British and American Representations of 9-11
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Already unable to focus on his work, his assignment to evaluate a publishing house in Valparaíso, Chile is both a beginning and an end for Changez. This temporary displacement from America turns eventually into a permanent one, with his return to Pakistan and open transformation into an anti-American agitator. After a conversation with the wise editor Juan Bautista (an overt tribute to Camus’s Jean Baptiste, an allusion to John the Baptist, a major religious figure in all Abrahamic religions , including Islam , or, perhaps, both), Changez acknowledges his status as a loyal prisoner enlisted in the army of the enemy of his country: ‘I was a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war’ (173).
It is worth mentioning here that the Chilean setting, adding to the American and Pakistani ones, has determined the assessment of Hamid’s novel as ‘deterritorialising’, that is, beyond the totalising categories of East and West (Morey 2011a, 138). Nevertheless , the toing and froing between the two is obvious in the structure of the narrative, often interrupted by picturesque glimpses of Lahore, which is the space for the framing ‘now’, as opposed to America , which is retrieved only as past reference in the framed narrative. Valparaíso is just a single instance and, as important as it proves to be in the economy of the novel , it still is a questionable argument for inscribing the text in the broad category of ‘world literature’ by the sole means of its occurrence. This is probably why Morey adds the ‘sub-theme of intercontinental business acquisition and the reach of global capital, and its own status as lauded and awarded international literary success’ (p. 142) to his list of reasons for going back to Goethe’s Weltliteratur, a concept augmented nowadays by free circulation, internationalisation and globalism, and as cynical as it may sound to some, by the lasting effects of colonialism too. Much more appropriate seems the evaluation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a postcolonial novel that ‘writes back’ to neo-imperialism , but only to the extent that this classification avoids the exaggerations of Eastern criticism, which tends to regard Hamid as a spokesperson for the Muslims who ‘are always misrepresented, underrepresented and misunderstood in the Western world’ (Shihada 2015, 455).
Towards the end of the novel , the anti-American discourse becomes acute, the narrator now openly critiquing the American superiority and its waging war against entire innocent populations. The gaze of the Other is probing, and what he sees is realistic, in accordance with the image America showed to the entire world immediately after 9/11: ‘You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums’ (RF 199). With this strong political statement inserted into an unreliable fiction and drawing it to the edge of the real, as well as with the final debunking of stereotypes on both sides—‘you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists , just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins’ (208), Mohsin Hamid seems to have finally attained that Occidentalist goal mentioned above, that of becoming a keen observer of their Other . Except that not only does he observe the West , but he also observes the East (and he can hardly be accused of Orientalism ). Aside from its literary qualities,20 what makes The Reluctant Fundamentalist a success is neither the Muslims’ quest for identity in an America prone to react negatively against all that stand for its symbolic bringing on its knees, nor the poignant anti-Americanism of some of the political statements it makes. It is precisely its objective positioning between both ways.
Conclusions
9/11 fiction , a subgenre comparable with war literatures in scope and also in the number of literary productions published in the aftermath of the tragic events that inspired them (the literature of the American Civil War and the two World Wars come to mind), generally provides attempts at trauma relief or at finding answers for the unimaginable tragedy that hit America and, by extension, the entire Western civilisation on the morning of 9/11. While having enormous potential to become the central characters of such fictions, terrorists are usually absent from the Western 9/11 narratives, being relegated to the past they came from, while focus is laid, perhaps naturally, on the thoughts, actions and feelings of the Westerners. Nevertheless, the canon of 9/11 fiction also comprises texts which centre on the most aggressive form of alterity of the twenty-first century: terrorism , and that in the works of some of the most important novelists of today. As such, the short story The Last Days of Muhammad Atta by the British novelist Martin Amis , and the novel Falling Man by the American Don DeLillo employ textual practices of representing otherness which may be (and are) accused of prejudicial standpoints against the Oriental Other . It is not accidental that their analyses are prefaced by a short introduction to Western Islamophobia manifest at various discourse levels, as the two literary texts may be, to some extents, considered Islamophobic. A point that cannot be emphasised enough is, however, that Islamophobic is not synonymous with anti-Oriental.
On a more general note, there are differences between the American and the British literary discourses ; firstly, in the rendition of trauma , but also in the way in which the influences from the media and the world of politics enter the literary text. As an aside, these differences are even more significant when French 9/11 fiction is in focus. Due to methodological constraints, the French authors’ takes on 9/11 fall outside the scope of this study, although this direction might have proven felicitous for the present argument. Nonetheless, when representing the Muslim , these differences are effaced and the literary texts tend to break the boundaries between the Wests. The resultant discourse is a Western product assumed by the self and centring on the Other. To a certain extent, Edward Said is right to affirm that the image of the East created in/by the West is distorted and prejudiced, that it is nothing else but a construct with little connection to reality , and, what is more, that it is overwhelmingly influenced by the media; nonetheless, he is, due to a subjective bias (which he admits), too intent on demonstrating the political agenda of the West in its writings of the Other . The present geopolitical context is no longer exclusively dominated by the discourse of only one category of the East/West dichotomy: the East speaks up against the West , and its voice is often louder. This is one of the reasons why the image of the West created in the mind and discourse of the Easterner, a construction conventionally termed Occidentalism , as a response to the Saidean Orientalism , should also be taken into consideration. The other is that the Western authors’ previous readings of texts of an Occidentalist nature seem to have inspired the construction of the fictional discourses of the Western-made characters , Muhammad Atta/Amir and Hamid.
The image of the terrorists provided by the first two pieces of fiction analysed here is by no means positive; however, the representations they forward are not intended as typifying either a nationality or a denomination. Martin Amis , who is particularly outspoken and politically incorrect as far as this issue is concerned, imagines a Muhammad Atta who does not resemble the real one—as described by various sources—in order to highlight his otherness, his ‘out-of-this-world-ness’, and not in the least to make a representative Muslim figure out of him. Amis’s short story is not Orientalism and is not a stereotypical generalisation, all the more as it actually employs direct quotations of the ideas of famous Islamist thinkers and agitators.
Although accused of being un-postmodern due to its embracing the totalising hegemonic discourses of the West , neither is DeLillo’s Falling Man an overtly anti-Oriental text. As far as the image of the Muslim Other is concerned, DeLillo’s text is closer to a stereotypical representation born inside the mind of a Westerner, but, again, what is forwarded is not the image of the Muslim , but that of the Muslim terrorist . Both literary texts employ intertextual references to famous Occidentalist texts, at least allusively, in the form of the att
itudes they forward, which is indicative of the fact that the authors have tried to understand the motivations of the perpetrators before turning them into literary characters , and that they might have come to the conclusion that indoctrination is as powerful a tool in the Eastern world as it is in the Western one, and that the socio-cultural context and its mechanisms of control may trigger disaster. It may be concluded that Amis’s text foregrounds and accentuates a familiar stereotype , that of the evil Muslim terrorist , all the while defamiliarising him by taking away his religious faith and the indoctrination that comes with it, while DeLillo’s leaves him in the background, acquiring the estrangement effect in an opposite manner by constructing a character who, though ‘normal’ by Western standards, is still subject to a manipulation that a Western mind cannot comprehend.
On the other hand, the paradigmatic changes brought forth by the liberal media in point of departing from irrational Islamophobia and openness to multiculturalism also find their expression in the literary world, which is always ready to follow suit. A case in point is Amy Waldman , formerly a journalist for The New York Times, a newspaper that advocates taking measures against ‘vilifying adherents of Islam’ and ‘promoting a dangerously exaggerated vision of an America under siege by what they call radical Islam’ (The New York Times, 9 February 2017). In keeping with this doctrine, Waldman published, on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, a novel which bounteously ‘documents’ such vilification in the press and the public sphere of the early 2000s, but which can be considered as positioned against such attitudes. Waldman’s Muslim characters , mainly Mohammad Khan and Asma Anwar, subvert the prejudice that all Muslims are the same. Khan is a lay, almost agnostic career man who never felt until the attacks that he was in any way different because of his ethnicity and religious denomination, a representation of accomplished hybridisation, in short. Anwar, a Bangladeshi illegal, is constructed as being capable of going against the stereotype of the submissive and quiet Muslim woman, firstly just in her inner thoughts, and then openly, in a public debate.
Lastly, since the Other has to be given the right to speak up, a different representation of the Muslim is identifiable in the literary works written by Muslims themselves. In this case, of course, one cannot speak of otherness, but of oneness as far as the authorial stance is concerned. Otherness is nevertheless present in the explicitly postcolonialist nature of these writings, in which the protagonists are often constructed as being forced to face their difference by the historical context . This is the case with Mohsin Hamid’s character from The Reluctant Fundamentalist , Changez, who covers the distance from a successful product of the American university system of identifying ‘the best and the brightest’ (2007, 4) international students to that of a radical anti-American, returning to his native Pakistan. This transformation is set against the background of the Global War on Terror , after the concentrated attacks on Afghanistan, when ‘these post-Taliban days are bad times for Islamist fanatics. Dead or alive, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar look like yesterday’s men, unholy warriors who forced martyrdom on others while running for the hills themselves. Also, if the persistent rumours are to be believed, the fall of the terrorist axis in Afghanistan may well have prevented an Islamist coup against President Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, led by the more Taliban-like elements in the armed forces and intelligence services’ (Rushdie 2002, 339). Hardly presented in Hamid’s novel in this positive light cast by Salman Rushdie , the American intervention in South Asia is sure to have bred resentment, which has, in turn, contributed to the rise of anti-Americanism in the area. For this reason, Hamid’s non-realist novel provides its significant Western readership with a particularly realist image of the Muslims and of their relation to Western civilisation in the aftermath of 9/11.
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