288 / 138
288
E
UR
A
MERICA
“Indian demands for self-rule” hypocritical, because, in fact, “they only
wanted it for half the population” (Shamsie, 2014c: 273). As a feminist,
Vivian believes that “social change” of the country should take place
before talking about “political change,” namely independence (273). It
is the Pashtun men, rather than the English, that should be the enemies
of Pashtun women and any women, and, therefore, upon arriving at
her temporary home in the Valley, “[w]ith something of the same
grandness with which she had cast her first vote[,] she threw off the
vile cloth, and didn’t look back” (273). Here, in a translational space
between self and other that, according to Delanty’s argument, can lead
to “world openness” (2006: 27) if the core redefines itself from the
perspective of the periphery, Vivian does not seem to undergo the
process of “self-transformation in which new cultural forms take shape
and where new spaces of discourse open up leading to a
transformation in the social world” (Delanty, 2006: 44). Instead, she is
frustrated beneath the burqa, disdains Indian demands for
independence, and speaks as a representative for the Pashtun women.
Vivian’s desire to appropriate others counteracts “the tendency within
modernity” that Delanty optimistically believes “towards self-
problematization” (40). Rather than present self-problematization,
Shamsie’s novel sheds critical light on the long history of Western
feminism’s ties to imperialism.
Having created a white English feminist character and focused in
detail on the symbol of the veil,
A God in Every Stone
on the one hand
comments on the ironical dissociation of Britain’s national movement
of social reforms in the early 20th century from its oppression of the
imperial subjects, and on the other hand compels the reader to rethink
the global phenomenon of the unveiling of Muslim women, which has
been an obsession, especially in the West, from the first wave of
feminism till now. The situation nowadays is even more urgent as
Duffy points out, “especially as the contested issue of the lawfulness of
the burqa in France, Quebec and the United Kingdom gains traction
and legitimizes a wide-reaching stigmatization of Muslim women”
(n.d.). Indeed, as Duffy has persuasively argued, “[b]y introducing a