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VIEW: Being a ‘real’ Pakistani — Rafia Zakaria

Pakistani and Pakistani-American readers of Hamid’s book must question the extent to which Hamid’s Changez represents the post-colonial quest to “make it” in the land of the white “other” and the extent to which Pakistani-American identity is built on this quest

Mohsin Hamid’s first novel Mothsmoke drew on how the author’s perception of Pakistan had changed after having spent time abroad. His new work The Reluctant Fundamentalist focuses on the conflicting pressures of fitting into America while still retaining a Pakistani identity.

The central conflict of the new book is the identity crisis faced by Changez, a Pakistani upstart from Lahore who, having slogged through Princeton on financial aid, is determined to succeed at his job at a prestigious consulting firm in New York City. Hamid uses the creative freedom afforded by fiction to render this Pakistani male digestible to Western readers. Ardently pursuing the Pakistani dream, Changez is committed to playing with the big boys on their turf. He hides all evidence of his “ethnicity” behind a carefully cultivated air of mystery and adopts the pretensions of the American rich (moneyed students of Princeton University). He dates the white, beautiful Erica, vacations in Greece, wears snazzy suits and knows how to schmooze.

September 11, 2001 changes all that. Changez finds himself tortured by the idea of being a janissary — a fighter trained and cultivated by the enemy, America, to fight his own people. He becomes obsessed with the war in Afghanistan and the impact of American foreign policy on Muslims. Angered, he begins to lapse at work, and keeps a beard to draw attention to his now visible “otherness”. The carefully constructed façade is gone. His relationship with Erica falls apart, and ultimately he abandons everything to return to Pakistan.

The most interesting aspect of Hamid’s Changez is that he is a “hero” who is markedly un-heroic. Changez’s pursuit of “whiteness”, his pretensions and near-pathetic submissiveness to the dictates of the American moneyed class, make an interesting thesis regarding the immigrant’s quest to become white. Pakistani immigrants (and many others), influenced possibly by their own colonial past and an American culture that reifies whiteness and presents being coloured as a disadvantage, devote themselves in their choice of friends, clothes, housing, even politics, to becoming white.

The tragedy of such a hollow, misguided pursuit, one illustrated by Hamid in the crisis that ultimately unravels Changez’s life, is that it creates a fake Pakistani-American identity. Prior to 9/11, this fake identity was unchallenged. After 9/11, the “otherness” of the Pakistani was suddenly highlighted. In capturing this conflict through fiction, Hamid presents an urgent question to all Pakistani-Americans who believe that they can, through Ivy League educations and high paying jobs, buy their way out of being brown.

As soon as Changez recognises how hollow his constructed American identity is, he decides he doesn’t belong in America anymore and despite financial pressure to support ailing parents, decides to return to Pakistan. The reader is left with the question of whether leaving America is the only way a Pakistani living there can be true to his roots. Hamid does leave us some room to attempt to resolve this question.

In painting the picture of post 9/11 America, for example, he is careful not to substantiate Changez’s identity crisis with an external event that would remove the ambiguity from his decision to return to Pakistan. Changez himself is never detained by the FBI (although he is subjected to a body search at an airport), he is not overtly discriminated against at his job (in fact he gets a plum assignment from his boss after 9/11). In other words, as readers we never quite know how much of Changez’s decision to leave for Pakistan is the result of actual discrimination (weird stares at work, a racial epithet in a parking lot, the body search etc) and how much is imagined as a result of confronting previous delusions he might have had about who he really was or wasn’t. Ultimately, Changez is not fired for being Pakistani or Muslim but because he simply stops working properly. In retaining this ambiguity, Hamid leaves the ultimate decision, whether one can continue to live in America and still be true to Pakistan, to the individual reader.

Crucially important is also the fact that Hamid takes pains to emphasise that Changez’s crisis is due more to being Pakistani than to being Muslim. Rarely if ever does one find a discussion of Islam and how it impacts Changez’s life or decisions. One instance is when at a dinner his girlfriend’s father expresses surprise at the fact that Changez drinks saying “I had a Pakistani working for me once,...Never drank”.

Changez recalls the incident for the reader saying “In truth, many Pakistanis drink” and “not all of our drinkers are Western educated urbanites such as myself”. As a further testament to pervasive consumption of alcohol, Changez touts Urdu poetry’s obsessive pre-occupation with alcohol. Are these instances alluding to Changez pre-9/11 quest to belong in America via his consumption of alcohol or do they make a larger statement on the Western tendency of identifying Pakistani, and in this case Islamic identity, to superficial practices such as abstention from alcohol?

Pakistani and Pakistani-American readers of Hamid’s book must question the extent to which Hamid’s Changez represents the post-colonial quest to “make it” in the land of the white “other” and the extent to which Pakistani-American identity is built on this quest. In refusing to make stark statements, Hamid tells a story that asks questions without being preachy so that the reader is left with a plethora of questions that each must answer on his own.

Is Changez’s decision to return truly an act of cowardice or bravery? How important is it for Pakistani-Americans to recognise that they are not white and identify instead with racial minorities such as African-Americans and Latinos? How valuable is the quest for material prosperity at the expense of losing one’s identity? Is opposing American policy an act of third-world anti-imperialism or Islamic fundamentalism? And finally and most importantly, is returning to Pakistani the only way to be a “real” Pakistani?

Rafia Zakaria is an attorney living in the United States where she teaches courses on Constitutional Law and Political Philosophy. She can be contacted at rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

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