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Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction

Name: Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction
Author: A. Kanwal

Beyond 9/11

A. Kanwal

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Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction

Beyond 9/11

A. Kanwal

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About This Book

This book focuses on the way that notions of home and identity have changed for Muslims as a result of international 'war on terror' rhetoric. It uniquely links the post-9/11 stereotyping of Muslims and Islam in the West to the roots of current jihadism and the resurgence of ethnocentrism within the subcontinent and beyond.

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Information

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

Year

2015

ISBN

9781137478443

Topic

Literatur

Subtopic

Asiatische Literaturkritik

1 How the World Changed: Narratives of Nationhood and Displaced Muslim Identities

Whilst reflecting upon the diversity of Muslim writings in English in the conclusion of his book Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English, Amin Malak notes that “with no defining or definitive influences as yet interlinking the majority of them, they thus reflect the specificity of each writer’s sociohistorical milieu, intellectual progress, and artistic development … to an engagement with the world and the values of Islam” (151). This chapter also seeks to address first- and second-generation Pakistani writers’ intellectual and artistic engagement with the representation of Islam and Muslims in pre- and post-9/11 contexts. This was also necessary because “post-9/11 (Pakistani) fiction” has been seen as a de-historicised phenomenon; and what I have wanted to do is to contextualise the so-called boom in Pakistani post-9/11 fiction in relation to a rich literary tradition that has developed over more than three decades. By that I mean the first-generation fictional narratives concerned with the 1947 Partition and its aftermath as well as post-independence narratives written in the 1980s, with a particular focus on the Islamic reassertion during Zia-ul-Haq’s administration. This era is also foregrounded by many second-generation writers in their fictional works as a turning point in the political history of Pakistan. The post-9/11 situation of Pakistan indeed owes a great deal to Zia’s foreign policies and his ruthless Islamisation of the country, influencing the rise of Islamic extremism and jihadist culture in Pakistan and Afghanistan (discussed in Chapters 2 and 3).

In the wake of this historical contextualisation, the section entitled “Rewriting Holy Terror” shifts the focus to post-9/11 contexts and surveys second-generation writers of Pakistani origin – Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Ali Sethi, H.M. Naqvi, Maha Khan Phillips and Feryal Gauhar– who can be grouped together because they construct a new category of Pakistani fiction in English on the basis of two main factors. Firstly, they foreground connections between the post-9/11 situation of Pakistan and Islamic reforms during the era of Zia’s military dictatorship. Secondly, these writers, whilst taking 9/11 discourse in new directions, represent historical and political connections between Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East in the context of both the rise of religious extremism in these countries and the rise of Islamophobia discourses in the West. In so doing, these writers expand the horizon of their fictional canvas to include both Pakistan and Muslim communities in the US and the UK, in order to represent Islam’s troubled relationship with the West in the post-9/11 world. Attention to these connections is particularly important given the ways in which Western public narratives tend to conflate Muslim and Arab identities in the way that they have with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Partly as a result of this conflation, Pakistani diasporic communities in the West have continued to be the target of US counter-terrorism activities since 9/11; this situation (along with other factors that I will explain) contributed to the post-9/11 political formation of the global ummah or faith-based Muslim identities.

One particular characteristic of Pakistani second-generation fiction is the way in which it critically engages sacred and legal texts including Qur’anic/Hadith references to war and jihad, as well as Islamic jurisprudence and shariat laws, such as the Hudood Ordinance and the Blasphemy Law. I argue that what makes second-generation texts distinct in dealing with these sacred and legal texts is the manner in which they foreground ways that the same references have been used in the West after 9/11 to Orientalise Islam and portray it as a religion of violence and militant jihad. At the same time, these writers are also very critical of state manipulation of the conservative tendencies within Islam, particularly as regards the ways it affects women.¹ This has arguably contributed towards the stereotyping of Muslims as intolerant and extremist by the West.

Because my book centres on texts written quite consciously from the position of the second generation, I discuss these second-generation novels by grouping them into two main categories: a major genre of “post-9/11 fiction” and a sub-genre of “retrospective prologues to post-9/11 fiction”. The term “9/11 fiction” has recently emerged as a category that includes both novels that reinforce the US public rhetoric equating Islam with terrorism (such as John Updike’s The Terrorist, 2006; and Don De Lillo’s Falling Man, 2007) and those that highlight the lives of Muslims affected by the 9/11 events. In this book, I distinguish the latter under the rubric of “post-9/11 fiction” (examples include Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Naqvi’s Homeboy and Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil). These novels provide a postcolonial gaze on the dominant “clash of civilisations” rhetoric.²

In order to provide historical contextualisation for “post-9/11 fiction”, I formulate an additional category by grouping together those novels that serve as “retrospective prologues to post-9/11 fiction”. Novels included in this category look at the political decisions and social factors in Pakistan from the late 1970s that have arguably contributed towards Pakistan’s image as a terrorist land, particularly after 9/11. By this I mean novels such as Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Shamsie’s Broken Verses, Khan’s The Geometry of God and Aslam’s Season of the Rainbirds, which accentuate the emergence of Islamic extremism in the region. I suggest that these two categories together provide literary-critical paradigms for redressing 9/11 Islamophobic fiction. In addition to this, these categories raise important concerns about Islamophobia as an ideology that continues to shape Western attitudes, or what Edward Said (borrowing the term from Thomas Frank and Edward Weisband), in Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, calls the effects of “word politics” since 9/11 (1981 xvi). My intention is to illuminate the ways in which a spectrum of locations – local, regional and global; national, transnational and international – is foregrounded in these novels as mutually informative in the construction of post-9/11 Muslim identities. In so doing, both “post-9/11 fiction” and “retrospective prologues to post-9/11 fiction” are shown to contribute to the nation’s long and rich literary tradition by setting up new paradigms and categories for “New Pakistani Literature in English” in the last two decades. My aim, more broadly, is therefore to re-position writers of Pakistani origin from the margins to the centre.

Narrating history: Partition and post-independence narratives

While talking to Alok Bhalla on the issue of Partition, Intizar Husain has said: “When my critics object and tell me that I am obsessed by the experience of the Partition, I am trapped in it, my response is that what happened in 1947 was so complex, so devastating, that I have yet to understand it fully. How can I get away from it?” (107). Husain’s comment not only gestures towards the significance of the catastrophic legacy of Partition in Pakistan’s political history but also underscores its central role in the making of Pakistani identities in the wake of apparently irreconcilable differences that have continued to exist since 1947. Of course, the troubles and challenges that Pakistan faces today cannot be understood in entirety without re-imagining the historical moment of Partition and its aftermaths. In this section I specifically address the dual focus of first-generation fictional narratives of Pakistani origin and the way that these narratives contextualise the fictional output of second-generation writers. In any case, my privileging of second-generation writers and the texts under consideration in this monograph on the basis of the above criteria does not undermine the significance of first-generation writers of Pakistani origin such as Sara Suleri, Bapsi Sidhwa, Abdullah Hussein and Zulfikar Ghose, whose work falls outside the scope of this book. Given the overall focus of my study, first-generation writers are only partly relevant here. For this reason, my discussion of the texts included in this section will be confined to select issues, for the purpose of highlighting a specific shift in thematic foci that comes with the second generation. The main purpose of discussing these texts is to emphasise the way the Islamisation reforms in Pakistan in the late 1970s provide a significant historical context for first- and second-generation Pakistani writing in English. This is also important for my exploration of a home–diaspora nexus in terms of the ways in which indigenous contexts and national history can affect diasporic communities. Whilst second-generation writers are concerned with critically locating Pakistan in the contemporary geo-political scenario, first-generation writers tend to focus either on the tragic aftermath of the Indo-Pak Partition and post-independence social realities or on problems of assimilation encountered by first-generation immigrants in the US or the UK.

Partition novels: narrating traumas

For many writers who witnessed it, the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan is the greatest trauma, from which the people of the subcontinent have failed to recover. On-going ethnic and sectarian conflicts in Karachi and Punjab bear witness to this trauma, a theme I address in Chapters 2 and 3. Given this context, the oeuvres of first-generation Pakistani writers focus predominantly on the 1947 Partition and its aftermaths. Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man (1988), Abdullah Hussein’s The Weary Generations (1999), short stories by Saadat Hassan Manto and the poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz all attempt to give an insight into the mayhem of the Partition and the subsequent large-scale sectarian violence. Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride (1990) and The Crow Eaters (1978) serve as a prologue to the Partition in dealing with communal tensions and political games in pre-Partition India, which resulted in the bloody massacres that erupted at the time of the Partition. Ice-Candy-Man (1988), later published as Cracking India (1991), is arguably the most significant of the Partition novels.

Written by a Parsi writer and focalised through a child narrator, Lenny, Ice-Candy-Man provides a non-dominant Parsi perspective on the Indo-Pak Partition that differs from Sidhwa’s Indian or Pakistani counterparts writing from Hindu, Sikh or Muslim perspectives. Readers are made to imbibe the violence that ravaged the subcontinent but they are never oblivious to Lenny’s childlike innocence, which serves a dual purpose in the novel. On the one hand, Lenny, as a child narrator, is presented as being oblivious to racial hatred and adult politics and, therefore, she can be seen as an objective and truthful witness of historical facts. On the other hand, the “child’s anxious naiveté” blurs the distinction between “memory and fictive (re)creation” as well as between private and public/national experiences (Hai 379–426). In so doing, Sidhwa tends to “put into question the authority of any act of writing by locating the discourses of both history and fiction within an ever-expanding intertextual network that mocks any notion of either single origin or simple causality” (Hutcheon 12).

Lenny’s consciousness of the horror and pity hovering over the city of Lahore is also informed by the story of what happens to her beloved Ayah, who becomes a representative for millions of displaced Hindus and Muslims during one of the harshest political phases in the history of the subcontinent. Lenny and Ayah together lend “a double feminist lens” (Hai 383) in voicing and representing the experiences of women during the 1947 Partition. It is important, however, to consider that Ayah has no voice of her own in the novel; her story is told by Lenny. The only part of Ayah’s story that is not narrated in Lenny’s voice is her rape. Ayah’s rape remains untold in the novel. This interplay between what is shown and what is told in the novel is significant for understanding the violence done to female bodies. Women’s bodies were raped and mutilated as if they provided a “space over which the competitive games of men were played out” (Kabir, “Gender, Memory, Trauma” 179). In the novel, a train from Gurdaspur brings the dead bodies of Muslims, but there “are no young women among the dead! Only two gunny-bags full of women’s breasts!”(Sidhwa 149). Ayah, too, is shown to be the “sexual and political victim [of] the antagonisms between Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu men” (Hai 390). Lenny says: “It is sudden. One day everybody is themselves – and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols. Ayah is no longer just my all-encompassing Ayah – she is also a token. A Hindu” (Sidhwa 101). Once identified as a token of Hinduism, she is not only gang-raped but is also forced into prostitution by her own Muslim admirer, Ice-Candy man. Through those few words that the Ayah speaks to Godmother, her rescuer, in order to request her to save her from Ice-Candy Man, Ayah becomes a “silent representative of female violation in the text” (Hai 400).

Some of the second-generation writers such as Shamsie, in Kartography and Salt and Saffron, also engage with the 1947 (and later 1971) Partition experiences of the first generation that have not only left unforgettable marks on the memories of the people of the subcontinent, but have also transferred to the next generations, who bear the consequences of the 1947 Partition in the form of ethnic and sectarian rivalries in the country that I discuss in detail in Chapter 2. Therefore, literary production concerned with the 1947 Partition and its aftermath remains significant in re-evaluating the political history of Pakistan.

Post-independence novels: narrating nationhood

Despite being of the same generation, writers such as Sara Suleri and Salman Rushdie, writing at a later date, offer a different perspective on national history from other first-generation writers discussed above. Rushdie and Suleri are concerned not so much with representing the cataclysmic event of the Partition as they are with exploring the problems of the newly established Islamic state of Pakistan.³ They also highlight identity crises that have emerged as a result of massive migrations of a first wave of Pakistanis to the UK and the US. In this context, Rushdie’s Shame (1983) and Suleri’s Meatless Days (1989) are quintessential examples of this dual focus on the identity problems of first-generation immigrant communities and the problems of post-independence Pakistan.

Both Rushdie and Suleri have experienced a double displacement and identity crises subsequently resonate through their works. As a migrant, Rushdie’s narrator in Shame has “floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time” (87). Having nothing substantial enough to grip, Suleri’s narrator in Meatless Days also recalls Pakistan as an intangible space and yearns for the “absolute need for steady location” (79). This sense of displacement from roots is accentuated in both novels in the form of what Rushdie describes in Shame as loss of “the force of gravity”, forming a distorted and fragmented “palimpsest on the past” (85). Both writers envisage history as “fragmented” and, therefore, their narrators feel they are floating in the realm of un-belonging. Rushdie’s self-conscious narrator describes “Pakistan [as] the peeling fragmenting palimpsest, increasingly at war with itself … [and] a failure of the dreaming mind” (87), while Suleri’s narrator claims that the country has “grown absentminded, and patches of amnesia hung over the hollows of the land like a fog’” (18). The narrator’s own relationship with history and the motherland is ambivalent and eccentric partly because of her Welsh mother Mairi, whose “awareness of national identity is reinforced by the people of Pakistan who look at her with ‘centuries’ worth of mistrust of Englishwomen” (Scanlon, 411–425). This ambivalence with regard to nationhood, history and her “real motherland” makes the narrator in Meatless Days describe herself as “an otherness machine” (105). It is because of this fragmented view of history that the self-reflexive narrators in Shame and Meatless Days become emblematic of the identity struggles of dual immigrants; their lives are shaped by personal and national tragic histories.

A critique of Pakistan’s national history is another major focus in Shame and Meatless Days. Both Rushdie and Suleri express extreme disillusionment with the manipulation of Islam and democracy by political leaders in the 1980s. Rushdie fictionalises a series of violent political events such as the execution of former Pakistani prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Bangladesh’s secession and the forced Islamisation of Pakistani society under General Zia’s regime. Making “shame” a central metaphor in the novel, Rushdie represents a dictator, corrupt politicians, civil servants and a backward “mullah-dominated” Islamic society that have shamelessly “espouse[d] the rhetoric of faith” (251) and legitimised censorship, violence and “barbaric” Islamic punishments for political ends (245).

The central characters in Shame, Iskander Harappa and Raza Hyder, are fictional equivalents of the real-world leaders Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Zia-ul-Haq and represent the clash between intellectual modernism and Islamic nationalism respectively propagated by these leaders during the late 1970s in Pakistan. Harappa, who is depicted as a democrat, promotes socialism, science and modern thought while Hyder, a militant with a strong belief in Islamic tradition, turns his back on anything that is not part of a particular kind of Islamic nationalism, which Rushdie terms “Islamic fundamentalism” (251) in the novel. Rushdie, like many Pakistani fiction writers, also criticises Bhutto’s execution and the establishment of a military dictatorship after Zia’s coup.

Another feature that links Rushdie’s novel to Suleri’s is the nexus of history and womanhood. Whereas Suleri’s feminist standpoint is accentuated in her autobiography by showing the interface between her familial and national tragedies (as I will discuss), Rushdie’s gender focus is evident through his critique of the misogyny within Pakistan’s patriarchal society. Both novelists juxtapose national history with violence done to women’s bodies within domestic spaces in the name of sharam (shame). Observing his feminist intervention in Shame, Suleri argues:

Rushdie embeds his rereading of history into a revision of the psychic structure of shame … [through] the battle between two opposing codes: the masculine code of honor, as it is manifested in the political world; and the feminine code of shame, which fights against its confinement within the domestic world. (Rhetoric 186)

Rushdie himself seems to suggest in Shame that the inclusion of women in a political narrative serves to deconstruct the confinement and marginalisation of women within domestic spaces. Rushdie’s narrative emphasises the fact that women’s voices cannot be suppressed even in patriarchal societies such as Pakistan. This is evident from the narrator’s confession ...