Humera Afridi is a New York based writer of Pakistani origin. Her work has appeared in, amongst other publications, Granta, Guernica, The Journal of Postcolonial Studies and The New York Times. She is the recipient of a 2017 Gregory Millard Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts and is a Muslim Communities Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop. Humera earned an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. She has taught English in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Dubai; Texas and New York. Humera is writing a book about the life of Noor Inayat Khan. Email: humera.afridi [at] gmail.com
by Humera Afridi On a frigid winter afternoon in February, in a western suburb of Paris, I stood outside the 17th century home of the last female survivor of the Special Operations Executive, a clandestine British organization, also known as Churchill's Secret Army, or the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. During World War II, the SOE…
May 29, 2017 Dear Babuly, Here in America, it is Memorial Day— a day for the honored dead. (Different from Veterans' Day, observed in November, which acknowledges all who have served in the military). Memorial Day is dedicated to the remembrance of those who never came back, who lost their lives in armed conflict. Solemnity…
by Humera Afridi I am the companion of the new Adam Who has earned my self-assured love (Fahmida Riaz) “Mommy, when are you going to start dating? You’re not even trying!” complained my nine-year old on a sunny afternoon in February, two days before Valentine’s Day. We’d just returned home from family day at Chelsea…
by Humera Afridi At the age of ten, my biggest fear was a dread of heights. Childhood weekends were sun-drenched (chlorine-filled) idylls during which I worked myself up to fling my body off the high board at the Sind Club into the gleaming swimming pool below. I lived in Karachi, and, yes, in a bubble.…
by Humera Afridi Nekbakht Foundation Archive “Mommy it's Christmas, you have to put away your work!” urged my nine-year old. And so I began clearing the dining table which had turned into an expansive workspace over the early winter weeks. As I gathered up my books, a sheet of paper slid out from a binder.…
by Humera Afridi Gündüz Vassaf's latest book, What Can I Do, arrived like manna this past summer, a panacea for our times, urging action as an antidote to pessimism. The book's publication in Turkey coincided with the heightened and volatile political climate in the country in the immediate aftermath of the failed coup attempt. Its…
by Humera Afridi On a recent weekend morning, I spoke with eminent writer and intellectual Gündüz Vassaf at his home on the island of Sedef in Turkey. I was calling from Manhattan, New York, via Skype, and the distances of space and time between us collapsed to make way for a conversation that felt like…
by Humera Afridi I have just finished reading The Morning They Came for Us by Janine Di Giovanni and, in its wake, Dreaming of Baghdad by Haifa Zangana. I can't recall the last time I had such a powerful and visceral reading experience—needing to physically move my body into air and sunlight, taking myself from…
by Humera Afridi “The pity of partition was not that instead of one country there were now two—independent India and independent Pakistan—but the fact that “human beings in both countries were slaves, slaves of bigotry… slaves of religious passions, slaves of animal instincts and barbarity.” —Ayesha Jalal, The Pity of Partition. Manto's Life, Times, and…
by Humera Afridi I arrived in Istanbul on the morning of July 3, fast on the heels of death. Amjad Sabri, an eminent Pakistani qawwal—a Sufi devotional musician in the tradition of world-renowned Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and son of the famous singer Ghulam Fareed Sabri of the Sabri Brothers—had been shot dead in his…
by Humera Afridi I want to hear her: bold; questioning; insistent, refusing to compromise her ideals. I want to understand; to see, her: this woman of deep faith, with a distinctive laugh, who “had no equal among either the women or the men of her century.” Possessed of a brilliant mind and exceptional memory, she…
by Humera Afridi Mere steps from Castle Clinton in Battery Park, on the southern tip of Manhattan, stands a striking bronze sculpture titled, The Immigrants. Created in 1973 by the Spanish sculptor Luis Sanguino, it portrays a group of individuals who have undertaken an arduous voyage. Their gripping expressions and postures tell a story of…