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January 01, 2008
Uzma Aslam Khan on Diaspora Writers
Though I have not read Uzma Aslam Khan's first novel The Story of Noble Rot, her second novel, Trespassing, is one of the most enjoyable novels I read in 2007 (hello, 2008!) by a Pakistani writer. Trespassing has strong characters in very credible situations and I especially enjoyed it because it was different from the usual tropes Uzma enumerates here as being employed by diaspora writers i.e. 'West saves the Eastern damsel in distress', or 'America freed me'. Also, thankfully, no wet saris, unnecessary mangos/samosas, or forced unhappily ever after arranged marriages. The tale of the domestic terrorist in 'Trespassing' is one of the finest instances of character-telling I've come across in a long while.
From Uzma's article:
The moral justification of 19th- and 20th-century colonialism was civilizing the native. The moral justification of 21st-century imperialism is liberating the native. Britain's jewel in the crown, the Indian subcontinent, is today being secured by those Asian-British writers who espouse the last line of Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane: "'This is England,' she said. 'You can do whatever you like.'"
Ali's ending clinched the political banner sewn in the pages of the book – England equals freedom – though not until the final page was it made explicit. But novelists ought to be challenging slogans, not trumpeting them. If a banner is waved, it should be the banner of scepticism. What if Nazneen's sister in Bangladesh had found a good-looking young man to hump, dumping her stodgy husband in the process, and Nazneen had been locked in a room and raped by a racist white man who pimped her to more racist white men, and she'd begged for freedom only to be told, 'This is England. We can do whatever we like"?
read rest here
Uzma's third novel The Geometry of God is available, so far, in India.
Posted by Soniah Kamal at January 1, 2008 06:01 PM
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