Challenging Conventional Discourses of Storytelling
A 2007 metafictional novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid is considered to be one of the best modern literary fiction books that deal with the issue of postcolonial Pakistani identity and the impacts that Islamophobia has on individuals who identify as Muslim. The present paper aims to discuss how towards the end of the novel, the events that take place contradict the essential themes of the novel through the actions that the protagonist of the novel takes (DARDA).
Hamid employs the narrative tropes of ‘Frame story’ throughout the course of the text in order to break the conventional patterns of storytelling. This aspect of the novel represents from the very beginning, the ability of Hamid to break away from traditional discourses and create something abstract and as the novel progresses, the readers realize that the frame story technique was not the only unique trope that Hamid took upon while creating this masterpiece. This technique introduces the readers to the protagonist of the story, Changez who embarks upon the journey of telling the story of his figurative as well as literal abandonment of his beloved country, America (Ilott).
One of the prominent and also one of the loudest themes of this book is the constant othering that Changez is forced to feel while he lives in America after the 911 attacks. His identity, an element of his being that he never gave enough until then, was constantly questioned for its mere existence. Hamid represents the emotional conundrum that the Muslim identity has to go through all over the world whenever there is a terrorist attack. As the plot of the book progresses, Changes tells the American stranger who is sitting with him in a café in Lahore that his identity became his worst enemy yet his only refuge in a country that had blatantly denied him the right to belong after an event that had nothing to do with his existence (Maqsood). While the entire story is told with a clear perspective, the wending of the novel is deliberately blurred by the author in order to convey the anxieties that riddle one’s mind when one is forced to live in an environment where he feels constantly in danger because of his identity. Hamid desperately creates an ending that does not clarify exactly what happens after Changez takes the stranger with him, but, his last conversation with the stranger is formed of words that make the readers ponder upon the actual identity of Changez after he left America (Hai). As he states ‘What exactly did I do to stop America, you ask?’, one is forced to consider the impacts of the constant brutal treatment of his identity and its extent. The way that the novel ends, one cannot help but think that Changez has turned into a religious fundamentalist, an identity that he has always abhorred, it is an identity that he has constantly denied throughout the course of the novel in order to explain to the west that he is not a terrorist or a religious fanatic. But, as the novel comes to its end, the readers can understand that Changez was forced into the identity of a fundamentalist because of the constant Islamophobic behavior of the west (Bordas).
Confronting Islamophobia and Othering
By taking this narrative discourse, an element that contradicts the established themes of the novel, Hamid exclaims how the west forces the east to succumb to the violence that was never meant to be unleashed upon anyone. This constant force of othering, a concept that Edward Said exclaims in his masterpiece ‘Orientalism’ is created in order to compartmentalize the citizens of the east into two categories, one that is considered to be ‘exotic’ an identity that is shoved down the throats of the citizen in order to continue the stereotype that the east symbolizes a mythical land where the creatures are otherworldly and thus, should be alienated because of the culture that they represent and the second is that of a population that represents nothing more than violence and hence it deserves to be abused and violated (Hamid Dabashi). This process of a constant conscious practice of marginalizing the population of the east by marginalizing the postcolonial nations creates the prevalent stereotypes. Hamid follows this trope in order to convey that this othering leads to the conscious decision of the citizens of the east to choose the path that the west forces them down to (Lau and Mendes).
Salman Rushdie, one of the most famous contemporary writers, clings to his identity of being a diasporic individual whose identity was partitioned with the partition of India and Pakistan, stated in his revolutionary collection of essays, Imaginary Homelands, that the ‘Commonwealth does not exist anymore’. By stating this, Rushdie exclaimed that the citizen of the postcolonial nations will not accept the title of ‘commonwealth’, which led to the conscious decision of writers and artists to break away from the colonized notions of the west which were fed to the subconscious mind of the postcolonial identity (Salman Rushdie). Rushdie also gave the concept of ‘writing back to the empire’, a concept further explored by Bill Ashcroft in the text ‘The Empire Writes Back’. Hamid can be seen following all these narrative tropes while writing this text. ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a postcolonial text that caters to the prominent themes of the creation of postcolonial literature. By writing this text Hamid is consciously undertaking a journey wherein he employs a protagonist who is brutally treated by the tools of colonization, a protagonist who, just like Hamid, undertakes the journey of writing back to the empire in his own way (Ashcroft et al.).
Through the last chapter of the novel, Hamid explores the extreme vulnerability to which a postcolonial identity succumbs after years of constant abuse by the colonizing west. This climax is brought upon by the ‘soft racism’ that Changez is forced to experience while he lives a comparative luxuries life in Princeton with people who treat him respectfully, yet believe him to be an outsider. Hamid explores this arc by examining the character of Erica, a love interest of Hamid who falls for him merely because he is ‘different’. After the attacks of September 11, this soft racism turns into vile violence, violence directly straight at the identity that Changez represents, an identity that his diasporic self initially resisted. A drastic change occurs in the novel when Changez gradually changes his appearance in order to merge with his true identity, rather than suppressing his true self. This appearance seems to the west a harmful appearance that caters to the notions of threatening the west’s freedom and existence. This instance shows how racism creates the thing that it dangerously fears. The transformation of Changez from a diasporic individual to possibly a religious fundamentalist depicts the harms that the traumas of colonization can unleash on the postcolonial identity. The crucial end of the novel forces the readers to pause and develop an ending of their own, this pattern of Hamid forces his readers to choose between two extremes, either Changez has turned into a violent terrorist or he is going to be assassinated by the Americans. Hamid deliberately takes this step because he knows that most of the readers will succumb to the stereotypical narrative discourses, proving once again the dangerous amount of strengt5h that racism holds over the minds of the postmodern civilization (Chowdhury).
In conclusion, it can be stated that in ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’, the author Mohsin Hamid employs the tropes of the resistance against the colonization of the postcolonial identity. Throughout the course of the novel, the protagonist resists the stereotypical identity that the west forces upon him, but, at the end of the novel, the narrative discourse takes a sudden turn where the protagonist can be seen succumbing to the stereotypes against which he had fought while he inhabited the identity of an outsider in the west. The present paper analyzed how the last chapter of the novel contradicts the main theme of the novel and evaluated the tools that forced the protagonist as well as the author to take the sudden decisions that they took.
Ashcroft, Bill, et al. The Empire Writes Back : Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. Brantford, Ont., W. Ross Macdonald School Resource Services, 2011.
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Hai, Ambreen. “Pitfalls of Ambiguity in Contexts of Islamophobia: Mohsin Hamid’s the Reluctant Fundamentalist.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 52, no. 4, 2020, pp. 434–458, 10.1353/sdn.2020.0053. Accessed 4 Mar. 2021.
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Maqsood, Sumbal. “Interrogating the Fundamentals of Identity: Changez’s Defining Act in the Reluctant Fundamentalist.” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, vol. 8, no. 8, 2018, 10.30845/ijhss.v8n8p11.
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