the novel from Tara’s point-of-view, is a place that is everything Mazinagar is not. But as more time goes by, Tara realizes that Hamad’s family too refuses to allow Tara the independence she desires.
In quick succession, Tara has two children– Rania and Haris. Alongside her own experience of motherhood, Tara’s picture of her own mother becomes more fully formed; she says of her mother: “Once, this mother of mine had been small. Someone had rocked her the way I was rocking Haris, someone had kissed her on the forehead and sung her lullabies. A crashing sadness threatened to bury me into the earth.” Upon becoming a mother, Tara can look back with an awareness of the ways motherhood works not just as an individual experience, but something cultural and historical too. In this mirroring, Tara can see both herself and her mother anew.
Tara begins a job at a school as an art teacher, which allows both her and her children social mobility, though Tara soon realizes that the gap between middle-class and wealthy is something she can never cross through employment alone, which provides the propulsion of the novel’s narrative. Her brother too moves to the city soon after, and Tara’s life is split into two—the life she can talk about, and the life she is driven to by want, by ambition, by the desire for social mobility. Hamad remains adrift, and Tara finally claws out financial independence for herself, though as she does, her relationships with her family become more and more fraught amidst her increasing secrecy.
“By then, I had already made the classic move from the town to the city—classic, because that is the tale of half this country, millions leaving the smallness and filth of the agrarian for the mythical promise of the urban,” says Tara, in the opening of the novel. The novel, about Tara as a singular and compelling individual, is also a stark and vivid portrait of gender in postcolonial Pakistan, its relationship with class and social mobility. Amna’s prose is sharp and lyrical in equal measure, offering us a generous account of a woman who wants, who seeks the same freedoms afforded to her brother and husband, and yet is repeatedly denied them. In its focus on the singular, A Splintering allows us to see both a nation and a self coming of age, always aware of and attentive to history as something ongoing, no longer only relegated to the past.
In this interview, we discussed influence, the domestic and historical, motherhood, and more.
Vika Mujumdar (VM): A Splintering is a novel that is very attuned to the world at large—not just in what happens concretely, but also in terms of how history shapes self; the novel uses real world events to move through time, and we see this at work in the characters themselves too, for example Hamad, and how he is very politically aware outside the context of the home, where his dynamic with his wife is still very gendered. How do you approach writing the relationship between self and world, and self and history?
Dur e Aziz Amna (DAA): We’ve talked about Ferrante and her work, and how that bleeds through so much of our own understandings of writing. Of course, there are so many great novels that write history and historical events. But when I read the Neapolitan quartet for the first time, the way Ferrante took the female domestic space and turned that historical, or married that to history in a very particular way, that was inspiring to me. That was a template throughout the book. I wanted to keep the focus on this character who, unlike Hamad, does not care about politics. Tara does not care about history. She says that history is the viper in the field, and our job is to just get out of the way. So, she has no respect for any of that. And yet, like everyone else, her life is affected by everything that’s going on around her. And so, the idea was always to have history in the background while at the same time always being most aware of the actual characters. The point, obviously, was never to write a history book on Pakistan, because that’s what history books are for. It was always to ground the characters but still provide this background. And at the same time, it felt true to my own experience of growing up in Pakistan—it’s just the daily fabric of your life, where suddenly you realize in the morning that actually you’re not going to school today because there’s some strike going on, or there’s been an attack. And for the next three days, the schools will be closed. All of this very actively affects the lives of people as well.
VM: You’ve discussed on your Substack that you’re drawn to a certain generation of European women writers—Ernaux, Erpenbeck, Ferrante—in a post about re-reading Ernaux’s The Years. How do you see the book in conversation with these influences, and could you speak a bit to how these writers shaped A Splintering both during the writing process and in later stages?
DAA: It’s funny because I’ve mentioned Ernaux a couple of times now, but when I actually think about her work, there’s only very specific books within her oeuvre that speak to me. It’s the books about her mother, her father, and then The Years, which I think is her best by far. The ones that are much more popular are the stories about the romantic entanglements and the fears, and those are not that interesting to me. The reason for that is because of her obsession with class that shows up much more in The Years, and of course in the books on her parents. There’s this class shift, or obsession with class mobility—who’s able to achieve it, who isn’t, and what happens to the self when you are able to. What is the cost of that mobility? What is the psychological cost of moving up the class ladder? Ferrante also thinks about this a lot; it’s present in a lot of Ernaux’s books I’m mentioning as well, because she was about to step far above her parents in terms of class and thinks about what that did to her relationship with them. That’s one thing I find in common with them.
The other big thing is the movement of women into the public space. It happened in Europe, and then a few decades later, it happened in Pakistan. And those decades happened to be when I was in Pakistan; my aunts and my mother were that first generation of women who were working outside the house in a profession. Of course, women always worked, but in that more regulated professional manner, and so there was what that did to the social fabric—when you have a bunch of men who are still used to those old ways, who still very much have those old patriarchal ideas, but then they now have to at least pretend to treat women like equals sometimes, and what that does to the relations between men and women.
VM: A large shift in Tara’s psyche in the novel happens during the moment the 2005 Kashmir earthquake is felt, which of course mirrors the moment of the earthquake in Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child. How did that moment of the earthquake as a moment of a rupture in Tara herself come to be?
DAA: I was in Islamabad at the time of the earthquake—Islamabad was not the epicenter, but it was enough north that there was a major apartment building that collapsed there. It’s funny because I think of the earthquake as a pair with the 2004 tsunami, even though the tsunami did not really affect Pakistan. But somehow, those two natural disasters that happened in consecutive years, they’re buried in my head. For weeks after, I’d open up the newspapers and there’d be stories. Thankfully, neither of those events physically affected me besides being there in the earthquake and being woken up by it. But I was such a newspaper kid, even more than books during that stage of my life; I pored over the daily paper and read every story, so the earthquake is just very vivid, in all the stories we heard later on, of destroyed homes. And then winter was coming because it was October, and there were drives to take food and bedding up. And Tara is not someone who’s empathetic. She views the earthquake, this huge natural disaster that has affected so many people practically, through this almost myopic, domestic lens of “how does this affect me?” My overall goal with any historical thing I brought in was to almost, in an ironic way, diminish it by showing that when you have a character who is so ambitious and driven but also self-absorbed and doesn’t really care for history, how all these things that are happening fade into the background for her.
I’m also wondering a little bit about how I’ve lived in the US for so many years now. The other day, I was at this talk with Karan Mahajan for his new book that came out recently, and he was talking about how at some point he had to stop pretending that he wasn’t a writer living in the US. He said in his first novel, he was trying so hard to be authentic, and eventually he had to come to terms with the fact that his lens was at least partly American because he was living here for many years. And this attitude Tara has that history doesn’t affect her, that her life is beyond history, is this very bootstrap mentality of “I’m going to make things happen for myself.” It’s also very American, this idea that we live beyond history.
VM: There’s a thread of Tara’s interiority in the novel that I find particularly fascinating—her imagination of the films in daydreams, ones in which she always embodies the consciousness of the man, not the woman. “But always, I was the man [,]” Tara insists. How do you see the role of film, culturally and individually, in relation to Tara’s selfhood, and in relation to gender in postcolonial Pakistan?
DAA: When I thought about Tara’s psyche, the films were one of the most interesting things that I was writing about, but they have been polarizing. My understanding is that most people have some version of them—you know, you think about these situations which are, a lot of times, related to your own insecurity. Someone who is a bit of a shy person might think about a situation where they’re shining socially. And so, it’s maybe a mix of insecurity and of just your hopes for yourself, and daydreaming, which is the typical way we refer to it, and maybe some people do it more than others.
Within that, what was interesting to me was that she was always imagining herself as the man, and she says that anytime the woman would leave the room in this film she would never go with the woman, which feels very true to my own experience. But there’s also this idea of the woman who is always something that is looked upon. When you’re constantly a viewed object, there’s this self-alienation that can happen to you. You are constantly looking at yourself, which means that you cannot be yourself.
And then the other thing about film is genre. The template that her films follow is the genre that many of us were brought up on, the classic staple diet of Bollywood. And even the drama serials that we were raised on follow a very specific kind of romance, with that very chivalrous man and a damsel-in-distress woman.
VM: That thread also comes up in American Fever, where Hira thinks about daydreaming in film her childhood too, and says: “The person I inhabited, the person I associated with, the character I entered and left imaginary rooms with, was always the man. I didn’t want to be a heroine, Father. I wanted to be Shah Rukh Khan.” Were there specific films you were thinking of as you were writing this, or that have shaped how you think about some of the films in the novel?
DAA: I tell myself that I’m not really a film person. Recently, I’m watching a lot of Abbas Kiarostami films. There are people who are very in touch with art cinema, and I don’t think I am that at all, but it definitely feeds into what you’re doing. I don’t think I have specific films that really left deep impressions, but going back to Shah Rukh Khan, Shah Rukh is the person who gets to look at the girl; he can be the cool one and then also get the girl. When you have a scene with him and any heroine, my impulse is always that I want to be him. It’s because there’s a kind of coolness or independence or almost mystique that he has that isn’t really afforded to any heroines.
VM: In the novel, Tara shares a complicated relationship with her mother—who both limits Tara and is the only person to support Tara’s education—and also shares a complicated relationship with her daughter, Rania, who doesn’t see, in the way of all children, how dedicated her mother is to Rania’s freedoms, freedoms Tara herself was denied. Tara’s recognition of her mother as a full person with interiority and a self too, comes at the same time as Rania’s misrecognition of Tara. How do you see the intertwined relationship between motherhood and daughterhood in the novel? How did you approach writing those two mirrored threads?
DAA: The way that I see the relationship between Tara and her mother is again like the relationship that Ernaux, for instance, has with her parents. There’s a complication of class, for the most part, that Tara is so desperate to leave behind her mother, to the point where she’s not able to see her mother as a person, but as someone who is a symbol for that, along with her brother. And she’s desperate for that. Whereas that’s less of the case for Tara and Rania; it’s more about what is proper. Tara defends her when she doesn’t want to wear her dupatta. Their issues are more of what it means to be a “good girl,” a “good woman.” The biggest issue that comes up is when it comes to Tara and her daughter is that her mother might not be a “good woman.”
VM: Motherhood and daughterhood is a theme that also comes up in American Fever, except in that case, we only see the daughter’s perspective of her mother and not a mother’s perspective of a daughter as well. Could you talk about that shift in your work as a writer, tracking that theme through both your books?
DAA: The very obvious answer is that I became a mother between the two. My children are much younger, but a lot of it is just giving yourself the permission to even imagine. I do not have kids Rania’s age, and so all of that was still the imagination, but still, maybe once you do become a parent, you can at least start imagining that other. I tell this to my friends now who don’t have kids, and they find it shocking. But now, anytime I see a mother and daughter, the mother might be 80, might be older than me, but I somehow put myself in the mother. There is something that really does change. Also, the timeframe of the novel, for a novel of its length, is pretty wide—about twenty years. And during that time, inevitably, Tara’s kids were going to grow up, and they were going through the stage where that kind of friction would be inevitable. So, it had to be part of the story too.
VM: The novel opens with Tara in the future, and then moves back to her upbringing in Mazinagar to then move linearly through time. The closing, though, is in the present tense, narrated by Tara in the moment. Could you talk about your choice to narrate this from the perspective of Tara in the future, her narrative voice seeping through time and place and history, and to close on Tara narrating the present moment?
DAA: I’m very comfortable with that kind of retrospective narration, because of the layer of interiority on the part of the character that very few of us possess in the moment. It’s very, very hard to be self-aware at all, in a moment of emotional distress. And some of that impulse was that the book had to be narrated. I don’t actually know with A Splintering if that was entirely true when it was written. American Fever was written with that—a good about of time lapsed between the point of narration and the facts of the story, whereas that’s not really the case for A Splintering. I’m imagining that even as the story is told, it’s meant to be read as told from the end of the novel, so it’s not further in the future.
I actually had to add the beginning afterwards. Initially, the book started off in Mazinagar, in Tara’s family’s house. I got some feedback from my agent that the rural setting might not be immediately relatable. It might be hard to enter for a reader who was not familiar with that social stuff, whereas the note that Tara starts with, of class envy and climbing the ladder felt more like a universal theme, so that was added later on.
VM: We’ve talked about Ernaux and Ferrante, but I’m curious if there were other writers who you think of as influences on this novel?
DAA: This is not an influence at all—I read Woman at Point Zero, by Nawal El Saadawi, because a friend of mine recommended it, and I absolutely hated it. It’s a classic, people love it and it stands for itself. And I told my friend that, and she read A Splintering, and she pointed out that I wrote the same book. And so sometimes influence works in different ways—if you’re writing about something, it’s not always fruitful to read things that are similar, and your reaction is that something is awful, because it’s probably too close.
Similarly, there’s a book in Urdu, Aangan, which translates to “courtyard,” by Khadija Mastoor, and it’s a book that’s set entirely within a courtyard around the time of Partition. The story never leaves the courtyard. Anytime someone leaves the courtyard, you stop following them. Everything stays within the courtyard. But at the same time, you’re getting all this political context—people are being thrown in jail, and two new countries are formed, and all of this is happening. I remember reading that too and being so frustrated, but I think of A Splintering as a sister novel to that.
Dur e Aziz Amna is the author of A Splintering, winner of the Stanfords Prize for Fiction and a BBC Book Club pick. Her previous novel, American Fever, won the South Asian Book Award and the APALA Award for Literature. Her work also appears in the New York Times, Financial Times, and Al Jazeera, among others. She was selected as Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2022 and has won the Salam Prize and the Financial Times / Bodley Head Essay Prize. She is a graduate of Yale College and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
Born and raised in Pakistan, she currently lives in the US.
__
Vika Mujumdar is a writer and critic based in Western Massachusetts. She was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India, and holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst where she is currently an MFA student in Fiction. A 2025-2026 NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow, her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, Public Books, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She works for the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and edits Liminal Transit Review.
Liminal Transit Review 