‘What Kept You?’: A Muslim feminist’s debut novel rebels against the suffocation of safety

The protagonist in Raaza Jamshed’s novel What Kept You? grows up in Lahore, Pakistan, under her grandmother’s watchful eye, in a house that sits in the shadow of the city’s walls. The memory of the turmoil and human suffering that resulted from India’s Partition in 1947 swirls around Jahan’s upbringing.

In an attempt to make her fearful of what awaits her outside the relative safety of home, Jahan’s female carers tell her stories about demons, as well as the more mundane reality of men’s violence against women and bodies turning up on the street.

Both of these threads, the mythic and the mundane, are ways of storying the pall of fear cast by violence and its memory. A refrain repeated throughout the novel – that “these are not our stories” – hints that Jahan is searching for an alternative story for herself.

A feminist sensibility

This desire motivates her to migrate to Sydney, and brings about the novel’s key events: meeting her partner Ali, moving together to live on a property on Sydney’s western outskirts, suffering a miscarriage, and surviving a bushfire that provides both climactic drama and catharsis.

Like much modern fiction, it is clear that What Kept You? is loosely drawn from the author’s life. Jamshed is herself a migrant writer who, like her...

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