Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
reviewed by anna battista
In their book Empire, authors Toni Negri and Michael Hardt theorize the death of the nation state and the rising of a new empire, the result of the various capitalistic processes occurred throughout history. Completed before 9/11 and with no direct reference to the United States as that specific “empire”, Negri and Hardt’s book also tackled issues such as the concept of labor, immigration and war. Mohsin Hamid’s new work, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, recently shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize, seems to touch the same themes, but in the fictional format.
As Hamid’s novel opens, Changez, a young Pakistani sees an American man sitting at a café table in Lahore’s Old Anarkali district and starts chatting with him. Like a modern and enigmatic Sherazade, Changez tells the stranger his story in an elegantly written monologue-like format: hailing from a formerly wealthy family, he was educated at Princeton, and soon recruited by a powerful financial company, Underwood Samson. In his early twenties, Changez is already a successful analyst, perfectly integrated in the fabric of the society – he indeed feels not like an American but like a New Yorker - and is also in love with the beautiful but troubled upper class Erica. The events of 9/11 bring his fall out with his “adoptive” country and a painful realization: during a moment of crisis over his own identity, Changez understands that he is a modern version of the janissaries, those Christian boys captured by the Ottomans and trained to fight against their own people and erase their own civilization (“I was a modern-day janissary,” he will say, “a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine...”).
Changez has a first epiphany during a business trip in Manila: while sitting in a limousine mired in traffic, he encounters the hostile and almost resentful gaze of a jeepney driver and suddenly feels closer to him than to his American colleagues. The final revelation comes to him while he watches with a monstrously innate pleasure the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsing, not thinking about the victims of the attack, but about the “symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees”. Nationalism seems to be the answer to the attacks, and, as the American flags invade New York, Hamid’s character becomes even more bitter, feeling that the flags are brought out to proclaim “We are America … the mightiest civilization the world has ever known; you have slighted us; beware our wrath.”
As the story progresses, Hamid’s main character turns into a reluctant fundamentalist in many different ways: he is not religious, but he is Pakistani and wears a beard, enough for his co-workers to perceive him as an extremist. Besides, he becomes reluctant at doing his job and valuing other companies on the basis of economic fundamentals and honouring Underwood Samson’s motto “Focus on the fundamentals”, are not his prerogatives anymore.
Changez’s transformation can also be detected in the language: the young man recounts his life as a Princeton student with American pride, but his mounting rage explodes also in the language (“I had always resented the manner in which America conducted itself in the world; your country’s constant interference in the affairs of others was insufferable. Vietnam, Korea, the straits of Taiwan, the Middle East, and now Afghanistan; in each of the major conflict and standoffs that ringed my mother continent of Asia, America played a central role.”), while the fragmented short sentences of the last pages contribute to leave unclear whether Changez has become an extremist or his listener is actually an FBI agent.
Mohsin Hamid, winner of the Betty Trask First Book Award for his Moth Smoke (2000), has woven in The Reluctant Fundamentalist an intelligent and provocative plot that touches those “fundamental” issues of our lives, among them identity and immigration, racism and xenophobia, fear and paranoia, prejudices and war.
Copyright (c) 2007 erasing clouds |
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