In our second term of ASTU we started by discussing Joe Sacco’s graphic novel Safe Area Gorazde which documented the Bosnian genocide. It was highly realistic, gruesome and rather shocking to the senses. It was interesting to have previously read Persepolis and compare the two styles each author decided to use. After analysing a graphic novel we changed gears and read Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). This novel takes the perspective of a Pakistani character who attends Princeton but eventually feels the resounding impacts of the September 11 attacks and eventually moves back to Lahore. From this novel we extended our discussion by reading Joseph Darda’s “Precarious World: Rethinking Global Fiction in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and Judith Butler’s “Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?”. These readings were applied to our discussion of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The storyline and writing style was so new from anything I had previously read. Not only that, it was really enlightening to read a story from a foreigner’s perspective on America. Although the protagonist was not Mohsin Hamid himself, it is still embedded with his ideas and world views. Even though I do like to consider myself as cultured, I am guilty of mainly having contact with predominantly Western literature. This novel made me rethink my position in the world and how I view the world itself. The main character Changez shares how he viewed America when he originally moved there to attend Princeton, which was excitement and optimism. However Changez feels the indelible effects of the culture of fear born out of the 9/11 attacks. Even though he was never identified as  Muslim or from the country that committed the attacks, he was othered and vilinised. While I knew this did happen, I myself have never experienced this but it made me realise how it is still highly present in our lives today. I also felt the emotion that Changez felt from being viewed as a threat and in a sense made this situation that occurs daily more real.

The additional scholarly readings we did, though hard to interpret, were extremely interesting and made me ponder a lot. Darda’s piece talked about global literature and looked at The Reluctant Fundamentalist but through Butler’s theory of survivability. His article was particularly interesting in how he argued the importance of global fiction in its ability to break borders and form connections. Judith Butler’s article was more detailed in that she described why it is we have borders between us. Butler suggests the idea of precariousness and precarity in which all human lives are precarious by nature but some lives, because of certain living situations for instance, are more precarious than others. She elaborates how interpretative frameworks create this notion that either people are allies or they are threats, and if they are deemed a threat than we must destroy them before they destroy us. In simple terms, it is the belief that one person’s existence directly affects my ability to exist. It is in this mentality that humans view certain lives as grievable (because they are similar to us and therefore we can relate) while others are not considered lives and could never be killed in the first place.

All of these ideas were new to me but have really resonated with me and made me evaluate my perceptions of various groups of people but more so wonder the feasibility of this attitude ever changing. Butler posits that once we recognise that we are different but at the same time we are all humans will we be able to have a more cohesive global community. While I agree with what she is saying I do not know how likely it would be to ever get to the point that everyone views another as a grievable life, regardless it is a beautiful idea.