Changez starts to feel American , both in his adoptive country and abroad, and even at home: ‘There are adjustments one must make if one comes here from America : a different way of observing is required. I recall the Americanness of my own gaze when I returned to Lahore that winter when war was in the offing. I was struck at first by how shabby our house appeared’ (RF 140). So far so good—a success story in the country of all possibilities, yet another representation of the American dream, of a Gatsby-like self-made man, which, according to Hamid, was at first the intention. Hamid confesses in an interview: ‘Well, the novel originally was a story about a man working in corporate America , who is a Muslim man from Pakistan, who then goes back to Pakistan. It was the story of a man’s encounter with capitalism as practiced at the very beginning of the twenty-first century and a man who comes from one culture to work in another’ (in Singh 2010, 153). Changez is set on a course of becoming an image of accomplished hybridisation, one that Žižek (2013) aptly termed ‘neighbour’: the integrated other . In a paper dedicated to The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Waldman’s The Submission , Ayşem Seval analyses the related destinies of Changez and Mohammad Khan starting from Žižek’s idea that ‘the adoption of an attitude of ‘liberal tolerance’—a respect for otherness —in late capitalist societies creates an uneasy relationship between the host society and what he calls the Neighbour. The position of the Neighbour is tolerated at best. This politically correct tolerance is hypocritical as it could potentially turn into hostility at any time. Because the Neighbour is close to the self, it poses a threat to the internal psyche and the very core of personhood’ (2017, 103). If Khan’s status as neighbouring Other is not activated until the moment of crisis, Changez receives signals of his otherness even in moments when he feels ‘a young New Yorker with the city at [his] feet’ (RF 51). During a conversation on what each of the students would like to become, Changez says, that he hopes ‘one day to be the dictator of an Islamic republic with nuclear capability’ (p. 33), a joke met with shock which could, as Seval rightfully notices, turn his tolerated/accepted position into ‘a bizarre, unwanted, and dangerously alien one’ (2017, 106) of an absolute Other.
However, this undesirable but expected outcome is not delayed much, as the events of 9/11 intervene in Changez’s life as suddenly as they did in everybody’s, real people or fictional characters of the time. Hamid places his character ‘far from the madding crowd’ of New York, in a delegation in the Philippines, thus ensuring the distance required to grasp the event in its filmic unreality. ‘I turned on the television and saw what at first I took to be a film . But as I continued to watch, I realized that it was not fiction but news . I stared as one—and then the other—of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed’ (RF 82–3). Nothing new here: this was, as already mentioned, the sensation reported by Martin Amis , Don DeLillo , Ian McEwan , Jean Baudrillard , Jacques Derrida and so many others in the days after the attack; it is, as also mentioned, the reason why this book was written. Similarly, hardly is there any novelty in pinpointing the symbolism of the two towers falling, a visible bringing of America ‘to her knees’ (83) by striking at one of the mightiest symbols of American power . What is problematic in the rendition of the 9/11 moment in The Reluctant Fundamentalist . What pushes the boundaries of what the general public is ready to accept even in fiction is Changez’s reaction: ‘And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased’ (83). The reaction is by no means singular—in an interview, Hamid recalls that he saw it on the faces of white Londoners: ‘I looked around,’ he remembered, ‘and saw that some people were smiling. These weren’t people who looked like me; they were white people. For days, I saw this recurring, people happy, people joking. If I mentioned the human suffering to these people, some said they were ashamed of the way they felt. It was the symbolism of the act that pleased them’ (qtd. in Kaplan, The New York Times, 19 April 2013). Hamid’s statement vouches for the prevalence of anti-Americanism in the wake of 9/11, when many people ignored the terrible loss of human lives and focused only on the wrong-doings of the American empire and its foreign policy, which had now, with the attacks, brought them what they deserved. Hamid seems to make a case in favour of the period’s public enemy number one, the Muslims, stereotyped as terrorists and subject to persecution, on account of what only a handful of them did and of an alleged hatred for America which is, in fact, shared by many others. Nonetheless, his point is sometimes missed. Seval quotes the reaction of an American reader, a member of Princeton Book Club, broadcast on a BBC radio show: ‘Changez’s smile brought us to a full stop; we lost sympathy with him and read the rest of the novel very cautiously’ (2017, 109). The response is anticipated in the novel: ‘you will find rather unpalatable what I intend to say next’ (RF 82). The reaction of the narratee, the unnamed American , functions as that of an implied reader: ‘your disgust is evident; indeed, your large hand has, perhaps without noticing, clenched into a fist’ (83). It may suggest that Hamid might have intended to enhance his narrator’s unreliability by adding a reader-repellent element, in an effort to distance himself as much as possible from Changez, who is unavoidably considered his alter ego.
On the other hand , this scene and the subsequent plotline may constitute a subtle warning: Occidentalism in general and anti-Americanism in particular are so ingrained in the colonised that they appear even in the mind of ‘a product of an American university […] earning a lucrative American salary [and …] infatuated with an American woman’ (84). All this personal engagement with America does not make the foreign Other a colonist there, a figure of the counter-colonisation of the West by the East , as one might think, but, as a later realisation reveals to the narrator, sooner ‘a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire’ (173). Confounded with guilt, Changez makes efforts to appear as indignant at the tragedy as his fellow Americans . Nevertheless, it only takes a few days for the persecution of Muslims to begin at airports, and Changez is no exception. Returning to America , he is singled out for strip search and interrogation both in Manila and New York, and during the flight he perceives the looks of concern of the other passengers. This is just the beginning.
New York in the days after the attacks is depicted in Hamid’s novel with the evocative force of what could be termed photorealism , if one chose to borrow the term from the area of visual arts and transpose it to fiction . Just as the artists of the 1960s and 1970s would photograph an image and paint it as realistically as possible afterwards, as a counterreaction to Abstract Expressionism, Hamid ‘draws’ the streets of New York from media images, perhaps from a realist impulse to hypertextually access the world outside the text, or perhaps unconsciously aiming at verisimilitude in a work that, because of the already established unreliability of its narrator , does not offer much in this respect. Particular to the case of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is that the colourful and nationalistic mourning on display on the streets of Manhattan is regarded critically, not as if it were genuinely born from pain, but as if it announced to the world that America felt hurt and would respond:New York was in mourning after the destruction of the World Trade Center, and floral motifs figured prominently in the shrines to the dead and the missing that had sprung up in my absence. I would often glance at them as I walked by: photos, bouquets, words of condolence—nestled into streets corners and between shops and along the railings of public squares. […] Your country’s flag invaded New York after the attacks: it was everywhere. They all seemed to proclaim: We are America […] the mightiest civilisation the world has ever known; you have slighted us; beware our wrath. (RF 90, emphasis in the original)
Although he seems to feel threatened, which, at the textual level, translates into a slight alteration of the tenor that suddenly acquires an archaic, mediaeval quality—‘I wondered what manner of host would sally forth from so grand a castle’ (90)—pointing to imperialism , to the angered superpower which is sure to retali
ate, Changez is still in a phase in which he considers that the persecutions of Muslims cannot affect him, owing to his status. ‘The crumbling of the world around [him] and the impending destruction of [his] personal American dream’ (106) are anticipated with detachment, a make-believe that prevents him from accepting that ‘Pakistani cabdrivers were being beaten to within an inch of their lives; the FBI was raiding mosques, shops, and even people’s houses; Muslim men were disappearing, perhaps into shadowy detention centres for questioning or worse’ (107). In an article entitled ‘Denied Citizenry and the Postnational Imaginary: Arab-American and Muslim American Literary Responses to 9/11’, Andrea Carosso provides a similar list of what he terms ‘dis-identification’ based on racial profiling and stereotyping:A crude anti-Muslim video circulated on the Internet suggesting the existence of a Muslim plot to take over the West ; a mosque was burned down in Missouri; an acid bomb was thrown at an Islamic school in Illinois; one speaker at the Republican primaries accused Muslims of harboring plans for ‘stealth Sharia;’ and a group of Republican House members, led by Michele Bachmann, conducted a witch-hunt against two prominent Muslim federal officials for alleged loyalty to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The allegations turned out to be groundless, but the pruriency for a revival of McCarthyist obsessions stuck. (2014, 194–5)
Extensively documented in Selling Fear: Counterterrorism, the Media and Public Opinion (Nacos et al. 2011), with an excellent analysis of the press coverage, the persecution of Muslims in America unfolded as a counteroffensive supported, if not triggered by the media, a vehicle for reproducing government policies meant to create a climate of fear and resentment among the public. Carosso cites a USA Today gallup poll from 2006 which shows that ‘39 percent of Americans admit to holding prejudice against Muslims and believe that Muslims—U.S. citizens included—should carry special IDs’ (2014, 196). Unlike other texts discussed in this book, Hamid’s novel does not refer to the media when it briefly reports the ‘framing Muslims’ atmosphere (Morey and Yaqin 2011); instead, it addresses public opinion and the hostile attitudes in the streets, metro stations and parking lots. As Morey puts it, ‘the stereotype tends to be articulated through an implicit distance between the viewer (normalised subject) and the Muslim object of the gaze, whose difference is always in view and never in doubt’ (2011b, 266). Relevant in this respect is Changez’s attempted assault by a man who calls him a ‘fucking Arab’ (RF 134). This is an illustration of the common misconception according to which all Muslims are Arabs and all Arabs are terrorists , widespread in the years after 9/11. This abuse is shortly followed by many others and even by his colleagues’ change of attitude because of his decision to grow a beard during his visit to Pakistan. While he acknowledges the beard as a symbol of his identity and as a protest, Changez reports this episode to his quiet American ‘interlocutor’ in the following terms: ‘it is remarkable, given its physical insignificance—it is only a hairstyle after all—the impact of a beard worn by a man of my complexion has on your fellow countrymen’ (148). This double standard adds to the explicit anti-Americanism of this narrator , which, at this point in the novel , has already started to gain momentum.
The reaction to the beard is stereotypical indeed, all the more so because Changez is not a stereotypical Muslim —he drinks alcohol, engages sexually with women, approves of nudity at the beach, and is disinterested in religion. Even when he becomes a ‘fundamentalist’, religion is not employed in any way other than in the construction of the character , being rooted instead in the personal and the political. In Estévez-Saá’s opinion, he is a representation of transculturalism—at the crossroads of postcolonialism , with its victimising obsession for difference, and cosmopolitanism, with its too great emphasis on commonality (2016, 1). I disagree with the Spanish scholar’s assessment of Changez as an Eastern partner in the intercultural dialogue engaged with the West , arguing that his pre-9/11 course is one of full integration in the host culture , while after the attacks, he gradually, yet completely disengages from it. In both cases, the cultural dialogue is missing, and the character’s two instances, separated by the moment of 9/11, are as monologic as is the entire novel , although the author claims in an interview for The New York Times that ‘a wall had suddenly come up between [his] American and Muslim worlds’ and that he wanted ‘to reconnect those divided worlds’ (Hamid in Solomon, The New York Times 2007).
It can be argued—and as shown, the novel offers enough textual evidence for such a claim—that Changez’s disengagement with America , doing away with the Occidentalist image of the Muslim who discovers his Islamic fundamentalist drives due to exposure to the evils of the West , is a result of his being denied the complete integration he wished for during the years he spent there. There is a sense of frustration which induces resentment, in other words. However, the explanation provided by the narrative is that Changez’s change of heart is owed to his increasing discontent at America’s response to the attacks, and the war on terror in Afghanistan , regarded as disproportional and also blurring the boundaries between the real and the simulacrum:The bombing of Afghanistan had already been under way for a fortnight, and I had been avoiding the evening news , preferring not to watch the partisan and sports-event-like coverage given to the mismatch between the American bombers with their twenty-first-century weaponry and the ill-equipped and ill-fed Afghan tribesmen below. […] I was reminded of the film Terminator, but with the roles reversed so that the machines were cast as heroes. (RF 113)
Hamid neither confirms nor invalidates the explanation above, saying that ‘the novel is not supposed to have a correct answer. It’s a mirror. It really is just a conversation, and different people will read it in different ways’ (in Solomon, The New York Times 2007). This is the point in the novel when the corporate American identity of Changez makes way for a different one, that of a citizen of a persecuted third-world Muslim country, sympathetic toward his peers: ‘Afghanistan was Pakistan’s neighbour, our friend, and a fellow Muslim nation’ (RF 113), although it is unclear, even to him, why the sudden interest for these ‘world events [that] were playing out on a stage of no relevance to [his] personal life’ (114). Palestinian scholar Isam Shihada gathers an entire host of questions that Hamid seems to be obliquely addressing the Muslim Americans through the inner voice of his character.Will you act passive when the American government of your new adoptive home attacks your country of origin or a neighbouring Muslim country such as Afghanistan and Iraq? What is your attitude toward the hate campaign, which sinisterly targets Islam and portrays it as a religion of terror? What is your next move when you feel alienated, discriminated against, stripped, humiliated at the American airports and treated with disgust and suspicion? What is your response when you see your fellow Muslim colleagues are beaten, humiliated, and sent to unknown detention centres all over the world? What is your answer when you see that the world is divided by the American Empire along the malicious lines of either with ‘us’ or ‘them’ in their War against Terror? (2015, 455)
This approach may be regarded as too author-oriented, and consequently, against all precepts of modern criticism and theory. Nonetheless, this author , like the others discussed in this book (see Banks , Amis, McEwan ), has manifestly made his opinions known in the Western media , which he considers to be silencing the Muslims (his silenced American non-character is a covert response, according to his statement). Although The Reluctant Fundamentalist ‘is a love song to America as much as it is a critique’ (Hamid in Solomon, The New York Times 2007), and the latter is rather obvious, his claim that the novel ‘is not an exercise in straight-out realism’ (in Singh 2012, 155) and the wide addressability of the text question such didactic aims.
The bitter revelation that he is an exponent of self-made Americanism while America is so overtly against his identity is also the moment when Changez realises that he feels pride for the great cultural history of South Asia, as opposed to that of America, which used to be ‘a collection of thirteen small col
onies, gnawing away at the edge of a continent’ (RF 116). The embedded critique of the Americans for so readily embracing war propaganda is once again transmitted via simulation and unreality: America , too, was increasingly giving itself over to a dangerous nostalgia at that time. There was something undeniably retro about the flags and uniforms, about generals addressing cameras in war rooms and newspaper headlines featuring such words as duty and honor. […] Living in New York was suddenly like living in a film about the Second World War. I, a foreigner, found myself starring out at a set that ought to be viewed not in Technicolor but in grainy black and white. (130–1)
Against the GWOT background, the backlash at home intensifies, and Muslims face persecution even if they are successful, integrated professionals like Changez: ‘I had heard tales of the discrimination Muslims were beginning to experience in the business world—stories of rescinded job offers and groundless dismissals’ (137). The character’s determination to keep his position is soon shaken by his visit to his native Pakistan, whose political circumstances (the inevitability of a war with India) make him feel like a traitor. This is a crossroads in his identity development—he grows a beard which brings him whispers and stares from his colleagues and abuse in the street, but the greater burden he feels is, once again, not one related to identity and/or religion , but to politics . Through his voice, America is criticised for its neutrality in the budding conflict between India and Pakistan, although the latter had supported the American troops in Afghanistan : ‘all America would have to do would be to inform India that an attack on Pakistan would be treated as an attack on any American ally and would be responded to by the overwhelming force of America’s military. Yet your country was signally failing to do this’ (163).
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