By: Rehan Ansari
September 19,2001

I have written in these pages about my friend Rashid, a visual artist from Lahore, and that Lahore is the material for his art. I’ll illustrate my point about Lahore being the material for his art from his work called Skyscraper.
Before I walk us through his work — Rashid is in New York, and him and I were wondering how anyone in New York could understand his work since its culturalreferences are located in Lahore and Pakistan. The conversation occurred before the World Trade Center bombing. The dimensions of Skyscraper, 24 by 12 ft, recall a cinema billboard. He has taken an image from an American B movie, starring ex-Playboy Anna Nicole-Smith. The rest of the image has the Twin Towers burning and a circling helicopter. These images stand juxtaposed with one from any number of Sultan Rahi Punjabi films. Rahi holds the Guinness Book of World Records for movie appearances. His image in the artwork is a huge bearded face in a grotesque grimace, and his handholding a blood stained kasai ka churra. The Twin towers on fire and a bearded brown man holding a cleaver.

After the WTC bombing Rashid and I were horrified by the thought that the New York Times journalist, who interviewed him on the occasion of a South Asian arts festival on August 15, may not have promptly trashed the press package he gave her. It may still be lying in some corner of her desk and she may still see a slide of Skyscraper.
In Lahore, the only movies you can go to are Punjabi films, in which every hero is an anti-hero and every woman a whore, or American B movies — slash and burn action thrillers. The violent Punjabi movie genre has a kick-off event: the resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Before 1979, the word Kalashnikov wasn’t known. Student groups, militant wings of political parties, no one possessed the gun. The network of guns and mercenaries, established by Americans and General Zia ul Haq to fight the Afghan jihad, destroyed the public culture of Pakistani cities.

Everybody I know is witness to this. It is both heartening and painful to see that commentators in the Pakistani media, from across the political spectrum, are recalling what I recall from the last time we fought America’s fight. Even General Musharraf, as he negotiates for everything from debt relief to the Kashmiri kitchen sink, fears the violence that this American fight will bring.

This time around we already have established and armed militias. What will go over better with the militias and their ever-new recruits: that we need to fight for the Americans, for their life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Or that we need to fight the Americans and their supporters for the apartheid that they support in the West Bank, for the bombing of Iraq, and so on. Ayaz Amir, columnist from Dawn, has said that America used Pakistan like a condom and threw it away. They are now going to use a used condom.