Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 16 Number 2, August 2015
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Manifestation of Global Characters’ Cognition amidst the Hostility of Religion, Politics and Terrorism: A Literary Analysis
by
International Islamic University, Islamabad
Abstract
In a multi-dimensional social scenario, multiple discourses overlap and affect cognitive hybridity of social actors. The global issue of religion, politics and terrorism has been a popular theme of postcolonial Pakistani English novels. These writings manifest social actors for the creation of powerful images in the form of their characters surviving amidst an era of terrorism, religious and political hostility. Mohsin Hamid and Bapsi Sidhwa exhibit a unique technique in the delineation of their protagonists possessing cognitive hybridity. Exploration of the characterization in the backdrop of political and religious turbulence existing in the social and cognitive hemispheres of the protagonists in Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Sidhwa’s An American Brat is the aim of the present study. Textual analyses of both texts reveal that a common fabric of the context comprising politics; terrorism and religion contributes towards the representation of cognition and consciousness of the characters.
Key Words: Cognitive Hybridity, Consciousness, Pakistani English novels, Postcolonial, Terrorism, Religion and Politics.
Introduction
The current research investigates the approach and manner of characterization budding in the ambience of religion, politics and terrorism in two postcolonial novels. The Reluctant Fundamentalist and An American Brat by Pakistani authors, Mohsin Hamid and Bapsi Sidhwa. A mutual characteristic connecting these novels is the concurrence and conjunction of two cultures and frames of reference to exhibit the character of transnational and transcultural encounters.
It has been argued that the laying down of characters in these novels envelope and beset the areas of sociopolitical discourse. Discerning and decoding the relationship that gets established between discourse, communicative usage and society involves not only the comprehensive description of discourse structures and social interaction, but also the notion of a cognitive interface. Social cognitive theory, postulates that observing others influences the individual’s knowledge acquisition within the context of social interactions and experiences. In other words, people do not learn new behaviors only by trying them, but rather, the continued existence of humanity is reliant upon the duplication of the actions of others. The focal point in the characterization of these two selected novels The Reluctant Fundamentalist and An American Brat is the subject of cognitive hybridity and consciousness which emerges out of distinct national and cultural perception as an eventuality of independence from a colonial power. ‘Postcolonial literature’ is the term which would give the impression of being an emblem of the literatures authored by people of the countries previously overpowered by other kingdoms or nations. But this just indicates the formerly suggested association of the expression, as a matter of fact; it is not without a hitch. Colonization is not the sole intention of postcolonial contemplation. If we look at the concept of ‘hegemony’ advocated by Gramsci (Adamson, 1980, 170), it was led by Lenin’s classical scrutiny of imperialism which makes a distinction between apparent political domination and authority through thoughts and civilization. The Gramscian term of hegemony stands for the prevalence of one social group more than others. This indicates not just economic and political power, but the capacity of the leading class to project its own perception of the world as well so the subordinated class accedes to it as 'natural'. The notion of neo-imperialism is to tag associations connecting the USA with many Latin American countries like Pakistan having subjugated economies.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist and An American Brat confine the core of complex existence by their characters possessing hybrid cognition, perception, awareness and consciousness. The construction of America as a terrain of prospects, authority and prosperity is placed in proximity against the terrible poverty, nonexistence of basic facilities and dearth of resources for educational enterprise, sanitation and wellbeing in Pakistan. The practices of transculturality are articulated by the protagonists of these two novels as they are stuck between two worlds not realizing where they exist. They represent their personal feelings and thoughts in a struggle to search and generate alternative discourses and alternative spaces. The current research has attempted to focus on the delineation of events –comprising religion, politics and terrorism- through the characters depicting subjective portrayal of perception and awareness.
Theoretical Framework
Characters in a literary work are social beings that learn from their surroundings, community and the context of their experiences. They are the persons presented in works of narrative expressing their individuality through dialogue and action by which the reader or audience understands their opinions, outlooks, intentions and motives. Characters are made accessible in any literary work by means of their description through their actions, speech, and thoughts and through the perception of other characters about them. The concept of characterization is a literary notion and it is employed in everyday discussion also.
The study of personality or character has an extensive and diverse history in psychology with a profusion of theoretical traditions. The foremost theories comprise biological, dispositional, psychodynamic, humanistic, behaviorist, evolutionary and social learning angles. However, many researchers and psychologists do not clearly perceive themselves with a certain point of view and instead acquire an eclectic approach.
Among the various dimensions of character manifestation, the cognitive or the psychological dimensions of characters are the most vital features for the exploration of a character through his thoughts, feelings and emotions as Alan Palmer stresses the exploration of cognitive dimensions of character to understand the essence of a literary work, in order to appreciate or comprehend a novel. “The constructions of the minds of the fictional characters by the narrators and readers are central to our understanding of how novel works, because readers enter story worlds primarily by attempting to follow the workings of the fictional minds contained in them. Fictional narrative is, in essence, the presentation of mental functioning” (Palmer, 2015, 137).
Similarly Schneider and Hartner in Blending and the Study of Narrative: Approaches and Applications recommend that “representing fictional agents crucially involves those characters fictional minds” (Schneider and Hartner, 2012, 87). David Herman also highlights the unique capacity of narratives to create “an environment in which versions of what it was like to experience situations and events can be juxtaposed, comparatively evaluated, and then factored into further accounts of the world (or a world)” (Herman, 2002, 151). Thus in order to explore the essence of a fictional and literary work, the realization of cognitive and psychological dimensions of the characters are the prerequisites as they allow the reader to grasp the essence, spirit and context of the work .
As social beings, we learn from our surroundings, community and the context of our experiences. Cognitive development of an individual is greatly influenced by culture and the interaction between people of different cultural backgrounds always lead to some point of cultural and cognitive hybridization. Accordingly, the context of text and talk can best be analyzed through subjective cognitive representations of hybridization as cognitive development of the individuals. In this regard, Van Dijk (2008) frames up and supports a sociocognitive outlook on discursive context. His interdisciplinary approach depends on findings from cognitive science and social psychology. The idea that context should be understood as an ongoing updated participant construct of the relevant contextual features of text and talk is at the heart of his theory. He reproves conventional sociolinguistic versions of the discourse-context connection as unreasonably superficial, and argues that the dynamics of this relationship are most profitably analyzed in terms of the subjective cognitive representations. He asserts that understanding and producing text and talk involves “what is traditionally and informally called the “context” of this speech, involving such categories as participant identities and roles, place, time, institution, political actions and political knowledge, among other components” (Vandijk, 2008, 3).
To understand the notion of cognitive hybridity, we need to revert to the post-colonial notion of hybridity as defined by various theorists. The materialization of non-native Englishes and Literatures has frequently been regarded as the cultural response and reciprocation to resist the supremacy of the governing culture and the colonial discourses. Cultural literary experts and critics like Bhabha, Hall and Ashcroft et. al. argue that as languages and texts performed a vital task in the production of the discourses related to empire, hence literary fiction is fundamental in the restoration of identities and national histories among the previously colonized states and cultures.
The term hybridity is associated with the category of culture. The category culture has been investigated by social theorists. Since the term culture refers to fixed categories of deterministic activities; a variety of novel terminologies and definitions of culture have been proposed. Brian Street in his article “Culture is a Verb” postulates that we are inclined to construct different definitions and concepts, and further argues that it is more purposeful to recognize the functioning of culture instead of describing its meanings (Street, 1993, 25). He scrutinizes culture as a dynamic practice of acknowledging debatable definitions. The employment of analyzing culture is not about discovering and then accepting its definitions but of analyzing how, what and why different nomenclatures of cultures are created .The concepts of ‘hybridity’ and ‘third space’ were developed by Homi. K. Bhaba who considers hybridity as a place “where difference is neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-betweens” (Bhaba, 1994, 129). For Pennycook hybridity is associated with colonial connotations of mixed breeding. Bhabha considers the hybrid third space as an indecisive position where cultural connotation and image do not have any ‘primordial unity or fixity’ (Pennycook, 2007, 208). He upholds that modern cultural critics “all recognize that the problem of the cultural emerges only at the significatory boundaries of cultures, where means and values are (mis)read or signs are misappropriated” (Pennycook, 2007, 206). We have to consider the borders between cultures to scrutinize the issues of “diversity” and “difference”. The boundary is the position at which different cultures meet up; hence it is a place where cultural differentiation can be detected. The core of Bhabha’s perspective is to facilitate the existence of what he refers a Third Space through which we are able to look at Ourselves and Others. Bhabha argues that “it is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meanings and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew” (Bhabha, 1994, 208). Pennycook also introduces the concept of transculturation or transidiomatic customs by critiquing the traditional ideas of culture. “ A move to look at ‘trans ‘ rather than ‘post’ theories, however, shifts the relationship from a temporal to a more spatial domain, from time to movement , shifting dependency away from a former set of theoretical paradigms ( modernism, structuralism, colonialism) to a more contemporary array of contexts. This shift from the temporal to the spatial is important for a move towards understanding globalization, movement, flows and linkages” (Pennycook, 2007, 44).
In a global world permeated with a lot of challenging and threatening incidents, the context of religion, politics and terrorism has always been potent in the wider social domains and is more likely to act as an impetus in influencing the sociocognitive consciousness of the individuals. Thus, the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers was not merely the incident of geo-politics and terrorism but also placed the world under changeability and ingrained fear. Ethnicity and religious identity became the major issues and people were labeled as ‘terrorists’ with regard to their religious and racial affiliations. Literature could not remain invulnerable to these changes, especially Pakistani fiction in English, since Pakistan’s standing acquired ambiguity both as a friend and foe of the USA. This ambiguity was transmitted to the average Pakistani out on the streets of any American city. Internationally, the terrorism fixation is also having vicious penalties. In the discourse of political and religious demagogues, and in that of common people who do not even understand the simple dissimilarity between Islamic and Islamist, it is used to disparage and convict one billion Muslims for the sins of only a few hundred. In so doing, it originates discriminating levels of hostility and distrust on both sides in relations between Western and Muslim societies.
The clash between east and west, between two different cultures and between two different civilizations is potent and compelling in creating the hybridity or the ‘third space’. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Hamid creates a persuasive and stirring account of a man’s existence between two worlds and the resulting hybrid cognition and feelings. Changez would by no means have really recognized his subjectivity if he would have not been in America and perceived the thoughts of being a stranger struggling to adjust, and his startling acknowledgment of the world around him. In An American Brat, a pre-war-on-terror novel, Sidhwa employs the dark stairwell as a metaphor for America where Feroza is ostensibly trapped once during her stay in America. The sentiment of being ensnared and incapable to eliminate the boundaries confines her pursuit of individuality and identity. This is the third space and hybridity occupied by the protagonist of the selected novels and hence establishes the defining features of character manifestation of these two novels. Both Feroza and Changez may have contact with the overriding culture, its language and connected values of individual autonomy—yet time and again they are made aware of their dissimilarity and divergence.
Research Statement
An American Brat by Bapsi Sidhwa and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid represent their protagonists possessing cognitive hybridity as the subjective cognitive representations and perception of Changez and Feroza are delineated by the novelists in the global era of chaos shaped by religion, politics and terrorism.
Rationale of the Study
In every part of the world, literature has been more or less acting as the mirror of society. The global issue of religion, politics and terrorism has been a popular theme of postcolonial Pakistani English novel. Mohsin Hamid and Bapsi Sidhwa are one of those Pakistani writers who have been engaged in understanding the politics of post-colonial experience through their writings, through stories of religious extremism, class divides, war, dictators and love. The present research aims to explore the experience of postcolonial existence through the character manifestation of the individuals living in an era of sociopolitical chaos and how the politics of a new country influence the consciousness and cognition of the characters. The research will add to the body of postcolonial research with a focus on the cognitive hybridity which has not been much emphasized in previous exploratory planes of post-colonial literary tradition. The current research has focused on the craft of characterization budding in the ambience of religion, politics and terrorism in two postcolonial novels The Reluctant Fundamentalist and An American Brat by Pakistani authors, as a common strand administrating through the novels is the juxtaposition and co-construction of two cultures and contexts to display the spirit of transnational and transcultural struggles from the perspective of both Pakistani man (Changez) and woman (Feroza). Since hybridity is a theme which is constantly being dealt with by contemporary Pakistani fiction in English, analytical studies in this sphere of cognitive hybridity have not as yet much talked over and written about. This study could facilitate discussion and encourage further research in this domain.
Methodology
For inquiry, the methodology employed in this paper is qualitative in nature. The characterization of the protagonists in the two novels has been analyzed under the categories of religion, politics and terrorism within the framework of proposition mentioned earlier. The methodology exercised in the paper is the textual analysis of the two novels.
Analysis
The three catalysts of religion, politics and terrorism in the global and postcolonial world are examined in the light of various theorists and the textual analysis of the novels to trace the character delineation of Changez and Feroza in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and An American Brat.
Religion
Religion has seldom been the central focus of post-colonial theory as compared to gender, identity, power and race. Nevertheless its dominant role in subjugating and empowering people is incontrovertible. Furthermore, in a global world, realities in the religious system of thoughts are viewed as subjective, plural and reliant on the individual’s perception and his world view. On one hand, global world is a notion which deflates cultural differences, decomposes local customs and viewpoints, and spreads a secular, capitalist conception of life that is in contrast with religions of all categories. On the other hand, religion is also associated with extremities like terrorism, victimization, and fundamentalism and is viewed in a position of enforcing its hegemonic and assertive stance. Beyer and Beaman in their work ‘Religion, Globalization and Culture’ defines the contestation and conflict between different cultures in a global world as
“What we are looking for, then, is insight into two sets of words that may intermesh and can be used to construct a version of the contemporary phenomenon of conflict anchored in religion: ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘you’, ‘they’, ‘self ’, ‘other’, ‘identity’, and ‘competition’, ‘struggle’, ‘conflict’, ‘controversy’, ‘contestation’.” (Beaman and Beyer, 2007, 187)
Feroza Ginwalla, a Parsee girl of sixteen years, growing up in Pakistan in 1970s is impulsive, and increasingly influenced by religious rigidity forced by the political regime in the country. The novel begins with the political discussion between Zareen and Cyrus, Feroza’s parents. The religious and political hostility at the name of martial law affected every facet of life in Pakistan and is very well depicted in the novel,
“In Pakistan, politics with its special brew of martial law and religion, influenced every aspect of day to day living” (Sidhwa, 1989, 3).
The scenario which Bapsi Sidhwa wants to paint with the help of these sentences is that the preoccupying phenomena of the country, influencing the psyche of the members of minorities like Feroza, was the intermingling of religion and politics. In Pakistan due to the tide of religious and political extremism, her mother thinks that she is getting more and more conservative. Her mother thinks that “travel will broaden her outlook, get this puritanical rubbish out of her” (Sidhwa, 1989, 6). Hence her family resolves to send her to America for a change of influence and attitude.
Religion does have an overwhelming effect upon her as before going to America, she harked back to her religion seeking its help for her journey to America. She recited the ancient prayers from Avastas that her grandmother had taught her. “Even though she had not understood a word of the extinct language of the sacred book, Feroza had blind faith in the power of its verses and imbued them with whatever exalted concepts and spiritual longing her soul and emotions periodically required”(Sidhwa, 1989, 39). Feroza’s immature mind has understood religion through the perception of her elders especially her parents and then further the wave of fundamentalism associated with religion and politics in Pakistan at the time of General Zia’s regime(1977-88) aggravated her conception of the clash between her religion and Islam. She is found perplexed and somewhat influenced by the dogmatism associated with religion and politics in Pakistan. Furthermore when she moved to America, the new culture, lifestyle, beliefs and worldview transformed the fundamentalism in her mind to a questioning stance and as a result her psyche kept on observing and questioning which sort of religion she is a follower of.
“Like her parents Feroza had a politically acute and restless mind, precocious for one her age, at least in America. And living with Joe and watching TV also gave her a disturbing insight into America’s foreign policy, into the nature of the fissure that existed at the core of America’s political heart, which like divine Zurvan’s mythic face was divided into darkness and light-Black and White Right and Wrong Good and Evil………..But duality also existed in human nature, in nature itself, in her own religion, even in God, so who was she to sit in judgment” (Sidhwa, 1989, 163).
Feroza falls in love with a non-Parsee boy and after her break-up with him she is able to define her own interpretation of religion and she resolves that she will marry a man of her own choice irrespective of the religious difference as she contemplates about the issue of her marriage in the last chapter of the novel,
It wouldn’t matter if he was Parsee or of another faith, she would be more sure of herself, and she wouldn’t let anyone interfere. It really wouldn’t matter; weren’t they all the children of same Adam and Eve? As for her religion, no one could take it away from her: she carried its fire in her heart. If the priests in Lahore and Karachi did not let her enter the fire Temple, she would go to one in Bombay where there were so many Parsee that no one would know if she was married to a Parsee or not. (Sidhwa, 1989, 310)
Hence the character of Feroza is made and portrayed as an emotional yet observant girl who is caught between two cultures and Sidhwa makes her protagonist understand and reflect on the situational differences between two cultures and two different parts of the world. The point to be noticed here is that in a global world, individuals are occupied with their own religious drives, by choosing the bits of diverse spiritualities which 'speak to them' and generate their own inner spiritual world. We can associate this subjective cognition and perception of realities with Vandijk’s approach of cognitive context, where he asserts that the social position of the speakers may well be redressed by the way they actually define their own position or role in their current context. “It is the subjective representation of such contexts that controls text and talk, and such a subjective representation may very well violate socially shared rules for a number of more or less valid reasons: resistance and challenge, creativity and originality, urgency and emergencies and other special circumstances”(Van Dijk 1997, 208).
Now taking the second novel into consideration, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, we find it as an incomparable endeavor that is created in a fictional autobiographical way and which arrests the convictions, conceptions and sentiments of the Western and Islamic worlds. The point of convergence in this novel is the subjectivity and emotions of a reactionary or a fundamentalist. To understand Changez, the fundamentalist, we need to look back at his past, the unwillingness in being a fundamentalist and final accommodation to his own religious fundamentalism. Hence Changez’s character is shown reflecting and questioning on his own religious identity through the subjective perception of his own religion and the religion of the developed country he is living in. Changez reflects on his own psyche after 9/11 attacks, after being under suspicion because of him being a Muslim,
I flew to New York uncomfortable in my own face: I was aware of being under suspicion; I felt guilty; I therefore tried to be as nonchalant as possible; this naturally led to my becoming more stiff and self-conscious (Hamid, 2007, 85).
Racial discrimination among the groups of people bestows them the opportunities of the formation of new coalitions among groups. As Changez’s dismal state of affairs and his marginalization after 9/11 by the west ends in his being more susceptible to Islamic terrorism.
FBI was raiding mosques, shops and even people’s houses; Muslim men were disappearing, perhaps into shadowy detention centers for questioning or worse. (Hamid, 2007, 107)
Thus the novel reflects the laments of the author for the terrorist label ascribed to Muslims through the perception and consciousness of Changez.
Politics and Terrorism
Through Feroza’s character, Bapsi Sidhwa elucidates the female experience of coming of age into societies with restraining political and social practices where immigration serves as the only real means to develop and mature. The context of politics is incredibly commanding in An American Brat as Feroza is depicted by being evolved through her experience of politics of two different parts of the worlds- east and west. In Pakistan, where she was born, “Politics, considering how it affected each individual’s personal life was a national passion.”(Sidhwa, 1989, 15)
The story of the novel starts in Lahore depicting the time of Zia’s regime when a “sense of betrayal … straddled the country” (Sidhwa 4). Feroza’s mother is a Bhutto supporter who thinks that sixteen-year-old Feroza, under Zia’s military-Islamic fundamentalist rule, is turning more and more conservative. The solution which she finds for her daughter is to send her to the America for some months as Zareen thinks about Feroza’s journey to America that “travel will broaden her outlook, get this puritanical rubbish out of her” (Sidhwa, 1989, 6). In America, she was gradually influenced by American politics and she continuously kept comparing the political scenarios of two countries and cultures. Feroza compares the politics in two countries by reflecting that “No matter who was voted in Republican or Democrats, the political process would run smoothly and it would make as little difference to Joe’s life as it would to American policy. Joe will continue to chase job and boyfriends and party at will (Sidhwa, 1989, 162).
While on the other hand,“In Pakistan, politics concerned everyone-from the street sweeper to the business tycoon-because it personally affected everyone, particularly women determining how they should dress, whether they should play Hockey in school or not, how they should conduct themselves even in the four walls of the room” (Sidhwa, 1989, 163). On the other hand, Changez (core character of The Reluctant Fundamentalist) turns neither as an immigrant nor an exile after studying at Princeton but converts as a “New Yorker” (Hamid, 2007, 33) with a fascinating job. Changez’s sense of affiliation to New York lofty society is unexpectedly distorted by the catastrophe of 11 September 2001 and then the USA assault of Afghanistan operates as the vehicle to depict Changez’s “fundamental” character, in a personal as well as political sense, and significantly, to highlight the shifting viewpoint of his preferences. Edward Said rightly says: imperialism lingers in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic and social practices (Said, 1994, 2). Thus the character of Changez is delineated as a voice from the margins. In regard to voices from the margins writing back to the empire, Uzma Aslam Khan, a post colonial Pakistani writer in an interview observes that those who go west have two roads to choose from: the backward path home, or the forward path of assimilation. In this respect, Changez returns home with an awareness of America’s hostility while Feroza chooses the path of assimilation.
Feroza’s character is evolved on the basis of her experiences and her life among two different societies and finally they shaped her cognition or perception. Feroza felt that living with Joe, her American friend, helped her understanding Americans and their exotic way of life in supporting any individual “how much an abstract word like freedom could encompass and how many rights the individuals had and most important that those rights were active in, not, as in Pakistan given by constitution but otherwise comatose .A person like Jo could ensure her rights through law and if required demand accountability of the state” (Sidhwa, 1989, 163).
For Feroza, the exposure to American politics provides a sense of security and freedom while for Changez this exposure leaves him in a sense of uncertainty, fear and a sense of betrayal. He realizes that his family and relations are under threat, principally due to abiding superiority of America and its domination around the world, as he explains and thinks that “A common strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie’s concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism […]” (Hamid, 2007, 178).
Politics is about closure, about 'us' versus 'them', about “questioning how identities are produced and taken up through practices of representation” (Grossberg, 1996, 90) and political identity in the largest sense is surely not restricted to an individual’s devotion to a specific ideological political sect, but depends rather on “cleavages” or splits / divides. Hence the focus on the character portrayal in the two novels is on the destabilizing identities resulting from contact with two different territories of different religion, beliefs, customs, and politics. Feroza and Changez intend to be similar as well as different from their host cultures which are presented through their cognitive hybridization. “Whatever their ideologies of purity, diasporic cultural forms can never in practice be nationalist. They are deployed in transnational networks built from multiple attachments, and they encode practices of accommodation with, as well as resistance to, the host countries, and their norms” (Clifford, 1997, 251). Furthermore, we can say that cognitive hybridity is a notion which is much akin and associated with diasporic identities as both the terms involve a holistic progression engaging economic, political and cultural dimensions at a variety of levels, in the milieu of globalization.
There is not much evidence of the context of terrorism in An American Brat because the novel is set in pre-War-on-Terror Pakistan but in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the context of terrorism is shown working in its full swing. Terrorism in its diverse modes--global terrorist set of connections, state-sponsored counter-terrorism, and political insurgency-- has provided a convincing new theme for fiction since 9/11. The post-9/11 novel concerns the altered climate due to the growth of worldwide terrorism, usually provoked by religious mandate, and it focuses on religious (frequently Muslim) extremism with its distinguishing “value systems, mechanisms of legitimation and justification, concepts of morality and world view.”(Hoffman, 2006, 94-95). The Reluctant Fundamentalist is about the claustrophobia, mistrust and disbelief in America and in Pakistan invoked by counter-terrorist trials and dealings and the “War on Terror” which appeared as the upshot of 9/11. “It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins” (Hamid, 2007, 183). While Changez seems to the American as a terrorist, although he has not apparently committed a violent act, it gradually appears that he might as he gestures mysteriously and articulates his concerns about American policies and capitalism. The American capitalism characterizes the economic fundamentalism referred in the novel’s title, as Changez notes when he finally leaves New York: “my days of focusing on fundamentals were done” (Hamid, 2007, 175). The high profile media coverage of the events of 9/11 impel his antagonism towards his adopted nation: seeing footage of the demolition of the twin towers, following on websites the War on Terror and the build-up of the Afghanistan campaign and discovering that India, in collusion with America, was bringing pressure on Pakistan to revise its policies. He tells the American : “Affronts were everywhere; the rhetoric emerging from your country at that moment in history—not just from the government but from the journalists and media as well—provided a ready and constant fuel for my anger”(Hamid, 2007, 190). Changez confronts the bitter truth that his bondage to American capitalism was a type of servitude, that he was “a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire”, and “a form of indentured servant whose right to work depended on the continued benevolence of the employer”(Hamid, 2007, 168). This leads to his vulnerability to ideological boundaries, even a psychological disparity: “I lacked a stable core. I was not certain where I belonged—in New York, in Lahore, in both, in neither […] my own identity was so fragile,” (Hamid, 2007, 178).
Thus the context of religion, politics and terrorism act as the catalyst in evoking hybrid cognition of the characters before and after 9/11. In each of the two novels, the protagonists, Feroza and Changez are caught between two cultures and societies in the rapidly changing social scenarios and hence they struggle to interpret the fluidity of their social contexts in terms of their subjective cognitive reflections.
Conclusion
To conclude, we can say that both Bapsi Sidhwa and Mohsin Hamid created and constructed their protagonists in the selected novels through the portrayal of their subjective perception in the context of religion and politics. In case of Changez’s character manifestation, the context of terrorism also serves as a strong impetus in formulating his subjectivity. In both novels the cognitive hybridity of the characters are shown to elucidate the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer which leaves indelible imprints on the psyche of the colonized. The subconscious longing of the colonized to write back to the colonizers in their language demonstrates the deep-seated predicaments of the subjugated nation’s psyche. The crucial issue of hybridity associates exclusively to the displaced people, the third world immigrants from colonized countries. In this regard the context and backdrop of religion, politics and terrorism act as a framework for character manifestation and the exhibition of cognitive hybridity in the characters of the post- colonial novel and further studies may be conducted to elaborate the varied impacts of religion, politics and terrorism into Pakistani fiction in English, and the exploration of cognitive hybridity in different scenarios in Pakistani fiction.
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