Portrayal of Identity Crisis in English Novels by Pakistani Writers
Moniba Mehboob
MA (Final) Literature Dr. Faisal Nazir 22nd May 2017
Abstract
This paper is focused mainly on the portrayal of identity crisis in the Uzma
Aslam Khan’s novel the Geometry of God and the representation of Pakistaniness in the novel, or the lack thereof, on established grounds of the relationship between national identity and literature. In doing so, it explores what Pakistaniness should entail. This is done by analysing the narrative, and the ethical value of the novel through an exploration of all characters but
especially of Noman who refers to himself as a “match - fixer”. The paper studies Noman’s identity crisis deeply , relating his condition to the postcolonial condition, and focuses on the resolution of the crisis. It is an effort to bridge some gaps in the critical work done on Pakistani English fiction in relation to portrayal of identity and a step towards establishing a future pathway for Pakistani English writers.
Now I wonder what really is my land The one left behind or the one just landed in Oscillating between these two worlds My fractured Identity looms large With worms of memories wriggling in my flesh And a myth dying in my brain
(My Fractured Identity by Valsa George)
In contemporary Pakistani English fiction, it is common to note a clear identity crisis, sometimes explicitly portrayed as in Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke, and sometimes implicitly present arising from the author’s own identity crisis arising from the nation’s hindering struggle with self-identity. Forming this connection between national identity and literature is not a misplaced notion since it has been prominent in the postcolonial world and
critics such as Franz Fanon, Timothy Brennan, and Edward Said have long ago commented upon it. Peter Hitchcock in the introduction to his book The Long Space writes, “Consciously or not the space of postcolonial writing brings alternative histories to bear on the process of anticolonial narration” (Hitchcock 9). This implies an immediate relationship between a
nation’s history and its literature and where those two are connected, national identity is manifest. Timothy Brennan in his essay, The National Longing for Form, has likened the novel and the nation saying that the novel is formed “by mimicking the structure of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles” (49). Edward Said in his book Culture and Imperialism argues that nations proclaim their identities through their narrations, that is, through their stories and novels. The culture represented in postcolonial novels then, forms and reinforces the cultural identity of a nation. In their book The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin outline four critica l models of postcolonial literatures, the first of them being the national or regional model in which a nation forms its own distinctive narrative to write its distinctive character. The first nation to do this was the USA. They write that forming a national liter ature is a postcolonial nation’s way to reject the coloniser’s “claim to exclusivity” (14-16). Edward Said too writes about selfdefinition which he says all nations carry out through their writing (42). This establishes the fact that novels are a means of self-definition for nations, a way of asserting their distinctive identity. This distinctive identity has often become a problem for postcolonial nations as Rushdie writes in his essay, An Indian Writer in England , a native of a postcolonial nation is "now partly of the West-sometimes... straddling two cultures; at other times falling between two stools" (Rushdie 79). The problem has resulted in an identity crisis, a fragmentation of identity, or in what Bhabha calls mimicry (4). Novelists have responded to this crisis with several concepts of identity portrayed in their novels. If we focus only on how Pakistani authors
have tried to resolve the issue, we see that most novelists such as Ahmed Ali, Moniza Alvi, and Kamila Shamsie present a universal standpoint or in Cara Cilano’s words, they take up “a human identity”. There are then those with a multicultural context such as Mohsin Hamid’s novels or Hanif Kureishi’s, which exhibit the hybridity which Bhabha proposes in his book , the Location of Culture. There are also those such as Uzma Aslam Khan’s the Geometry of God
which see resolution in the form of a clear secular and westernized position of mimicry after having portrayed the struggle between all components of identity formation; this is seen especially in novels with a background of Zia’s era of Islamization which Muneeza Shamsie also mentions in her essay South Asian Muslims: Fiction and Poetry in English (153). Critics such as Bina Shah have presented the universal standpoint as the “antidote to the Pakistani identity crisis” (9), while Mahira Hajiyeva represents hybridity as the “most apt answer to identity crises” (140). In this paper, we shall discuss the portrayal of this problem in Uzma Aslam Khan’s novel the Geometry of God. We shall divide our discussion into three sections. In the first section, I will analyse the novel’s characters and see how they identify themselves, paying special attention to the character of Noman who is most explicitly shown to be amidst the dilemma of identity. In the second section, I will comment upon the novel’s narrative and analyse it to show how it can be interpreted as a representation of Pakistan and the postcolonial dilemma. In the third section, I will relate the previous discussion to an ethical analysis of the novel to gauge its representation of Pakistan in the light of what Pakistaniness entails accord ing to several critics. The Geometry of God is the story of the headstrong and pragmatic Amal and her younger sister Mehwish who is blind and develops her own version of language in her journey of becoming herself, along with their grandfather Zahoor who is a palaeontologist disliked in his country for his Darwinian ideas, and Noman who calls himself a match-fixer and struggles
between his Islamic and secular identity, ultimately calling himself an “imitation” Muslim sarcastically. Each of these characters is struggling with themselves and with society in trying to find their real selves, much like the Pakistanis are doing today, except Zahoor who in his late age has already fixed himself in the secular stance although he never clearly says so. The story shows how the four central characters mature under Zahoor’s influence and grow up to join the secular bloc, ending with Zahoor’s death, Amal’s marriage with her lover, and Mehwish finding love with Noman. In this section, we shall take a clo ser look at the characterization of the t hree maturing protagonists, mostly focusing on Noman. Amal, having been named by Zahoor for her Aql-e- amali or “a talent for doing” as Zahoor himself translates it, stands true to her name and becomes a palaeontologist, tracing his footsteps but mostly stays away from religion. Even as a child, she steers clear of Apa Farzana who is her mother’s friend and an Islamic preacher. She seems to have had no identity crisis to resolve except to face the challenges posed to her by her sister’s blindness and by the patriarchal society. Mehwish too, raised by Amal and influenced direct ly and indirectly by Zahoor, crosses to the secular bloc. Her maturing centres on her blindness and the way she dea ls with it, building relationships and coping mechanisms accordingly. We see her clash with religion most prominently in her encounters with Miss Fauzia and even in them, her tone is always critical of what Miss Fauzia says, often in a confused way, as when Miss Fauzia tells her that, “the moazzan calls not sings. He is to be obeyed not enjoyed” (Khan 151). Miss Fauzia is an interesting portrayal of religion in the novel. She is a flat and hypocritical character just like all other religious characters portrayed in the novel and tells Mehwish in class that God has punished t he blind with things they cannot do themselves (Khan 137). Eventually, Mehwish grows to call her “zero someone” and begins to ridicule her, and since hers was the only religious presence in Mehwish’s life, this shows us her perspective of religion (Khan 175).
The character of Noman and the struggles he faces portray best the identity crisis we are examining. When we first meet Noman, he is in a park near a masjid. His father is praying and Noman has already prayed. He is doing algebra and thinking about how his father has changed and isn’t the fun person he used to be anymore. He focuses on the structure of the mosque and finds the magic zero, with which he concludes that his father has changed because “God has left the country” (Khan 17). We also get to know that he is passionate about algebra. When we next get to meet him, he is at the dinner table with his family and his father calls the youth of Pakistan “cultural freaks” and criticizes science for its discoveries (Khan 22). In our third meeting, we are given the first hint at Noman’s dilemma. His father hands him two speeches of Jinnah; one which proves that Jinnah wanted a secular state and one which proves that he wanted an Islamic state-and hence, Noman becomes a match-fixer. His father, the new Vice Chairman of the Party of Creation appoints him as his personal secretary and uses him to publish a monthly periodical for the Academy of Moral Policy, which is supposed to “prescribe ways to relieve young minds of maghrib za’adagi, westernisation” (Khan 89). This is ironic since Noman himself is one of those influenced by westernisation as we see in his behaviour when he’s with Petrov, strolling the bazaar outside Anarkali (Khan 63-67). After becoming his father’s secretary, Noman is forced to kill off one side of his personality in order to please his father. What his father says about “the young Pakistani” is true for Noman. “He is a sp lit” (Khan 75). When he introduces himself to Zahoor later in the novel, he tells him, “I match -fix. Give me a sacred verse, and I can prove both divine will and biological evolution wrong and right. Or give me one of our founder’s speeches, and I can prove he was a believer and a kafir” (Khan 125). The author has rightly named him Noman which can be read “no man”. Noman himself calls himself “Not a synthesis, or even a cultural freak. But an absence” (Khan 122). He understands that in all her question, his mother really asks him, “how long before you,
Noman, become a man?”, asking him to resolve his identity crisis (Khan 97). Noman himself identifies his crisis when he says he won’t write the periodical Akhlaq in his native Punjabi or even in Urdu but in “foreign English” (Khan 89). He is well aware of his dilemma. He continuously asks himself, “why don’t I stop being Aba’s peon and get my own job teac hing al Jabra, before I forget the magic in a sifr?” (Khan 105). In his case, the coloniser is Aba and Noman is the colonised, therefore, he is forced to write in foreign English and moulded in a shape which is not his own. He identifies his Satan being memory because he can’t sto p serving his father, in hopes of rediscovering the original. We can relate this to what Milan Kundera writes about the postcolonial condition , “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” (3). Noman writes about religion when by now he has fully accepted that he doesn’t believe, yet, he writes things such as the section on Pure Science for a science book where he eliminates all discoveries saying that everything happens by Allah’s will and must be le ft at that. We see clear expression of the conclusion he will reach when he says he doesn’t even want to represent God, that he doesn’t even want to represent himself (Khan 110). Near the middle of the novel, he shows signs of depression resulting from his identity crisis and he says, “I’ve become a man who can’t even gaze at the stars and tune into cosmic radiation on the radio without searching for a verse to prove the crackling exists”, but that lately he has been coming across verses which he is to ignore such as the ones hinting at evolution (Khan 118). He realizes when he calls himself “an absence” that he has no beliefs of his own left anymore. He “believe[s] Aba wrong and prove[s] him right” (Khan 122). He argues for his father in public but internally he argues for Zahoor, both representing polar ends of belief. It is when Noman’s foolish acts get Zahoor arrested that he decides to finally pick sides and stop match-fixing. This is when he again finds the magic zero which he hadn’t seen since he first saw it. This is when he decides to leave home to find himself. How he finds himself
or rather how he asserts his complete shift to secularism is interesting to note; he does this by revolting against his father who in the novel is the religious extreme of belief, by writing the editor’s note for his last issue of Akhlaq. The couplet by Mir Taqi Mir which he includes in this issue is relevant here: To save their souls they kill themselves with care/ A paradise like that can go to hell! (Khan 261). This can go both ways; Noman might have included this in reference
to the Party of Creation, but it goes for him just as much and perhaps more. Absences like Noman adopt “protective stupidity”, as George Orwell terms it in his novel 1984, which is equivalent to “killing with care”. It is this secular resolution which demands our attention. The author has not really even considered a tilt towards a religious resolution. In this, the novel may be called biased. Being a representation of Pakistan, a tilt at least was considerable but Noman always had a secular mind, he was only gathering up the co urage to expose it. Now, we come to interpretation of the general narrative of the novel which deals with issues such as identity, postcolonial experience, faith and reason, westernization, and even postcolonial literature. Uzma Aslam Khan has subtly touched upon the topic of postcolonial experience and postcolonial literature. “The present is dangerous, the past was glorious. It’s our jammed intersection. When you’re not illuminated by history, you’re encumbered by it” (Khan 79). In saying this, Noman admits his postcolonial state and that his identity crisis stems from that state. This is what he refers to when he talks of writing in “foreign English” as has been mentioned earlier. He says later about Mehwish that he must wait “for her to resolve the conversation I believe she’s been having with herself for too long” (Khan 215). This we can say for Pakistani literature too, or for postcolonial literature. It is a d iscourse trying to find itself by conversing with its own self and engaging with its people and we must wait for it to resolve its silent conversation. Further in the novel we have Amal thinking, “I need to scra tch fingerprints, and leave my own” (Khan 301). She says this almost as if prescribing a way for
Pakistani literature; to scratch colonial influence and form distinct literary identity corresponding with national identity. Another issue the author touches upon is that of representation. Just as Pakistani authors do not explicitly wish to represent their country, Noman says he doesn’t want to represent God or even himself - hence the problem of representation in literature. We can also find a metaphor in the danger Noman faces from the bullet near his chest for the danger Pakistani literature faces from westernisation, except that Noman’s bullet has not slipped and Pakistan’s seems to already have slipped halfway, hence the lack of complete and authentic representation of the country, but this issue we shall deal with in the next section. Pakistani novels are internationally viewed as representat ions of the country but the novels rarely display Pakistaniness. A reading of Mushtaq Bilal’s collection of intervie ws of Pakistani novelists would make clear that most of these authors do not think of themselves as representatives of Pakistan. And yet David Waterman in his book ca lls Pakistani novels “fiction informed by history and operating as social critique” and ob viously takes them as a representation of Pakistan. It seems as if a western sensibility has been enforced upon Pakistani settings or characters in these novels, as if they were a vehicle of American expansionism. Anna Hartnell agrees with this opinion in her essay on Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (336-348) as she observes western influence in the novel. Cara Cilano in her book Contemporary Pakistani Fiction in English presents several definitions of Pakistaniness from numerous aspects and then settles for “a ranging understanding of Pakistani identities (1-10). In another discussion on the Pakistaniness of Pakistani literature, Klein mentions the beliefs of several Pakistani critics such as Wazir Agha who sought in it a synthesis of local cultures, Jameel Jalbi who incorporates Pakistan’s identit y into that of the Muslim Ummah, Saleem Ahmed and Hasan Askari who equate the Islamic and the Pakistani. According to Klein, there is a consensus among these differing critics that
Pakistani literature should not be westernized (458). The westernization of literature is something Saleem Ahmed warned us of in his essay Pakistani Adab ka Masla (Problem of Pakistani literature). Since he equates the Pakistani identity and the Muslim identity, Ahmed
maintains that our identity was prominent pre-partition due to its strong opposition to the Hindu identity and now that the opposition is no more as explicit since the inception of Pakistan, the Pakistani identity is endangered. He suggests looking to our Islamic roots and reinvigorating them to find a new identity now that we’ve lost the identity of opposition and are falling prey to mimicry (786-787). An analysis of the novel under discussion clearly elucidates western influence on our literature. The kind of society displayed in the Geometry of God is clearly one which if anything, represents only a small section of the Pakistani society. The character of Noman in the beginning, the lusty and promiscuous charact er of Zara, the love affair of Amal with Omar and the sexual depiction throughout the novel is again an aspect which does not represent Pakistan as such. Most Pakistani authors adopt a sexual tone in their novels, showing themselves sexually open perhaps to deflect their own identity and adopt that of the coloniser in order to eliminate difference. This has been clarified by Albert Memmi in his book The Coloniser and the Colonised, Their constant and very justified ambition is to escape from their colonized condition, an additional burden in an already oppressive status. To that end, they endeavour to resemble the colonizer in the frank hope that he may cease to consider them different from him. Hence their efforts to forget the past, to change collective habits, and their enthusiastic adoption of Western language. Culture and customs. ” (15-16)
This is exactly what Khan seems to be doing too in her novel. The values presented in the novel are not those of a Pakistani. The Party of Creation is an exaggerated portrayal of religious extremists, and the characters are not representations of Pakistan. It
would be fair to say that in light of t he opinions of the above-mentioned critics, the Geometry of God does not exhibit any Pakistaniness at all except to show some “Desi invertebrates”, to use Zara’s term (Khan 187). The term here would refer to how I previously described Pakistanis English novels- western sensibility forced upon Pakistani characters and settings or rather, the reverse. Conclusion:
“You have spilled both blood and ink, what more will you do with your hands?” (Khan 324) This paper discusses Uzma Aslam Khan’s novel the Geometr y of God to study the portrayal of the identity crisis of Pakistan. I t also gauges the representative value of the novel along with a short discourse on Pakistaniness, claiming that the novel has very less representative value as a Pakistani English novel. However, the novel does portray the identity crisis is Noman’s character well enough and even prescribes a future pathway in the previously quoted words of Amal, “I need to scratch fingerprints, and leave my own”. This combined with Saleem Ahmed’s advice of reconnecting with our Islamic roots to find a distinct Pakistani voice, much like Djebar’s suggestion of Anamnesis, is probably the best advice for Pakistani authors which will also help them overcome t heir postcolonial tendencies and finally be known as Pakistani writers instead of postco lonial novelists, achieving a distinct status as the literature of America has managed to do.
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