Mohsin Hamid

Most of you guys, readers of Addafication, will have a sense of the term "Exile Complex."

It is a feeling of nostalgia for a home far away. The nostalgia is often wrapped around imaginations of a city - its smells, sights, sounds, and friends it contains.

The city remains geographically far but conversationally very near. It is evoked in the movies we like to watch. Perhaps more so in the music we listen to, and the older we get, the more we realize the encroaching influences of our old selves, old homes, and old cities, in our lives.

This past summer, I greatly enjoyed Baul music. But when I was thirteen, if you had snuk in a Baul or Lalon tape in my replete collection of the Seattle Grunge Scene, chances are, I'd be a bit annoyed with you. Things have changed. As have tastes.

All this then fall under the "Exile complex"

Also, in some ways, it is because of this very Exile complex, that we South Asians, Bengali, Indian, Pakistani or what have you, enjoy reading post-colonial literature so much.

Post-colonial literature?

I am sure Wiki has a definition, but just think of the kinds of literature Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth write.

They are about the former colonies and one of the objectives in these literatures is to show the effects of the long colonial hangover that exists in former colonies.

And the way in which people from the colonies, mostly Brown folks like you and me, negotiate modernity, westernization, et all, while trying to retain aspects of our cultural and religious pasts.

That said, post colonial lit can get a little tiresome. Some greatest hits aside, a lot of the new stuff that comes out keep re-inventing the wheel. Soon, all plots and characters start to look the same.

But a breath of fresh air, in the midst of such re-inventions, is Mohsin Hamid.

In fact, Mr. Hamid may even be my hero.

Brought up in Lahore, educated at Princeton and Harvard, Hamid worked for McKinsey and eventually wrote his first novel, "Moth Smoke," which became rather huge. The story: Darashikoh, a banker in Lahore manages to lose his job and fall in love with his best friend's wife at the same time. A life of drugs and crime await him and soon absorb him into its fold.

Lots of depth here though.

The story is an allegory of both the trial of Mughal prince Darashikoh by his brother (17th century), the infamous Mughal ruler Aurangzeb. Also allegorized is the state of Pakistan of the late 1990s when the country went nuclear.

So am eagerly awaiting Hamid's new novel, titled, "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" (forthcoming, Arpil 2007).

From Kirkus Reviews:

Changez (our hero) describes in eloquent detail his arrival in America as a
scholarship student at Princeton, his academic success and lucrative employment
at Underwood Samson, a “valuation firm” that analyzes its clients’businesses and
counsels improvement via trimming expenses and abandoning inefficient
practices—i.e., going back to “fundamentals.”

Changez’s success story is crowned
by his semi-romantic friendship with beautiful, rich classmate Erica, to whom he
draws close during a summer vacation in Greece shared by several fellow
students.

But the idyll is marred by Erica’s distracted love for a former boyfriend
who died young and by the events of 9/11, which simultaneously make all
“foreigners” objects of suspicion... and exits the country that had promised so
much, becoming himself the bearded, vaguely menacing “stranger” who accompanies
his increasingly worried listener to the latter’s hotel...A superb cautionary
tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling,
miscommunication and confrontation.

Exciting.

If you find Mr. Hamid's work and thoughts as interesting as I do, check out an interview with Tehelka. An excerpt:

Tehelka: How has Pakistan negotiated modernity?

Hamid: In remarkably
complex ways. You have everything in Pakistan — mini zones of talibanisation,
fashion shows with girls wearing next to nothing in Lahore, parties in Karachi
where people are doing cocaine and Ecstasy, villages where people don’t have
education or electricity. It’s a huge collage.

The thing people often forget about Pakistan is that it’s enormous. It’s the sixth biggest country in the world. China, India, US, Indonesia, Brazil, then Pakistan. It’s only when you
compare it with something even more galactically vast like India that it seems
anything but huge. So there’s a huge diversity in the way people are dealing
with modernity — from complete hedonistic embrace to religious reactionism.

Seeing Ourselves

“Where are you frrrom??” is a common question asked of me by taxi drivers in the city. The next question that often follows: “Are you Muslim??” For some reason, this usually sends my eyes darting searchingly for their IDs, which are on display above them. This lets me know that they are Muslim.

Although by now I should be accustomed to this sort of interrogation, both the direct verbal form by cab drivers, and occasionally by restaurant waiters, as well as the indirect, visual form by airport officials when they see my last name (and right before X-tra screening), the question still jolts my senses.

Some of us, who relish living in a society organized around liberal principles do not enjoy being queried in this manner by utter strangers. Coming from acquaintances, it may be a different matter. For a while I assumed that the source of my discomfort was in the fact that there is a certain tone of judgement in the way the query is conducted. It may be relevant to note here that I don’t wear hijab.

But my unease is wrapped in some other feelings that, for a while, I couldn’t quite get to.

In his recent book about identity politics, Amartya Sen remarkably arrived at the root of these feelings. He explained how the “solitarist approach” to human identity, where individuals are seen as members of only one group, can often lead to bewilderment.

“Bewildered.” The word that most accurately describes my status in these situations.

Sen’s view is that we are happiest when the myriad identities within us are recognized. (He also goes on wonderfully about how the narrow perception and manipulation of identity can be used to instigate violence etc etc etc, but this is not a book review.)

Sen was in Washington last October. I sat in awe as he spoke about how communitarian notions of identity have sometimes corrupted policy, and diminished the scope for individual freedom. Each of his words rang true to me. They reminded me of scenes from my daily life, where at different times I wanted to be different things, but was assigned…some other identity.

Last week, in a cab somewhere between McPherson Square and Dupont Circle I found myself being pointedly asked again by the driver: “Are you Muslim?” I glanced at his dubious-looking brows in the rearview mirror for a second before replying: “Yes.”

He continued for a little while….something about our relationship with Allah and our “deen”. At that time I went from being “The Muslim Woman” to “The Woman Looking for Change in her Wallet” so I was only half-listening. When we reached our destination he turned around in his seat, looked me squarely in the eyes and concluded: “Also, please make sure you marry a Muslim man.”

What I am about to start reading...

I am so looking forward to the delivery from Amazon that should arrive in a day or two. I have, after arguing with myself about not having enough time for random reading, finally given in. I ordered the Buru Quartet. It was highly recommended on a blog I read regularly and like a lot as the least read great novel of the 20th century.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer "wrote" his epic quartet while imprisoned as a political prisoner by the Suharto regime after his bloody rise to power in 1965. He was already a well-known writer when he was imprisoned. The regime tried to break his spirit by burning down his library and depriving him of access to pen and paper. Yet, at the end of each day of hard labor, Pak Pram (as he was affectionately known) would gather the other prisoners around him and narrate his epic novel to them. They would put these down on paper. When he was finally allowed to write, his fellow prisoners shouldered his work so that he could finish his epic for posterity. Priests and river-boatmen would smuggle these manuscripts out for illicit publication. After his release at they end of 14 years, the quartet was final published, and immediately banned in Indonesia.

This should be an fascinating read. A true and compelling triumph of the human spirit.

Indonesia - or rather Java - seems to me to have a lot of cultural and sociological similarities to Bangladesh...