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Moving through America: Race, place

and resistance in Mohsin Hamid's The
Reluctant Fundamentalist
Anna Hartnell

University of Birmingham , UK
Published online: 05 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Anna Hartnell (2010) Moving through America: Race, place and resistance in
Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist , Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 46:3-4, 336-348,
DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2010.482407
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2010.482407

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Journal of Postcolonial Writing

Vol. 46, Nos. 34, July/September 2010, 336348

Moving through America: Race, place and resistance in Mohsin

Hamids The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Anna Hartnell*
University of Birmingham, UK

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This article explores Mohsin Hamids The Reluctant Fundamentalist in the context of
debates about US multiculturalism after 9/11. It suggests that while Hamids novel
undoubtedly identifies and critiques the racism at the heart of the so-called war on terror
expressed both in domestic and foreign arenas his text also appears to be seduced by
certain aspects of American exceptionalism. Though the novel in part paints US imperial
power as heir to the European colonial legacy, I argue that The Reluctant Fundamentalist
also invests in the possibility that America might represent the transcendence of racial
differences.
Keywords: America; race; multiculturalism; postcolonial; Mohsin Hamid; The Reluctant
Fundamentalist

Introduction
Mohsin Hamids self-described love story about America is a complex interrogation of
American nationalism and US spaces in the aftermath of 9/11 and the onset of the so-called
war on terror (qtd in Perlez). The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) subjects the insular
tendencies of the American 9/11 novel to a postcolonial gaze, and in so doing makes
manifest the repressed political content of the genre. This sublimated content ostensibly
points to the re-signification of older forms of European colonialism under the aegis of
an American empire, a process by no means inaugurated but undoubtedly accelerated by
9/11. But Hamids perspective seems to be much more convoluted and conflicted than this
simplistic rendering of American state power. Indeed, though increasingly marginalized
within the post-9/11 US milieu, Hamids Pakistani migrant protagonist is not simply alienated but also simultaneously drawn to the isolationist and exceptionalist currents of the
American national narrative. This, I suggest, is the paradoxical premise that conditions The
Reluctant Fundamentalists resistance to the racism and national triumphalism that fuelled
the Bush administrations war on terror.
9/11, as a deeply ambivalent sign of transnationalism and globalization, has re-framed
older debates about American multiculturalism which have in the past tended to construe
the nations cultural conflicts as a civil war rather than one that takes place within a wider
global milieu. This is the ground fascinatingly navigated by Mohsin Hamid who, as a
Pakistani writer who has lived in both New York and London, shares with his central
protagonist the burden of representing the racial, religious and national difference that
formed the focus of post-9/11 xenophobia. The Reluctant Fundamentalist stages an encounter between a Pakistani narrator, Changez, and an unidentified and wholly silent American
*Email: a.hartnell@bham.ac.uk
ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online
2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2010.482407
http://www.informaworld.com

Downloaded by [37.106.251.41] at 08:06 04 November 2014

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

337

addressee. The suggestion that the American might himself be armed and hostile while the
ostensibly peaceable narrator may have turned to jihadi violence informs an atmosphere of
mutual suspicion and impending violence, an atmosphere that challenges and implicates the
readers own processes of identification.
Hamid provocatively paints a forbidding picture of Lahore, the frame-storys immediate
setting, which evokes what Hamid describes elsewhere as Pakistans recurring role as a
villain (It had to be a sign). Though the narrator makes much of the citys rich cuisine,
its decidedly bloody nature along with the shadowy figures and places that characterize
Hamids Lahore underscore the fact that the novel deliberately filters the city through
Orientalist stereotypes, demonstrating its status as a menace in the imagination of the
western reader. Yet at the same time the Americans possible identity as a governmentsponsored assassin render the arguably manipulative tenor of Changezs uninterrupted
narration a sign of weakness, one that recalls the frame narrator of One Thousand and One
Nights, Scheherazade, who wards off the threat of her own impending death by telling
stories. By this analogy the American visitor and the Pakistani narrator stand in for what
the novel characterizes as the mismatch between the American bombers with their twentyfirst-century weaponry and the ill-equipped and ill-fed Afghan tribesmen below. This
scenario, the narrator suggests, is reminiscent of the film Terminator, but with the roles
reversed so that the machines were cast as heroes (99). If the reader identifies with the fear
felt by the American, one reading of the novel implies, they too are implicated in the process
whereby the technologically powerful conquer the weak.
Arguably The Reluctant Fundamentalist itself fails to escape the stereotypes it erects
and attempts to challenge. Yet I suggest that beneath the novels more obvious symbolism
American state power is reflected in a firm named Underwood Samson, the initials of
which visibly recall those of the nation, while American nationalism is personified by a
woman named Erica there lies a compelling exploration of the narrative of American
innocence. This story is elaborated via a divergence of discourses on state and on nation, a
divergence that is, indeed, mirrored in the very different treatments of Underwood Samson
and Erica. Rather than dismissed as cynicism, this narrative of innocence forms part of
Americas allure, even though it is also precisely what occasions rejection for the nonAmerican migrant on levels both personal and political. Hamid pointed to his novels
paradoxical attitudes to the United States in an interview:
the traditional immigrant novel is about coming to America [ ] I wanted to do the 21stcentury polarity when the magnet switches and pushes them away. At its core, this is a story of
someone who is in love with America, in love with an American woman, who finds he has to
leave. Its a tragic love story. (Qtd in Perlez)

The first section of this essay looks at the post-9/11 attack on multiculturalism that
occurred within the United States and which forms the backdrop for Hamids emigrant
novel. I argue that while The Reluctant Fundamentalist critiques the melting pot conception
of American society in its manifestations both before and after 9/11 indeed, the novel
questions this supposed break it also insists on a shared vision of society that eludes many
accounts of multiculturalism. I pursue this idea in the second section which reads the
novels love story as an allegory of the relationship between America and Europe, one that
questions the extent to which the war on terror represented a repetition of the European
colonial project. Hamids novel undoubtedly identifies race as intrinsic to the constitution
of the American politics of place, but I argue that it also hangs on to an image of America
as the possibility of a new kind of national politics that might enable the transcendence of
racial difference.

338

A. Hartnell

Between multiculturalism and the melting pot

Ten days after 9/11, the US Advertising Council launched a Public Service Announcement
that, as the Council explains,

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features people of many ages, races and religions proudly stating I Am an American. The
spot ends with the words, E Pluribus Unum, which means out of many, one. That phrase
communicates that, out of many faces, religions, geographical backgrounds, and ethnicities,
we are one nation. (I am an American)

The Council claims that fearing a possible backlash against Arab Americans and other ethnic
groups after the attacks, it decided to communicate a message that would remind Americans
that this was the time to unite as a country. It turned out that these fears were well founded;
the weeks after September 11 saw a sharp rise in attacks not just on Arab Americans but on
a range of ethnic groups who might be perceived as Muslims by hostile Americans wanting
to display their ostensible patriotism a reality that Hamid portrays in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. These weeks also saw the sharp increase in the racial profiling of these same groups.
Yet despite the seemingly noble intentions of the I am an American ad campaign, the
academic and filmmaker Cynthia Weber felt the need to re-make the advert several years
later. In Webers revised version, a range of speakers similarly state their claim to American
identity, but they then go on to declare, as Weber explains, just what kind of US American
they are the son of an immigrant without papers, a political refugee from the United States,
a person wrongly accused of being a terrorist spy (Weber). Rather than ending with E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one, Webers film ends with Ex Unum, Plurus out of one, many.
So Webers re-make not only challenges what she sees as the single-minded patriotism of
the original ad campaign. It also counters Americas residual melting pot solution to cultural
difference with a multicultural one that recognizes differences rather than appropriating them
into the logic of the same.
The implication of Webers work is that the advert in its original form represents the
soft end of the attack on domestic discourses of multiculturalism sustained as a result of
post-9/11 US foreign policy. Lynne Cheney, the wife of the then vice-president and former
chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, made this attack explicit when
in the weeks after 9/11 she publicly denounced those promoting multicultural teaching and
internationalism as a way of counteracting rising anti-Americanism. Such a response, in
Lynne Cheneys view, was an admission that the events of September 11th were our fault,
that it was our failure to understand Islam that led to so many deaths and so much destruction (qtd in Rubin and Verheul 7). As Derek Rubin and Jaap Verheul claim, by unapologetically promoting national history and patriotism over diversity and tolerance, Cheney
advanced her long-standing agenda to steer the national curriculum clear of multiculturalism (7). Such a stance was reflected in the widespread rituals of public flag-waving that
shrouded New York and the nation as a whole in 9/11s aftermath, and which were perhaps
best captured by the now iconic image of three New York fire-fighters resurrecting the
national cloth on the devastated site of the collapsed twin towers.
This image encapsulates the patriotic story of heroic sacrifice recycled as a redemptive
motif in the tragedys aftermath. It also became the centre of a race row. When plans were
proposed to use the photograph as a model for a memorial statue, the city requested that
the statue depict one white, one African-American, and one Hispanic fire-fighter to reflect
the racial diversity of the department, the city, and the victims of the attacks (Connor 94).
As Michan Andrew Connor explains, this request was denounced from the right as an
example of political correctness and a wretched [ ] [alteration of] historical reality to

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impose proper quotas on past events (94). These commentators claimed that the rescue
effort that took place on ground zero was essentially a display of heroism by multiculturalisms villain class white males. An estimated 319 of 343 fire-fighters who gave their
lives at the World Trade Center on September 11 were non-Hispanic whites (95). According to Connor, the elevation of this story of heroism alongside the insistence that these
heroes were primarily white was deployed to justify imperial projects of war while
bolstering the related ongoing domestic right-wing cultural agenda of defending the
privileged cultural, political, and economic standing of white men (93).
Connors account seems to underestimate the extent to which this narrative was mobilized as a ritual of trauma, and his sense of the connection between the domestic attack on
multiculturalism and the justification of imperial wars is too simplistic not least because
it implies an element of intent alongside the more persuasive structural link. Nonetheless
this episode illustrates the potentially sinister aspect of the homogenizing slogan E
Pluribus Unum, one that contradicts the idealized notion of Americas melting pot which
absorbs the immigrant as a quintessential ingredient of American identity even as it fails to
recognize and valorize difference. The privileging of the image of the white male fire-fighters highlights the always already precarious status of racial and gendered others in a melting
pot version of national identity. The premium placed on notions of homogeneity and unity
always threatens the elision of any others who fail to conceal their difference, a difference
that will be construed in this model as deviance in relation to the national consensus. This
is the reality explored in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which portrays the destruction of
the World Trade Center not as a definitive turning point in US discourses on race, religion
or nation but rather as the violent disturbance of old thoughts that had settled in the manner
of sediment to the bottom of a pond (83).
On the occasion of September 11 Changez, the Pakistani migrant who is the novels
narrator and central character, is visiting the Philippines and enjoying a sense that he is
somehow an American ambassador and that his Pakistaniness has become invisible. But
after watching the 9/11 attacks in his hotel room in Manila, and on return to America, he is
overcome by a feeling among Americans that he is curiously guilty. Changez explains: I
flew to New York uncomfortable in my own face (74). And yet whats interesting about
this apparently seismic shift in national perceptions is that Changez responds to the images
of the planes flying into the World Trade Center with a smile, and this smile occurs before
he is greeted as a traitor by US immigration and at just the moment he claims to feel most
American. The novels implication seems to be that the chauvinistic and racially charged
atmosphere it describes after 9/11 is merely an intensification of something that was already
there before. Yet this something is much more complex than a failure to fully embrace
multiculturalism.
As Bart Moore-Gilbert argues, The Reluctant Fundamentalist highlights precisely the
problem with the politics of recognition so central to understandings of multiculturalism.
The post-9/11 escalation of inter-ethnic tensions portrayed in the novel occasions the need
to simultaneously recognise and police certain individuals and groups who threaten it
(3). Thus islands of difference as represented in the novel by the Pak-Punjab Deli that
Changez frequents, run by people who speak Urdu and who do not, significantly, accept
American Express, are vulnerable to misrecognition and violence in an atmosphere of
heightened security. At the same time, the melting pot scenario presents its own dilemmas.
In the scene immediately prior to the sketch of the multicultural Pak-Punjab Deli,
Changez contemplates the new recruits at Underwood Samson the high-flying firm that
he lands a position with on graduation from Princeton and notes the groups apparent
diversity in terms of race and gender. At a moment well before the attacks on New York

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A. Hartnell

and Washington, it strikes him that shorn of hair and dressed in battle fatigues, we would
have been virtually indistinguishable (38). This juxtaposition of military and economic
power not only anticipates the symbolic targets of the 9/11 hijackers. The image also anticipates Changezs later sense that as a representative of a firm that values companies in
order that they might be broken up and sold in line with the firms motto, focus on the
fundamentals (98) he is in effect a modern-day janissary, a servant of Americas
economic empire (152). The fundamentalist free-market principles represented by the
firm work in tandem, Changez comes to feel, with the nations military arm, and wage war
on those Changez sees as his own people. That this moment is also one in which the
marvelous diversity of the group melts away is significant. For Underwood Samson
seems to represents the pragmatic face of American state power. It is consistently described
in the novel as ruthlessly future oriented. And it is on this site that Americas melting pot is
ostensibly realized, not on the grounds of the more romantic elements of American nationalism outlined elsewhere in the novel.
The idea that a highly compromised version of the melting pot vision of society might
function as a reality in this utilitarian as opposed to idealistic vein was memorably
articulated by Toni Morrison in 1993. In what is now a well-known essay for Time magazine,
Morrison claimed that newly arrived immigrants to the United States achieve assimilation
in part by learning discriminatory behaviour and practices towards African Americans. In
this essay, poignantly entitled On the Backs of Blacks, Morrison writes that negative
appraisals of the native-born black population constitute the most enduring and efficient
rite of passage into American culture (98). This idea has gained a certain currency since
Morrison first voiced it in 1993. If, as she suggests, black people exist at the bottom of US
racial hierarchies an idea supported by ample statistical evidence and suggested by Hamid
himself in a piece written for the Guardian newspaper1 then white and Asian immigrants
have significantly more chance of successful initiation into American culture. This is at the
expense, Morrison claims, of African Americans. Certainly Hamids assertion that if you
speak with an American accent, youre an American, bears out the view that migrants from
Asia can blend in, despite markers of ethnic difference (qtd in Perlez). While this rather rosy
view of American attitudes towards immigrants is in no way obviously borne out by Hamids
novel, I suggest that The Reluctant Fundamentalist does entail a conflicted exploration of US
race discourses, one that refuses to equate them with those found in Europe.
Talking to the New York Times in 2007, Hamid claimed that in Europe, its more a
question of the tribe [ ] you can be a second- or third-generation Turkish-German, and
there is still a question whether you are European (qtd in Perlez). Hamid points out that in
spite of the fact that he holds a British passport and has never held an American one, he is
perceived as a Pakistani writer in the United Kingdom whereas in the United States he is
described as a Pakistani American. While Toni Morrisons own critical project is in some
ways dedicated to showing the ways in which the new world embraced forms of subjugation
ostensibly left behind in Europe, her thesis in On the Backs of Blacks concedes that the
United States offers opportunities to immigrants beyond the reach of slaverys long shadow.
The fact that America hosts a far more assimilated and upwardly mobile population of
Muslims and Arabs than any European country suggests as much.2 For Morrisons assertion
that the nations founding ideals of freedom were made possible by the existence of
the unfree represents something much more complex than a straightforward contradiction
of the vision of a society in which one is not chained to the circumstances of ones birth
(Playing in the Dark).
Hamid admits in interviews that things have changed for people of South Asian and
Middle Eastern descent living in the United States since 9/11. The indiscriminate attacks on

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

341

those who might vaguely resemble a Muslim or an Arab partly reversed Morrisons
suggestion; in 9/11s immediate aftermath, anecdotal evidence suggests that African
Americans received a momentary reprieve from the singular and painful position they have
long occupied in the US racial formation. Given the opportunity to actively and symbolically perform their own allegiance to America, it seems that African Americans alongside
Hispanic Americans were prominent among those who spoke out against the presence of
Arabs and Muslims in the United States.3 Commenting on this apparent turning of the
tables, Roopali Mukherjee writes:

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the predicament of those who are named national others and state enemies may be likened
to a game of musical chairs, with each player making a run for inclusion into the coveted seated
circle and collaborating in exclusionary tactics against those who are left standing. (29)

Arguably Mukherjees analogy here is too fluid evidence also suggests that, possibly
because they have stood to gain the least from American national ideology, African Americans have been less supportive of post-9/11 US foreign policy than any other minority
group.4 Yet Mukherjees article also anticipates this finding by emphasizing the fact that
African Americans have long functioned as whistleblowers in relation to US state power,
their victimization at the hands of a system that legalized slavery and turned a blind eye to
lynchings evidence of state-sponsored terrorism on US soil.
This was precisely the function and message of Amiri Barakas controversial poem
Somebody Blew Up America, which portrays the 9/11 attacks as the effects of the blowback of US imperial power an argument partially shared by The Reluctant Fundamentalist. As one of black Americas most influential and celebrated poets, Barakas oeuvre has
long emphasized that African American difference will not be appropriated to service the
national ideology. Similarly, Hamids novel casts Muslims as an interruptive presence on
the global stage. Where the African American experience was forged in an agonistic
relationship to US white supremacy, The Reluctant Fundamentalist casts Islamism as both
the product of and a rebellion against American-led globalization. Both writers portray a
violent intimacy between the apparently diametrically opposed combatants a violent
intimacy that points to the disavowal of a narrative that is in reality partially shared. Such a
reality eludes facile liberal understandings of the multicultural model that often surrender
an account of the connections between different cultures.
Where Barakas work has largely eschewed the idea that black America functions as the
nations conscience not only as its quintessential symbol of oppression but also as the
embodiment of the possibility of its highest ideals an idea so prominent in much African
American thought Hamids novel takes up the possibility that the demonized other of
the western imagination is itself invested in the more romantic elements of Americas triumphalist story. The next section explores this idea by charting the failure of Changezs own
American dream, and the extent to which this failure can be attributed to Americas
partial embrace of the European imperial project.

Between the old world and the new

Changezs boss, Jim the number one man at Underwood Samson identifies with
Changez on the basis that he descends from some part of the body that the species doesnt
need anymore, an idea that chimes with the European imperial tendency to treat colonized
cultures as the past of the western narrative of progress. Yet Jim also advises Changez that
power comes from becoming change (97). Jim thus makes the future of the western

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A. Hartnell

narrative available to Changez, suggesting that he allow himself to be transformed by his

new environment, which in the world of business in which Changez finds himself is relentlessly forward looking. This is, of course, precisely the hallmark of an American nationalism rooted in the immigrant experience, one that differs from European forms of
nationalism in distinct ways. While the colonial project presented Europe as the worlds
future, a stance undoubtedly inherited by America as the supposed embodiment of
Europes highest ideals European colonialism was nonetheless justified on the basis of
nationalisms with an eye to the past. Though US history has been plagued by discrimination
rooted in ideas of racial and linguistic consanguinity, American nationalism has escaped
from such episodes peculiarly unscathed because it is so often articulated as the realization
of future ideals rather than as the celebration of a shared past. Americas oft-noted flight
from history finds its way into this moment in Hamids novel by virtue of the fact that it
is not just Changezs home of Pakistan but also Europe that is relegated to what Hegel
memorably described as the historical lumber-room of the old world (86).
As already suggested, the firm of Underwood Samson embodies a utilitarian version of
the melting pot, thus highlighting a national culture determined to assimilate difference only
as past, as history. If heritage is not converted to history and basically discarded, as is the
case with Changez, who after September 11 insists on wearing a beard as a marker of his
Pakistani identity, then integration on any terms is no longer possible. The novel thus
dramatizes the absolute claim that American culture places on its newly arrived immigrants,
a claim that remains peculiarly indifferent to the dynamics of cultural exchange that might
recognize the values brought to America by its migrant population. While many European
nations do, of course, place similar demands on new immigrants, the American experience
distinguishes itself by incorporating a racist and xenophobic aversion to difference with the
more appealing sense that shedding old world difference is precisely what becoming
American is all about.
That America seems to embody these push and pull factors simultaneously for the
ostensible outsider is, I suggest, what makes it so enticing for Changez. This is further
complicated by the fact that while the American state as represented by Underwood Samson
pragmatically rejects the past and casts US identity as quintessentially new, it is not immune
to currents that draw it backwards. Jim himself is the personification of the self-made man
who pulled himself up from lowly beginnings beginnings that he equates with Changezs
own. Yet in spite of his advice to Changez that he follow Jims lead by facing the future,
there are signs that Jim is himself unable to bury the past. While he lives in an ultra-modern,
trendy and minimalist loft in New York City during the week, he also entertains guests in a
beach-side property that reminds Changez of The Great Gatsby. The swing band, cocktails,
tennis courts and swimming pool that greet Jims guests are highly suggestive of the idea
that Jim, like Jay Gatz, is chasing the status that only old money the one thing that
cannot be bought or invented can bring. The novel thus strongly suggests that the supposedly meritocratic society represented by Underwood Samson is edged with an unspoken
elitism that condemns outsiders like Jim and Changez to its fringes. Hamid thus incorporates into his own novel the paradox that shapes F. Scott Fitzgeralds: that the myth of selfinvention, while surely constituting the heart of the elusive notion of the American dream,
is stalked by a classificatory logic that entirely contradicts the vision of a classless society.
This insight emerges most painfully in The Reluctant Fundamentalist via Changezs
relationship with Erica who, like Daisy in The Great Gatsby, carries the burden of
representing far more than an individual love interest. The love story in the novel between
man and woman does not simply mirror but also complicates the protagonists relationship
with America. The shock of 9/11 intensifies Ericas already introspective tendencies, and

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Journal of Postcolonial Writing

343

she increasingly struggles against a current that pulled her within herself (86). Her
symbolic turn away from Changez provides an eloquent commentary on the polemical
dimension of the novel which speaks about an America gripped by a growing and selfrighteous rage (94). The psychological state of Changezs would-be lover provides the
opportunity to explore and understand the mechanisms of rejection that only inspire anger
when related to the public, national domain. Thus Ericas disappearance into a beautiful
nostalgia offers a more sympathetic window onto the dangerous nostalgia that shapes
post-9/11 America.
Nostalgia evidently figures a kind of return. For Erica, the World Trade Center attacks
churn up old thoughts of her dead lover the waters of her mind, the novel tells us, were
murky with what had previously been ignored (83). While Erica is herself described as
stunningly regal (17), her dead lover, she claims, elicited an Old World appeal (27). It
seems unlikely that this detail is insignificant given that his name, Chris, recalls not only
Europes Christian roots but also Christopher Columbus encounter with the Americas, and
the continents status in the European imagination as an object of its own discovery. Thus
in contrast to the pragmatic sphere of Underwood Samson, Erica seemingly represents a
romantic strain in American nationalism that looks back to a European past, a past that only
partially captures the nations roots and the make-up of contemporary America.
Changezs aborted attempt to make love to Erica is the corollary of what is clearly an
aborted love affair with America itself. Lying in bed with Erica, Changez notes that she
did not respond; she did not resist. She is, quite literally, impenetrable, and it is only his
desire that leads Changez to overlook the growing wound this inflicted on my pride (89).
Quite in contrast to the crass rituals of patriotism described in the novel, Ericas demeanour
is otherworldly and seemingly corresponds to an aspect of American culture that Changez
would like to touch and make his own. So much so in fact that the next time he finds himself
in bed with Erica, Changez suggests that she pretends that he is her dead lover, Chris. The
novel reads:
It was as though we were under a spell, transported where I was Chris and she was with Chris,
and we made love with a physical intimacy that Erica and I had never enjoyed. Her body denied
mine no longer; I watched her shut eyes, and her shut eyes watched him. (105)

This painful scene seems to capture quite precisely the direction of the migrant gaze in the
novel, which looks on at an object seemingly impervious to its influence. Thus while Erica
is initially quite charmed by her idea of Changezs family life in Pakistan, her interest in
him is merely transitory, fleeting; later in the novel, Changez notes that Ericas speech has
consigned him to the past tense, and by the end of the narrative it dawns on him that
Erica had chosen not to be part of my story; her own had proven too compelling (167).
Following the logic of the novels symbolism, this is a story in which America is locked in
a nostalgic embrace with Europe, an embrace that refuses to be transformed by the postcolonial moment that Changez potentially represents.
Though rejected by it, Changez too is transfixed by this American story. For it seems to
involve a postcolonial nostalgia that his native Pakistan shares: like Pakistan, America is,
after all, a former English colony (41). Both nations, the novel suggests, associate an
Anglicized accent with wealth and power. Indeed, part of the advantage that Changez
realizes is conferred upon me by my foreignness is his ability to function in a hierarchical environment, something American youngsters unlike their Pakistani counterparts
rarely seem trained to do (42). Long before 9/11 Changez notes a typically American
undercurrent of condescension (55) and objects to the way in which his young American

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A. Hartnell

friends conduct themselves in the world as though they were its ruling class; they would
be regarded, Changez feels, as upstarts in my own country, so devoid of refinement were
they (21). Changezs imitation of Chris, then, suggests that Ericas nostalgia is in
part Changezs own. The irony is that while both America and Pakistan elicit regressive
tendencies that mimic their former colonial masters, Changez is in fact the character in the
novel who best exemplifies the Old World appeal that Erica finds in Chris.
Ericas fixation on Chris and the European past that he apparently symbolizes seemingly
stands in for a fantasy of the West: as Changez suspects, there is something fictitious about
both Americas post-9/11 nostalgia and Ericas past life with her former lover. In this way
I suggest that The Reluctant Fundamentalist points to a non-identity between Europe and
America, one that implies a bifurcation at the heart of what is so often portrayed as a unified
West. As the war on terror is rolled out, Changez notes that the United States is assuming
the hallmarks of a traditional empire, but the novels love story points to something other
than Americas straightforward repetition of European-style imperialism. As S. Sayyid
argues, the rise of Islamism points to a steady de-centring of the West, one that will be
exacerbated if a sharp distinction between American and European values and practices
were to emerge in the future (xvii). The polemical level of Hamids narration consistently
points to the Eurocentrism Sayyid identifies at the heart of the war on terror, but Hamids
allegorical exploration of American identity departs from this thesis in subtle ways.
The ways in which Changezs and Ericas love-making alludes to the violent penetration
of American space as represented by the 9/11 attacks are obvious. Changez notes a violent
undertone to their act of apparent physical intimacy, an act that, rather than bringing Erica
out of herself as Changez hopes, sends her into a spiralling cycle of introspection and,
ultimately, self-destruction. Instead of turning to face the rest of the world, Erica fixates on
the evidence of her own mortality Chris by investing in a melancholic stance that
refuses the act of mourning. Changez is humiliated and resentful. Yet Hamids allegories
are deceptively simple. It is, I suggest, the ways in which this love triangle provides an
alternative commentary on the 9/11 attacks that constitutes its real interest.
In spite of himself, part of Changez welcomes the imagery of 9/11: I was caught up in
the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees
(73). Changezs dominant feeling for Erica, in contrast, is concern for her well-being. While
Changez grows increasingly disgusted at the exercise of US state power, not only via the
war on terror but also via the states economic arm as embodied in Underwood Samson, his
affection for Erica remains constant. In this way Hamid introduces a curious disconnect
between Changezs attitudes to the non-identical but nonetheless collaborative entities of
(American) state and nation. Paradoxically, Changezs rejection by Erica engenders resentment not about Americas expansionist tendencies but almost the reverse: an isolationist
streak that turns its gaze away from the rest of the world. Indeed, Changez dreams of a proximity to Erica that goes much further than simply lying shoulder to shoulder (92). This
attitude perhaps explains his seemingly contradictory stance towards Americas role as a
superpower, an attitude which simultaneously resents the way the US asserts itself on the
world stage while critiquing Americas refusal to defend Pakistan against Indian aggression
(127).
These conflicting attitudes and identifications refuse the simplistic opposition between
the West and the rest that supports the mutually reinforcing logics of the Bush administrations war on terror and al-Qaeda. In Manila Changez notes in himself a Third World
sensibility that sets him apart from his American colleagues (67), and he casts the
American bombing of Afghanistan as aggression against a friendly neighbour. Yet the novel
also notes that Pakistan lent assistance to the United States in its war against the Taliban, a

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fact that highlights a national affiliation that arguably trumps Changezs identification with
Islam more generally an issue that is left deliberately cloudy in the novel. Thus while the
novel everywhere points to an America that gestures back to old world colonialism and
the global divisions that are its legacy, it apparently yearns for an other America; one that,
like Erica, occupies an otherworldly space, but a space that might recognize Changez as
a fellow bearer of a conflicted postcolonial legacy.
Conclusion: American exceptionalism and the question of resistance
In this way I suggest The Reluctant Fundamentalist provides a commentary not only on
post-9/11 America and the inevitably transnational nature of its internal debate about multiculturalism. In addition, the novel offers a comment on the introspective tendencies of the
post-9/11 novel itself, which, as many critics have pointed out, have tended to sublimate
contemporary anxieties about state activity, and about the states jeopardising of the safety
of its citizens, in stories about the failures of family members to protect one another
(Holloway 108). As David Holloway claims, these novels repress history as a function of
trauma and enact a central tension between the outward pull of public history as literary
theme and the inward pull of interiorised narrative form (11719). This tension is selfconsciously dramatized in The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
This should give pause to those who read The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a straightforward condemnation of the American response to 9/11. For the novel points to a weakness
on the part not just of the hijackers seeking to assert themselves against an American superpower but of America as well. Hamid navigates what Fritz Breithaupt describes as the
taboo of September 11 (79) empathizing with the hijackers a taboo carefully evaded by
much US 9/11 fiction which has largely focused on domestic trauma and thus a narrative of
American innocence. Yet Hamids novel is much more than a simple inversion of this story.
Changez does, of course, fit the stereotypical profile of an Islamist terrorist: a highly
educated migrant from the Muslim world disaffected by a sense of rejection on the part of
the West. Yet there is another potentially more revealing meaning to his reluctant fundamentalism, one that considerably complicates the possibilities of resistance in the face of US
ideology. While the novels polemic explodes the myth of American innocence, the story of
Erica leaves it intact. Her inward eye is incapable of embracing Changezs narrative, just as
the wider political culture is incapable of valuing Muslim lives on a par with those of
Americans. Yet Ericas isolation is not only sympathetically drawn but curiously alluring.
She remains completely impervious to Changezs non-violent and indeed very gentle
protestations, for her own notably self-destructive narrative wields far more power. In
following her trail Changez himself reluctantly participates in the compelling drama of
American innocence. It is not Erica herself but rather the ghost of Chris that leads her down
this dangerous path. While undoubtedly Changez desires to open Erica up in an attempt
to interrupt this self-destructive drive, I suggest that the novel maintains the logic of American exceptionalist discourse by emphasizing that Changezs rival is not America itself but
rather the Europe symbolized by Ericas deceased lover.
At the institution to which Erica retreats before her suspected suicide, Changez is told
by Ericas nurse that youre the one who upsets her most. Because youre the most real,
and you make her lose her balance (133). While mirroring some psychoanalytic readings
of the 9/11 attacks, this idea also suggests that Changez is the ideal vehicle by which
Erica might be wrested away from Chris and thus made more truly American. It is one of
the paradoxes of American exceptionalism which, in its most basic form, is a story
of American specialness that while it has historically collaborated with notions of

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346

A. Hartnell

superiority and racial chauvinism, the narrative partly rests on asserting a difference from
Europe, a difference that is often articulated precisely in terms of the transcendence of
these kinds of hierarchies.
Nowhere is this idea more potently symbolized than in the 2008 election of Barack
Obama as the first black president of the United States. Obama presented himself to the
electorate as the embodiment of Americas immigrant experience. While his vision of
America has been more attuned to cultural and ethnic differences than many of his presidential predecessors, Obama has powerfully articulated a shared vision of American identity
that holds firm to the idea of a common good often absent from models of multiculturalism.
In the wake of the Bush administrations war on terror that alienated people all around the
globe, Obama has attempted to re-awaken the idea that the United States might represent an
inherently anti-imperial and progressive project. Obamas appeal has proved particularly
strong in Europe, arguably because his Kenyan familys experiences at the hands of British
colonial rule make him an oddly redemptive figure in relation to the European colonial
project in a way that mirrors his more obvious role as a redemptive figure in the context
of American racism. Unsurprisingly though, the evidence of Obamas writing and experience suggests that he cannot quite return the warmth felt for him by Europeans.5 In this
sense Obama embodies the nations better history yearned for by Changez in The
Reluctant Fundamentalist, one that I have suggested rests on an assertion of American
difference from a Europe marred by the legacy of colonialism.
And yet while jettisoning much of the baggage of Bushs war on terror, Obamas
presidency may in part be defined by the war in Afghanistan, to which the president has
committed a massive surge in troop levels. In a speech made on 1 December 2009, Obama
insisted that unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination, while
re-summoning the national spirit of unity in the aftermath of 9/11 to bolster his recommitment to the war in Afghanistan (Remarks by the President). In so doing Obama
disarmingly brings together the widely hated spectre of US state power with his own brand
of American exceptionalism that has re-captured the romance of America for many both
within and beyond the nations shores. Thus Obama seems to embody the deeply paradoxical appeal of America elaborated in Hamids novel.
In an interview, Mohsin Hamid mentions the desirability of a Martin Luther King
approach over and above a Malcolm X approach, invoking the history of African
American resistance to white supremacy as a kind of metaphor for looking at global relations between the United States and the Muslim world (qtd in Aitkenhead). Hamids somewhat reductive appropriation of King and Malcolm nonetheless makes an important point
about the need to establish common ground between the only apparently polarized entities
of East and West, a need that particularly the frame narrative of The Reluctant Fundamentalist insistently points to. But I suggest that this comparison also points to the larger function of the novel, which rigorously critiques US foreign policy by calling on America to live
up to its founding ideals in a move that recalls not just Kings call on America to renew
itself but Obamas too. In this way Hamid echoes a long line of African American thinkers
who have challenged US racism by stressing that the true genius of America is not that
America is, but that America will be; not that we are perfect, but that we can make ourselves
more perfect (Remarks of Senator Barack Obama). This is not to suggest that Hamid
sticks to the script of an exceptionalist narrative. Rather, he insists on the potentially radical
nature of the American project by suggesting that its meaning eschews fixed understandings
of identity based on race or place and thus transcends its old world beginnings. In this way
the novels resistance constitutes a deeply paradoxical and conflicted identification with
Americas self-understanding as a postcolonial nation.

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Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

See Hamid, It Had to be a Sign.

See Haddad.
See Mukherjee.
See Harlow and Dundes; and Dawson, Lacewell, Cohen.
See Obama, Dreams From My Father (299302).

Notes on contributor
Anna Hartnell is Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. Her
research focuses on race and religion in US culture, and her forthcoming book, Rewriting Exodus:
American Futures from Du Bois to Obama, is to be published by Pluto Press.

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