BHUTTO'S FATEFUL MOMENT

I told her I was still curious about one thing. “You titled your autobiography in its British edition ‘Daughter of the East,’ and in its American edition ‘Daughter of Destiny.’ Which are you?”

“What a difficult question,” she said. “I don’t know.”

She became reflective, tilting her face as she rested her chin on her hand. Then she went on, “I’m partly a child of destiny. Fate put me where I am now, against my own inner wishes, but I chose to stay on, when I could always have opted out. Of course, I did have a sense of duty to my father and the causes he espoused, and now I have a duty to those people who believe in me and to myself. A daughter of the East or a daughter of destiny?” She repeated the titles. “Did I have a choice?” She paused, as if she were considering her next words carefully, and then she said, very deliberately, “I am a daughter of the East. I was born into it; conditioned by it; thrust into a political system which is Eastern—a political system in which I have to win or lose. And, more than that, as a daughter of the East I want other women, born into this tradition, this environment, where they’re forced to submit to those societal pressures and those fates which have been written for them, to see how I fight—as a politician, as a woman, as a mother—and how I survive. I want to show them that they can rise above these pressures too, and that they can demand to make their own choices, and not have others—fathers, husbands, or brothers—make their choices for them.”

more a The New Yorker profile in 1993 here.