Books read in Japan #3: Islamic trio



Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (1995, Text Publishing 2008)
Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Jonathan Cape 2008)
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamish Hamilton 2007)

Dreams from My Father, a last minute Sydney Airport purchase, was written when Barack Obama had recently become the first black president, not of the USA (future e-archaeologists please note that he has not been elected to that office at the time of writing) but of the Harvard Law Review. In his introduction to that 1995 edition, the author describes the book he had planned to write:
There would be an essay on the limits of civil rights litigation in bringing about racial equality, thoughts on the meaning of community and the restoration of public life through grassroots organising, musings on affirmative action and Afrocentrism ... it was an intellectual journey I imagined for myself.

What he actually wrote includes quite a lot of what he planned, but it amounts to a much more interesting whole. The essays, thoughts and musings hang from a central autobiographical narrative -- at one level a quest for identity, but also a complex struggle to identify and take up arms against internalised racism. Its original subtitle was 'A Story of Race and Inheritance'. The book might not have become a No 1 best seller, and would almost certainly not have appeared in an Australian edition, if its author had not become famous for other things, but as things stand it's riveting. Given the evasiveness of Clinton and the actual or pretend dim-wittedness of his successor, it's astonishing and, yes, hope-inducing that a US presidential candidate should have written a book that is so complex and, on some matters at least, so frank. Probably the most interesting bits are those dealing with his time as a community organiser (disingenuously derided by the Republican VP candidate). Other elements of the narrative play off fascinatingly against his presidential candidacy: his father's life was destroyed because he refused to cooperate with the corruption in his native Kenya; his stepfather made ethical compromises in order to have access to power in Indonesia; the Reverend Jeremiah Wright gives a sermon that reduces Barack to tears, and not so incidentally gives him the title for his second book, The Audacity of Hope. My title for this post categorises Dreams from My Father as an Islamic book, but that's not to say for a minute that I think he (or Prince Charles, for that matter), is a secret Muslim. Rather, in the final section of the book, in which Barack visits Kenya in search of his roots, specifically to learn more of his father's story, he finds a profoundly Muslim world and recognises that he has deep intimate connections with it. The book is a surprisingly good read.

I guess A Case of Exploding Mangoes is a historical novel, dealing as it does with the last days of General Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator of Pakistan who died in a plane crash in August 1988, along with the US ambassador and a number of Pakistani generals. But it has something of the feel of a Terry Pratchett fantasy in Zia's delusions of popularity and bizarre religiosity, the suave worldweariness of his torturers, his wife's disdain, the key role played by a non-human character, and above all the way death tends to be treated as farce. But this isn't the Discworld. Mohammed Hanif served in the Pakistani Airforce and at the time of Zia's death was roughly the age of the Junior Under Officer Ali Shigri, the book's narrator-hero and would-be assassin. So the comedy has an edge to it -- as absurdity piles on absurdity, there is the lurking recognition that at least some of it is, appallingly, a matter of historical record.

Fast forward 20 years for a very different Pakistani voice. I read most of The Reluctant Fundamentalist in sight of Japan's Inland Sea -- calm, misty, a living explanation for the aesthetics of zen gardens. Perhaps that affected the way I heard the narrator's voice: unruffled, fatalistic, courteous. The book is a monologue: bearded Pakistani man engages an American in conversation in a marketplace in Lahore. As night falls, he persuades the other man to eat with him as he tells him the story of his life, or rather of his relationship with America. If the mangoes book is rooted in its author's time in the Pakistani Airforce, this one probably grows from Mohsin Hamid's time at Princeton. Where that book's rage at the terrible realities of Pakistani politics communicates through derision, this one's is delivered with mellifluous inevitability that made me think of a Handel concerto. The actual relationship beween the narrator and his guest, as hinted at throughout and revealed in the final pages, is neither surprising nor plausible, but that hardly seems to matter.

Posted: Sat - September 13, 2008 at 12:03 PM           |

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