Andrew Feinstein: From your work I gather that brutal dehumanizations of the other are dependent on extraordinary misinformation and distortion. Is this something that each of you, as you’re writing books about what are very difficult circumstances, very difficult regions”is this something you’re conscious of, that you’re trying to restore in some ways, this loss of collective conscience?
Mirza Waheed: You look into it, the loss of collective conscience. You look into the moral landscape of these times and areas … what happens to normal behavior, the suspension of every day good behavior in a way which seems normal. We come to expect and then accept that this is how it’s going to be. It’s war, and these things happen in war. And then, as a novelist, as a writer, you do want to question that. And you want to explore … so how did we get to this place? What makes brutality banal? How do we come to accept violence as an everyday thing? And as a novelist, I want to explore those things and see … how do we come to a point where killing as many people as possible is a job? And what does it do to the person who’s doing the killing and, obviously, also to the people who are getting killed in that manner. You know, we live in this strange, bizarre age where the Nobel peace laureate has ended up as a proud assassin. More here.