Sparks of Fire

Memoirs and autobiographies are a genre read with interest by this reviewer. The reader cannot help but associate one’s own thoughts and memories with the story that they are reading. Female writers, it could be argued, are by far the best narrator of autobiographical stories because of their deep involvement with day-to-day affairs, household stories, births and weddings, cooking and feast. A very old example in the Urdu language is by Rasheedun Nisa who wrote her first autobiographical novel Islahun Nisa as early as 1881. Since then, the sharing of one’s life is an ongoing interest for women writers of the IndoPakistan subcontinent. In the memoirs under discussion, Sparks of Fire, Saida Sherif takes us through a century of events in British India and she then moves her story to Pakistan and the United Kingdom. In the subsequent years, she details her constant involvement in socio-educational issues in and around London. She developed great emotional strength in dealing with the issues of Bosnia Herzegovina, ,which agitated the minds of not only Muslims but many concerned people in the West. This event, one might concur, changed the course of the modern history of Europe and aroused the Muslims of the affected states who were, for many years, under the subjugation of the communist regime and its ideology.