Reconstruction 11.2 (2011)
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The Tragic Mulatto Reconfigured: Post 9/11 Pakistani-American Identities in H.M Naqvi’s Home Boy and Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist / Bidhan Chandra Roy
Abstract: South Asian diasporic fiction has been widely celebrated for its representation of culturally hybrid characters that challenge fixed conceptions of ethnic and racial identity. Two recent novels by Pakistani diasporic writers, however, expose the political limits of discourses of cultural hybridity following the events of 9/11. This paper explores 9/11 as a seminal event in the representation of South Asian diasporic identity in H.M Naqvi’s Home Boy and Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It proposes that following 9/11 the marginality of Pakistani diasporic identity is more profitably read in light of a precursor to the hybrid - the figure of the Tragic Mulatto. Like the Tragic Mulatto, the protagonists of these novels examine the complexities surrounding interrelated identities of race and national allegiance, in which biological explanations of racial otherness have been reconfigured through various (mis) representations of Islam. As with the convention of the Tragic Mulatto, Naqvi and Hamid’s Pakistani diasporic protagonists’ attempts to "pass" in mainstream American society, but are "unmasked" in their respective narratives as their "Muslimness" is exposed in the wake of 9/11. The injustice of effects of 9/11 on the lives of these characters rests upon their inability to continue privileged, mainstream American lives, recalling the pathos that the figure of the Tragic Mulatto sought to engender in its nineteenth century audience. Such pathos is questionable politically, because it creates sympathy for the secular, westernized Muslim that has been stigmatized following 9/11, but leaves the broader political relations between America and the "Muslim world" unquestioned.
Keywords: Globalization, Literature, Religion
<1> The events of 9/11 have been discussed in a plethora of different discourses as varied as the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, the films of Oliver Stone, the novels of Don DeLillo, and the political speeches of George Bush. To this list we can also add two recent novels by H.M Naqvi and Moshin Hamid that examine the effects of 9/11 from a Pakistani, "Muslim" perspective. Both novels complicate the singularity of the idea frequently advanced in the media that "September 11 changed everything." From the perspective of these novels, if 9/11 did indeed change everything then it did so in the lives of their Pakistani-American protagonists in ways that are often overlooked in mainstream American public discourse. At the same time, the experiences of 9/11represented in both novels problematize certain models of postcolonial hybridity and US multiculturalism that are widely used to read contemporary South Asian diasporic fiction in America. Consequently, this paper proposes that the post 9/11 Pakistani-American identities in Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist are more profitably read in light of a precursor to theories of postcolonial hybridity and American multiculturalism—the figure of the Tragic Mulatto. Like the figure of the Tragic Mulatto, the protagonists of Hamid and Naqvi novels examine the complexities surrounding the interrelated identities of race and national allegiance but do so in a new way. Instead of a biological definition of race expelling these protagonists from their lives in mainstream American society, it is their (mis) identification as Muslims that serves this function in the narrative. In this way both novels recall the figure of the tragic mulatto by showing how their protagonists are exposed as Muslims in a post 9/11 America that is no longer able to tolerate the ambiguity of their identities.
The Concept of Cultural Hybridity
<2> The concept of hybridity has gained considerable currency in recent years and various articulations of it have been widely employed to read South Asian diasporic writers, such as Moshin Hamid and H.M. Naqvi. On the surface, hybridity is a deceptively simple concept, the most basic component of which is the idea of cultural mixing—what Salman Rushdie has famously referred to in his essay "In Good Faith" as "Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that." (Rushdie 1991, 394) Yet beyond this basic idea, theorizing hybridity has yielded a complex and varied range of models and connotations that have resulted in much debate within cultural studies.
<3> Among the most influential models of hybridity, particularly with respect to diasporic and migrant subjectivity, is Homi Bhabha’s conception of ambivalence articulated in The Location of Culture. Drawing upon poststructuralist theory, Bhabha finds diasporic subjects so compelling because they operate at the borders between nations and cultures that are redolent of contradictions and ambivalence. Borders both divide and connect different places and are important not only in a physical sense, but also as spaces in which subjects contemplate moving beyond a threshold: or in Bhabha’s terminology, borders are characterized by ‘the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.’ (Bhabha 1) This emphasis upon the value of border-crossings leads Bhabha to value migrant and diasporic subjects because they undergo imaginative as well as physical journeys as a result of migration. It is from this imaginative space of border crossing that hybrid identities and cultures emerge, challenging received notions of identity and culture that rely on fixed binary definitions. Bhabha valorizes this ‘in-between’ space for the possibilities it provides for articulating new identities and conceptions of selfhood that destabilize categories such as native/foreigner and black/white. Consequently, for Bhabha, as well as theorists who draw upon his work to read literary texts, the concept of hybridity is important because it challenges the notion of an essentialized or sovereign subject and, therefore, the foundational categories upon which various discourses of racism and ethno-nationalism are founded. Moreover, because hybridity exposes cultures and identities as constructed rather than received, it enables identities to be re-imagined and re-made in new, empowering ways.
<4> In recent years, Bhabha’s model of hybridity has moved beyond the confines of colonial/postcolonial contexts to be brought to bear on issues of cultural globalization more broadly. Within the field of literature, a number of theorists draw upon Bhabha’s work to argue that globalization and diaspora have produced new forms of literature that force rethinking a traditional nationally based taxonomy. For example, Roger Bromley’s Narratives For A New Belonging draws upon Bhabha to argue that diasporic writers have given voice to "postnational’ forms of culture and identities." (Bromley, 9) Such fiction is seen by Bromley as a "liberal, multicultural space" that plays a crucial role in articulating "new senses of (un) belonging," re-drawing borders and re-mapping identities. (Bromley 6) Bromley argues that the "double sense of identity" implicit to diasporic narratives undermines traditional territorially-bounded models of cultural identity, which ‘may be rendered existentially and analytically redundant’ in our contemporary world [1]. From this perspective, the Pakistani-American outlook of Naqvi’s Home Boy and Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist might be seen as harbingers of a new globalized novel that represents a "third space" of literary representation beyond traditional national categories. (Bromley 6)
<5> Yet one of the weaknesses of Bromley’s version of hybridized global culture is a failure to account for the power structures in which such culture is produced and, therefore, to question who determines how and what cultures are being hybridized. As numerous Marxist commentators have pointed out, when framed within the context of the multinational publishing industry, the sorts of hybrid identities and culture that Bhabha and Bromley celebrate can be read as complicit with contemporary American-led globalization. From this perspective, the close association between global capitalism and the sort of hybrid visions of culture and identity that Bromely espouses reflects an Americanisation of the world’s cultures. Hence, what are frequently offered as examples of hybridized "global" culture often reveal American pluralism writ large: not the end of nationalism, but the universalization of American national identity.
<6> For example, Timothy Brennan in At Home In The World: Cosmopolitanism Now, identifies a "new ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the London and New York book markets" that extends beyond the realm of literature to "the newspaper commentators, professors and talk show hosts" who helped promote it, and further still to the networks of "academic, governmental, media, and think tank intellectuals." (Brennan 1) Therefore, according to Brennan the emergence of a new literary cosmopolitanism that celebrates hybridity of the sort Bromley valorises is one aspect of a much broader series of power structures that produce similar global outlooks in a range of discourses and fields of American public policy [2]. Acknowledging the global hegemony of the U.S. in this way enables Brennan to bring to light the particular imprint of American national identity and culture – "its’ famous, highly celebrated mixedness of population, which has created a repertoire of troping and a reason for being" – upon global culture. (Brennan 9) Consequently, for Brennan, discourses of hybridity and cosmopolitanism frequently serve to privilege U.S. experience, and to implicitly offer the U.S. as prototypical of a new "global" cultural identity, signifying "assimilation with dignity" into a global American empire [3]. Framing the discourse of hybridity within the context of what Brennan identifies as ‘the American empire’ demands a rethinking of what constitutes "American" literature beyond a narrow territorially based definition. From this perspective, Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist might be considered American novels not only because of their settings and author’s connection to the U.S., but also because of the extent to which their aesthetic and ideological outlooks promote Americanization.
<7> There is certainly evidence to support Brennan’s claim of the conflation between an American model of national identity and global hybridized culture in a number of novels by writers of the South Asian Diaspora written prior to 9/11. Perhaps most notable of these is Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, that both valorises New York City as a globalized cosmopolitan space and represents rock music as a new, hybridized form of postnational culture. A good example of the novel’s conflation of American and global hybridized culture is its description of the "Quakershaker" album, produced by the novel’s two Indian rock star protagonists, Vina and Ormus. Rushdie describes the album as follows:
America which by losing certitude has newly opened itself to the external world responds to the un-American sounds Ormus adds to his tracks: the sexiness of the Cuban horns, the mind-bending patterns of the Brazilian drums, the Chilean woodwinds moaning like the winds of oppression, the African male voice choruses like tree’s swaying in freedom’s breeze, the grand old ladies of Algerian music with their yearning squawks and ululations, the holy passion of the Pakistani qawwals. (Rushdie 2000, 379)
Yet, despite Rushdie’s claim that the album is "un-American," its appropriation of various global music traditions is ultimately dependent upon American production, distribution, as well as an American audience to achieve its "global" status. Consequently, the "global" aspects of the album, such as "the Cuban horns’ and ‘Pakistani qawwals," are lifted out of their traditional cultural contexts and re-packaged for the consumption of ‘young Americans, in search of new frontiers.’ (Rushdie 200, 379) This means that the idea of "global" culture is exclusively defined through the English language (in its Americanized form that is mimicked in the diction of the novel), and mediated through American musical contexts with a few notable British exceptions [4]. Hence, simply because the "Quakershaker" album is influenced by a range of musical traditions does not mean it represents an egalitarian, "global" musical conversation. Rather, it exposes how the ostensibly "global" sound of the album does not take place in a neutral space of cultural exchange, but must first pass through America in order to be "hybridized." In this respect the novel supports Brennan’s work by illustrating how America acts as the final arbiter in defining the criteria of what constitutes hybridized, "global" culture.
<8> Nevertheless, while numerous South Asian diasporic novels, like The Ground Beneath Her Feet, support Brennan’s argument that global "hybridized" culture privileges American identity, the point of departure of this essay is that the representation of 9/11 in Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist complicates this relationship. While Brennan’s work is important for recognizing how globalization forces a rethinking of American culture and identity in a global context, Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist also suggest that Brennan oversimplifies the connection between American national identity and its "highly celebrated mixedness of population." (Brennan 9) Consequently, reading these texts in light of a precursor to the hybrid in American literature, the tragic mulatto, reveals the limits of both Brennan’s critique of hybridity and Bromley’s celebration of it by, showing how the novels’ Pakistani-American protagonists are exposed as "Muslims" in post 9/11 America.
The Tragic Mulatto and the Limits of Hybridity Following 9/11
<9> In contrast to Bhabha and Bromley’s theoretical approaches to hybridity, Werner Sollors in Neither Black nor White places the contemporary conceptualization of hybridity within a broader historical context. Although Sollors work focuses more narrowly upon conceptions of racial identities in American literature, it remains important for providing a historical context for contemporary theories of hybridity and exposing some of their possible limitations. Of particular importance in this regard is the figure of the tragic mulatto, a popular figure in nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature and a precursor to contemporary conceptions of the hybrid. While as Sollors notes, there are a number of specific features of the tragic mulatto complex, the basic literary convention is one in which a racially mixed protagonist is shown to be the "ultimate marginal man" who is unable to find a place for him or herself in an American society sharply divided by race. (Sollors 241) Frequently the tragic mulatto narrative revolves around the revelation of the protagonist’s ambiguous background after previously "passing" within white society and the subsequent tragedy of he or she being rejected from it. A common objection to such a plot, as well as the convention in general, is that it allows readers to empathize and/or sympathize with the plight of oppressed or enslaved races but only through a veil of whiteness. In other words, instead of the tragic mulatto engendering emotional identification with a meaningful racial other, it is a figure that invites a white readership to sympathize with a character who is made to appear as white as possible. Sterling A. Brown notes in Negro in American Fiction that the effect of constructing such a character is that "the real Gamut of Negro life and character" and the meaningful social and political aspects of slavery are overlooked. (Brown 46) Moreover, by occluding "the real Gamut of Negro life and character," the figure of the tragic mulatto suggests that tragedy is only possible if the protagonist were someone in whom a white audience can see themselves reflected in some way. (Sollors 224) Hence, the limitation of the convention as an antislavery narrative is that it gives a myopic view of the politics of antislavery and, according to Brown, reinforces the racial hierarchies it ostensibly seeks to work against.
<10> Both Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist rework the basic narrative convention of the tragic mulatto by centring upon two Pakistani-American protagonists who are able to pass in mainstream pre-9/11 American society. Prior to 9/11, the protagonists of both novels, Chuck and Changez, live privileged lives in Manhattan having graduated from American universities and succeeded in getting jobs on Wall Street. New York City is, at this time of their lives, a source of unequivocal celebration that echoes much of Rushdie’s valorisation of the cosmopolitan nature of the city in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. For example, in Home Boy, Chuck comments that "you could, as Mini Auntie told me once, spend ten years in Britain and not feel British, but after spending ten months in New York, you were a New Yorker, an original settler." (Naqvi 19) Similarly, Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist assesses that he was "in four and a half years, never an American" but ‘was immediately a New Yorker.’ (Hamid 33) In this respect, both novels propagate the myth of New York City as a global city that eschews exclusionary narratives of national identity -a place where "you felt you were no different from anybody else." (Naqvi 20)
<11> Such enthusiasm for New York means that both Changez and Chuck are too deeply immersed in the city’s social life and too busy in their pursuit of upward mobility to question any of the political and cultural issues that later surface in both narratives. Changez, for example, assesses his life in pre-9/11 New York as one in which "Nothing troubled me; I was a young New Yorker with the city at my feet." (Hamid 43) While Chuck brags that the "turn of the century had been epic" and revels in the Tribeca bar scene "populated by the local Scandinavian scenesters and sundry expatriates as well as socialites, arrivistes, homosexuals, metrosexuals, and a smattering of has-been and wannabe models." (Naqvi 4) This valorization of metropolitan New York as a cosmopolitan utopia in both novels implies that had it not been for 9/11, neither Chuck nor Changez would leave the city on their own volition.
<12> In contrast to nineteenth and early twentieth century America, the ability to pass in pre-9/11 New York in Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist has little to do with concealing one’s ethnic or racial background. Indeed, the Pakistani dimension of both Changez and Chuck’s identities within such a metropolitan world is, in one sense, unremarkable because New York is represented as the quintessential global city. However, both novels also represent Pakistaniness as advantageous to their protagonists in pre-9/11 New York. Changez, for instance, remarks upon "an advantage conferred upon me by my foreignness" that "I tried to utilize as much as I could." (Hamid 42) Changez sets about doing this in the novel in two distinct ways, both of which are crucial to advancing the plot. The first is by capitalizing upon the exoticness of his identity in pursuit of his upper-middle class love interest, Erica. To Erica’s WASP sensibility Changez’ Pakistani background makes him stand out from her other Anglo-American suitors and appear ‘"unusual"’—an advantage that Changez plays to the fullest by, for example, wearing a traditional Pakistani Kurta on their first date. (Hamid 28) The second, somewhat more inadvertently, is by brokering his "Third World" credentials that indicate him to be ‘"hungry"’ to his interviewer, Jim, in order to secure a Wall Street job. However questionable Jim’s understanding of Changez’ upper class background in Pakistan maybe in assessing his ‘"hunger"’, it nevertheless demonstrates how Changez’ is able to utilize Pakistaniness for its "Third World" status in New York City as effectively as he is its cosmopolitan appeal. (Hamid 28)
<13> In Home Boy the brokering of Pakistani identity in pre 9/11 New York is represented in an equally positive light, albeit it in a more Anglo-American pop cultural register. Principally, Pakistaniness functions for the three central characters – AC, Jimbo and Chuck – as a signifier of having their "fingers on the pulse of the great global dialectic." (Naqvi 1) Pakistani identity within this formulation functions along the lines of Jameson’s conception of ‘neo-ethnicity’ in Postmodernism, in which ethnicity is conceived in terms of fashion and consumption, and is argued to be primarily "a yuppie phenomenon." (Jameson 341) Thus, Chuck’s "Pakistani carpet" and "hookah" are "integral accoutrements of urbanity," while ‘Nusrat’ is listened to along with "a new generation of native rockers" as evidence of their status as self styled "renaissance men." (Naqvi 1) The effect of using Pakistaniness as part of their "mostly self-invented and self made" identities is as a way of appearing distinct and memorable in New York’s party scene – "the famous Pakistanis!" as one well-off New York socialite describes them in her "swank corner apartment overlooking West Broadway." (Naqvi 23) Pakistaniness is, in short, something that the Pakistani diaspora brings to a city that prides itself on its globality, establishing cultural difference in a way that is not threatening to the Anglo-American social worlds that the protagonists of both novels inhabit.
<14> By contrast, the Muslim aspect of Chuck and Changez’ backgrounds is not commented upon until after 9/11 in either novel. Unlike Pakistaniness, which functions as a means of establishing an exoticized cultural difference to Anglo-America, the indifference of Chuck and Changez to Islam is used to establish their sameness to the liberal, secular, metropolitan New York that they inhabit. For instance in Home Boy, Chuck articulates an irreverent and parodying attitude toward the Koran by commenting:
Like most Muslims, I read the Koran once circa age ten and, like some, had combed through it afterward. There were issues in the Holy Book that were indisputable, like eating pork, but the directives concerning liquor could easily be interpreted wither way. You should not, for instance, pray when hammered. (Naqvi 68)
Similarly, after 9/11 AC rejects a television address that claims Muslims "are not the enemy of America" and that Islam’s "teachings are good and peaceful" by remarking that ‘"it’s a violent, bastard religion, as violent as say, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, whatever. Man’s been killing and maiming in the name of God since the dawn of time."’ (Naqvi 122) Both instances serve to illustrate the secular allegiances of the three characters and hence to reinforce the absurdity of them being identified as Muslims in American society following 9/11. Hamid achieves a similar effect more subtly in The Reluctant Fundamentalist by using ‘fundamentalist’ in the title – a word that is inextricably linked with Islam in western discourse—and then barely mentioning Islam at all throughout the novel. Therefore, while, Changez may be identified as a Muslim in post 9/11 America, Islam is ironically absent from Changez’s narration of his life, political concerns and identity. In this regard, both novels appear very clearly designed to disrupt American stereotypes of Pakistani’s as religion fanatics and question the idea of Islam as an important aspect of identity to many who are defined as "Muslims" by the US following 9/11.
<15> Nevertheless, despite the secular, cosmopolitan outlooks of these self identified New Yorkers, 9/11 represents a watershed moment in their lives and a critical turning point in both narratives. Changez path of upward mobility in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the hedonistic lifestyles of Naqvi’s characters in Home Boy are abruptly forced to confront 9/11 as an event that implicates them within America’s representation of a monolithic Muslim "them." They become, in short, inadvertent Muslims whose identities are now produced for them by American media stereotypes, rather than the self-identifying ‘New Yorkers’ they had been prior to the event. It is this loss of agency and self-determination – this inability to pass in metropolitan New York—upon which the dramatic tension in both novels depends. In Home Boy this shift is both abrupt and forceful, creating a very definite chronology of before and after 9/11 in the lives of the three central Pakistani diasporic characters. For instance, the New York bar scene in which Chuck and his friends had previously been "boulevardiers, raconteurs, renaissance men" (Naqvi 1) is suddenly transformed into a space in which they are hailed as ‘"A-rabs,"’ ‘"Moslems, Mo-hicans"’ and in which there is ‘"NO ROOM FOR YOUS."’(Naqvi 31) Similarly, in The Reluctant Fundamentalist Changez experiences an increasingly narrowly defining nationalism that he identifies as American "nostalgia" (Hamid 116). This new climate of American nationalism leads Changez to also suffer verbal abuse from strangers and, like Chuck and his friends in Home Boy, to be attacked for being a "fucking Arab." (Hamid 117)
<16> Such abusive responses to Pakistanis following 9/11 reveal a racialization of their identities that Chuck and Chanqez had previously not experienced in New York. Chuck articulates this process of racialization explicitly by commenting that "we’d become Japs, Jews, Niggers." (Naqvi 1) Similarly, in The Reluctant Fundamentalist Changez’ notes that following 9/11 he is "of a suspect race" that is ‘quarantined and subjected to additional inspection’ at US airports. (Hamid 157) The effect of this shift in the perception of Pakistani identity is to exclude Chuck and Changez from the comfortable lives that they had created for themselves in New York City and to be denied the prerogative of what Chuck describes as not caring "to wear my identity on my sleeve." (68) In losing this privilege, their ability to self-identify as cosmopolitan New Yorkers is replaced by a new status as an excluded Other in an America that now rigidly defines the world, to use the words of George Bush, as being "either with us or against us in the fight against terror." The distinction that Bush is making is not of course a racial one, however what both novels show is that the problem of identifying who is "with us or against us" in post 9/11 America redefines Muslim identity in a perversely racial way.
<17> The effect of this new Manichaean American worldview transforms both novels from narratives that describe the experience of arrival in metropolitan America to emigration narratives of forced departure. A useful way to read this shift in narrative trajectory is as a re-working of the convention of the tragic mulatto in which the idea of being "for or against us" evokes the rigid racial binaries of nineteenth and early twentieth century America. In so doing, the veil of whiteness that exists in both texts is not the narrowly defined racial identity of nineteenth and early twentieth century America that Brown describes. Rather, it is better understood as a more subtle cultural, ideological and political division: a whiteness that is closely approximated with what is frequently termed in discourses of globalization, the hegemony of Anglo-American neoliberalism. Prior to 9/11 both protagonists are able to pass in such a world by adopting identities and worldviews that are complicit with American global dominance. Thus, Chuck’s refashioning of self in New York includes the Anglicization of his name, the embrace of American popular culture and the affirmation of secular, liberal values. While in The Reluctant Fundamentalist Changez becomes acutely aware of his position as an "indentured servant" serving the "American empire." (Hamid 156) In making this assessment, the ‘veil’ (157) that Changez identifies himself to have previously existed behind the global network of power through which America advances its "project of domination." (Hamid 156) Like the convention of the tragic mulatto, the pathos of both novels rests upon the injustice of Changez and Chuck’s inability to fit within this network of power in a post 9/11 America that rigidly and inaccurately defines Chuck and Changez identities as "Muslim" threats to it.
<18> To be sure, this parallel between the convention of the Tragic Mulatto and the experience of Muslims in America following 9/11 is most closely followed in Home Boy. Framed as Chuck’s 9/11 story in the second half of the novel, the previously fragmented observations of 9/11 become fashioned into a more cohesive narrative that recount the effects of 9/11 on the lives of Chuck and his two Pakistani friends. Chuck’s 9/11 story represents the heavy handed response of the US state to the attacks from a "Muslim" point of view, enabling Naqvi to expose the bigotry that Chuck and his friends must endure at the hands of the US state. For instance, consider the following exchange between Chuck and his interrogator, Grizzly.
Grizzly: You a terrorist?
Chuck: no Sir.
Grizzly: You a Moslem?
Chuck: Yes, sir.
Grizzly: So you read the Ko-ran?
Chuck: I’ve read it.
Grizzly: And pray five times a day to Al-La?
Chuck: No Sir. I pray several times a year, on special occasions like Eid.
Grizzly: You keep the Ram-a-Dan?
Chuck: Yes, sir, I usually keep about half, sometimes more but mostly less –
Grizzly: Do you eat pork?
Chuck: No Sir. (Naqvi 143)
There is little subtle about this exchange that appears clearly designed to challenge the misinformed ideas about Muslims that proliferated in America following 9/11. But what is important to note is that the sense of injustice it creates, the real pathos of the scene, hinges upon the reader spending the previous one hundred and fifty pages with Chuck drinking cocktails in Tribecca, quoting NWA lyrics and rooting for the New York Knicks without mentioning prayer, the Koran, or any aspect of his Muslim identity. In short, it is a pathos that depends upon a western metropolitan audience identifying with Chuck as being just "like us" prior to him being identified as a Muslim Other in post 9/11 America.
<19> This pathos is reinforced at the conclusion of the novel as Chuck reflects upon the life he might have led in the US had he not been picked up unjustly as a suspected terrorist and subsequently deported. The novel ends with Chuck fantasying of such a life had he been able to stay and ask "Old Man Khan for his daughter’s hand." (Naqvi 268) Chuck describes this future married life that is denied him in the following way:
Afterward we would rent a junior one-bedroom on the Upper East Side before applying for a more accommodating apartment, and in a decade or so, with both of us earning six figures, we might move to the suburbs, like the Shaman, Scarsdale perhaps, because of the schools.’ After producing progeny, we would live out the rest of days with an SUV in the garage, assorted objets d’art in the drawing room and a view of a manicured lawn. (Naqvi 268)
The "tragedy" of Chuck’s story then, is that although he may be a character with whom the novels audience can see their lives reflected, he is denied access to their world of good schools, suburbs, SUV’s and objets d’art simply because he is now identified as a "Muslim" in post 9/11 America.
<20> While in certain respects such pathos may be effective in alerting American audiences to some of the effects of 9/11 that are often occluded in mainstream American discourse, the limitations of it are exposed by reading the novel as a re-articulation of the Tragic Mulatto convention. As Brown argues of the tragic mulatto, Chuck is a character that an American audience is made to sympathize with because he appears to be as much like them as possible. To sympathize with Chuck’s experience as a "Muslim" in post 9/11 New York, therefore, is not to identify with a meaningful Other that rejects the Americanized worldview that Chuck holds. Consequently, the broader political implications of the US "War on Terror" are overlooked in a narrative that focuses upon the misidentification of a secular, Americanized Muslim for a terrorist, but does not in any way broach meaningful political and cultural differences between the US and many Muslims in the world. The complex and much more difficult question of how America responds to Muslims that are not terrorists but nevertheless reject an Americanized world is left entirely unanswered by Naqvi. Indeed the novel suggests that all Muslims fall into two simplistic groups: the terrorists that attacked The World Trade Centre and the majority of Muslims that see the world much the same as Americans do. Consequently, while the novel is critical of America’s misidentification of all Muslims as religious fanatics and terrorists following 9/11, the sorts of dissenting Muslim viewpoints that critics like Bobby Sayyid and Ziauddin Sardar articulate are entirely overlooked. [5]
<21> A similar pathos is at work in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, but Hamid’s representation of it is far more nuanced. Like Chuck and his friends, Changez is an equally politically, culturally and religiously compliant subject of global Americanization prior to 9/11 who becomes identified as a threatening Muslim Other afterward. Unlike Chuck, however, the effects of 9/11 upon Changez’ identity do not simply render him a victim of American society, but simultaneously cause him to question his own position as an "indentured servant" (Hamid 157) of the "American empire." (Hamid 156) Consequently, Changez departure from America is not simply as a result of his disenfranchisement from American society, but also as a result of his rejection of the American state. The difference between Chuck as a victim of post 9/11 American intolerance in Home Boy and Changez’ critical interrogation of self in The Reluctant Fundamentalist results in the later novel exploring the political implications of American foreign policy upon Pakistani identities in far more comprehensive way. Indeed, Changez comes to reflect upon his experiences following 9/11 primarily in political terms, a shift that he regards as transforming his worldview in the following way:
Yes, I too had previously derived comfort from my firm’s exhortations to focus intensely on work, but now is I saw that in this constant striving to realize a financial future, no thought was given to the critical personal and political issues that affect one’s emotional present. In other words, my blinders were coming off, and I was dazzled and rendered immobile by the saddening broadening of my arc of vision. (Hamid 145)
This broadening of Changez’ "arc of vision" results in him responding to the Manichean post 9/11 world that Bush articulates by choosing Pakistan over America. Symbolically Changez’ act of dissent against Americanization begins with growing a beard in defiance of the wishes of the American company that he works for. It later grows into a more meaningful rejection of America through his decision to return to Pakistan and disseminate his newly "broadened arc of vision" as a university lecturer. (Hamid 179)
<22> Yet despite The Reluctant Fundamentalist nuanced and thoughtful political perspective, the novel’s trajectory toward this broadening ‘arc of vision’ hinges upon the US response to 9/11. (Hamid 145) There is no evidence in the novel to indicate that had 9/11 not occurred Changez would come to question his identity and the politics of the "American empire" in the way that he does. This aspect of the plot is crucial because it implies that Changez’ rejection of the ‘American empire’ is predicated upon his rejection by it. Therefore, while the novel cautions against what Hamid has described in an interview with NPR as the US response to 9/11 creating "a kind of dangerous exclusion that leads people to feel like they have to choose one side or other." (Hamid 2010) It also tacitly re-centres US global power by promoting Hamid’s idea that the US should create "a kind of safe space" for Pakistani’s "to be comfortable having American cultural exposure," while denying the possibility of legitimate dissent or "delinking" from the "American empire." (Hamid 2010)
<23> As with Home Boy, the shortcomings of this view are illuminated by reading Changez’s character as a reconfiguration of the tragic mulatto convention. One of Brown’s central criticisms of the tragic mulatto is that its popularity within antislavery literature eclipses the "workday life of the average slave" and avoids representation of meaningful social issues. (Brown 46) Consequently, the tragic mulatto represents a myopic view of the politics of the antislavery movement by focusing upon a figure that may appeal to a white audience, but in so doing detracts from the broader political system in which slavery exists. Similarly, The Reluctant Fundamentalist creates sympathy for a protagonist who Hamid describes as "uncertain about where he fits" and is consequently led to "delink" from America following the US response to 9/11. But it does not lead an American audience to question why a Pakistani might reject a world system in which Pakistan is economically, culturally and politically marginalized. Therefore, while the novel may encourage an American audience to imagine a more tolerant American attitude toward the rest of the world, it does not engender reflection upon the systemic issues of globalization that have led many Muslims to look to Islam as alternative center to American global dominance. In other words, the idea of becoming "delinked" from America is only represented as a dangerous path toward fundamentalism and not, as Sayyid argues, a politics of global self-determination that is radically Other to Americanization and that challenges "the logic of Eurocentrism." (Sayyid 129)
Conclusion
<24> In concluding, I want to bring the ideas I have developed in this essay to bear on how we read hybridized literary characters like Changez and Chuck in an age of globalization. When read in light of the tragic mulatto, both novels represent hybridity more ambivalently than either the progressive "third space" that Bromley theorizes, or the process of Americanization that Brennan conceives hybridization as. On one hand, these texts show that, from a Pakistani/Muslim-American perspective, the conception of hybridization as Americanization does not hold following 9/11. On the other hand, these novels also critique the U.S. response to 9/11 precisely because it forecloses the space of hybridity in which Pakistanis like Changez can be both Pakistani and American. In this respect, both novels would seem to support the American promotion of hybridization, a position that Hamid articulates in a recent interview with NPR:
For some people, like myself, that’s not a difficult thing. You think, I’m a bit of both, I’m a hybridized person. That’s fine. But for others, it can be, "I have to reject one of these two things that are confusing me." And in this case rejecting America, trying to be just Pakistani or just Muslim. Which of course isn’t true to your experience and isn’t even true to your identity. But if you walk that path, it can lead to dangerous places. (Hamid 2010)
From Hamid’s perspective then, the reason that Changez and other Muslims take paths that "lead to dangerous places" is because post 9/11 geopolitics have led many Muslims to feel increasingly pressured to pledge their allegiance to either Islam or America. The foreclosing of a "comfortable space" in which to enact a hybridized identity is, according to Hamid, an important factor in leading Changez to becoming a "reluctant fundamentalist." In this regard, Hamid appears to endorse Bromley’s celebration of hybridity as the antidote to both the Manichean worldview of George Bush and of Islamic "fundamentalism." However, as I have attempted to show in this essay, by reading Hamid and Naqvi’s novels in light of a precursor to contemporary theories of hybridity, the tragic mulatto, the limits of this perspective are revealed. This reading reminds us that while Chuck and Changez are certainly characters in who an Anglo-American audience can see their lives and identities reflected, they are not characters that disturb a narrative of global Americanization. On the contrary, both novels generate considerable pathos for a world that enables Pakistani/Muslims to become more fully integrated into an American-led world. Such pathos might be easy for a Western audience to digest because it does not challenge them to confront viewpoints that conflict with a Western liberal worldview. However the failure to imagine Muslim dissent to Americanization outside of the discourse of terrorism in the end only reinforces the sort Manichean worldview that both novels ostensibly set out to undermine. In today’s globalized world, for western readers to engage with a worldview that is meaningfully Other to westernization requires more than celebrating hybridity—a limitation of which we are reminded by the figure of the tragic mulatto.
Notes
[1] Ibid: 9. More specifically, drawing upon Stuart Hall, Bromley argues that diasporic fiction represents ‘the third scenario:’ a cultural and discursive space of ‘cultural translation’ that is continually subject to transformation and renewal. Such a space should not be seen a ‘melting pot or mosaic, of a simple "rainbow merging,’ but rather something much more ambivalent, contradictory and plural that resists conceptualisation through oversimplified metaphors of fusion: the third scenario is ‘a space beyond existing political, social and cultural binaries.’ Ibid:1.
[2] Brennan’s exposure of these structures, in which a new ‘Western aesthetics’ of cosmopolitanism has emerged, leads him to distinguish it from earlier articulations of cosmopolitanism, such as that advanced by Kant in the nineteenth century. Of this, Brennan writes: ‘Accompanied by a phalanx of debates in several disciplines, the revival [of cosmopolitism] occurs at a time when there are more objective foundations for a "new world" than Kant ever knew: namely, the existence of a nation (the United States) with the individual means, the motive, and the alliances to establish the first universal law. We are finding more and more common the claim that American judges have jurisdiction everywhere – that not only does the sun never set on the American empire, there is no place it shines that is not America.’ Ibid: 4.
[3] Indeed Brennan argues that ‘pluralism is the slogan of American [identity] ‘in which the immigrant has become a fetish, and the images of immigration as heroic survival have become the new mixed-race, intercultural products of the American crucible seen as a source of American strength.’ Therefore in understanding globalisation as a reconstituted form of imperialism centred in America rather than Britain, Brennan argues that the rise of pluralist identities in contemporary cultural production further the political and economic project of American led neoliberal globalisation. Ibid: 204-5.
[4] The history of rock music is, however, is centred in Anglo-American artists and locations in the novel , including: ‘Dylan, Lennon, Joplin, Joni, Country Joe Fish’ as well as Muscle Shoals in Alabama and The Fillmore in San Francisco. Ibid: 402.
[5] Sayyid argues that the contemporary world is one in which the West is no able to universalize its worldview and that Islamism has emerged as alternative centre to the West that refuses to centre itself in western discourse. Sayyid regards this turn away from western discourse, and toward Islam, as a broad political project that is a self-conscious attempt by Muslims to locate their identities within an Islamic genealogy and worldview. Pakistani’s with an Islamist worldview, therefore, do not seek a place for their selves within an Americanized world as Chuck and his friends do, but rather reject Americanization entirely. This is not to suggest that Islamists inherently seek to attack America, but rather that they refuse to allow America to define the parameters of cultural, political and social life, and instead look to Islam ‘as the solution’ even if this conflicts with an American worldview.
Works Cited
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