Review: ‘Discontent and Its Civilizations’: Mohsin Hamid at Home in Three Lands
By Michiko Kakutani
The central characters in Mohsin Hamid’s novels
are all outsiders, caught on the ever-shifting margins of class, values and national
identity — caught between their ambitions and memories, their aspirations and
resentments, and finding the lines between the personal and the political, the
private and the public continually blurred.
“Moth Smoke” used the tale of a romantic triangle to
explore the divisions racking Pakistan. “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” took the form of a monologue
delivered by a young Princeton-educated Pakistani, whose life and sense of self
are rocked by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. And “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” recounted the journey of an
unnamed hero, who leaves an impoverished village in an unnamed country, moves
to a big city and makes and loses a fortune.
In his erratic but often compelling new
collection of essays, “Discontent and Its Civilizations,” Mr. Hamid addresses
many of these same themes — as well as the themes of migration, exile and the
relationship between East and West that Salman Rushdie addressed in “Imaginary Homelands” and “Step Across This Line.” When he was younger, Mr. Hamid recalls, he
thought of himself as being a migrant and being foreign — “things that made me
different, an outsider.” In today’s globalized world, subject to accelerating
change and flux, he says, he now thinks of his experiences as “increasingly
universal.”
Mr. Hamid writes about his
own peregrinations (from Lahore to New York to London and back to Lahore),
Pakistan’s fraught relationship with the West in the post-Sept. 11 era, and the
frightening, sometimes absurd challenges of daily life there. He writes about
deciding to move back to Pakistan with his wife and daughter, after two decades
of living in London and New York, and being reintroduced “to a
multigenerational daily existence,” occupying an apartment above his parents’
house in Lahore — “three generations at one address, as was the case when I was
a child.” He also writes about the frustrations and anxieties of living there,
from unreliable Internet service to worrying about getting a haircut because
his barber is in Main Market — two letters different from and four kilometers
away from Moon Market, where two bombs had recently gone off, killing 42 people
and injuring 135.
This volume (which includes
some pieces that originally appeared in The New York Times) lacks the layered complexities
of Mr. Hamid’s novels — which employ narrative frames and subtle inflections of
voice to create added tension and ambiguity. Its strongest entries, however,
reflect the same subtleties of thought, laid down in his lapidary, crystalline
prose.
The sections on art and
writing are, for the most part, banal — predictable musings about whether
characters ought to be “likable” or not, and the pleasures of rereading
favorite short books. It’s the chapters about Mr. Hamid’s own life and his
meditations on Pakistan’s tumultuous recent history that command attention —
and call out for a volume of their own.
Like so many characters in
his fiction, Mr. Hamid seems to be of two minds about many things — especially
the country of his birth. One moment he is lamenting the hazards of life in
Pakistan, where death can come in the form of militant terror attacks and
American drone strikes, and where one can be killed for “being liberal, for
being mystical, for being in politics, the army or the police, or for simply
being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
At the same time, Mr. Hamid
points out, he’s made “an attempt at optimism,” however forced and possibly
misguided — so fervent is his belief that “Pakistan is a test bed for pluralism
on a globalizing planet that desperately needs more pluralism.” Although he
writes that Pakistanis have often been their “own worst enemies,” he says that
he’s never believed the role the country frequently “plays as a villain on news
shows”: “The Pakistan I knew was the out-of-character Pakistan, Pakistan
without its makeup and plastic fangs, a working actor with worn-out shoes, a
close family and a hearty laugh.”
Despite its inclusion on
lists of failing states, he goes on, Pakistan is “not a basket case,” arguing
in one essay that “it has well-established political parties, noisy private
media, and an independent-minded supreme court.”
When it comes to Pakistan’s
relationship with the United States, Mr. Hamid is blunt and to the point. In a
2011 piece, he writes that the alliance between the United States and the
Pakistan military (comprising mutual need, suspicion and financial dependence)
remains “a relationship between parties viewing one another through gun sights”
— “each side blames the other for putting its citizens in grave danger, and
each is correct to do so.”
In what is perhaps the
volume’s most impassioned piece, he contends that American drone strikes in
Pakistan have had a deeply pernicious effect: they facilitate “the refusal of
the Pakistani state and Pakistani society to do more to confront the problem of
extremists who threaten Pakistanis and non-Pakistanis alike.”
The drone attacks, he adds,
also fuel the conspiracy theories that thrive in Pakistan — like “the claim
that flying robots from an alien power regularly strike down from the skies and
kill Pakistani citizens.” In the United States, such a claim would be “science
fiction or paranoid survivor cultism of the furthest fringe-dwelling kind,” he
notes. “In Pakistan, it is real. And constantly, wrenchingly, in the news.”
DISCONTENT AND ITS CIVILIZATIONS
Dispatches From Lahore, New York, and London
By Mohsin Hamid
226 pages. Riverhead Books. $27.95.
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