In Conversation
Seeing the shadows within
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Mohsin Hamid on the reasons why he chose to write The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a dramatic monologue and leave it deliberately polemical. SUCHITRA BEHAL
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Photo: AP
Holding a mirror up to prejudice: Mohsin Hamid.
You could easily mistake him for an investment banker. Slight, bald and bespectacled, Mohsin Hamid. doesn’t look the part of a serious writer. Trained at Harvard Law School and Princeton before that, he’s been a management guy f
or years. But something gives and Hamid wants to write. So write he does. Toiling away for seven years before producing his first novel
Moth Smoke
. Which wins rave reviews both sides of the Atlantic. He’s tipped to become the next big voice in fiction. But then there is a long and deafening silence. Hamid retreats and many readers remember him as the guy who wrote that book.
But seven years later, he’s back with a vengeance. The world has changed meanwhile and so has Hamid. His subject this time is delicate, deals with an issue that has vexed people across continents . Hamid is no longer in a full time jo
b. He’s moved from the country he lived and studied in, America, to London. He now freelances as a part time management consultant — just enough to cover the rent and electricity bills. The book took him seven years to write, is a slimmer volume but once again Hamid has hit a jackpot. “This time I think I can quit my job,” he chirps, “and take to writing full time.”
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
is not a pretty book. No, there is no violence but there is a certain stealth in its telling. That requires guts and a tremendous insight into a difficult situation. Hamid seems to have both and has employed his technique to perfection. 9/11 change
d many things for many people. To quote Hamid, “I wanted to explore in fiction my own growing desire to leave (America). It was confusing territory for me, because I loved and still love so much about America and yet was still uncertain about staying on.” The book mirrors this. Excerpts:
The transformation of Changez is almost insidious. On one level it seems related to the larger issue and on another with his not-happening relationship with Erica.
I think that the personal and political are always intertwined. And in Changez’s case, there is the political narrative about what he’s feeling about the world alongside the personal narrative of what’s happening with Erica and he has inside him these fissures, he has this mix of being a very insecure person but a very proud person. He has this affair with this woman Erica and if it had worked out perhaps things would have been different for him. I think all of that mix is what makes his story.
You’ve choosen a difficult genre for this book. Was it a natural choice once you thought of your character or was this deliberate? Also there is only one viewpoint here, as if you are deliberately keeping out the American from saying
anything or offering any explanation.
I did several drafts for seven years and it certainly didn’t start off as a monologue. In fact it didn’t turn into a monologue till 2005, but eventually when I came along the monologue form I tried it out. What I liked about it was, firstly, it created a kind of tension, a sort of ambiguity, which led one to wonder, who are these two people, why are they speaking to each other, what are they thinking about each other? Did they want to hurt each other, harm each other? And that for me captured the tension in the world. Between the Muslim world and the Western world. The next reason for not having the American speak is the space that the reader gets to move into. The reader starts to identify with the American and step into the novel; but as you say, you only get to hear one side of the story and I think unlike a first person narrative where you still only hear one side of a story, in dramatic monologue it’s a first person narrative told to somebody else and so the fact that that person is silent is a signal to you. It signals self-consciously its biased nature, that you are hearing a one-sided account. And that was very intentional. I think I wanted it to signal that bias.
Why?
Partly because I wanted it to reflect the fact that so often the media we get today is often biased, that what we get to hear is really one side but it doesn’t tell us that we’re hearing only one side. Also because I think that this hyper-biased account can be very thought provoking sometimes. It is often interesting as a writer not to explore the nuanced balanced perspective which pits one side against the other. But very strongly exploring just one opinion clearly indicates that it is not the only real opinion and it is not even a particularly fair opinion. Then let the reader react to that and come up with the other side as it were or the balancing act.
The non-ending of the book is actually very scary and leaves the reader to imagine the worst possible scenario. If you were to give the story an end what would it be?
Well, I never thought what the ending would be after what I wrote. Partly because I thought that if I determine an ending after that I would write the novel reflecting that ending. So I wanted to deliberately, in my mind, end where it ended. Also the ending of the novel is meant to reflect back at the reader, the readers’ own paranoia and tension and fears. We live in a world where actually few of us are killed by terrorists or very few of us are killed violently in this way. Most of us are not killed by human beings; we’re killed by cholesterol, heart attacks, cancer and these things so we shouldn’t be so afraid of each other. So the novel tries to create these shadows, take you through them and leave you with your sense of fear of shadows and ask the question, should I be afraid of shadows? Why am I so afraid of shadows? What have I been left with here? I’ve been left with my own fears brought out on me.
So what you’re saying is that the world is increasingly a fearful place in our own minds.
It’s fearful of the wrong things is what I’m saying.
But we always imagine the worst in any situation…
We’ve been led to do so. Partly we are pre-conditioned to do so and partly we have been brainwashed. By the media, by politicians. This notion that we should be so scared of each other is in so many people’s interest. It sells newspapers, it gets people elected. You know nobody sells newspapers or gets elected by saying, “You know, the world is complicated.” That slogan just doesn’t fly. That is the truth obviously. And these over simplifications are very often completely destructive.
When 9/11 happened how did you react?
I was devastated. I had friends there and my reaction was at a completely different level.
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