Exclusion, empathy, and Islam: The Runaways in the literary marketplace

ABSTRACT

With the location of the global literary marketplace in western centres, post-9/11 interest in anglophone Pakistani literature comes with the fetishization of minoritized identities. Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways combats Islamophobic arguments about the Islamic origins of radicalization, showing that it emerges out of exclusion stemming from material facts of race, class, and gender. However, the novel's place in the literary marketplace complicates Bhutto's efforts to elicit empathy from readers. This article argues that although The Runaways is ideologically opposed to Eurocentric cosmopolitan liberalism, it occasionally falters in its representation of Pakistan and Islamic practices. The novel’s empathy is invested in universalism, suggesting a blind spot which is attributable to the global literary marketplace’s anticipation of a secular cosmopolitan “elite” readership. Through analysis of Bhutto’s novel, this article explores the possibility of productive empathy, and interrogates the ethics of reading and writing the other.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• Islam
• Fatima Bhutto
• literary marketplace
• cosmopolitanism
• radicalization

There is a well-documented tendency amongst western readers to view novels about Muslims as informative accounts. While this tendency spiked following Huntington’s (1996) clash of civilizations thesis and in the wake of 9/11, it has its roots in early ideas about supposed Muslim backwardness from the Middle Ages (Kahf 1999, 4–8). Before the emergence of debates on world literature and the marketplace (Apter 2009; Mufti 2016; Brouillette 2007; Slaughter 2007; Huggan 2001), Gayatri C. Spivak (1985) identified the tendency to read what was then referred to as “Third World literature” for insights into the lives of the other as “information-retrieval” (235–236). More recently, Peter Morey (2018, 6) has criticized this tendency to approach “non-Western literatures as essentially anthropological in nature” in the current context of the Muslim novel. Given the prevalence of this approach towards the anglophone Pakistani novel (Marlowe 2007, n.p.; King 2007, 683–688), it is not surprising that novelists want to challenge this notion. Fatima Bhutto’s (2018c) The Runaways, a timely and urgent tale of three teenagers who enlist in an ISIS-like terrorist organization called the Ummah Movement, appears in the post-9/11 sociopolitical landscape as what could be called a “literary response to Islamophobia” (Morey 2018, 3), in that it subverts Islamophobic expectations of difference. The novel offers a nuanced look at its radicalized young protagonists, eschewing the cliches that ordinarily characterize radicalization narratives.¹

Indeed, The Runaways does not dwell on ideas of a clash of civilizations or oppressed womanhood, or hold up visions of an idealized liberal cosmopolitanism. Instead, it offers a secular explanation for radicalization, attributing it to exclusion, not religious fervour. The novel contends that exclusion is tied to issues of identity and situated within existing sociopolitical conditions. While the protagonists seem at first to be characterized by what Chandra Mohanty (1988) called “Third World difference” – which flattens those in the Global South into an oppressed monolith – the narrative makes it apparent that their motivations are fundamentally human though they are placed in extraordinary circumstances. This appeal to a common human experience subverts Islamophobic and Eurocentric expectations of fundamental difference but also attempts to generate empathy from readers by means of a universalist approach. I argue that this focus on eliciting empathy – “a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect” – from readers means the novel is unable to completely escape the expectation of a secular western addressee (Keen 2007, 4). As a result, The Runaways is not just a useful attempt to disrupt reductive narratives of difference. Rather, it raises awareness of the need to remain cognizant of the politics of eliciting empathy for minoritized characters from primarily western readers.

The three teenage protagonists in The Runaways have vastly different origins but share a sense of “unbelonging” due to their exclusion from society because of material conditions including race, class, and gender. The first, Anita Rose, grows up in a minority Christian community in a Karachi slum while her mother barely ekes out a living working as a maalish wali (masseuse) at the homes of the wealthy. The second, Monty, grows up on the other side of Karachi, shrinking under the scrutiny of his overbearing father, an unscrupulous businessman from an extremely wealthy family. Finally, Sunny, a Portsmouth teenager of Indian origin, experiences marginalization because of his race, class, and sexuality. While Sunny’s immigrant father had left India for England to give his son greater opportunities, his struggles fill Sunny with resentment for Britain’s exclusionary attitudes. Crucially, the journeys of all three protagonists delink radicalization from religion. However, instead of removing religion from the equation entirely, Bhutto places it in context alongside the other factors that inform her characters’ worlds. As such, The Runaways manages to sidestep any simplistic explanations for radicalization. Among the themes the novel explores are identity (a postcolonial touchstone), belonging/unbelonging, and witnessing/testimony, all of which are intimately connected to debates on empathy and literature.

Exclusion and its discontents

The impact of the marketplace on the development of world literature and the postcolonial novel is palpable. Indeed, the literary marketplace has a complicated relationship with diversity as the expansion of publishers into the global market impacts the literature produced (Brouillette 2007, 57–59; Slaughter 2007, 35; Huggan 2001, viii–ix). Specifically, as Sarah Brouillette (2007, 58) has noted, the more that literature “associable with specific national or ethnic identities” enters the market, the more that market can justify its dominance through claims to “inclusivity and universality”. The market desires literature that is identifiable with specific national or ethnic identities but also capable of promoting a universalizing ethic. Postcolonial literature is burdened by the expectation that it should satisfy this association in a way that appeals to readers in the Global North. As a result, much of the writing that falls under the label of the postcolonial novel is now defined by certain shared characteristics, as Brouillette identifies. Written in English, such fiction is “politically liberal and suspicious of nationalism; it uses a language of exile, hybridity, and ‘mongrel’ subjectivity” (61). These themes are identifiable in The Runaways, and can be connected to the social positioning of its author.

The circumstances of the postcolonial author require particular scholarly attention because the postcolonial author is transformed, “willingly or not, [into a] cultural spokesperson” by the marketplace (Huggan 2001, 34). As a member of the prominent political Bhutto family and a cosmopolitan literary celebrity educated in the US and UK, Bhutto commands attention. If the postcolonial author is necessarily positioned as a marketing tool, then someone of Bhutto’s background must have a particularly potent utility (Brouillette 2007, 177). Certainly, it is easy to see a personal impetus behind the themes of human suffering, belonging/unbelonging, and witnessing that define The Runaways, considering that these concerns are also central to Bhutto’s (2010) memoir and life as a public figure. The marketplace can present Bhutto as someone who can – to borrow Timothy Brennan’s (1989) assertion about western-resident Indian writers – provide novelty as well as cosmopolitan familiarity. It is also worth reflecting on the relationship of class to the figure of the postcolonial author. In the recent resurgence of debates about world literature as an elite commodity, Brouillette has called attention to the “deceptively simple fact that reading and writing literature are elite activities” (2015, 98).

While The Runaways exhibits the expected characteristics of cosmopolitan, politically liberal, postcolonial fiction, Bhutto also attempts to critique inequality. She is careful to home in on class tensions and religious discrimination. In an interview, Bhutto talks about how she thinks Monty’s world of “privilege and comfort and ease [ … ] needs to be investigated and questioned thoroughly” (2018b, n.p.). She adds that she wants to present Monty’s and Anita’s worlds “as they are in conflict with each other, [as] they exist in great tension to each other” (n.p.). Class and religion coexist in uncomfortable proximity: where Anita’s – later called Layla – and Sunny’s religious backgrounds (Christianity and Islam, respectively) minoritize and marginalize them, Monty’s family benefits from such divisions. The first chapter juxtaposes Monty’s mother’s performative religiosity with the history of their family wealth: Monty’s father has “made his money divvying up parcels of the country’s promised land”, encouraging Parsis to sell prime real estate cheaply in the post-Partition chaos and “fudging the papers of abandoned Hindu homes” (Bhutto 2018c, 55, 56). Religious identity, then, becomes a material condition that can either further, or sabotage, material wealth.

Bhutto investigates radicalization through this novel to offer an explanation that shifts the focus from unique, religious explanations towards shared aspects of the human condition. While “Islamophobia fetishizes Islam as the cause and explanation of violence”, the novel pushes back by emphasizing factors that are grounded in personal life experiences rather than religious beliefs (Morey 2018, 247). This shift allows for the novel to invest in what Suzanne Keen (2007, 114) has termed “the possibility of universal feelings shared by humankind” which carries with it “an optimistic program for transcending cultural differences”. In interviews, Bhutto frames The Runaways as an exercise in understanding the universal forces behind radicalization and extending empathy to its victims. She offers:

People are not radicalized because they are Muslim or because they are Hindu or Christian. People are radicalized because they are cast out to the peripheries of their societies and are isolated. They are alienated and made to feel they are somehow different, that something intrinsic about that society or nation doesn’t apply to them. [ … ] It has very little to do with religion. It has to do with power, with belonging, with loneliness and very much to do with pain. (Bhutto 2018b, n.p.)

In making legible the universal feelings of alienation, loneliness, and pain these otherwise different characters experience, Bhutto aims to inspire a shared affect in readers. She articulates the novel–empathy connection clearly in a number of interviews (Bhutto 2008, 2018b, 2019). Most strikingly, answering a question about the biggest challenge while writing The Runaways, Bhutto tweeted: “I thought a lot about [ … ] how you can empathize with someone on a human level while disagreeing very strongly with their actions and their impulses” (2018a, n.p.). In her desire to call attention to the possibility of empathizing with different, even flawed, people, Bhutto is optimistic about the ethical impact of empathy. This is also true of other novelists who connect novel reading with empathy and intend to use their writing to draw the world’s attention to a problem (Keen 2007, 121, 140). Critiquing the problem of unequal material conditions, The Runaways also describes the affects that arise from these conditions, such as the pain from unbelonging, as universal feelings.

Since Bhutto aims to inspire empathy for her characters, it makes sense that she draws on the conventions of the bildungsroman, a form that allows her to trace the trajectory of their development. Bildungsroman scholars observe that the form documents the tension between the individuality emerging from a culture of self-determination, and the socialization that modern bourgeois society demands (Moretti 1985, 115). The postcolonial Bildungsroman sees this tension as “intensified by the shadow of colonialism, [ … and] widespread disenfranchisement” (Hoagland 2019, 220). The Runaways inherits this intensification in its capturing of the devastating consequences of exclusion based on sociopolitical events, prejudice against minorities, and their disenfranchisement. Monty’s, Anita’s (Layla’s), and Sunny’s stories are ultimately doomed Bildungsromane as they are unable to achieve the ideal of self-determination precisely because of reasons related to unbelonging that result from their political circumstances. The novel insists that it is not ideology or religion that drives these characters but universal human impulses. Before they encounter and enact tangible violence, they each experience different forms of psychological violence arising from their exclusion. In this, the novel appears to say that the three are just like “us”, the readers, but their circumstances do not allow them to develop their selves in productive and ethical ways. In subverting expectations by emphasizing these characters’ human desires and tying their exclusion to material facts of race, class, and gender, this novel appears as a plea to extend empathy to them, and to others like them.

The Runaways is preoccupied with inclusion and exclusion, including the desperation borne out of the latter. Sunny initially faces exclusion because of his Indian, Muslim, and working-class origins. He is subject to racial abuse growing up and, as a teenager, experiences unbelonging based on his sexuality. At school, his wealthier crush Ben, who is half-Pakistani and seeks to project a white, far-right identity, owing to his own desire to belong, makes jokes about sleeper cells and texts Sunny “[e]xploding-bomb emoji[s]” (Bhutto 2018c, 127). At home, his cousin Oz preys on Sunny’s desperation to belong and recruits him into a terrorist organization, only to become a reformer himself. In Oz’s propaganda, Sunny sees a chance to belong because it offers him an opportunity to be part of something, a unity of “good brothers” who stand in opposition to an ideal of assimilation from which they have been excluded (Bhutto 2018c, 141, 164, 166). There is the sense that Oz’s efforts are successful because Sunny is desperate to belong. This is apparent in the words “Sunny knew one thing: no one had ever seen through all the fog he put up around himself, no one had ever touched upon the heart of it all – the pain, the loneliness, the confusion. No one until Oz” (169). That Oz is the only one who makes Sunny feel as though he belongs is why Oz’s betrayal later hits Sunny so hard. It means Sunny can no longer find community with him and is left to satisfy his desire for community and belonging by becoming one with the Ummah Movement and capitulating to the group’s values entirely.

Additionally, the novel paints Sunny as vulnerable to Oz’s propaganda because of repressed queer desire. Sunny perceives his reality as someone who experiences attraction to other men as an aberration that adds to the disconnection and rejection he already feels. As such, he latches onto the terrorist organization as a force to purify himself.² This development reaches a disturbing conclusion when, near the book’s close, Sunny graduates to enjoying the act of killing when he beheads the mayor of Nineveh, Iraq, because it allows him to possess another man entirely: “I inherited his world when I spilled that filthy blood [ … ]. He’s mine now” (Bhutto 2018c, 495), he gloats. As Monty listens in startled horror, Sunny announces: “I killed a man, I ate his soul” (495). Sunny’s visceral glee in murder and his choice to frame it as eating a soul speaks to the horrifying corruption of his romantic desires. Sunny no longer tries to be with men; instead, he seems happy to possess them in this cannibalistic way.

Indeed, with both Sunny and Monty, Bhutto connects radicalization to exclusion coupled with masculinity gone awry. Monty’s unbelonging is rooted in his inability to reproduce his father’s masculinity even though, as the scion of a rich Karachi family, he has every reason to belong. The son of a corrupt father and an anxious mother who is always trying on new identities, Monty is perpetually lost. His family’s moral bankruptcy defines his life: he feels uncomfortable with his father’s behaviour and his family’s ill-treatment of their servants. Finally, Monty is disoriented by his mother’s newly acquired religiosity, which manifests in an almost cartoonish, cult-like devotion to a televangelist rather than any meaningful behavioural change. Crucially, apart from his mother’s new practice, which is limited to “pinning and unpinning the cloth [of her hijab] around her anxious face” (Bhutto 2018c, 120) and mouthing the televangelist’s “mispronounced prayers” (203), Monty and his cosmopolitan elite family are indifferent to religious observance, an important detail within the novel’s larger efforts to challenge stereotypes connecting radicalization to Islam.

Finally, just as Sunny is excluded in England because of his religion and class, Anita is marginalized in Pakistan because she belongs to a working-class Christian family in a Muslim-majority country. As a child, she feels some measure of solidarity with the pet caged birds at her mother’s rich employer’s house since they are also trapped by their oppressors. Anita spends her childhood “worrying about the hungry birds” (Bhutto 2018c, 110). The employer’s son, a boy around Anita’s age, does not care about these pets at all and, indeed, eats “fried bird”, as evidenced by the “crumpled Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes” Anita spies in his room (110–111). It is apparent that she cannot fit in with people like this boy, a point further driven home when she enrols at the elite Karachi American School under the name Layla and, although she is adept at playing the part of the popular girl, fails to connect with her sheltered classmates in any real way. The only belonging Anita feels growing up is with her communist neighbour, Osama, who offers a way for the novel to introduce class commentary and deride the injustices of economic inequalities. The old book that Osama gifts Anita as “his greatest inheritance” contains annotations such as “Confiscate the fields from the landowners, take away the mills from robbers, redeem the country from its dark hours” (Bhutto 2018c, 351, 352). The contrast of these ideas with the chronicling of Monty’s landowning family’s corruption suggests where the novel’s politics lie and how it invites readers to empathize with those who suffer the consequences of inequality. In delineating the circumstances of the three young characters in the style of the Bildungsroman, The Runaways wants readers to imagine themselves in place of these characters. However, asking readers who are likely to come from a place of privilege to empathize with othered characters also underscores the limits and universalizing tendencies of empathy.

The empathy argument

In recent years, the idea that reading fiction makes people more empathetic has been disseminated across disciplines from psychology and neuroscience to philosophy and literary studies (Tamir et al. 2016; Oatley 2016; Zaki 2019; Samur, Tops, and Koole 2018; Galgut 2010; Nussbaum 1996; Bracher 2013). In many discussions, world literature, through its ability to showcase othered lives, is framed as the ideal means of encouraging empathy. What is left out of this framing is who world literature makes more empathetic and who is positioned as the object of this empathy. The problem with making the case for cross-cultural empathy through the novel is that it can further centre privileged readers over others. The world literary marketplace commodifies world literature related to the Global South for readers largely in the Global North, filtering and packaging literature according to their perceived preferences (Brouillette 2007, 59–61; Young 2006, 3–4; Ranasinha 2007, 15; Toth 2021, 637–638). Morey warns us in Islamophobia and the Novel that while the novel remains popular as “a conduit for empathy”, and many writers see it as their duty to provoke empathy in readers, it is necessary to distinguish “active transcultural empathy” from universalizing ideas about the shared human experience (2018, 25). Similarly, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1998) reject “literary universality” as a mask for Eurocentrism in literary study (92). Furthermore, recent scepticism about relying on fiction to learn empathy casts doubt on whether cross-cultural empathy can move beyond universalism (Stonebridge 2020; Landy 2012). The challenge that remains, therefore, is for the writer (and publishers) to adjust cross-cultural communication so that it does not flatten the complexity of othered cultures.

Witnessing is a key component of what novelists hope to create when they talk about inspiring empathy. There is the sense that witnessing is ethical because it involves “mimetic reflection” or rumination on what it would feel like to suffer if one swapped places with the other (Ganguly 2016, 36). Mimetic reflection can provoke such strong empathy that the viewer is inspired to act (Kaplan 2011, 257). When reflection accompanies empathy, it becomes what Debjani Ganguly (2016, 36) has called affective cognition – “a union of feeling, imagination, and reflection” – which involves an intense sense of connection identifiable as witnessing. The ethics of witnessing should be scrutinized, however, when “we” are witnessing another who is othered. In the interest of resisting the urge to throw the baby (reading) out with the bathwater (the Eurocentric tendencies of the literary marketplace), I turn to Megan Boler’s (1997) account of the risks of passive empathy in teaching MAUS (Spiegelman 1997), a graphic novel about survival in Nazi Germany, in a multicultural undergraduate survey course, and H.G. Toth’s (2021) attempt to centre reading through reader-response theory in order to read difference more ethically. Boler argues that “in the absence of more complete historical accounts” of the Holocaust, the empathy generated from reading a text like MAUS is passive (1997, 255). Passive empathy, generated from reading, can be summed up as the act of “putting oneself in the other person’s shoes” (257). This kind of empathy is dangerous because it directs concern to “a fairly distant other, whom we cannot directly help” (257). In the absence of the possibility of helping, this empathy is easily reducible to a concern not for the other but for oneself (257). What follows from putting yourself in another person’s shoes is the thought that the calamity that has befallen the other could just as easily happen to you. Instead of being forced to identify with the oppressor and interrogate their own complicity in oppressive power structures, readers can simply identify with the oppressed and exonerate themselves (258).

As a solution, Boler offers “testimonial reading”, a reading practice that takes witnessing a step further to include personal responsibility on the part of readers who must rethink their own assumptions and recognize themselves as “implicated in the social forces that create the climate of obstacles the other must confront” (1997, 261–263). Similarly, Tim S. Gauthier (2015, 29) suggests that effective empathy is “bi-directional”: it involves practising vulnerability and interrogating oneself as well as the target of one’s empathy. Instead of offering an ethical reading strategy, Toth chooses to describe reading, insisting that reading can be ethical because it involves “the reading self and self-in-the-world interact[ing] and affect[ing] each other, mutually shaping their viewpoints” (2021, 651). These strategies suggest that the act of reading the novel can be productive in the empathy it inspires only if the reader is sufficiently immersed in the process through either additional political and ethical work, or a willingness to alter the self through engagement with a text.

In order for a postcolonial novel to employ witnessing effectively, it must move its world-making beyond what Ganguly has called “the postcolonial world’s violent spasms and the various forms of spectatorship that have been generated in the global West” (2016, 178). Put simply, the relationship between the Global North reader and the Global South-based text must go beyond consumption and spectatorship to cause the reader to reflect on their own positionality and responsibility. For its part, The Runaways does attempt to implicate its privileged readers and hold them to account. This is apparent in Bhutto’s call to investigate the elite existences of characters like Monty, who represent the cosmopolitan global elite. Perhaps, Bhutto’s fiction relies on the possibility that readerly empathy is a different type of witnessing, as Keen suggests (2007, 4). There are witnesses who experience events in person, those who hear about another’s experience, and those who simply witness by reading about the event in question (4). Consider also Caroline Wake’s (2013, 113, 116) differentiation of the three levels of witnesses: primary, secondary, and tertiary witnesses. Primary witnesses are “spatiotemporally copresent at the scene of the trauma” and secondary witnesses are “spatiotemporally copresent at the scene of testimony” (113). Tertiary witnesses – for example, the viewers of video testimony – lack spatio-temporal presence but have emotional co-presence (113). In our context, Monty, the primary witness, is a conduit for the reader, the tertiary witness. As The Runaways closes, Monty finds himself witness to unspeakable horror as Layla (formerly Anita), the girl he loves, is subjected to torture under a terrorist regime that has turned against her. In this moment, Monty finds his purpose as “a sentinel”:

He breathes deeply and tries not to listen to Layla, screaming and crying in her chair, her face wet with tears.

He is a sentinel, a beacon.

This is why he was sent here, why he walked to Nineveh through the desert, why he is a vanguard of this army. He’s a sentinel, a watchman. (Bhutto 2018c, 542)

His inability to act mirrors the inability of those who feel empathy through reading fiction to act given what Keen (2007, 17–19) has characterized as the impossibility of reciprocity, the idea that readers cannot do anything to help the characters simply because these characters do not exist. Fictionality also makes it easier for readers to feel empathy because it guarantees that there will be no real-world cost: readers can feel empathy without even wanting to help. This inability – or even unwillingness – to effect change can extend beyond the realm of the fictional to what a tertiary witness might feel watching horror unroll as part of the 24-hour news cycle, as a constant spectator of atrocities without personal stakes. A generous reading of Monty witnessing Layla’s torture might cast him as Jacques Derrida’s (2000, 186) superstes: the witness as “survivor”, who exists in the present and the future, recording for posterity the truth of what has occurred. In the face of his worst nightmare, Monty discovers a tragic purpose as the survivor-witness who observes everything but is rendered an immobile “sentinel”. There is a shocking power to this image that captures the horror of events, drawing clear parallels with our real world in which we have watched news of atrocities in Syria and Iraq in immobilized shock. Ultimately, the novel’s final moments reveal the inadequacy of the empathy witnesses feel even as Bhutto tries to make a case for empathy. Universalizing affect may succeed in challenging stereotypes and provoking empathy, but this feeling cannot be productive without additional political and ethical work and a desire to act, even at personal cost, on the part of the privileged reader predominantly located in the Global North.

The implied reader and the global literary marketplace

Owing to the dynamics of the literary marketplace, empathy is to be felt primarily by readers in the Global North for characters in the Global South. The Runaways subverts expectations about Islam and radicalization. However, it still centres the Global North, complicating the equation, as this final section will detail. Given the global literary marketplace’s tendency to fashion world literature as a commodity (Brouillette 2007; Huggan 2001), there is a thin line between writing that creates productive empathy for the other – which might promote cross-cultural understanding in the real world – and writing that is complicit in an imperialist narrative. Slaughter (2007, 325) is cautious of the latter, terming it “cosmopolitan solipsism”, and characterizing it as a “literary manipulation” designed to justify western political intervention. In a review of Malala Yousafzai’s memoir (co-written with Christina Lamb), Bhutto herself notes that “there is a genuine concern that this extraordinary girl’s courageous and articulate message will be colonized by one power or other for its own insidious agendas” (2013, n.p.). This is part of a larger problem with the idea of writing as testimony. There is a history of literature about oppression in foreign places justifying imperialist agendas, most recently US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Contemporary scholarship has focused on this problem.³ Shenila Khoja-Moolji (2018, 4–6) argues that books such as Malala’s are appropriated to promote neo-imperialist, capitalist agendas. Meanwhile, Rachel Fox (2018), borrowing Gillian Whitlock’s (2007) term, observes that such “veiled bestsellers” (Fox 2018, 88) or “pedagogies of peril” (174) become subsumed into “a neo-imperial project of cosmopolitan interest, sympathy, charity, and ‘rescue’ within the context of the War on Terror” (180). These characteristics are not just limited to the memoir genre. Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj (2000) offer similar critiques of novels. They argue that novels about women in the Global South are given book covers with images of “veiled, faceless” women, and blurbs that offer a look into an exotic world, citing Fadia Faqir’s Nisanit (1987), Hanan Al-Shayth’s Women of Sand and Myrrh (1992), and Alifa Rifaat’s Distant View of a Minaret (1983) as examples. The logic goes that playing to stereotypes attracts readers and sales (Amireh and Majaj 2000, 5–6). The narratives in and marketing of Taslima Nasreen’s novel Lajja (Ghosh 2000, 39–84) and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (Grewal 1994, 45–74), respectively, have been accused of framing the Global North as the saviour. Finally, Fox (2022, 16–19) extends the term “veiled bestseller” to fictional contexts in her study of novels from Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Contemporary world literature must therefore toe a difficult line, resisting the neo-imperial project without becoming unmarketable.

The Runaways creates an interesting tension in registering a protest against exactly the kind of global capitalism within which the literary marketplace sits. In the novel, Monty’s family represent the corrupt global elite. They have made their money through a series of nefarious business moves starting with his grandfather’s profiteering during Partition in 1947. That they continue to make money by slicing up Karachi into luxury real-estate developments and driving up gentrification, while maintaining significant assets overseas, paints them as the postcolonial inheritors of extractive colonialism. Their lives of luxury, cosmopolitan mobility, and shopping trips to the luxury store Harrods in London all come at the expense of Karachi’s suffering locals. Bhutto insists on writing against the moneyed cosmopolitanism of Monty’s world to indict the global elite. The language of her novel is most precise and insightful when it is taking an objective, bird’s-eye view of its characters’ lives that satirizes their modern, globalized world. This is evident when Karachi is described as an oppressive space replete with “towering billboards advertising Gulf Airlines and skin-lightening creams”, hinting at the complicity between such things as colourism and consumerism (Bhutto 2018c, 13). Bhutto’s anti-capitalist critique also resurfaces later when the BBC and Davos become points of contention between Sunny and Oz. Symbols of success are revealed to be devoid of meaning throughout the text, from Layla’s disdain for the private school in Karachi to Oz’s leveraging of liberal media and Davos for his own publicity. Bhutto’s critique is most clearly expressed in her portrayal of how Dubai, “a fantasy of metal and glass, skyscrapers and highways, glittering against the ochre sand” (378), becomes the site of Layla’s brother prostituting her to his wealthy clients. However, despite these powerful critiques, the novel is embedded in this cosmopolitan capitalist world. It is because of this, perhaps, that it stumbles in terms of detail and cannot help but reveal the kind of cosmopolitan elite world it emerges from and addresses.

I offer a reading of culturally specific details from the novel to demonstrate the ways in which the novel stumbles here. Consider the word “naath” (Bhutto 2018c, 201, 207) that is substituted for “naat” (نعت ‎in Urdu, meaning a poem recited in honour of the Prophet Muhammad). The introduction of the “h” Bhutto affixes at the end of “naath” renders the word meaningless as it interferes with its phonetic pronunciation. Additionally, at one point, Nayar, the religious guide of Monty’s mother, advises her to remove her nail polish, “for it contained alcohol” (190). In actuality, some Muslims avoid nail polish not because it contains alcohol (it does not) but because the varnish does not permit water to pass over the nails during wudu (ritual ablution before prayer) (Wright 2015, 159). These instances reinforce the sense that the anticipated reader is one who is not familiar with the intricacies of Islamic religious practice and, perhaps, one who leans towards secularism. Similarly, certain other moments betray a lack of on-the-ground knowledge on the part of The Runaways. For instance, there is a memorable scene when Anita’s mother Zenobia tastes Cadbury’s chocolate for the first time after her son brings it from Dubai. Here, it is emphatically stated that “Zenobia had never had Cadbury’s before and she relished the milky chocolate, rationing her limited supply” (Bhutto 2018c, 471). This is an unbelievable moment given that Cadbury’s has, for decades, manufactured chocolate in Pakistan under Cadbury Dairy Milk Pakistan Ltd and sold it at affordable prices in the local market (“Cadbury Dairy Milk – Pakistan – PakBiz” n.d.). While minor, these errors point to a larger problem of intent. The modern publishing apparatus involves multiple steps and scrutiny, even – since 2014 (Zelevansky 2019, n.p.) – sensitivity reading, “the practice of reviewing advance manuscripts for inaccuracies in their portrayal of marginalized persons” (Lawrence 2020, 30). That these errors should crop up suggests that their consideration was not prioritized, perhaps because the implied readership for this novel is not one likely to be familiar with the contexts it discusses. Given the lack of diversity within the publishing industry (So 2020), which continues to centre a “core (white) audience” (Saha and van Lente 2020, 14), this is not surprising.

In light of these observations, it is imperative to look at the question of audience: who does The Runaways address and what are the implications of publishers assuming it will be read by such an audience? Kwame Anthony Appiah (1991, 348) has pointed out, albeit in the African context, that postcolonial intellectuals depend almost entirely on two institutions: “the African university, an institution whose intellectual life is overwhelmingly constituted as western, and the Euro-American publisher and reader”. Appiah speculates that postcolonial intellectuals are “always at risk of becoming otherness machines, with the manufacture of alterity as our principal role” (356).⁴ This dilemma remains true for the industry of postcoloniality today. For instance, the role of the character of Monty as a witness suggests that The Runaways speaks to other “Montys”, or to a community of privileged readers. Furthermore, the overlooked errors referenced above demonstrate that the novel does not anticipate readers with significant Pakistani lived experience. Of course, because of the market forces at play, representation within anglophone Pakistani literature remains limited and it is more likely to remain interested in speaking to privileged readers. This is not because of nefarious design on the part of the author but rather because writers who are able to publish with prestigious publishing houses come from some level of privilege.

Given the dynamics of the literary marketplace, can this novel, and the novel in general, succeed in encouraging empathy through reading? The novel, as a form, provides a safe space for an encounter with the other which allows readers to recognize sameness within the other and thus to be able to feel empathy in this recognition (Gauthier 2015, 36). As sameness is the key to empathy, Bhutto’s gesture towards universality aligns with her purported aim. With The Runaways, she succeeds in creating the conditions for an empathetic encounter. In unpacking the sociopolitical factors that contribute to radicalization in this postcolonial Bildungsroman, Bhutto challenges the assumption that religion – specifically, Islam – is the driver of radicalization. As I have shown, she instead attributes radicalization to exclusion based on religion, class, masculinity, and sexuality. However, the problems with empathy and the power imbalance in the global literary industry remain. That The Runaways asks its relatively privileged readers to empathize with its othered characters underscores the limits of empathy and its universalizing tendencies. While the turns to witnessing and testimonial reading offer ways to recoup productive empathy, the postcolonial novel and its empathy project nevertheless centres a certain type of secular cosmopolitan reader, who, as a spectator, can remain at a safe distance from the traumatic experiences of the central protagonists.

This is apparent in what the text prioritizes (manufacturing empathy for the minoritized other) and what it overlooks (specific details of the Pakistani and Muslim experience). This issue does not concern just this text but also encompasses the larger industry and the material conditions of the production of world literature. Ultimately, even when a novel intends to complicate the equation, it cannot fully succeed given the larger apparatus of literary production. Brouillette has recently suggested that we interrogate the political economy of literary production to look not only at the circulation of texts, literary prizes and reviews, but also at the kind of people who are able to “make a living working within the literary book industries” (2017, n.p.). Given that it is primarily people with a certain degree of financial privilege who can devote themselves to the literary industry as readers and writers, and that the industry itself is centred in the Global North, it is not surprising that the postcolonial novel addresses itself to the Global North. Until the material conditions of the industry undergo a transformation, the postcolonial writer will continue to be positioned as a cultural spokesperson, and the postcolonial novel will engage in production for western consumption. That said, the careful work this novel does in teasing out the root causes of radicalization and uncovering the insidious impact of exclusion is valuable even if its empathy project ultimately remains plagued by larger problems within the global literary marketplace. In the end, the reader is responsible for engaging in self-reflective reading practices which can allow for productive empathy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of York (Overseas Research Scholarship).

Notes on contributors

Sauleha Kamal

Sauleha Kamal PhD investigates connections between the novel, empathy, and human rights, and problematizes them in terms of the economic aims of the literary marketplace. She has published articles in Postcolonial Text and The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature (2021), and essays in Desi Delicacies (2021), The Atlantic, and DAWN. She was a resident fellow in writing at Yaddo in New York (2019).

Notes

1. Examples include Marin Amis (2006), John Updike (2006), Don DeLillo (2007), and Frank Miller (2011).

2. The word “pure” appears throughout the text in this context (Bhutto 2018c, 171, 252, 530, 641).

3. This genre spans everything from Azar Nafisi (2003) to Khalid Hosseini (2003) and Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb (2013). While these stories hold their own merits, they become bestsellers for reasons associated with an Orientalist imagining of Islamicate cultures (Kamal 2018, 1–19) and as modern iterations of Harem literatures (Whitlock 2007, 88).

4. Appiah borrows the term “otherness machines” from Pakistani writer and critic Sara Suleri (1989, 105).