Migrating from terror: The postcolonial novel after September 11

Abstract

Following 9/11, public rhetoric in the United States equated Islam with terror. This equation permitted the internment and deportation of Muslim immigrants and lent inevitability to the invasion not only of Afghanistan but also of Iraq. When even liberal newspapers and Democratic politicians supported the war on terror, one looked to literature for an alternative. Yet several novels published in the aftermath of 9/11 – John Updike’s The Terrorist, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, and Alexie Sherman’s Flight – inadvertently reinforced the dominant rhetoric. Set in a United States where virtually every Muslim in sight was a terrorist, they could at best hope to make the violence understandable. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men (2007) offer a postcolonial perspective on revolutionary violence. Where the war on terror opposes East and West, these novels internalize a conflict in ordinary people between their cultural and religious heritage and western values and amenities. These novels tease apart identities the war on terror fuses: Muslim and terrorist, say, or American and right‐wing neocolonialist. The hesitations, qualifications, and complexities of lived experience become alternatives to the lethal polarities of public rhetoric.

Keywords:

• Kiran Desai
• Mohsin Hamid
• Hisham Matar
• war on terror
• September 11 attacks
• American perceptions of Islam

Notes

1. Whose bloody life ended in York in AD 211. De Imperatoribus Romanis. An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Emperors. ⟨http://www.roman-emperors.org/sepsev.htm⟩, retrieved 30 April 2010.

2. For many years the family believed that Jaballa Matar had been killed in a 1996 prison riot, but recent reports suggest that he may still be alive. For more information on Jaballa Matar, including a reference to a BBC radio report on his case that aired 21 April 2010, see ⟨http://www.freematar.org⟩, retrieved 14 May 2010.

3. See, for example, David Horowitz’s call for American college students to observe 22–26October 2007 as Islamo‐fascism Awareness Week by staging sit‐ins in the offices of Women’s Studies programs accused of failing to condemn Muslim repression of women.