Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie 

by Sarah Ahmed

I know many a Pakistani who feels they have to share their opinions of how the world has changed after 9/11, and Kamila Shamsie is no exception. Her book, Burnt Shadows, deals with the events of the day in a very personal way. She boldly takes responsibility for describing what led up to the fateful event, and then segues into stating the resulting consequences. Her formula works for one main reason –  her characters are very relatable, as she elegantly drapes layer upon layer of detail so they win the sympathy of all readers, irrespective of politics or background. This is no mean feat, and by the end it us up to the individual reader to come to their own conclusions.

This book reflects the power that writers have when it comes to providing insight and opinions from different places and people. No one can justify what happened on the 11^th of September, but people can attempt to provide answers to why it may have happened and how the world has changed since. This is particularly relevant to us now. As we mourn those who died and sympathise with those who lost loved ones on that day, reading this book may remind us of those being unfairly punished in places where no conventions or rules exist. Thousands upon thousands of people across the globe have been directly affected by the resulting war on terror, and Shamsie offers the lives of normal every day people to illustrate this. The book revolves around two multicultural families, and one central character that wades through time, having survived Nagasaki and now residing in post 9/11 New York.  This character, Hiroko, is essentially a survivor. She carries upon her back bird (crane)-shaped burns, keepsakes of the atomic bomb, which ironically signify life and birth.

The novel deals with Hiroko’s loved ones and her journeys through significant historical times and places, i.e. Nagasaki in 1945, Delhi in 1947 (around the partition of India), Pakistan in 1983 (when the United States stepped up the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets) and post 9/11 Afghanistan and New York. The fact that the characters are from all over the world but remain united and connected, shows that the incidents of 9/11 cannot be pinned down to one country, one religion or even one identity. In fact, history repeats itself and if one looks carefully, the fault lines leading up to the Vesuvius that was 9/11, are actually the incidents that happened in 1945, 1947 and 1983

The end of the book is a positive one, should you choose to see it that way of course. Shamsie’s previous books have vastly been about identity and rootedness in relation to Pakistan. While this book offers vivid landscapes of exotic worlds, it cautions that nationalism is more often than not misinterpreted and insinuates that nothing is constant. But people are – love is, regardless of caste, country or creed.

 

 The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid 

by Emily Wight

Readers will be surprised to learn that Mohsin Hamid completed his first draft of The Reluctant Fundamentalist in July 2001 – two months before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington that tore a hole in the geopolitical map and changed our world forever.

The surprise comes not only from the marketing and indeed categorisation of the novel as “post-9/11 literature”, but from the pivotal point in the narrative structure that the attacks represent.

In an interview with The Guardian’s John Mullan, Hamid claimed that the novel’s central focus is that which Juan-Batista alludes to towards the end: of Christian boys kidnapped by the Ottoman Empire and trained to fight against their own people. Our narrator, Changez, compares this to his own situation as a Lahori man working in New York: “I was a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war.”

Clearly then the subject of immigration, of multicultural identity and hybridity, is one that touched Hamid before 9/11. But the events of that September provided him with a heightened sense of context within which to set his novel.

Furthermore, it is the turning point on the scale of trust which we lend to the narrator. At first Changez seems like a friendly young man, welcoming the addressee – immediately associated with us, the reader, in Hamid’s use of second person address – to Lahore. He claims to be “a lover of America”, recalling with delight his student days at Princeton and his arrival in New York. Although he warns us of his unreliability, confessing that he is “inclined to exaggerate”, it is not until he openly admits that his reaction the fall of the twin towers was “to be remarkably pleased” that we question Changez’s motives.

Our escalating uncertainty around the narrator’s reliability – in terms of both storytelling and safeguarding the American we are with – mimics the intensification of uncertainty that has persisted across the globe since 9/11. For the past ten years, citizens of both East and West have struggled with the huge loss of life caused by the war on terror, the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used on terror suspects, many of them innocent, and of course further terrorist attacks in Bali, Madrid, London and Mumbai. Just as our trust in Changez wavers, many of us struggle to trust our governments.

The ambivalent ending adds to this uncertainty as Hamid suggests that there is no clear winner in this war. Since 9/11, everyone has suffered in some way.

 

Home Boy by H.M. Naqvi

by Nadia Jafri

Three young Pakistani men live the New York dream. They roam freely from trendy Tribeca lounges to their favorite desi haunts in Jackson Heights. They creatively claim the identity of “Metrostanis” in a New York that is free – a city that is oft-celebrated for its ability to absorb and accept anyone and everyone who has the will. H.M Naqvi’s Home Boy is a fast paced ride through the streets of New York, a city that is changed in the face of 9/11. Once working on Wall Street and living the American dream, Chuck soon becomes the ubiquitous New York City taxi driver, experiencing new dimensions of the City during a time that becomes historic and critical to the future of the many Muslim immigrants that call it home.

Naqvi’s fictional account of post-9/11 New York is both serious and entertaining. Chuck, AC and Jimbo’s adventures, once whimsical, become increasingly precarious as they struggle with the realisation that things have changed, and their identities become all the more relevant despite their very ordinariness.

In an attempt to find an enigmatic friend they call the Shaman, the three friends find themselves in a Connecticut suburb – and suddenly charged of suspected terrorism, unlawfully detained, and interrogated about their morality, religiosity and identity.

With the use of urban vernacular and sharp, witty dialogue, Naqvi’s tale manages to be solemn whilst arousing a chuckle over amusing conversations between the characters who become, very soon, deeply familiar.

In an interview response about the voice of the narrator, Chuck, Naqvi remarks, “Chuck is an everyman, like me, like you. He is bright and sensitive, curious and interested in making sense of himself and the world around him. The voice is characterized by his context, by Americana. Consequently Whitman and Salinger and McInerney are invoked, as is Springsteen and Erik B. and Rakim. There is hip-hop and Yiddish and Spanish and Punjabi in the texture of the prose.”

And the prose is indeed beautiful in its striking balance between light and dark – casting that heavy shadow of doubt, danger, and sorrow while maintaining the beauty of a city that is loved despite the cloud that looms over it, large and wide.

Home Boy is both honest and jarring in its ability to narrate a 9/11 story in a voice that feels authentic both to Pakistanis living in New York and to New York itself.