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Engaging Politically from the Margin 275
“quite deliberately use[d] the phrase ‘War on Terror,’” for “to talk
about a ‘War on Terror’ novel is to really talk about the consequences
of the decisions made by various governments (including those of the
US and Pakistan), rather than to place the terrorists of 9/11 at the
centre of the narrative.” The War on Terror, which the American
government called for in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 to protect
democracy and liberty, has inflicted suffering on many Muslims in the
United States, especially after the Patriot Act was signed and enacted.
6
In the novel, in the wake of 9/11, Kim becomes more patriotic and
paranoid than before, and yet, when Raza tells Kim that the Patriot Act
permits the FBI to “indefinitely detain someone with just minor visa
violations if they have even the vaguest suspicions about them”
(Shamsie, 2009a: 305), Kim appears to have known nothing about it.
Kim’s ignorance reflects some extremely patriotic Americans’ blind
support of their government’s actions without knowing or caring about
the outcomes.
Despite being called the Patriot Act, such a homeland security
policy seems to reflect a sentiment less related to patriotism than to
ethnocentrism and aggressive nationalism which, while including white
Americans, excludes immigrants in the rebuilding of the nation. This is
the other side of immigrant story that remains mostly untold in
Shamsie’s Karachi novels, in which migrant characters appear, to some
extent, to be unaffected by, or unconcerned with, the politics of their
host country while constantly feeling nostalgia for the homeland.
7
6
USA Patriot Act stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing
Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.
7
In fact, Shamsie’s fourth novel,
Broken Verses
,
briefly touches upon Americans’
anti-Muslim xenophobia after 9/11. In the novel, the male protagonist Ed returns
from New York to Pakistan because of the immediate consequences of the 9/11
events, such as “[t]he INS[,] Guantanamo Bay[,] [t]he unrandom random security
check in airports[,] [t]he visit from the FBI” (Shamsie, 2005: 45-46). Most
importantly, as he says with “anger on his face”: “‘I was laid off because I’m
Muslim’” (46). These, however, are the only parts about 9/11 and its impact on the
immigrants. The main focus of the novel is still on the Pakistani society that Ed
returns to.