Irony and cultural misunderstanding in Hamid's Reluctant Fundamentalist

Mohsin Hamid's 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist depicts a protagonist, Changez, who is essentially a cultural hybrid. Changez's name, as Hamid tells us, is the Urdu equivalent of Genghis -- reminding the reader perhaps that "Khan" remains a relatively common Pakistani surname even in the twenty-first century -- and thus ironically calls to the reader's mind the notion of hostile and warlike foreign invaders, terror and violence. Yet the story is narrated by Changez himself, who is represented as unfailingly polite and charming, as he tells his life story to an unnamed American (revealed in the final pages as potentially an assassin). Yet the major literary device of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is irony, and it can be demonstrated that Hamid's larger point is perhaps that Islamic fundamentalism is itself a response to the ironies, confusions, false impressions, and tendentious definitions that are produced in the power struggle inherent in a cross-cultural encounter.

We should begin with Changez's observations regarding the most salient cliche that Americans or other westerners would have in approaching Pakistanis in 2007, which is terrorism. The Reluctant Fundamentalist was written after the terrorist attacks in New York and elsewhere on September 11, 2001, but it is written before the revelation that Osama Bin Laden, architect of those attacks, was hiding in Pakistan with the collusion of the Pakistani military. Changez is fairly open about how he wishes his interlocutor (and by extension the reader) to approach this issue: "It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins" (Hamid 183). The rhetoric here should be analyzed closely: Changez begins apologetically, noting that "it seems an obvious thing to say," where the word "seems" backs away from a flat-out assertion that his generalization "is" obvious, and where the claim that the statement is "obvious" is meant to be an excuse for the potential offense lurking in the statement itself. What is concealed in this backhanded way of making the assertion is that, of course, many Americans do believe all Pakistanis to be "potential terrorists" and that many Pakistanis do perceive Americans as "assassins" -- but the frequency with which these bigoted beliefs are embraced on both sides of the cultural divide means that, of course, it is not precisely "obvious" to make this assertion. What Hamid seems to be suggesting is that it is only "obvious" for Changez to make his true statement because this same true statement must be made so often by open-minded persons on both sides of the conflict.

The question of terrorism is most memorably depicted, however, in the fifth chapter of Hamid's novel, when Changez narrates his reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Here, Changez confesses that -- while on business in the Philippines -- he saw the attacks on television and states "I stared as one -- and then the other -- of the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased" (Hamid 72). But this shocking statement is immediately followed by a reaction to the unnamed American that Changez is addressing, and Hamid implicitly asks the reader to measure his or her own reaction to the statement against the reaction Changez describes in the unnamed American: "Your disgust is evident; indeed, your large hand has, perhaps without your noticing, clenched into a fist. But please believe me when I tell you that I am no sociopath; I am not indifferent to the suffering of others." (Hamid 72). There is an element of comedy, almost, in Changez's immediate self-defense -- because the whole story is narrated in his voice, it should be apparent to the reader by page 72 that the elaborate rhetoric of politeness (addressing the unnamed American as "sir," constant displays of emotional solicitude such as this one) employed by the narrator should have shown, rather than told, that Changez is certainly not an amoral sociopath. Instead what the book attempts to describe is Changez's desire for a valid way to critique the America he first embraced and then rejected.

We may, perhaps, find the ultimate key to interpreting Hamid's representation of cultural hybridity in The Reluctant Fundamentalist within the protagonist's own name. It is true, as I noted at the outset, that "Changez" is the Urdu version of "Genghis" and thus is meant to indicate a sort of nightmare vision of the Asian in the mind of the European -- indeed the invasions of Genghis Khan are alluded to in the outset of the book, when Changez describes his home city of Lahore as "layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders from the Aryans to the Mongols to the British" (Hamid 7). This rather cleverly reminds us that, when assessing the brutality of invasions, Genghis Khan might actually be slightly less horrifying than the British East India Company in the minds of an American twenty-first century reader (since Americans have their own experience of being postcolonial British subjects). But more importantly, the reader is forced to look at the very name of "Changez" and to see a lurking English word beneath: it looks like an Internet mis-spelling of "changes." History is of course made up of changes to the status quo, and in some sense Changez himself stands in for the strange course of history -- there is no authentic culture, American or Pakistani, that has not been "layered like a sedimentary plain with [an] accreted history of invaders." As a result, the "fundamentalism" that Changez reluctantly embraces is perhaps intended to provide an "un-changing" intellectual framework in response to such volatile historical processes. This is the ultimate irony of Hamid's novel -- by the end, when Changez has sought to revert to a Pakistani identity, the western reader is capable of identifying with him all the more, because such ideologically-pure identities have been revealed to be a construct all along.

Literature and Cross-Cultural Encounters: An Annotated Bibliography

Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Massachussetts Review 18: 1977. Reprinted in Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988. Web. Accessed at: http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html

The recently deceased Nigerian novelist and professor Chinua Achebe, best known for his classic novel Things Fall Apart (about life in West Africa before the arrival of colonialism), wrote this penetrating analysis of Conrad's frequently-assigned canonical novella. Achebe outlines the way in which Conrad's racism is expressed in obvious ways -- noting that "Conrad had a problem with n*ggers. His inordinate love of that word itself should be of interest to psychoanalysts" -- but also more importantly in a conceptual way. Achebe argues that the portrayal of Africa in Heart of Darkness is not based on observation, but based on an underlying structural trick whereby Africa is defined as "the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization" (Achebe 254). What is most important about Achebe's analysis of Heart of Darkness is that the book has usually been taken to be progressive: Achebe concedes that "Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth" (Achebe 261). This is an important essay for understanding the way in which even a supposedly "enlightened" writer like Conrad can ultimately be shown to harbor tacit and unexplored racist assumptions.

Arens, W.T. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Print.

This short and fascinating book, written by an American academic anthropologist, approaches the question of cross-cultural encounters through one significant motif, the idea of cannibalism. Arens's chief argument is that, in all western accounts of "primitive" or "savage" societies that practice cannibalism, there is never any verifiable evidence that the practice occurred. For Arens, the idea of cannibalism is an effective way of defining "otherness." He argues that "all cultures, subcultures, religions, sects, secret societies and every other possible human association have been labeled" cannibals by another group (Arens 139). As a result, Arens argues that accounts of cannibal behavior serve primarily to strengthen a "we-they" distinction between the west and foreign cultures, or indeed in any case of cross-cultural encounter (Arens 184).

Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. New York: Harvest Books, 2008. Print.

Hamid's novel presents the story of a westernized Pakistani named Changez, a graduate of Princeton University in America who then takes a job with a "globalized" American firm that evaluates international commercial enterprises, who ultimately returns to Pakistan and embraces, reluctantly, a life of traditional fundamentalist Islam. Changez's story hinges upon his unhappy love affair with an American woman named Erica. Using the narrative device of the first person, in which Changez tells his own story to an unnamed American interlocutor. Hamid's take on the issue of cross-cultural encounters is complex and multilayered. The reader experiences both Changez's earlier workplace life for the American firm, visiting the Philippines and South America where he finds himself attempting to assert his own "American-ness," but eventually coming around to a position where he must assert his own critique of America by reinventing himself as Pakistani once again. Hamid manages to link the personal and the political in this narrative, and brings a fascinating perspective to the notion that cross-cultural experience is always subjective and slippery -- because there is no "omniscient" third person narrator, the reader is forced to evaluate Changez's explanations and justifications both in terms of their surface but also in terms of the narrator's denials, blind-spots, and controversial statements (such as his experience of 9/11, in which Changez confesses that "despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased" (Hamid 72).

Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: Plume, 1988. Print.

Hwang's Pulitzer-winning drama provides a perfect example of cross-cultural encounters and misunderstandings. Using Puccini's popular opera Madame Butterfly -- about an American sailor who purchases a Japanese Geisha, marries her, and abandons her (whereupon she commits suicide) -- as his conceptual template, Hwang dramatizes a true but unbelievable story about a French diplomat who is seduced by a Chinese "actress" who turns out to be a man in female clothing. Anyone reading the original newspaper story must have been struck by the Westerner being fooled for so long during the course of a sexual affair, but Hwang makes this implausibility into the centerpiece of his drama. Using ideas derived from Edward Said (see below), Hwang ironizes the tragic-romantic drama to explore underlying Western assumptions about the inherent "femininity" of "Oriental" cultures.

Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. Print.

The cross-cultural encounters occasioned by colonialism have been well-documented in South America, Africa, and Asia, but Declan Kiberd's important and fascinating study reminds us that Ireland provides an example of the colonialist enterprise that exists just on the edge of continental Europe itself. Kiberd's subject in this book is the way in which Irish writers began to re-invent their own national self-definition after centuries of colonization by the English. As Kiberd memorably remarks, "if colonialism is a system, so also is resistance" and this resistance begins when the subaltern native writer began "reading those texts which misrepresented him" and "resolved to answer back" (Kiberd 13). The study attains a relevance beyond the Anglo-Irish interaction, as Kiberd demonstrates the way in which the Irish were described by the English using the same terms and concepts by which they described Native Americans, Africans, and the peoples of the Indian subcontinent -- which leads to some amazing events described in this book, such as the "large party of Indian Hindus in native dress who walked in the Saint Patrick's Day parades of New York" in 1920, as an expression of solidarity following the Amritsar Massacre (Kiberd 255).

Lowry, Lois. The Giver. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Print.

Lowry's classic dystopian novel may seem an unusual work to consider under the subject of cross-cultural encounters, but in a very important sense Lowry is engaged in presenting an allegory of the way that all cultures operate. There is no cross-cultural conflict in the world of The Giver, because conflict has been eradicated in the society that is described. The protagonist Jonas -- who is to "receive" the memories of this culture from "the Giver" -- does not know of the existence of war until he inherits the cultural memory, and it becomes clear that whatever devastating cultural trauma did occur in the past is the reason for the peculiar social structure of the dystopia. The world outside the community depicted in Lowry's novel is merely known as "Elsewhere," which effectively reduces all cultural difference to willed ignorance.

Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Print.

Pagden's classic study approaches the invention of the discipline of anthropology as a result of the cross-cultural encounters begun when the Spanish began to colonize the Americas in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Pagden's chief subject here is the way that Europeans attempted to understand and describe the native inhabitants they encountered, so in some sense he is investigating the origins of racism, but also the origins of a disinterested, scientific, or academic approach to the subject of racial and cultural difference. As Pagden notes, "sixteenth-century Europe…had very little knowledge and still less understanding of the peoples beyond its borders" and thus "there were very few terms with which to classify men" ( Pagden 13). Pagden offers an in-depth analysis of certain key terms -- such as "barbarian" -- which recur in early Spanish accounts of Native American societies, and uses them to illuminate the way in which cross-cultural encounters began to develop a vocabulary in Europe. As a result, Pagden provides necessary reading for understanding the conceptual framework behind the idea of cross-cultural encounters in literature.

Rawson, Claude. "Indians and Irish: Montaigne, Swift, and the Cannibal Question." Modern Language Quarterly, 53:3 (1992): 299-363. Print.

Rawson's essay explores a fascinating theme in cross-cultural encounters, by examining the willingness of western cultures to engage in fantasies of transgressive behavior on the part of subaltern cultures. Focusing on the issue of cannibalism -- which, as Rawson notes, is something that is only ever imputed to other cultures as a technique of denigration, and is never held forth by a culture as its own approved activity -- Rawson demonstrates the way in which certain Western writers turned this trope around, and used it as a technique for criticizing the cultural attitudes of the west. The French Renaissance-era essayist Michel de Montaigne is examined through his famous essay "Of Cannibals," which suggests that the cannibal behavior of New World natives is actually more admirable than the violent internecine European religious violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Meanwhile satirist Jonathan Swift's blackly comic "Modest Proposal" is shown to be a satire not of the colonized Irish, frequently depicted by the English as savage cannibals, but of the English colonizers, described as "a country which would be glad to eat up our whole nation" (Rawson 360). Rawson concludes by demonstrating the ways in which racist assumptions can be repackaged to make the opposite point, that "Europeans are more barbaric than the barbarians." (Rawson 363).