A Study of Cultural Hybridity in Nadeem Aslam's Novel

 

“A human being is never what he is but the self he seeks”

(Octavio Paz)

Works of 9/11 have immense capability to foreground the importance of cultural and identical choices to lay the groundwork for one’s individuality. These works also declare that a migrant identity is a consequence of reality in a culturally hybrid world. This cultural hybridity can be explored in Nadeem Aslam’s work; he dares to explore the ways which advocates the hybrid world. Heterogeneity and diversity are the major sources for cultural enrichment and safe living. At the introductory level, hybridity refers to “any mixing of Eastern and Western culture”. It is an evolution of interaction between different cultures at normal within the colonial and post-colonial literatures. The Post-Colonial era renders the background of complex phenomena of cultural hybridity. Under the umbrella term of hybridity, there are few aspects of cultural identity which are necessary to be focused:  individuality of migrants, Post-colonial history and language. The base for the analysis of Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers is provided by the work of Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994).

Keywords: Post-Colonialism, Hybridity, Cross-Cultural Conflicts, Migration, Language, Identity.

“We find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.” (The Location of Culture: 1994, p1)

Living in the Post-modern world, Post-Colonial persons see themselves in the moment of transition and complicated interrelated globalization. This Post-Colonial world is distinguished by paradoxical mixture of violent cultural differences. It is the world recognized by quick communication and global economies hence there is an increase in the migrants of all continents thus formed their cultural identity which is different and it has intensely shaken the old views of the prevailing cultural identities. One of the dominating subjects among the contemporary fiction is Cultural Hybridity. It is analyzed in the works of Nadeem Aslam. He has explored the feelings and attitudes of families at the crossroads of culture; its hybridity and diversity. He is a Diaspora writer who reflects the issues of race, religion, history and language under the umbrella of cultural identity.

Cultures, around the globe, are not homogeneous. But they are related to time and space whereas the cultural identities are also exposed to time and space. History plays an important role in constructing the past. It is the demand of Post-Colonialism that people should change their understanding of the cross-culture relationships. Maps for Lost Lovers manifests Aslam’s exploration of identities. The central character of the novel is Shamas. The whole story of the novel revolves around him. He was born to a Hindu father and a Muslim mother. He grew up with Muslim roots but as he grew up he became communist. He rejected the wickedness in Pakistan in the 1950’s and opted exile. After the 10 years, he came back and married the daughter of a clerk, named as Kaukab. Still after a decade, he was unable to find a perfect job for him so he returned back to England. As a migrant in England, his life opens up a classic spectrum of a migrant’s life which is full of all challenges, threats and questions to his cultural identity. Throughout his life, he carries the burden of representation which never let him detached from his motherland (East) even while his attaching to the West. However Kaukab, his wife, opposes the cultural assault. Their children try to adopt the Western culture. The reality, as confronted by the Shamas family, tells about the smoothness of identity and the process of transformation.

Bhabha’s cultural approach can be seen through his work, The Location of Culture (1994). In which he has granted the undercurrent for his research and to apply his theory of cultural hybridity. Bhabha remarks about hybridity, in his The Location of Culture, as a moment “when other denied knowledge enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority-its rule of recognition (Bhabha, 1994: 211). He sees hybridity as a “third space”. Hybridity is a dimension where post-Colonial subjects ‘recover’ themselves. Hybridity is an on-going process. Nadeem Aslam himself is the manifestation of hybrid identity. He was born at Gujranwala, left Pakistan in his teens and he spent his adolescence in Huddersfield, near Bradford. He claims himself as connected with an identity which defines him as a culturally Muslim. Hybridity is simpler than the mixture of cultures.

Bhabha’s view of the hybridity of culture is more extensive, broad and appropriate more than the Post-Colonial thinkers. According to him, the Post-Colonial situation demands new concepts and formulae to entrap the useful future of the Post-Colonial subjects. In an interview, he says, ‘For me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge. Therefore the third space breaks the stability. In Bhabha’s opinion, when two cultures are inter-mingled, a specific space is produced that he called “third space of enunciation” (Bhabha, 1994: 37). Hence, the cultural identity is shaped through this inconsistent and ambivalent space. The instability of cultural identity brings variety and enriches it to further build identities as a never ending process.

Paul Gilroy’s book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) presents a story which presents the rational history of African people. In this book, he gives the concept of Black Atlantic which is a space of transnational cultural construction. He demonstrates the idea of double consciousness. This idea is openly implied to cultural hybridity. Because it embellishes that Black Atlantics are struggling to be European and Black as well. As they have a strong relationship with their land where they were born and their political ethnicity which is being totally converted. Gilroy does not view identity in absolute terms, but as something that is fluid and shifting (Gilroy, 1993).

Clair Chambers is a well-known English writer, critic and an author of British Muslim Fiction: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, (2011). She gives tribute to Nadeem Aslam, and considers him as one of the most persuasive British Muslim writers. According to her, he is a “Multiple award winner, Nadeem Aslam is a lyrical chronicler of religious abuses both in his native Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan, and in South Asian communities in England.” (2011:19). For her, the fame of Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, as “the most gorgeously written British novel of the year”, using the words of Boyd Tonkin, Independent proves that Aslam is strong and clear in his condemnation of superstitions associated with Islam, which harm many people, particularly women” (2011: 137).

Cordule Lemke in his article “Racism in the Diaspora: Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers” (2004) explores the rhetoric of racism, which shapes the identities in Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lover. It showed the community which uses racist stereotypes to protect themselves from cultural predominance of whites and also from the Asian neighbours. The novel depicts the problems which occurred in linking the cultural features with racism.  

          Nadeem Aslam, in his arguments, is seen quite close to Bhabha and Salman Rushdie. His work Maps for Lost Lovers appears to be a true depiction of cultural hybridity. This novel overflows with many of these examples and illustrations in order to justify his work. The future of humanity is situated in love and in the practical use of hybrid culture, not in sticking to a single identity. Thus, it is the demand of time to blow away the cross-cultural clashes and give a new way to grow in this Post-Colonial, Post-Modern and globalized world. Hence it is necessary to explore the ‘Migrants Cultural Identity’ through the text, keeping in view the aspects of cultural hybridity put forth by Bhabha.

          Maps for Lost Lovers investigates the unclear development of a migrant, who suffers from East to West, from purity to hybridity while establishing their identities. Majority of its characters are immigrants from South Asian nations, mainly from Pakistan. They are making new lives and attempting to determine their cultural identity, themselves. Therefore, the cultural choices made by the first and second generation migrants determine the course of their lives. The loss of identity happens when a person travels from one country to another, one culture to another and one region to another region. Throughout the course of the novel, the characters, which belong to the first generation of migrants, particularly, are forced to accept the truth that their identity is no longer singular. It is their past which restricts them to enter fully into the new culture, their new homes. Hence, they are seen split between the two worlds; the two cultures. They are unable to accept this newness or this new life in the West. According to Aslam, the West eventually destroys the migrant. This phenomenon is seen in the case of Kaukab and her children. The ability to maintain spaces helps the migrant to set themselves up in the centre, as shown by Kaukab’s children.

          Bhabha declares that the one, who is divided between two cultures, is the most related characterization of the contemporary age. He further explains, that the “split subject that articulates, with the greatest intensity, the disjunction of time and being that characterize the social syntax of the postmodern condition” (Bhabha 1994:307). Throughout this book, the main character Shamas, neither yield himself in Pakistani community nor does he attach himself to the White community. In this book, Maps for Lost Lovers, Nadeem Aslam tries to express the living through of South Asian Community, its struggles and its heterogeneity. The real spirit of this book lies in the individuals who were confronting their inner self between East and the West. The characters of Shamas and Kaukab are used as symbols to explore the individual identity by the writer. It is the point made by Nadeem Aslam, that all the migrants experience the same dislocation and commonness. The struggle for this identity is highlighted in the two main characters of this novel; Shamas and Kaukab.

          Maps for Lost Lovers is actually a story of two individuals, who are divided painfully. The division of Shamas is social as well as secular; he is ripped between East and West, between London and Lahore. On the other hand, the division of Kaukab is spiritual that is the splitting of soul.  But they both are kept in practice to gain wholeness in their identities, despite of the fact that they are moving in two different directions. Both Shamas and Kaukab are facing the challenges in accepting their own hybrid natures although it is very difficult. Shamas practices in a way to sustain his roots and the English influence. If this novel is analyzed in this way, then it seems to praise hybridity, impurity, blending and transformation, which can never happen unless the migrant does not perform it. It is exactly how newness enters the world (Imaginary Homeland: 394). Here Nadeem Aslam obligates Bhabha’s version of “cultural Hybridity” and it becomes evident in accordance with the character of Shamas and his family.

          Migrants find places within the cultures by dissolving themselves in the boundaries, by erasing all the limits and opening up to new places. Bhabha expresses that dealing with the identity of a migrant is crucial in developing the newness in the culture. He further stresses upon the migrants’ subjects that they are in between One and Other “find their agency in a form of the future where the past is not originary, where the present is not simply transitory” (1994:313). This is justified through the character of Charagh, the elder son of Shamas and Kaukab, also by Ujala and Mah-Jabeen. Their lives, as being migrants, illustrates that living in the system of cultural space, is neither dependent upon the past wholly nor passing through a meaningless present. Towards accepting their hybrid cultural identity, their march throws light on hope and the beauty of life.

          In the novel, there are two generations which face the cultural hybridity. The first generation immigrants experience the confusion of their cultural identity from the very first moment. They remain in conflict between the outside world and their home. These immigrants discovered it to be difficult to accept them as being British Asian; they became nostalgic as they miss their roots. On the other hand, the second generation is called as a “post-in-between generation”. They always remain in the confusion of their identity. In Maps for Lost Lovers there are two major types of second generation; the rejecters, such as Jugnu and Ujala, who prefer assimilation just to avoid confrontation. The second type of the migrant is the multiple and fluid identity which represents a “new way of being British’ (Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette” p18). They think themselves to be the first English but at the same time they realize their cultural responsibilities towards their roots. Slowly they learn to accept the confusion and hybridity of their identity. Mah-Jabeen and Chanda become more open to the hybridity after their bitter endurances in Pakistan. 

          In the very start of the novel, the credit is give to the “Jazz” music, in order to bringing the people together, making them human beings, regardless of the gender, religion, age and their status:

“The record would begin and soon the listeners would be engrossed by those musicians who seemed to know how to blend together all that life contains…by the end of the piece, the space between them would have contracted, heads leaning together as though they were sharing a mirror. (p13)

          Correspondingly, as the novel moves ahead, same kind of practice is also seen in the middle of the book, when the concerts of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan served as a cultural bridge and also serving as a tool to express unorthodox point of views. They sees Pakistan as a poor country, because, they think that ‘the Whites stole all its wealth, beginning with the Koh-I-Noor diamond’ (p 46) and to counter the fear of thrown out of Britain , ‘ they plan to put up a fight and say they‘ll go back with pleasure as soon as the Queen gives back our Koh-I- Noor.’ (p47) Aslam’s characters establish and maintain the spaces, suggesting themselves as a part of hybridity and their empowerment through it.

Hence, it had been made clear that the theory of cultural hybridity put forth by Bhabha in the novel Maps for Lost Lovers provides the understanding in accordance with the ambitions and views of the migrants. It also can be said that the migrants, who are living in Dasht-e-Tanhaai, are the product of closeness of Eastern and Western cultures, which is created by the third space. It exhibits the two sides of a picture as well; when the hybridity functions and when it is opposed. There are actually different levels of hybridity to be settled in. All the characters, including Kaukab, determined their cultural lives that it is necessary for them to live in an alien culture; they exhibit their fluid identity which is formed at the edge of cultures. It is organized and in flow. The children of Shamas are the part of that generation which is actually a link between Pakistan and British and their personality is pulled apart by the conflicting demands which provide a practical demonstration of the concept of Bhabha’s third space. The migrants shown in Maps for Lost Lovers are found complaining about the atrocities which is committed by the Whites in the sub-continent. They raise great cry against the racial behavior of them. It exhibits their courage which is collected through their exploration of interstitial positions. Under the umbrella of this third world, new cultural identities are formed.

          If it is to be analyzed in a Post-Colonial context, then they are actually the Subalterns who are reinforced by cultural hybridity and they can also speak so well. And if they are to be examined as common men and women, they have been empowered by their positions; from where they can’t go back (to their roots) as well as can’t leave their new place. Undoubtedly, this cultural hybridity has resolved many Post-Colonial issues; transforming time to time, space to space, the migrants struggling with the past to build the future, helping them to make their way through. The Post-Colonial world is actually a world in which destructive cultural encounter changes to an acceptance of the disagreement. Kaukab’s grandson is taken as the product of cultural hybridity so is Charag, Ujala and Jugnu. “The little boy would no doubt marry a white girl and his own children would too: all trace of modesty and propriety would be bred out of them…” (p309). Under the comprehension of Cultural Hybridity, as put forward by Bhabha, there are some other aspects to be analyzed in Maps for Lost Lovers as;

·        Hybrid place (Dasht-e-Tanhaai where inhabitants are Sikhs, Muslims, Bengalis and English)

·         Hybrid history (reflection of the history of India and Pakistan)

·        Hybrid language (Urdu, Hindi, Bengali and English).