Finding Common Cause

Abstract

In recent postcolonial discourse, planetarity and planetary humanism have been offered as potentially effective, though often ignored, responses to intractable global antagonisms. This essay explores whether stylistically experimental postcolonial literary texts might provide a valuable narrative archive toward the cultivation of such unconsidered responses. As a test case, I track the techniques through which Mohsin Hamid’s speculative novel Exit West reveals and produces common cause between familiar contemporary adversaries. Building on Leela Gandhi’s notion of common cause in relation to ahimsaic, or non-violent, historiography, this essay concludes that experimental fiction produced within specific contexts – anticolonial, postcolonial, neocolonial, marginalized, totalitarian, diasporic – provides a legitimate narrative source to be used toward an ethical refiguration of future planetary life.

• Common cause
• counter-askesis
• experimental postcolonial fiction
• Gandhi, Leela
• Hamid, Mohsin
• planetarity

Notes

1 “I propose”, Spivak states, “the planet to overwrite the globe” (2003, 72). While it may not be possible to fully replace global-thought with “planet-thought”, it is vital – indeed, a matter of planetary survival – to “persistently educate ourselves into this peculiar mindset” (72–73). Following Spivak, I consider ways in which fiction and comparative literary analysis might allow us to cultivate this urgent mode of thought and, potentially, action. For a selection of essays on planetarity in the humanities, building on the theories of Spivak and others, see Elias and Moraru (2015).

2 M. K. Gandhi’s theorization of ahimsa, or non-violence, in his Indian Home Rule, or Hind Swaraj (1910) is the model for Leela Gandhi’s ahimsaic historiography (2014, 153–154). For a rich discussion of M. K. Gandhi’s ahimsa, see Ganguly and Docker (2007).

3 Palestinian Israeli writer Emile Habiby’s 1974 experimental novel, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, would be an especially fascinating work to read from this perspective; as would Nigerian American writer Teju Cole’s Open City; Iraqi American writer Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer; Arundhati Roy’s fiction; to name only a few.

4 For the role of modernist fiction and cosmopolitanism in the transformation of early twentieth-century European communities, see Berman (2001).

5 For an analysis of “planetary modernisms”, see Friedman (2015).

6 Bruce Sterling (1989) coined the term “slipstream” to describe “a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange”. One of the techniques he mentions includes “sharp violations of viewpoint limits”, which Hamid’s doors (to be discussed shortly) certainly produce.

7 Nevertheless, slipstream’s tendency to break the rules of conventional science fiction, not to mention realism, and to “mak[e] the familiar strange or the strange familiar”, does resonate with some of the key tenets of modernism (Kelly and Kessel 2006, xiii). For a discussion of links between science fiction and Victor Shklovsky’s formalist notion of defamiliarization, see Spiegel (2008).

8 Hamid’s use of the second person (Mildorf 2016) and his adaptation of the self-help genre in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (Gui 2013), as well as his use of dramatic monologue, temporal leaps, and ambiguous conclusion in The Reluctant Fundamentalist also could be considered as experimental features that produce or reveal common cause. For a reading of The Reluctant Fundamentalist as an example of “critical global fiction” that challenges expectations about “otherness” and “elsewheres” toward advancing unconventional recognitions, see Darda (2014).

9 Like the doors, mobile phones and the Internet are similarly described as “portals” facilitating the connectivity of the planet, as even this early scene alludes to (Hamid 2017, 8, 39, 57). However, unlike magical doors, mobile phones and the Internet are only as reliable as the signal through which they are carried (57, 140–141). Far better, Exit West suggests, to rely on human connections (118) or celestial signals (140) than digital ones.

10 On Said’s analysis, Conrad’s formally complex novella posits two possible postcolonial visions: one that is ahistorical and continues to view the post-World War II world in imperialist and Eurocentric terms; another that historicizes imperialism and therefore is open to alternative, non-imperialist futures (1993, 25–26). Said identifies “Conrad’s self-consciously circular narrative forms” as “encouraging us to sense the potential of a reality that seemed inaccessible to imperialism, just beyond its control, and that only well after Conrad’s death in 1924 acquired a substantial presence” (28–29). It is this second vision suggested by Conrad’s form that Hamid’s allusion to Heart of Darkness evokes and, by way of portal doors, extends.

11 Other experimental features in Exit West that also reveal common cause include the use of “as” and “while” as conjunctions to indicate temporal simultaneity in far-flung locations (Hamid 2017, 7, 9, 29, 109); the use of paragraph-long sentences to produce a decelerated temporal effect (an example on almost every page); repetition of words within sentences, again as a way to slow down cognition, sharpen critical focus, and identify unlikely links (96, 175); and the description of phenomena in paradoxically opposed terms, demonstrating how both descriptions make an unconventional kind of sense (87, 90, 103, 104).

12 In a brief article, Daniel O’Gorman (2012) identifies Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a Pakistani post-9/11 novel that expresses planetarity.

13 The novel does not assert that the only alternative to dying in war is exiting west. Rather, it suggests that unless a different historiography (ahimsaic) is cultivated by those in power, along with alternative conceptualizations of spatial geography and temporality (through which may emerge a more planetary ethical perspective), the cycle of war and migratory movement will likely persist. Finding common cause, therefore, becomes urgent both in moments of crisis and before such moments erupt. For a reading of The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a novel that defies the expected logic of immigration – east to west – and “its supposedly inherent privileges”, see Singh (2012, 42).

14 The planetary point of view elicited by the photos for Saeed and Nadia, even before their exit west through portal doors, reveals, like the telescope, that such a view is readily available to us, as inhabitants of this planet, if we are attentive. Hamid’s narrative style makes this point of view explicit, toward a more ethical consideration of past effects on present and future life. French photographer Thierry Cohen’s Darkened Cities (2010–) is likely the photographic series in question.

15 Consider, in this regard, Raymond Williams’ articulation of the dominant, residual, and emergent (1977, 121–127).

16 The overlap between birth and death is made explicit in Hamid’s description of the experience of passing through the doors: “It was said in those days that passage was both like dying and being born” (2017, 104).

17 For an analysis of The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a novel that critiques the often hypocritical notion of liberal tolerance and offers instead a more neutral and indifferent attitude as a way out of the bind produced by terrorism and the war on terrorism, see Seval (2017, 122). The benefits of adopting a neutral state, expressed by the Turkish word hosgörü, resonates with the extinguishing of love, as expressed by Hugo of St. Victor and identified in this essay as a means of finding common cause (Seval 2017, 120).

18 For a relevant Deleuzo-Spinozist conception of materiality in terms of degree (quantitative differences) rather than kind (qualitative differences), see Al-Nakib (2008).