Migrating from terror: The postcolonial novel after September 11

Abstract

Following 9/11, public rhetoric in the United States equated Islam with terror. This equation permitted the internment and deportation of Muslim immigrants and lent inevitability to the invasion not only of Afghanistan but also of Iraq. When even liberal newspapers and Democratic politicians supported the war on terror, one looked to literature for an alternative. Yet several novels published in the aftermath of 9/11 – John Updike’s The Terrorist, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, and Alexie Sherman’s Flight – inadvertently reinforced the dominant rhetoric. Set in a United States where virtually every Muslim in sight was a terrorist, they could at best hope to make the violence understandable. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men (2007) offer a postcolonial perspective on revolutionary violence. Where the war on terror opposes East and West, these novels internalize a conflict in ordinary people between their cultural and religious heritage and western values and amenities. These novels tease apart identities the war on terror fuses: Muslim and terrorist, say, or American and right‐wing neocolonialist. The hesitations, qualifications, and complexities of lived experience become alternatives to the lethal polarities of public rhetoric.

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