From a Britain independent film production company, The Reluctant Fundamentalist somehow has a controversial content: a young Pakistani strived to survive in United States and finally realized that although after all the trial and tribulation, sudden breakout of the conflict between western and eastern worlds climaxing in 911 tore down his dream of “stepping into the American upper class” and forced him to take off his American mask to return to Pakistani again. Compared with other relatively older films after 11th September of 2001, where are described as having “politically safer subject…and to ancient and biblical sources”, this film is bold and thought-provoking as well.
Considering the dangerous subject to handle and the blurred boundary between sympathy for Islamic ‘terrorism’ and American nationalism, the narrative rendered in the book is of a more subtle monological tone. However, by cooperating with the writer and another colleague to create a new adaptation for film materializing the plot, although the director Mira Nair mentioned the original novel as “tricky”, which for me means the deliberately blurred background of the speakers and historical context, the complexity brought by ambiguity of the book is replaced by a bolder narrative.
It does the work by directly putting the answer in the blank and materializing the American Changez is talking to by naming him Bobby and constructing his career as a spy, who came to Lahore to negotiate with Changez to rescue an American hostage. This helps to end the story in a relatively close ending but still without making explicit value judgments.
This adaptation includes hot topics and expresses them in an integrate way: Terrorism, feminism, non-violent protest, economic imperialism and worship of money, declining old culture, social class change, globalization, education, how to treat people with psychological illness and inclination to suicide. Those topics appear and intertwined with each other, thus preventing the story from becoming simply anti-American or a peace appeal cliche.
The deep-rooted reason of all the conflicts in this story, from my perspective, is the cultural exclusiveness faced by not only Changez but everyone around him. Although it seems that his life is defined and decided by cultural exclusiveness in different period, what is special about Changez is his constant fighting towards the exclusiveness, which eventually makes him a complex round person.
On the one hand, Changez, as a symbol of cultural intersection, was cultivated in an American way in his university after being raised up in Pakistan culture. Obviously, the seeming acceptance from American culture reflected in his excellent performance during and after university could not permit his blending into this culture. Though the American exclusiveness was momentarily replaced by the illusion of fitting in brought by his thriving career and the congeniality from Erica – his idealized personification of the nostalgia and vitality mixture, it cannot be avoided forever especially under the breakout of 911 and its aftermath. He described himself as where the violence grows day by day and he could not even recognize himself.
On the other hand, Changez also acts as the victim of Pakistan cultural exclusiveness, which is represented by the declination of his family and his disagreement with some particular ways of social reformation emphasized by the film, for example, the protest and kidnap from his radical students. In his periodical returning home, the generation gap with his parents as well as the unfamiliarity with his own cultural circumstances made him an exile in his own land. The unintentional exclusiveness felt by Changez also exists in other society like the taxi driver in the Philippines, or the book dealer in Turkey. By dating back to Changez’s description of his family, he objectively shows the change of social class in Pakistan and obviously, his family has sunken into a lower class as the capital centralizing into those new capitalists.
Several turning points of Changez’s life are the explosion of his reactions towards cultural exclusiveness evoked respectively by his rebut while being interviewed by Samson Underwood, the 911 attacking, the alienation from Erica and the breakout of Afghanistan war. For me, he became a fighter of cultural exclusiveness all long his life: He fought for the American cultural exclusiveness by working hard to prove his ability as same as his American peers, even including his chasing Erica, which is, luckily, an equally difficult mission for other American guys.
Through his fighting, he finally became exiled from his own past and future as being trapped by the unwanted present. His past means Pakistan origin and the hatred towards the “privileged, unsympathetic” American. His future, if we suppose there was no 911 attacking, would be an American lifestyle and being “privileged, unsympathetic”. But the struggle of him is being stuck in the middle of between past to future, which is described by him, as he returned to his home after 911 attacking and found that his home was so shabby, that he “must make adjustment” and “a different way of observing is required”. He recalls the “Americanness of his own gaze”, followed by recognizing that “the house had not changed”, it is him changed.
The anger of him is vented by the reaction Changez described when he was watching the news of 11th of September, “but at that moment, my thoughts were not with the victims of the attack…no, I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had s visibly brought America to her knees.” Clearly, this emotion not only belongs to Changaz or the author, by showing the loneliness and despair of Changez in New York after 911 attacking – a city “featureing such words as duty and honor” – the director Mira Nair and many other people struggling with the cultural exclusiveness also share it.
Having the same experience of pursuing her career abroad, Mira Nair, the director of this film was raised up in India where at that time was integrate with Pakistan and people had the same traditional education of poetry and language with each other. She said that she lived in America for half of her life and this is why she felt the same feeling as Hamid Moshin did. To illustrate her opinion about the film, she said, “that is the time when people should really learn from the dialogue from each other, which is what the film is aiming at.”
“From 911 onwards, the sense of being different, the sense of being an outsider all around us…The world changes…not only in US, also in Pakistan, the Muslims going defence for their identity to show that they were fine, to show the world how people perceive them. The lack of understanding, the many misconception…if they keep holding on about who was the one got hurt more, they wouldn’t get anywhere. ” said by Nadia Zaffer, a Pakistan student in UK.
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