Driving While Brown: The American Road Trip in H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy

ABSTRACT

H.M. Naqvi’s novel Home Boy features three men of Pakistani background who embark on a cab ride from New York City to Westbrook, Connecticut. They wish to check on an elusive character, Mohammed Shah (a.k.a. the Pakistani Gatsby or the Shaman), who is missing after 9/11. I analyze this journey, known as the “Shaman Run,” as an American road trip. For critical analysis, I synthesize Nancy Leong’s concepts of “open road” and “traffic stop narratives,” highlighting the racialization of American roads, with Sarah Sharma’s notion of “Brown Space” regarding the post-9/11 criminalization of cabdrivers with ties to the Global South. I argue that the Shaman Run begins as an open road narrative but is transformed into a traffic stop narrative overlaid with Brown Space, leading to a reconsideration of the possibilities of open road narratives. Naqvi incorporates elements of road trip fiction in Home Boy to recount how certain Americans did not regard Muslims as fellow mourners in the aftermath of 9/11. Writers and filmmakers from Pakistan and the Pakistani Diaspora have depicted the othering of Muslims in post-9/11 America, but Naqvi is distinctive in foregrounding this theme by repurposing a well-known genre of American literature.

Acknowledgments

I thank the anonymous peer reviewer and executive editor at Critique for their comments. I am deeply indebted to Ann Amicucci, Arthur Evenchik, Jennifer Mehta, Krupa Shandilya, Paul Hanson, Rebecca Laroche, and Stephen Carter for providing feedback on various drafts of this paper. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the British Postcolonial and Commonwealth Studies conference (February 2021) and the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies conference (June 2019). I first wrote about Home Boy in my dissertation “Cosmopolitanism, Fundamentalism, and Empire: 9/11 Fiction and Film from Pakistan and the Pakistani Diaspora” (Ohio State U, 2013). I am grateful to my committee members Pranav Jani, James Phelan, Martin Joseph Ponce, and the late Sean O’Sullivan for being such incredible mentors.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In the emerging critical conversation on this novel, scholars have shown that Home Boy represents the fallout from 9/11 by analyzing specific themes, narrative strategies, and elements of genre. For the post-9/11 normalization and legalization of the economic vulnerability of brown Muslims, see al Zayed (69–70); for reliable narration in Home Boy as a corrective to the unintended consequences of unreliable narration in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), see Hai “H.M.” (116–117); and for Home Boy as an ethnic bildungsroman, see Daily-Bruckner (221).

2. I highlight here some of the scholarly studies on non-canonical road trip literature . Ronald Primeau writes that “[c]ulturally diverse road protagonists … are likely to continue modifying crucial elements of the road genre [as] women and minority authors … [plan] different kinds of itineraries” (125); Katie Millis focuses on road narratives that highlight post-World War II “emancipation in social relations” (3); Kris Lackey notes that African-American road texts challenge the notion of roads as democratic spaces that “[transcend] class and color” (130); Alexandra Ganser writes that late twentieth century road fictions by women from North America reveal and interrogate “the hegemonic construction of gendered space” (18); and Nicole Dib studies “twentieth- and twenty-first century” multiethnic American authors who reexamine conventional “racialized and gendered encounters” by deploying the road trip motif in some of their works (1).

3. Sharma also writes that liberals romanticize the taxi as “‘public sphere on wheels’” at the expense of the “embodied taxi driver,” but this aspect of her theoretical argument falls beyond the scope of my paper (“Taxi” 185).

4. The idea of “the clash of civilizations” was first articulated by Bernard Lewis in 1964 and amplified by Samuel Huntington in 1993 (Trumpbour 93).

5. On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush delivered a speech, which Chuck watches as “either a repeat telecast or a live event” in the Shaman’s home (Naqvi 118). Echoing Huntington, President Bush casts the War on Terror as a civilizational obligation to preserve “progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom” (n.p.). To be fair, President Bush adopts a measured tone in his speech. He refrains from painting all Muslims with a broad brush when he mentions “prayers” being said “in English, Hebrew, and Arabic;” “the prayers of sympathy [being] offered at a mosque in Cairo;” and the fact that “citizens of 80 other nations … died with [Americans] [including] dozens of Pakistanis” (n.p.).

6. Birte Heidemann notes that Hamid Dabashi and Daniel Varisco fill gaps in Edward Said’s Orientalism by developing the idea of “counter-Orientalism” (289–290, 297). Counter-Orientalism refers to the “rebellious agency” of “the subaltern, the colonized, [and] the dominated,” which Said ostensibly overlooked (Dabashi and Varisco qtd. in Heidemann 290).

7. For the struggle of cabdrivers – the majority of whom immigrated from the Global South – to achieve financial independence in a neoliberal economy, see Hodges (“The Lease” 147–177) and Mathew (79–82).

8. The court case that set this precedent was Terry vs. Ohio (1968; Leong 325).

9. Trig’s insinuation that arming a vehicle is a uniquely post-9/11 Muslim ploy overlooks the American intelligence community’s weaponization of the automobile in the late twentieth century. Drawing on Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars (2004), Mike Davis notes that the Afghan fighters who used car bombs during their anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s were trained by the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, and were supported by the then CIA director, William Casey (93). Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, “the car bomb proliferated across the planet like a kudzu vine of destruction, taking root in the thousand fissures of ethnic and religious enmity that globalization has paradoxically revealed” (188–189).

10. For an excellent analysis of how Naqvi’s representation of Chuck’s interrogation shapes the judgment of the novel’s readers, see Hai “H.M” (133–135).

11. Maira first published this piece in summer 2001 in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society (3.3: 65–86)

12. Sarah Sharma’s concept of Brown Space is influenced by Kumarini Silva’s essay “Brown: from identity to identification,” which appeared in the journal Cultural Studies, 24.2 (2010): 167–182. Besides Silva’s indirect influence on my paper, here I engage directly with her subsequent work Brown Threat.

13. Eleven filmmakers from around the world, including Mira Nair, made 11-minute short films focusing on 9/11, collectively referred to as 11’09”1 (2002). Though Nair is Indian American, her film is based on a Pakistani American family.

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Suhaan Kiran Mehta

Suhaan Kiran Mehta is currently an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He works on postcolonial literature and cinema with a particular interest in South Asia. He has published scholarly articles on Indian and Pakistani Anglophone novels, plays, short stories, and graphic novels. He has taught previously at Case Western Reserve University, the Ohio State University, and St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai.