Can this literature separate the breech between the United States and Muslim countries of the world? I think it has remarkable universal appeal. I, personally, was blown away by The Crooked Line. I also think it had a nice amount of fusion and tentative understanding within the different religious communities Shaman came into contact with. Her marriage to an Irishman seems to fall apart near the end, but these bonds that she's formed with him stay, like ghosts, in the back of her mind. She is also, it is hinted, pregnant.
First of all, let me say that I think Ismat Chughtai is a woman after my own heart, and is more concerned about people and characters rather than sending out messages. (This is all purely speculation, but I like to think I could be right.) But of course, if we want to read this pregnancy as something more than a biological phenomenon, we can read it as a partnership, a bond, and a future for the fusion and birth of a relationship between these two different cultures. Yeah, that reading is a little in-your-face, but I like it.
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Sure, I feel like all of these novels have universal appeal, even the novels that don't focus on character and character faults, traits, etc...the things that are usually so -human- and so -universal-...choose to focus on the universal trait itself. (See Shame)
ReplyDeleteBut I think that The Crooked Line is unbelievably political, and that Chugthai is sending out complicated political messages right and left, even if it is commentary about social politics in her own society. For me, the class has emphasized that there is a very specific Muslim point of view within the literature (thank god because most classes I've taken have tried to defy ethnic...or religious, I guess in this case... genres) and that that Islam is inextricable from the world view of South Asian Muslims. Largely because, I think, it has been so politicized.