Planetary Iconographies
The year was 1985. Zia-ul Haq was in power. On a stage facing an audience of an estimated fifty thousand in a packed arena in Lahore, the very fine Pakistani singer Iqbal Bano sang an extraordinary rendition of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s “Wa-yabqā wajhu rabbik” (The Face of Thy Lord Will Abide Forever) which is also, probably because of the performance, more familiarly known as “Ham dekhen ge” (We Will See). Bano’s performance that evening has become the stuff of political legend—so much so that people dispute the year and the place of the performance but not the effect of the event. For the poem about the upending of tyranny with its grand assertion of human selfhood, articulated through a quotation from the tenth-century mystic Al-Hallaj, “anā l-haqq” (I am the truth), written under a title that is a verse from the Qur’an, was received as a powerful repudiation of the sitting tyrant. The performance was to become such a political flashpoint that even in a recording from 1988, called “A Tribute to Faiz,” one can hear the crowd erupt as Bano sings the lines “sab tāj uchāle jā’enge/ sab takht girā’e jā’enge” (all crowns will be tossed in the air/ all thrones will be toppled”).1
The song turns the first line “Ham dekhenge” into a refrain, which sounds like a promise of a future, a longing for the possibility of one, and, subtly, a threat of justice rendered against the tyrant. The framing of “anā l-haqq” as the emancipatory cry—“uṭhegā anā l-haqq kā na’rah” (and the cry/slogan will rise: I am the truth)—places one of the greatest lines from Sufism at the center of the claim to social and political justice, and at the heart of the struggle for freedom from tyranny. In Faiz’s full version, the line combines with the title of the poem, which states the abiding quality of divine being, to suggest the immanence of the divine in the human, linking that divinity to human freedom and the necessity of justice. Al-Hallaj’s reputation as the great Sufi at odds even with other Sufis, the antinomian, in other words, of antinomians, provides a complicated corrective to the historical inversions of the present, indeed to its temporal parochialism. In the mid-1980s, Bano’s performance was exultantly received as a rejection of the dictator whose tyrannical power was underwritten and made possible in its fullest extent by the United States. In the post–September 11, 2001, environment, U.S. think tanks, in a bid to encourage “moderate” Islam as an antidote to the forms of Islam that were until quite recently part of the U.S. imperium, have become advocates of Sufism, as did the military dictator Parvez Musharraf in 2008.2 Sufi devotional forms are under a new and increasing threat because they can now be cast as collaborator devotionals. The effect is one that places a contemporary historical turn at odds with a longer internal history with complex philosophical, theological, and aesthetic stakes and valences.3 The schematism of policy documents, which try to map and even axiomatize divisions within Islam with a view to increasing the power of the security state and its ideological apparatus, erases and imprisons these longer histories, reducing them merely to pawns in the great, doomed game and impoverished intellectual grid of global securitization. As one can see by reading the Rand Corporation report of 2003, Civil-Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies, they manifest a remarkable amnesia about the role of the United States in the cultivation of the most iconoclastic varieties of Islam.4 Such schematism is, of course, itself an effect of the genre of the document, which encourages, even requires, the instrumentalization of knowledge in a manner that further necessitates historical reductionism, usually through the selective embrace of different moments in the history of the object of knowledge (in this case “Islam,” all of it, all the time, for all time) of the documents.
The geopolitical historical entanglements at play in these ideological oscillations are everywhere evident in the work of Nadeem Aslam.5 In a strikingly different tonal register than Mohammed Hanif, Aslam almost compulsively engages the divisions within Cold War Islam and is everywhere attentive to their swirled and ruptured (post)colonial histories. The crisis engendered by imperial-theological geopolitics is present in every one of his novels, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), and The Wasted Vigil (2008). Repeatedly in his fiction, Aslam stages an intricately aesthetic meditation on these histories, by putting them in play against, and with, one another through a series of formal confrontations and fusions: between poetry and the novel and, through ecphrasis, between painting and statuary and the novel. Almost as if he had set out to address the question: What forms would the novel have to take to embody earlier aesthetic histories? Or, to reformulate the question in Bakhtinian terms: how might a novel accomplish the work of “assimilating historical reality into the poetic image”?6 The novels’ aesthetic density comes, moreover, from their absorption, rather in the manner of epic, of other forms—elegy, pastoral, love lyric—and novelistic subgenres such as the spy thriller (The Wasted Vigil) and the murder mystery (Maps for Lost Lovers), the use of stylistic figures such as ecphrasis, and, in The Wasted Vigil, structurally central allusions to Greek tragedy and epic.
Aslam’s work is a profoundly layered response to imperial theology. So aesthetically laden, even overwrought is the prose in the two novels on which I focus in this chapter that they invite the charge of préciosité leveled against the historical Baroque. In Aslam’s novels baroque is a form of exacerbation and of hyper-aestheticism. It is moreover a principle of lateness, of repetition, and of rereading. Cold War histories, devotional aesthetics, literary forms are infolded, inverted, revealed to be caught in a cycle of seemingly inescapable yet endlessly torqued iteration. In a different stylistic vein than Hanif, Aslam shows us that Baroque in Cold War Baroque is the name of a polemicization of customary and regional devotional practices and aesthetics under the pressure of the theological divisions of modernity and the particularities of their politicization. At the same time, in its polemically responsive guise, Aslam’s work makes available the insight that the historical Baroque was always a responsive formation, attempting to defend, elaborate, and reinscribe habits of theologically driven representation in the face of the Protestant iconoclastic attack.
Aslam’s version of Cold War Baroque yields the baroque novel, which is, of course, a heuristic rubric that, in turn, gives us another heuristic rubric, that of a planetary baroque that extends beyond Europe and the Americas, in which Muslim aesthetic forms are enfolded in a manner that is not merely accidental or simply dependent on casual morphologies. This planetary baroque need not refer explicitly to Christianity and yet is entangled with its modern history, insofar as the conceptual world of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation exercised a pressure on the Empires that would come to shape colonial modernity and its postcolonial aftermath, revealing that we have yet to reckon fully with the history of Westphalia. In his engagement with imperial theology, Aslam makes the postcolonial aftermath visible as convergent with the theological struggles of Europe in the era of colonial modernity and the Cold War exacerbation and exploitation of the colonial reorganization and stabilization of religion, culture, and identities as facilitating a historical continuation, however spatially displaced, of those struggles. My point is not that the postcolonial world is repeating a colonial history as yet another iteration of its belatedness but, instead, that this trajectory of history remains to be interrupted or (if that is even possible) resolved—in postcolony and metropole.
Aslam’s novels combine a use of theological thinking with intense poeticism and a profound preoccupation with the body. What facilitates this fusion is a sustained use of Sufi aesthetics, which, though it is not adequately addressed by the word theological, nonetheless invites it. For Aslam reveals aesthetic practice that engages and interprets scripture and religious law—simply by manifesting a response to either in habits of devotion and the aesthetic forms that comprise them—to be “theological.” Aslam addresses the chronotopic challenge of novelistic narrative, of finding a formal correlative for the particular kind of time/space compressions required by the stories he wishes to tell, by putting Islamic (theological, aesthetic, and social), formal literary, and Cold War histories in play with each other, through the staging of a series of aesthetic confrontations between different understandings of Islam but also between iconoclastic impulses and the most iconic and image-riddled aesthetic forms. The novels are replete with references to broken Buddha heads, smashed dolls, Russian icons, illuminated books, walls frescoed in the manner of Bihzad, love lyric that collapses the distinction between human and divine, nude portraits, qawwali with its forms of devotion that insist on the planetary immanence of the divine.
Even as Aslam’s practice appears to court anachronism by incorporating Sufi poetics within the Anglophone novel, it is in keeping with the work of Urdu writers such as Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Qurratulain Hyder both of whom use Sufi ideas in their work. Rushdie does so too in Grimus. To name just two Arabic novelists, Naguib Mahfouz and Tayyib Salih, too, engage with Sufism. The post–World War II renewal of interest in the Sufi tradition among poets in the Middle East (some of whom as AnneMarie Schimmel puts it with some coyness “politically are leftists”) extends beyond the Middle East. It is an element in the thought and literary practice of the South Asian Left but also in a wider ideological array of literary practice that draws upon Sufi strands in traditions of Urdu and Persian poetry.7The transnational element of this interest and its Third Worldist component awaits more scholarship.
The simultaneous address to these histories and the intensity of their chronotopic compression make for the baroqueness of the Cold War Baroque novel. The planetary aspect of this baroque relies on this intensity of compression and on the resurfacing of these struggles in confrontations within modern Islam, in the long afterlife of the colonial restructuring of religion. Perhaps paradoxically, in Aslam’s case, the deterritorialized space of the global Anglophone novel provides the conditions of possibility for this intensity.
In this context, the conceptual use of a notion of a baroque novel is perhaps most visible when we attend to the terms baroque and novel as mutually constitutive of the text. For the novel exerts its own conceptual pressure on the material and forms that can be identified with the baroque, and Aslam appears concerned to exploit that tension. In Maps for Lost Lovers, the elements in the novel, which lead Lukacs to designate it the form of “a world deserted by God,” allow Aslam to produce a complex formal reflection on Sufi thought itself. In their elegiac address to these histories, to those who have made them and perhaps to those who may yet survive their consequences, the novels produce a reflection on death—as the murder of an aesthetic tradition, of learning, of beauty, of human possibility, of the earth itself—and the finitude of human life, which draws on Sufi aesthetics but which, in turn, reveals the limit, concerning the problem of death, in Sufi thought. In Maps for Lost Lovers, the Sufi emphasis on the annihilation of the self as part of its emancipation emerges as itself elegiac, and thus even as Sufi thought provides a critical apparatus in its antinomian and anticonventional aspects, it leads to a hypostatized repetition of loss as the outcome of desire, of suffering as the outcome of love, making redress in the world seem unattainable.8
In The Wasted Vigil, Sufism, and the Islam of which it is a face, is revealed as a moment in the history of the species and of human civilization. The novel’s staging of moments in the history of the region as disparate archaeological strata shows Hyder’s Āg kā daryā (River of Fire) to be an important influence and precursor.9 As in Āg kā daryā, the shards of different civilizational moments represent and demand a reflection on the very idea of history. In The Wasted Vigil, this reflection on history comes in a two-tiered structure. As in Maps for Lost Lovers, there is an engagement with and absorption of Sufi thought and aesthetics, most clearly visible in the use of the Bihzad, but also in the effort to imagine the earth as wounded and woundable in the manner of the human body, to imagine Allah as the “artist” and creator (aligning Him with the poet and thus all living creation with aesthetic creation) and in the identification of heroic, even defiant, loss with the female characters, Qatrina, Zameen, and Dunia.10
Even as this Sufism is itself shown to be ruined and fragmented through the various iconoclasms of war, working from below, the Buddha head represents a stratum of human history that contextualizes even the Sufi moment (now fallen victim to a series of catastrophes, engineered by Empire through the figure of Islam) as merely another stratum in the archaeological layers that comprise the history of the earth. It is as if Aslam has decided to use the fallen Buddha head to concretize a passage from the concluding chapter of River of Fire. I mention the English version because the passage does not occur in quite that form in the final chapter of Āg kā daryā even if the idea it presents is implicit in the very structure of the novel: “They watched the river ripple past. Words were temporary and transitory. Languages fade away or are forced into oblivion by new tongues. Men also come and go, even the river and the jungle are not eternal.”11 Aslam’s use of the Buddha head is in keeping with the structures of Hyder’s novel, in which the Buddhist presence in the region called South Asia and the violence of the expansion of the Mauryan Empire, at the very inception of the novel, are used to establish a history, which even as it is only available to the present in the form of ruins nonetheless enables the interrogation of the idea of a national culture, especially one conceived in religious terms. And yet, as in Hyder’s novel, Aslam’s point is not merely national, even in an antinationalist guise, but instead enables a reflection on the very nature, and parochialism, of human time and its irrelevance to the time of the earth. Such a conception of history (one way of making sense of of human time) offers no comforting vision of redemption.
Aslam’s novel achieves its vision of history through an encounter with tragedy and epic, both of which appear commemorative and elegiac in a manner that is inadequate to war. The commemorative elements are hard to sustain in the realist novel, which cannot produce the fanfare of the Iliadic funeral games or the heroic death—such as Antigone’s—of tragedy. The realist novel presents the commitment to glory as justification by honor, and thus as attempting an ethical redemption of waste, of unnecessary loss, as glory. The Wasted Vigil’s interest in the fate of conscripts refuses the economy of honor and glory. It does so, too, by staging the suggestion that mourning the dead is a luxury unavailable to most in war. The impossibility of mourning the dead properly, the suggestion that there is, to borrow a phrase from Spivak, no response to war, permeates the novel and is strikingly evident in Aslam’s play on the stories of Priam and Antigone.12
At the same time, Aslam probes the limit of the novel’s alignment with history in times of war. As the Buddha head, which is so central, if silent, a presence throughout the novel lies as a reminder of the end of great civilizations in the novel, it yet configures the realist novel as a form that can address the history of the world only as a list of ruins. The broad-canvased realist novel is a social form; war tears societies apart. In its failure, the novel thus enables a historical challenge to the eschatology that might appear licensed by the Baroque that presents ecstatic suffering (Bernini’s sculpture of Saint Teresa) as the transformative conduit to heaven, or which presents a muscular power that produces grandiose monuments (Bernini’s additions to St. Peter’s in Rome) as the earthly manifestations of a power that yet awaits its fullest universal and cosmic expression. At the same time, the novel issues a challenge to the teleology of a secular modernity that might be tempted to celebrate progress by presenting a redemptive economy of historical achievement outweighing or perhaps just earning a history of human pain.
Death and the Poet
Even as Aslam’s oeuvre performs complex acts of retrieval and exposure of disparate histories, the hermeneutic work, the daily cognitive mapping, demanded of the faithful by a conservative piety, both in its domestic and more overtly political guises, is also everywhere present in his novels. In Maps for Lost Lovers, the novel in which, as I suggested in chapter 3, the hermeneutic demands and their worldly instantiations are most intensely imagined and in which their representation is most fully achieved—particularly in the detail with which the inner lives of the characters is presented—Aslam stages a confrontation between poetry and the law, represented by those who adhere to more conservative forms of social and religious norms.
The novel’s perspective is aligned with poetry and poets, especially with Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose presence is felt throughout the book, which is dedicated to him along with the painter Abdur Rahman Chughtai, who will become even more significant in The Wasted Vigil. It is also aligned with Faiz through the name, Dasht-e-Tanhaii, it adopts for the town in which it is set, given within the novel by the Pakistani immigrants to the corner of Britain in which they find themselves. It is taken from one of his lyrics and translated for the reader as “Desert of Loneliness” or “Wilderness of Solitude.” Like Faiz, Aslam, too, has inhabited Sufi tradition for his own literary practice.13
Aslam ushers in a Sufi devotional aesthetic in opposition to a more law-bound conception of Islam through the perspective of the Communist poet, Shamas, enraged and despairing about what the Soviet Union has done to communism but yet committed to radical principles, who has refused to move out of the working-class immigrant neighborhood in which he lives and where he continues to work to integrate the local community into the larger political system. Shamas is an atheist who loves the Sufis, and in this love and his political commitments he is clearly allied with Faiz.
Encountering Maps for Lost Lovers for the first time can be disconcerting. Intensely image-ridden, almost overwrought, obsessed with tropes of love poetry, elegy, and pastoral, it is as if Aslam has written the novel as poem. The central preoccupation of the novel is the relationship between religious law and human attempts to live by and around it in the presence of the darkest brutalities of history: colonialism, Partition, life under Zia-ul-Haq, the migration of the poorest sections of society from Pakistan to England, the savage and unrelenting racism they face there, the violence the rigidly faithful or the opportunistically religious visit upon honest transgressors.
Aslam’s use of a self-consciously poetic voice allows him to write a profoundly aesthetic meditation on the encounter between faith, religious law, and the world. The novel is unusual in its unapologetic romanticism and relatively straightforward realism, and in its eschewal of the kind of sophisticated reflexivity one finds in Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk (both of whom have written poets as characters in their novels about the foundational narratives of Islam—Baal in The Satanic Verses—and Islamism—Ka in Snow) and yet, of course, very much a product of the contemporary moment—as the refusal of that sort of reflexive sophistication is precisely part of Aslam’s determination to produce a didactic and simultaneously imaginative record of the historical depredations of the never-ending durée of the Cold War moment. Shamas’s very presence in Britain is a result of the persecution of the Left in a national context of Cold War clientelism. The almost palpable need to produce a historical record of the geopolitics that have led to the current moment are perhaps most unsurprisingly evident in The Wasted Vigil, which can seem like an exercise in didactic history.
Poetry enters the novel in multiple ways. First it is filtered into the prose. The pastoralist combines the consciousness of the poet with that of the painter with a meticulous attention to visual detail. Jugnu, a lepidopterist, uses his passport to carry wildflowers picked before a flight; peacocks and butterflies wander through houses. Although the story is set in an ordinary English town, the novel seeks out and describes every trace of nature. Aslam uses free indirect discourse and slips with unfussed omniscience into the heads of his characters, but the consciousness with which the narrative is most clearly allied is that of the a highly visual poet, indeed, of the poet imagined as the painter of life.
Some of Aslam’s uses of nature imagery are prompted by impulses that are fairly familiar to readers of immigrant fiction. For Maps for Lost Lovers is, among other things, a record of migrant desolation. Aslam’s version of the immigrant novel is particularly elaborate, and arguably its most powerful character, Kaukab, Shamas’s very conservative wife, is a richly imagined and meticulously represented version of the helpless and angry mother stymied by what the culture into which she has been brought has done to her children. Kaukab’s wrenching loneliness is rendered with great care and without irony, as if Aslam has set out to retrieve the voice of the immigrant mother from the silence imposed by metropolitan culture and by rebellious children, who are nonetheless her victims as well. It is a complex choreography.
The immigrant’s loss of a land is also the loss of a landscape and, as the novel has told us earlier, of a season, the monsoon. The pastoralist’s attention to nature registers the loss of the home world, especially for the rural migrants at the heart of this story. It is their world that Aslam describes with sustained attention to nature in the novel set in the Punjab, The Season of the Rainbirds, in which the attention to nature invites the rubric “Punjabi pastoral,” with pastoral conceived not as a form of elite idealization but instead as the villager’s perception of beauty in quotidian rural life.14Recurring to an attempt frequent in immigrant fiction to make the new home less alien, less climatically traumatic, in Maps for Lost Lovers Aslam’s attention to nature signals an attempt to create a language that recognizes and makes the migrant’s own the beauty of the new land.15 He presents the poet before he dies, two pages from the end of the novel:
He stretches out an arm to receive the small light snowflake on his hand. A habit as old as his arrival in this country, he has always greeted the season’s first snow in this manner, the flakes losing their whiteness on the palm of his hand to become clear wafers of ice before melting to water—crystals of snow transformed into a monsoon raindrop. (ML, 377)
The poet’s careful attention to the new land is part of the endeavor of making Britain less European, more Asian, and this attempt defies both the whites, who want to repatriate Pakistanis, and those immigrants who want to police the community from within, keep it faithful to practices they claim will keep it more Pakistani, purely Muslim. Here it is a poetic image that makes England less white and more livable, lyric imagery that transforms the English language by making it more South Asian, by describing it in terms taken from a non-European landscape and from Urdu and Punjabi poetry. Aslam’s use of the image is of a piece with his larger practice of using Sufi poetics throughout the novel. One of the effects is to de-Anglicize the novel, hook it firmly to a South Asian literary genealogy, and, through that process, claim English literature for Britain’s most despised immigrants. Nowhere does the novel shy away from a reckoning with that contempt. There are numerous episodes of racist violence in the novel, but a synoptic history of racist attitudes is presented early:
It was a time in England when the white attitude to the dark-skinned foreigners was just beginning to go from I don’t want to see them or work next to them to I don’t mind working next to them if I’m not forced to, as long as I don’t have to speak to them, an attitude that would change again within the next ten years to I don’t mind speaking when I have to in the workplace, as long as I don’t have to talk to them outside the working hours, and then in another ten years to I don’t mind them socializing in the same place as me if they must, as long as I don’t have to live next to them. By then it was the 1970s and because the immigrant families had to live somewhere and were moving in next door to the whites, there were calls for a ban on immigration and the repatriation of the immigrants who were already here. (ML, 11; Aslam’s italics)
The nature imagery connects the desolation engendered by such violent exclusion to a larger sense of desolation in the novel, a sense that is bound up with a more planetary conception of loss and suffering. Aslam’s reflections may begin with the immigrants of the novel, but his vision of desolation encompasses the earth. In the very first line of Maps for Lost Lovers, the poet watches the snow falling: “Shamas stands in the open door and watches the earth, the magnet that it is, pulling snowflakes out of the sky towards itself” (ML, 3). A few pages later, he reflects on Chanda’s and Jugnu’s deaths: “He is not a believer, so he knows that the universe is without saviors: the earth is a great shroud whose dead will not be resurrected” (ML ,20).
The poetic imagery that pervades Maps for Lost Lovers is connected to the Sufism that is so central to the novel. The earth is magnet, shroud, and a wilderness of solitude and loneliness. The magnet is also an image of love in Sufi poetry.16By calling the earth a magnet in the opening paragraph of the novel, Aslam locates love as much as death in the earth itself. Aslam’s use of the metaphor is central to his endeavor. The notion of the earth’s inescapability is not merely an incidental effect of a character’s reflections; it is fundamental to the novel’s vision itself. As the source of nourishment as well as the recipient of the body after death, the world is all. Aslam’s honoring of the earth’s attraction even as a final grave (the resonances between gravity and grave are hard to miss) is part of his insistence that the body is all that humans have. This is, of course, meant to counteract the denial of the body with which the novel is so concerned. If everything ends with the grave, there is no reward to be gained by deferring the body’s pleasure, and the idea of resurrection is a cheat, not a promise. At the same time, an image that figures the earth as a magnet emphasizes the need to see the earth as an object and a subject of love, and as love itself. This conception demands a mode of being that recognizes the denial of the world as fundamentally unethical, as a rejection of the earth as love. Moreover, it sets forth a vision of the worldliness of love, turning the image of the magnet against its Sufi source by qualifying the emphasis on the annihilation of the self.
Despite her law-bound denial of the body, even Kaukab’s thoughts are infused with an awareness of the relationship between the earth and the human body. In order to come to terms with her loneliness and sense of exile in England, she thinks of the story of Adam’s creation:
Kaukab knows her dissatisfaction with England is a slight to Allah because He is the Creator and ruler of the entire earth . . . She often reminds herself that Allah had given Adam his name after the Arabic word adim, which means “the surface of the earth;” he—and therefore the whole of mankind, his descendants—was created from earth taken from different parts of the world. His head was made from the soil of the East, his breast from the soil of Mecca, his feet from the West. (ML, 31)
It is in order to pay due recognition to the earth’s pull, its link to the human body and its capacity to provide for the body, that Aslam demands the reader’s attention to its beauty. The house in The Wasted Vigil serves a similar function. But it is a beauty and plenitude perennially endangered by humans. In the scene where Shamas’s father loses his memory (and Hindu identity) in an aerial bombing, he smells oranges being “cut open” by the bomb “before he forgot everything, the last sensation being the flesh-eating heat of his hair on fire against his scalp” (ML, 54). In The Wasted Vigil, Aslam returns to this vision of a cut and wounded earth. Casa remembers that “Once he had seen a mine detonating in a grove of pomegranate trees with such force that the skin of every fruit on every branch had cracked, the red seed spilling out” (WV, 59). Human creations and actions make the world itself bleed, as the world’s body, which may indeed be of the same matter—as even Kaukab’s reflections suggest—as the human body, is torn and burned alongside humans.
Poetry also enters the novel through a depiction of Sufi song. The rupture between song and lyric has never really taken place in South Asia, where poetry, old and new, is still sung by qawwali singers, classical vocalists, and even modern rock bands. Pakistan’s most popular band, Junoon, calls its music Sufi-rock and has as a hit a poem by the Punjabi poet Bulleh Shah, which the group names “Bulleya”—one of the poets, who presides over Aslam’s novel. In the current moment, consciously Sufi forms and themes are ever more visible as practices of counterculture. Their presence in a mediatized popular culture presents the danger of increasing commodification, as is evident even in the name of a show that has become a premier site of Sufi song, Coke Studio, which is sponsored by Coca-Cola in Pakistan. Yet the problem of aesthetic commodification can be overstated if the varieties of economic patronage in global capitalism are not attended to more carefully.17 To focus on the forms of patronage available to artists without a sufficient recognition of the forms of economic largesse bestowed upon those who object to most aesthetic practices is to produce a somewhat skewed account of global capitalism. As different varieties of Islamic neo-orthodoxy, themselves beneficiaries of the economic patronage of oil money and the Cold War U.S. war chest, represent themselves as the only available anti-imperialism on the block, each neo-orthodox revivalism claims to represent all authentic Muslim tradition. Such countercultural assertion both fights the neo-orthodox revival that the Islamists prefer and rejects Western imperialism. Aslam’s project is a sophisticated part of this larger historical trend.
The mystical and heretical heritage of lyric is explicitly restored to the novel through Sufi poetics, and dramatizes a distinction between religious law and devotional practice and custom. Aslam describes a performance by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan at some length. Early in the performance, Khan sings a “love lyric,” and “when he comes to the word ‘you’—denoting the earthly beloved—he points to the sky with his index finger to indicate and include Allah in the love being felt and celebrated—a lover looking for the beloved represents the human soul looking for salvation” (ML, 192–93). One of the ways in which Aslam aligns himself with the Sufi tradition is to give everyone in Shamas’s and Kaukab’s family a name that translates into a form or source of light: Shamas, Kaukab, Ujala, Mah-jabin, Charag, the lovers Chanda and Jugnu, and Kiran, whose name is explicitly translated for the reader as a “ray of light.” One of the names for God is light (Nur), and the novel’s implication is that each one of these humans has a spark of a light we might think of as divine. Each one in the end threatened with extinction by the Law and murderous social norms. In this respect, Shamas’s name is perhaps most significant for it links the novel very directly to Rumi’s mysticism. By giving his protagonist a name that is variation on Shams (sun), which Rumi himself took after his beloved Shamas’s death, Aslam plays with the significations of mystical union in the world. The human is lover, beloved, and the most powerful light (almost) visible to humans—seeker, sought, and source of light and thus divine. The “lost lovers” of the title are thus all those whose love is denied, and the novel is a litany of such characters, but they are also those, like Chanda’s brothers and murderers, who cannot find the divine spark in every human or in human love; and the very possibility of the salvation the soul seeks (as light attempts to return to itself) is thus destroyed. Aslam aligns his work with this tradition by availing himself of the theology of Sufi thought.18
The thought that illuminates Aslam’s own practice, that metaphysical concepts need to be available to the imagination, is one that he attributes to Shamas as his father lies dying: “Shamas was no believer, but imagination insists that all aspects of life be at its disposal, the language of thought richer for its appropriation of concepts such as the afterlife (ML, 83). God’s light as an igniting spark in humans may only be a metaphor to Aslam, but it is a metaphor that is part of the deep structure of imagery which allows an elegy for human (and planetary) waste to permeate the novel.
Later in the performance, Khan sings a song by Bulleh Shah about fabled and doomed lovers. This turns into a meditation on the role of the “poet-saints of Islam”:
[T]hese verses of the saints—because they advocated a direct communion with Allah, bypassing the mosques—were denounced by the orthodox clerics, so much so that when the poet Bulleh Shah died the clerics refused to give him a decent burial, leaving the body outside in the blazing sun until hundreds of his outraged admirers pushed the holy men aside and buried him themselves. Even today the Sufis are referred to as the “opposition party of Islam.” (ML, 196)
Aslam’s decision to align the general style and consciousness of the novel with that of the poet allows him to recover and update a classic confrontation in Muslim history: the confrontation between the mullah and the antinomian religious poet. It is usually a fight in which the Sufi poet excoriates the rigidity of the mullah’s adherence to religious law and tries also to provide dissenting interpretations of Muslim foundational texts and traditions to shore up practices considered insufficiently orthodox. It is an antipathy shared by Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil.
The mullahs are the ones to want to introduce a life-denying dualism into everything, and the Sufis respond with a vitalism that insists that everything in the world is alive. Like many Sufi poets, the seventeenth-century Bulleh Shah’s writing brims with stories of famous lovers, a vitalist sense of the earth, anticlericalism, a disdain for religious law, and a contempt for religious sectarianism and bigotry. He is particularly famous for his defense of Hindus and Sikhs against orthodox violence in Mughal India. The pastoralism of the novel and the image-riddled sensitivity of its prose mark Aslam’s own honoring of Sufi vitalism. There is a glimpse of this in the passage about the snowflake that I quoted earlier: a world of transformations is a living world in which everything is perpetually in process. Ultimately that vitalism underpins the entire structure of imagery and the commitment to chronicling that other life of the planet, perpetually at risk from the dark side of human creation—bombs and land mines.
The use of Sufi thought is perhaps most explicitly visible in the way Aslam takes a story about doomed lovers, the kind of story one finds repeatedly in South Asian vernacular Sufi verse, and weaves a novel out of and around it. The novel is both a principled stand against a form of violence that is sometimes presented as peculiar to Muslims and a literary convention inherited from a branch of Muslim literature. The retelling of this Sufi story is also a solution to the ideological quandary that we have seen as a pervasive problem in “West”-“Islam” relations, and also more largely of the postcolonial double bind. Aslam replaces the chivalric idiom of the humanitarian romance of imperial rescue—where white men save brown women from brown men, to recur to Spivak’s usually decontextualized line—with an actual tradition of romance, which is used here to provide a critique of misogyny. In other words, Aslam does not match the imperial line with what Spivak calls the “nativist patriarchal” counter and “parody of the nostalgia for lost origins: ‘The woman actually wanted to die.’” Instead he turns to a tradition that foregrounds the pain, loss and violence of misogyny.19
In the West, honor killings (though not unique to Muslims) are usually greeted with a kind of hushed despair over Muslim dysfunction, sometimes as a sign that Muslim migrants are irretrievably foreign, pressed by their religion into a barbarism that will never allow them to live comfortably in Europe or the United States. Internal critique is always in danger of being taken to endorse an imperialism or racism that has seized the language of opposition for its own, and the dilemma is in part rhetorical, requiring its own temporospatial compression: How can one register a simultaneous distance from all elements in the bind? How can one circumvent the usual lag in the unfolding of a narrative, an utterance, a judgment, and forestall it being received in a way that reduces the complexities of double critique? How does one find a language to condemn such cruelty that does not seem borrowed from Europe, and thus cannot be manipulated by neo-Orthodox Islamists or the chivalric knights of the West? The impasse is grave and disabling.20
By turning to the Sufi poetic tradition, by incorporating it into his own literary practice, Aslam makes it clear that he is claiming a critical position that comes from within Islam’s history and that this is first and foremost an internal fight. Muslims have their own historical resources for dealing with such social challenges; Empire does not need to gallop to the rescue. At the same time, the Sufi valuation of the annihilation of the self and its dissolution into the divine, and concomitant valuation of loss in the world as a conduit to that annihilation, can turn into a perpetual postponement of the possibility of betterment in the world and an aesthetic addiction to loss, unable to deliver or imagine any actual improvement in the condition of women, unable to overcome the impasse generated around them by empire, but also to overcome a choice between body and soul, unable to overcome circumstance. The women repeatedly fail for the “poet-saints of Islam [expressed] their loathing of power and injustice always through female protagonists in their verse romances” (ML, 195); “always it was the very vulnerability of women that was used by the poet-saints to portray the intolerance and oppression of their times; in their verses the women rebel and try bravely to face all opposition and they—more than the men—attempt to make a new world. And, in every poem and every story, they fail. But by striving they become part of the universal story of human hope” (ML, 196). To some extent Aslam overturns the relationship presented in these lines, because in the novel, in contrast to the poetry he describes, women are also the bearers of the law. If Chanda, like Sassi and Heer, is killed, Kaukab and Suraya are themselves committed to the law and terribly lonely in their entrapment by it. The realist novel as conceived by Aslam does not permit simply a lyrical lament for the dead beloved and for the inevitable Sisyphean failure of the attempt at love but instead also presents a meditation on the social relations that produce that death and such failure. The lingering of hope cannot be as simple as these lines suggest.
Poetry persists in this realist novel as the force of utopian possibility. Sufi poetry is the voice both of autonomy and of an earlier literary tradition. On the terms of the novel, the woman lover/beloved is aligned with poetry, and that the women always fail suggests that poetry itself fails. This implication is important to Maps for Lost Lovers. At the end of the penultimate chapter Shamas dies as a result of being beaten up by thugs for hire because he has threatened to expose a local mullah’s pedophilia. As he lies dying he calls the entire world by the name borrowed from Faiz, Dasht-e-Tanhaii, the “desert of loneliness.” This is why Aslam has withheld the English name of the town he describes: he wants to make the tragedy of the migrants represent all human suffering—returning us to the theological problem of evil.
It seems that Aslam ends Maps for Lost Lovers with Shamas’s death (imaginable as a metaphor for the death of poetry) and asserts the primacy of the novel so firmly because, in a story of so much suffering, a literary mode that celebrates beauty and love, that enshrines an autonomy that is usually denied to most, risks being socially obtuse and turning misery into theodicy, into an apology for suffering as part of God’s plan. To the extent that the Sufi lyric, or indeed any lyric, can slot the story of destroyed lovers into a universal history of hope, to the extent that it risks redeeming that suffering within some larger scheme of human history it can turn utopian hope into theodicy. The generic encounter tugs, thus, in contrary directions. The poet represents a necessary Sufism. But his is also, on the novel’s terms, a Sufism that is already defeated, as he has not been able to understand his own injunction to his painter-son: you must represent society. He has not switched over to writing novels. He has also not understood his own central insight about the importance of understanding systems. Earlier on in Maps for Lost Lovers, he describes Islam as an administered order:
A system conditions people into thinking it is never to blame, is never to be questioned. We have to beg, say the beggars, the accursed belly demands food: it is the fault of the belly, not the unjust world that doesn’t allow enough sustenance to reach the bellies of everyone through dignified means. (ML, 242)
The novel issues an invitation to think in Lukacsian terms and prompts its readers, explicitly, to conceive of the world as “system.” Yet where a Lukacsian might think of European capitalism as the only system worth narrating, Aslam makes law-bound conceptions of Islam and global capitalism visible as analogous systems.
To the extent that Sufism provides the immanent structure of lyric in the novel it, too, is defeated. And so, in the end, Aslam’s relationship with Sufism and the kind of poetic consciousness that underpins it is ambivalent. However much Maps for Lost Lovers might be allied with its poet’s way of perceiving the world, and however lyrical that perception might be, the fact is that he no longer writes poetry. Poetry turns you back to the world, forces you to reckon with its beauty and the possibilities for love it offers, and yet the world remains governed by law. Sufism might push toward its cancellation, but in a world governed by the law, poetry like people is crushed into lifelessness.
On the one hand, the realist novel’s worldliness makes it antitheodicy; on the other, its absorption of lyric allows its worldliness to become a demand for human emancipation, for a genuine human autonomy. It is almost as if Aslam has arranged a confrontation between Lukacs and Adorno in his novel. The novel reveals the utopian quality of lyric, which erupts into the narrative with the demand for a better world, as if dramatizing Adorno’s thoughts about the lyric: “the [lyric’s] distance from mere existence becomes the measure of all that is false and bad in the latter. In its protest the poem expresses the dream of a world in which things would be different.”21 Yet the fusing of the realist novel and the utopian lyric risks a backfire to the extent that it asks one to experience the actually existing world as already utopian—that is, it risks representing demand as actuality. At the same time, the big novel’s realism pulls it in another direction: realism must be antitheodicy if it is not to be mere romance, if it is not to turn pain and risk into adventure and reward, shut down by marriage plots that end just where new sorts of difficulty begin. In the face of this danger, the realist novel keeps faith with the utopian demand by terminating the premature utopianism of poetry.
Yet Aslam ends the novel away from the hypostatized commitment to loss represented by Shamas’s death. Two pages later, the narrative shifts to conclude with a focus on a new minor character: the brother of the immigrant killed in the condemned building decides to come out of hiding. He stops at a news agent’s and then walks into the street.
He hasn’t been able to sleep much thinking some calamity is imminent, dreaming again and again of rocks and stones being hurled at butterflies. But at dawn today he had told himself to go out into the world again. If a calamity is coming then where else would he rather be than with his fellow humans? What else is there but them?
He moves away from the newsagent’s window and resumes his journey along the snow-covered street. (ML, 379)
Aslam is austere, then: by aligning himself with the novel in this way, he refuses a redemptive account of suffering. He refuses what is, in effect, an aesthetic vindication of human pain.
Warlords and Image Makers
The recalcitrance of human pain is at the very heart of The Wasted Vigil and infuses the repetition, which is the novel’s structuring principle. Early in the novel the reader is told, “Up there Priam begged Achilles for the mutilated body of his son Hector. And Antigone wished to give her brother the correct burial, finding unbearable the thought of him being, unwept, unsepulchred” (WV, 15). “Up there” is the library of books nailed to the ceiling, to protect them from being detected by the Taliban. Marcus’s search for his daughter, Zameen, and his ongoing search for his grandson, Bihzad, recalls Priam’s devastating fate: to watch the young die and have only the hope of granting their bodies a dignity they lost in the particularly cruel forms of their dying. The Russian, Lara, seeks to find and bury her brother, the conscript who raped Zameen every night while she was held prisoner and impregnated her with Bihzad, who, of course, in turn, will become Casa, the militant, and as we learn a different kind of conscript.
The novel is framed by these two figures. Lara opens the novel, “Her mind is a haunted house. The woman named Lara looks up at an imagined noise. Folding away the letter she has been rereading” (WV, 5); and Marcus concludes it, “He enters the building and asks if someone would be kind enough to take him to the city centre in a while. He is meeting someone there who could be Zameen’s son” (WV, 319). Marcus continues a search the reader knows to be futile, one of the wasted vigils suggested by the novel’s title, which is itself taken from Abdur Rahman Chughtai’s wistful neo-Orientalist painting. That painting feminizes loss and waiting in a way that resonates with Aslam’s use of Sufi poetics.
Priam and Antigone are not just arbitrary borrowings from a Western tradition but instead part of the novel’s insistence on the history of the Greek presence in the regions bounded by the borders of present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is a history, along with that of the Gandharan civilization that produced the statue of Buddha that is a broken presence throughout the novel, lost through the destruction wreaked by war and, more systematically, by the Taliban’s ideologically motivated assault on all forms of unacceptable learning, art, and worship. Aslam may well be particularly sensitive to this because of the analogous precursor banishment of the history of the region now bounded by the map of Pakistan, in which the national narrative required by the creation of the Muslim state sits in tension with the history of the many ancient civilizations, and even relatively recent histories, that have preceded the achieved state—a state, moreover, whose secret service has had a significant hand in Afghanistan’s present condition, precisely because of the paradoxical embrace and denial of the borders that are an aftermath of the colonial presence. The state’s machinations are represented through the hugely unpleasant character of Fedallah, the rogue ISI agent. The nationalism of the ISI signals a commitment to these borders, whereas the meddling in Afghanistan—based on a resentment of the Durand line dividing Pakistan and Afghanistan and the desire to be able to win a war with India—is, of course, predicated on a denial of those very borders.
The image of the books nailed to the ceiling is a fundamental part of the novel’s commitment to repetition. In The English Patient, the novel of war that presides most immediately over The Wasted Vigil, making it seem, as Pankaj Mishra has said, “an extended tribute” to Ondaatje’s novel, Hana nails books to the floor and to each other so she can step on them to reach something.22 Although the most powerful citation of The English Patient in The Wasted Vigil is the very conceit of a house partially ruined by war, in which the wounded and the grieving congregate, providing a central organizing principle for the convergence of places and histories, Aslam’s sustained elaboration of the image of the nailed books is crucial to his staging of the eruption of inconvenient histories into a violently resistant antiaesthetic, anti-intellectual, and iconoclastic present.
The fundamental antagonism in the novel—the confrontation or, perhaps more daring, “converse” between the warlord and the poet, between the iconoclast and the maker of images—is set up with the epigraphs. The second epigraph from Daulat Shah of Herat’s Tazkirat-ush-Shaura (Lives of the Poets) pulls the first one from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s canonical interview regarding U.S. “strategy” in Afghanistan into its ambit in a gently surprising way:
And the poet in his solitude
turned towards the warlord a corner of his mind
and gradually came to look upon him
and held a converse with him.
Even as the epigraph sets a precedent for Aslam’s own “converse” with the warlord, it performs a confrontation with Brzezinski whose inscription on the page sets him up as the warlord at whom Daulat Shah looks across time and space and with whom he is in dialogue. The address from across centuries to this most modern of warlords invites the question of what kind of converse one might have with someone who can say with magnificent dismissive arrogance:
What is more important to the history of the world—the Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? A few agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War. (WV, 1)
The epigraph reveals a didacticism—recurrent in the novel—that seems born of despair. Unable to rely on the reader’s knowledge of the speaker of the utterance, the novelist needs to introduce the speaker without the subtle omission of information that may make its literariness more deft. The author’s inability to count on such knowledge is a symptom of the historical amnesia, which allows the former allies of the United States to become historyless “terrorists” in the metropolitan imagination. It marks, moreover, the burden upon the author in the global Anglophone marketplace—the task of overcoming the metropolitan audience’s investment in forgetting its own collusion in this history, an amnesia that Khalid Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, with its veneration of Ronald Reagan, facilitates marvelously. The pressure to bring that knowledge to the reader is evident throughout the novel, as is the pressure to bring the knowledge of the Muslim past to Muslim readers, metropolitan and otherwise, who may be in danger of forgetting that history in the face of iconoclastic assaults from fellow Muslims. Aslam introduces Brzezinski’s words, thus, in a rather explanatory introduction, with a framing that borders on the clumsy. The epigraph is followed by the words below.
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI,
President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, asked if he regretted “having supported Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists.” from Le Nouvel Observateur, 15–21 January 1998. (WV, 1)
If the author cannot rely on his reader to have or desire this knowledge, because of the complex redactions and revisions of history after September 11, 2001, and because of the assault on the signs of history that the war has produced, he must also find a way to address this particular warlord in a manner that circumvents the cavalier dismissal of Muslim “agitation” and find the craft that can manage a converse with the monumental arrogance of that phrase “to the history of the world.” The structure of repetition in the novel is in part a response to the challenge it poses. Aslam’s repetitions might be read as a meditation on precisely that phrase and as a nonteleological response to it that stages a different conception of history, as a series of repetitions of loss, destruction, and human suffering.
The war between erasure and broken remembrance is the human history of the planet, endlessly set to repeat itself—waiting for the dead, the end of those who can survive it. The history of the world, as a history of loss, does not enable a redemptive reading of the fall of the Soviet Empire. In other words, the history of the world is not consonant with any teleological understanding of “the end of history” as the desirable outcome of that fall. In fact one allegory of the end of history is to be found in the death of Casa, the disappearance of Dunia, and the mutilation of James. The three young people caught in a triangle, products of the Cold War machinations Brzezinski defends, the planet’s future on the novel’s terms, die, disappear, or are terribly wounded. Dunia’s name is at the heart of this allegory. One end of history is the disappearance of the world (Dunia).
Aslam’s formal response, already foregrounded by the epigraph from Daulat Shah, is to set the poet, but more broadly the image maker and the made image, against the warlord and the violence of war. On the very first page of the novel the reader is presented with the wistful image of Lara dragging a large round mirror so that she can read the titles on the ceiling without straining her neck:
The mirror is large—if it was water she could dive and disappear into it without touching the sides. On the wide ceiling are hundreds of books, each held in place by an iron nail hammered through it. A spike driven through the pages of history, a spike through the pages of love. A spike through the sacred. The words are reversed but that is easier than looking up for entire minutes would be. . . . She slides the mirror along the floor as though visiting another section of a library. (WV, 5)
It is significant that these spikes have been driven through the books by a character who has lost her reason upon being confronted with the terrible atrocity of having to cut off her husband’s hand as a punishment for his having ostensibly stolen paintings that she painted. Her attempt to protect the books from the Taliban by nailing them to the ceiling repeats the violence she has had to inflict on her husband in order to protect him from being murdered. But the spikes also represent an assault on love, the sacred, and history that is the tally of the quarter century of war in Afghanistan. The passage intimates a connection that will get developed over the course of the novel between God’s creation (humans) and human creation (a variety of images and words). In the description of Qatrina’s paintings the connection gets extended to God Himself, who is enfolded into the circle of creation and being. Each painting of one of his ninety-nine names provides a quandary for the Taliban, who want to destroy them all but are unable to separate word from image:
The Taliban did not know how to deal with the pictures—each bore one of Allah’s names in Arabic calligraphy, the Compassionate One, the Immortal One—but the words were surrounded by images not only of flowers and vines but of other living things. Animals, insects and humans. They wanted to tear out these details but couldn’t because the various strokes and curves of the name took up the entire rectangle, reaching into every corner, every angle. (WV, 179)
If the paintings represent the impossibility of separating divinity from creation, the description of Qatrina’s process in creating the paintings shows an almost devotional reverence. The description is slow and prayerlike in its repetition, and so, too, is the process described at leisurely length:
She would paint a picture, allow the paper to dry, and then dip it into a tray of water to dissolve away some or all of the colour. After it had dried she would paint for a second time and again take away part or the whole of the pigment in the water bath. The process could be repeated as many as ten or twelve times. On occasion she added an amount of colour to the trayful of water before lowering the picture into it, so that the entire composition was suffused by a very pale redness or by a reticent haze of saffron. A sustained shimmer of blue. Layer by layer she would build a complex painting over many weeks (WV, 178)
The process bears some resemblance to the layering of Aslam’s own style and at the same time figures artistic creation as itself carrying a devotional quality. The way the paintings are made suggests creation and divine manifestation cannot be separated in them, and as the Taliban’s dilemma reveals, neither can word, image, script(ure), being, and body.
The other side of the potential for creation is the steady recurrence of atrocity, which itself represents the insidiously inventive (and ecumenical) creativity of human cruelty. Throughout the novel both forms of creation are tortured, assaulted, and broken; word, image, body, and earth are all torn, sometimes in the name of the sacred. Paradoxically the very litany of horror calls the sacred into question by prompting again and again the question: what kind of an eschatological notion of the human future could possibly justify this atrocity?
The confrontation between the warlord and the image maker is present in its most concentrated form in the play on Bihzad’s name, a central though not solitary part of which is the plot around the eponymous character in the novel. The novel refers to the artists who have painted in the manner of Bihzad and whose work has been defaced or destroyed. The walls decorated in this way in Marcus’s house are either covered with mud for their protection or lying in fragments on the floor. The frescoes are themselves evidence of human creativity, in their dedication to the senses, a metaphor for the shattering of the body and violation of senses by the war, and also for the attack on the Sufi past by the Taliban.
Bihzad’s illuminated manuscripts and the style he continues to inspire across the centuries haunt the book with the memory of the Muslim past and offer a reproach—in name and form—to the destructively iconoclastic vision of the Muslim future. The character Bihzad’s transformation into Casabianca then stages an allegorical contest between two different conceptions of the Muslim future and performs their attachment to different moments in the past. Bihzad/Casa is turned into a cipher that represents the possibilities of history and of being at its center. If Bihzad represents Muslim creation and the possibilities of an open future that yet bears some connection to customary forms and thus the paradoxical possibility of nurture from the past, his transformation into Casa, as a truncated Casabianca (from the Felicia Hemans poem), represents a child loyal to elders who, if one follows the poem, are going down with a sinking ship, or, in the case of the new Casa, are busy betraying their young by turning them into cannon fodder. That the character who names Casa is able to remember the reference to the poem and later turn against the education that made that act of naming possible is, on the novel’s terms, one of the ironies of the history the imperial encounter has produced. For Casa’s very name suggests a transformation—marked by mirroring and mimicry of the imperial fleet and its conscripts—rather than a historically pure resistance by the militant Islamist imagination to imperial encroachment.
The future signified by a Bihzad as opposed to one represented by a Casabianca comes attached to different conceptions of the past. One conception imagines the past as capable of producing an (antinomian) creativity from within the structures of Islam, and another replaces that generative yet paradoxically customary creativity with a modern necropolitics, shaped by imperial defeat, and now mimicking the morbidity of the Western empires that are the cause of that defeat.
Spies in Love and the Ends of Freedom
The Wasted Vigil’s structure of repetition contributes to its density of allusion. Aslam has said that this is a book about other books. The suggestion in the opening lines is that like Lara rereading her letter, we, too, are caught in a cycle of rereading. Lara’s name itself seems an allusion to the heroine of Dr. Zhivago.23 Another book about a doctor-poet, or healer–image maker, caught (like Qatrina) in the brutalizing maelstrom of war, a novel, like The Wasted Vigil, of lovers and children lost to historical events. Like Lara, who is herself a product of the history her name ushers in, dragging the mirror that could have been pulled down from the wall in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” the reader, too, must read these stories in their many iterations, discerning continuities, as through the inversions and reversals of a mirror.24
A significant reworking in the novel is of the figure of the CIA agent who falls in love with a native woman and turns her into an object of rescue—interchangeable with the land she inhabits. David’s love affair with Zameen is a rewriting, or perhaps a rereading, of Alden Pyle’s love for Phuong in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.25 David’s character is the figure through whom the American hand in the current crisis can be revealed. The spy is an increasingly ubiquitous figure in contemporary attempts to map the relations between Western power and radical Islamism. On the news, the spy who turns against current policy in order to reveal its bankruptcy and lack of regional understanding is a figure of remarkable authority, guarantor of a presumed access to covert knowledge, the being who holds the key to penetrating the occult mysteries of the covert control of the world. David’s own story leads to us to see the connections between the United States, the Taliban, and the history of the United States itself in the form of the Vietnam War in which he lost his brother, which has fortified his conviction that the world has to be saved from communism; as if the Vietnam War has entirely counterintuitively convinced him of the need to continue the enterprise undertaken there.
David enables the figuration of the tormented spy’s need for absolution as a reminder of the cost of American “innocence,” perhaps the greatest symbol of American exceptionalism. If Pyle is the “quiet” American, David is more explicitly a “nice” one, operating always under the best of intentions and, decades later, wracked by guilt and eager to make restitution. Within the novel, his niceness is an extension of the innocence that places the burden of absolution upon its many victims. The likability of the American spy, his good intentions, his or her (usually his) capacity to mask his violence even to himself, by a focus on the goodness of his intentions and the logic of rescue, stages the drama of American exceptionalism by displacing the ethical burden upon those on whose bodies that drama is enacted. Such “innocence” and “likability” are themselves predicated on a complex national amnesia, which frees David from the ethical burden of the early history of the United States, a relation in which Native American lifeworlds are fractured and then absorbed in the very process of decimation, of which the canoe he builds is a symbol. David’s almost pastoral appreciation for the disappearing practices—as when he remembers with languid wistfulness the Ojibwa woman harvesting wild rice—of Native American life is poised on a suppression of the ethical rage that should attend such witness:
This time he had brought with him from the United States the basic materials to construct a birch-bark canoe, having contemplated spending a week or so building it here. . . . Visiting the lakes of the northern United States as a child, in the company of his brother Jonathan and an uncle, he had seen a sea of wild rice engulf an Ojibwa woman seated in a canoe. A slide into harvest: she gently bent the slender stalks that were sticking out of the water’s surface and knocked the grain into her vessel, to sell for twenty-five cents a pound. The last armed conflict between the United States and military forces and the Native Americans had taken place right there on Leech Lake in 1898. (WV, 73)
It is left to Casa’s thought to reveal the terrible and habitual violence of that national history as he wonders to himself with an unknowingly ironic awe:
The missiles that landed in Casa’s jihad training camp were named after an American Indian weapon—Tomahawk. Casa knows other words too like Comanche and Apache and Chinook. First the Americans exterminate the Indians, then name their weapons and warplanes after them.
What did those Indians do to make the white Americans respect them?” (WV, 159)
Casa’s fascination with the American capacity to forget the violence inflicted in the service of the American imperium reveals another mirroring. His appreciation of the violence, innocent in its own right, represents the dispersal of American innocence, the global spread of mimic exceptionalisms. On the novel’s terms, the combination of destruction and a disdain for history are America’s Cold War gift to the planet. The final and most decisive metaphor for that relationship is the shared grave in which Casa and David end up, entwined to the death. The embrace in which they find themselves as they die represents what the novel imagines as an outcome of America’s spread of its particular varieties of violence. The intimacy will continue unto death and beyond.
David’s relationship with Zameen follows the more familiar logic of imperial rescue in which women become alibis for political adventures driven by other motives. David’s determination to keep her from her first love, the communist Afghan, simply repeats Pyle’s conviction that he is the right person to save Phuong. The question of the woman’s choice is more clearly foregrounded by Aslam; for Zameen is a much more active figure, attempting to rescue children and lead them to refugee camps across the border, working secretly with refugee women in Peshawar. Yet David is unable to see her as a being capable of making choices. Although she is no longer in love with the young communist and is, in fact, in love with David, he cannot trust her to make her own choice. She must, in other words, be saved from her imagined self.
However, Zameen’s name (land) overdetermines the allegory in a slightly distasteful manner. To figure the woman as land is to invite the image of woman as that which can be tilled, the source of fertility, indeed the earth itself. Zameen’s captivity under the Soviets and her repeated rape by Benedikt does little to upset that gendered cliché. The allegory might be seen as a way of addressing the problem of a response to the Taliban’s misogyny, which is completely bound with the perceived impossibility of separating the support of groups such as the Feminist Majority in the buildup to the war in Afghanistan from any other critique of Taliban misogyny. By contrast Northern Alliance misogyny can be useful. That is, a systematic critique can very quickly be assumed to be part of the imperial project and the result, as I suggested in chapter 2, is a series of politically aphasic concessions to the impasse.
In a response to the attempted assassination of Malala Yusufzai, the Pakistani child activist, by the Tehreek-t-Taliban of Pakistan, the novelist Kamila Shamsie described the stalemate with striking clarity. What she wrote is worth quoting at length:
Yes, of course, the Taliban exists because of political decisions dating back to the 1980s; and of course the mess that is the “war on terror” has only added to the TTP’s ranks.
There’s no need for the Taliban to invent propaganda against the American and Pakistan state (although they do)—both governments supply an excess of recruitment material for those who hate them. So if you view the Taliban simply through the prism of the war on terror and Pakistan and the United States, it’s possible to think the process can be reversed; policies can be changed; everyone can stop being murderous and duplicitous.
But then there’s Malala Yousafzai, standing in for all the women attacked, oppressed, condemned by the Taliban. What role have women played in creating the Taliban? Which of their failures is tied to the Taliban’s strength? What grave responsibility, what terrible guilt do they carry around which explains the reprisals against them?26
Shamsie’s questions demand an attention to the evasions that attend a focus on the way women have been used to motivate the war, which repeatedly subsume the questions of what is being done to women, and why it is being countenanced, to the question of how the Western media, policy circles, and the wider apparatus of bellicose justification together manipulate that issue.
The apparent conceptual stress produced by such manipulation can lead to a number of prophylactic moves, which include a quick distancing of oneself by showing one’s contempt for Madonna (or some other celebrity’s) “discovery” of an issue, a knowing distancing from Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Irshad Manji if one is a Muslim woman or one from a Muslim-majority society, a throwing of any woman who produces a feminist critique of Islamism under the bus by equating her with Hirsi Ali. For all Muslim women are only one degree of separation from Hirsi Ali, and they must at all times lead with the proof that they are not her, or supporters of war against Muslim-majority societies, just as Palestinians and their “sympathizers” always have to lead with their condemnation of suicide bombings in order to earn the right to speak. The more difficult task of questioning the bigotry by which every Muslim woman is always already the same as every other Muslim woman, and the even more complex task of producing an understanding of the stabilization of a discourse of collaboration that homogenizes Muslims through their division only into collaborators and noncollaborators is yet to be undertaken. Indeed the very question of collaboration in the age of transnationalism, globalization, and massive immigration and its relationship with internationalism requires more sustained analysis.
Aslam’s response to this impasse in The Wasted Vigil is in line with his turning to Sufism as a discourse internal to Islam that provides resources for critique in Maps for Lost Lovers. Like the women whose “vulnerability” was used by Sufi poets to represent the “intolerance and oppression of their times” the female characters in The Wasted Vigil, too, attempt to remake their world and repeatedly fail. Unlike Maps for Lost Lovers, The Wasted Vigil provides little by way of a “universal history of hope.” The title of the novel obviates the possibility of hope and presents any waiting that might attend it as simply a devastating waste. Within the world designated by the title, the burden on the women appears as a terrible expectation and marks, at the same time, the gendered limits of interpolating women into such a role.
To imagine Zameen as land is very much in keeping with a variety of nationalist identifications of women with land or nation, destined to bear the burden of identity and honor and to become ciphers for the violation of the land by the invaders. If Zameen, like Phuong in The Quiet American, bears those allegorical markings, the burden on Dunia is greater. Her disappearance signifies the end of the world, but her romance with Casa presents the other side of that figuration. Her task—as representation of world—is to love Casa out of his rejection of humanity and the world, to persuade him yet of the humanity of women. This produces a new impasse: in order to understand—and thus recuperate—Casa’s humanity the novel has to displace the burden of love onto the woman, whose healing power lies in her being a redemptive figure of self-erasing love who, if one follows the logic of the various allegories, could, but for the vicious brutality of the American apparatuses of torture, return Muslim history to its own self-determining and humane self. Ultimately, however, all is lost: world, history, in Aslam’s words, “the planet’s future.”
When confronted with the brutally inventive varieties of annihilation offered by war, the annihilation of the self may seem trivial, and yet this war reveals that annihilation as a reiteration of the destruction, not as its emancipatory other. Dunia, the world—what is usually taken to be the very antinomy of a Neoplatonic conception of love—is turned into a Neoplatonic and thus abstract and world-erasing entity, through the reduction of the woman simply to a symbol of redemptive love. In her capacity as cipher, the burden of her gender upon the woman is that of providing the illusion of emancipation through love while being interpellated into an ever-expanding economy of annihilation.