A Portrait of My Father

Abstract

This work of life writing aims to piece together my late father, Muhammad Iftikhar Butt, who passed away on 20 of September 1996, in Lahore, Pakistan, when I was a teenager. A loss of a parent is a great tragedy and an emotional trauma, but this tragedy and trauma are deeper when the child has not mourned the loss but has erased it from its memory. By pondering father-daughter relationships in patriarchal cultures and gender dynamics in nuclear families, I re-member the forgotten bits of the past not only to mourn my father after more than two decades but also to commemorate the extraordinary phases of his fatherhood. Since my father has left behind no traces of his past life, the only way to bring him back to life is through my words – written words. With the help of shards and scraps of memory – some vivid, some fading – I seek to put the fragments of his life together to understand him long after his death due to my inability to understand him in his life. Indeed, I finally manage to re-collect him and see him as a person rather than a parent.