In December last year, I returned to Karachi after 15 weeks of teaching three concurrent creative writing courses at Hamilton College in the US. Rewarding as teaching is, 12 hours of it a week, with 40 students, is enough to make anyone (or at least, me) feel it necessary to take a pause from the whole process of workshops and writing exercises and discussions about the craft of writing. So it was with a slight feeling of dread that I recalled my commitment to the British Council to run an intensive five-day workshop with five young writers between the ages of 17-22 as part of the first phase of the multi-nation I Belong project.

I Belong is a multi-nation writing project, starting in Pakistan and travelling on to Malaysia, Egypt, France, the UK, and hopefully Iraq between 2003 and 2006. In each country, five young writers between the ages of 17 and 22 will write (or in the case of Pakistan and Malaysia, have already written) a 2,000 word story around the topic ‘I Belong’ which is posted on the British Council website (both in English and in the official language of the nation, with the aid of a translator). As the project evolves, all the writers will be able to read each other’s stories, post responses to each other’s work online, perhaps pick up on ideas from one story and use it to help construct another – and ultimately, one story from each country will be turned into a movie.

By the time I got to Karachi in December the project was already underway via a nationwide competition, which had been advertised in the national papers and on the British Council website, inviting young writers to submit stories of 1,000 words around the theme ‘I Belong.’ Three judges read through the two hundred-plus submissions and narrowed them down to 15 stories, which they then turned over to me when I arrived. Those feelings of dread I had about the workshop diminished considerably when I read the stories and picked 5 finalists. Here were stories of wonderful range, sensitivity, ambition – each one of them approaching ‘belonging’ as a complex idea, as pertinent to one’s relationship with one’s family as to the idea of finding a place within the world. After just one reading of the stories I could almost hear them talking to each other – challenging and complementing each other’s questions and assumptions. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it was a sign of things to come when the writers of those pieces finally met in Karachi at the Beach Luxury Hotel.

I Belong participants from Pakistan

My own ideas for the workshop were fairly basic – in the mornings we’d discuss the ‘building blocks’ of fiction (i.e. language, character, setting, point of view) with the aid of short writing exercises, analyze excerpts of prose from writers I particularly admire (such is the blessed prerogative of the instructor), interrogate the idea of ‘belonging’ and how it pertains to fiction. And in the afternoons, I would leave the five writers with a writing assignment, related to the morning’s work, and give them three hours in which to complete it. In other words, nothing unusual.

What was unusual was the intellectual hunger of the students in the group. Writing workshops – or any kind of forums for writers to come together – are a rarity in Pakistan, and from the first moment, the I Belong writers chose to treat the workshop as an opportunity that might never come again, and from which they were, therefore, compelled to extract every possible benefit. Or at least this was true of four of the writers. The fifth was quite honest about admitting that he wasn’t quite ‘on the same page’ as the others. As he explained it to me, ‘There was one story I’d been thinking about for a while. It fit with the ‘I Belong’ topic, so I wrote it, and now I’m here. But I don’t know if I’ll ever write a story again. I’m not like the others here. They all want to be writers.’ In every workshop I’ve ever been part of, there’s always a mix of people for whom writing is a passion and those for whom it is merely something of interest or curiosity – but this was the first time the mix was so heavily weighted on the side of passion.

It meant, of course, that many of the ideas I was prepared to introduce to the writers – ideas of politics, the aesthetics of language, the function of national literatures, the freedoms and constraints of bilingualism – were matters about which they had already formed opinions. It meant there was no tentativeness in discussions, no moments of ‘well, I don’t know.’ For me one of the most interesting discussions was around the question of language. Not the hackneyed argument of ‘What are the implications of using English, the language of the colonizers’ – which seems, blessedly, to have absolutely no relevance for the young in Pakistan – but rather, ‘what do you do if you grow up in a bi-lingual world but then write primarily in one language rather than the other?’ We all agreed that there are certain words that simply have different resonances in both languages. For instance, ‘Khandaan’ in Urdu is much weightier than its English translation: ‘family.’ So when do you leave Urdu words untranslated in English texts, how necessary is it to create a context to make the Urdu words explicable, is it possible to create an atmosphere that shifts the culture-specific resonance of a particular word?

The workshop itself was a somewhat bi-lingual affair – I don’t think any of us noticed when someone shifted from English to Urdu, dropped in a word of one language between ten words of another. One of the writers wrote most of the afternoon assignments, as well as his final story, in Urdu – though his original story for the competition had been in English. He said the decision of which language to use was based entirely on the story that came to mind – some stories just make more sense in one language than the other.

I can only speak of the conversations that went on in my hearing. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the workshop is the equations that spring up between the writers. One evening we were all to meet for dinner, several hours after the workshop was over – the two writers from Karachi stayed behind in the hotel where the other three writers were living, and spent those hours reading and critiquing each other’s stories. Some mornings they’d come in and pick up conversations they’d been having with each other the night before on the internet. They were entirely unrestrained about disagreeing with each other, but there was never a moment of unpleasantness.

And on the final morning of the workshop, I walked out to the barge abutting from the ground of the Beach Luxury Hotel, where the writers were sitting around a table, deep in conversation as I approached. After today our interactions would occur in an electronic world, with a series of one-on-one e-mail tutorials as they worked on their final stories for the I Belong website. So for this final group meeting, I had a discussion planned and writing exercises ready – but as I saw them, conversing animatedly with each other, it became obvious there was only one way to end this week. I put my notes to a side. ‘Let’s just talk,’ I said – and there we were, a group of six on a barge rocked by the sea, talking about how we write and why we write and all the ways in which language moves us.

Kamila Shamsie is the author of three novels, In the City by the Sea, Salt and Saffron and Kartography. She has received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature (Pakistan) and has twice been shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys/ Mail on Sunday Award (UK). She lives in Karachi and London, and has just finished working on a new novel, Broken Verses.

Editor's note: If you'd like to know about the project please visit the I Belong website.