Best known for his fiction, especially the acclaimed novels “Moth Smoke” (2000), “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” (2007) and “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” (2013), Mohsin Hamid maintains a fruitful sideline as an essayist and commentator on international affairs, particularly those affecting his home country of Pakistan.
Hamid was born there, moved with his family at the age of 3 to the United States, and later spent several years in Great Britain before returning as a young father to Pakistan, where he still lives with his family. This great migration is the backstory of “Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches From Lahore, New York, and London,” a collection of his essays and columns published over the past 15 years. In these elegant, piercing, often funny pieces, he engages with his own family history, multiculturalism, terrorism, the legacy of 9/11, and other topics.
Printers Row Journal caught up with Hamid, now in his mid-40s, for a Skype interview from his home in Lahore. Here’s an edited transcript of our chat.
More Top Picks Best Range Hoods
Q: The title of the book is a clever inversion of another familiar title.
A: Of course, “Civilization and Its Discontents” is a famous work by Sigmund Freud. My book of essays isn’t particularly engaged with Freud’s work, but that title stuck in my mind, and maybe it set me to thinking about what civilizations are: classical civilizations, Muslim civilizations, Western civilizations. And I started to feel, more and more, that they are illusory — that people like me, who have spent half their lives in America, or, say, people who are gay or atheist and living in Pakistan, what civilization do they belong to? What civilization can they identify with? And that started me thinking, Why do we have civilizations? Where do they come from? How do we maintain them? And I think that in a sense, the various discontents that we feel about our place in life, about our politics, our socio-economic equality — those discontents get harnessed into a kind of tribalism that allows us to manufacture the idea of our civilizations.
Q: Much of the books deals with the ideas of migrancy, hybridism, movement within the culture of globalization. You yourself have embodied these trends. How has all that movement formed you?
A: It’s interesting. I’m very clearly a migrant, but I have friends who never left Lahore or New York City, yet they are migrants, too. Certainly I’ve been completely transformed by this experience of moving around so much. I live in Pakistan, and probably most people I meet here have no idea I’ve lived half my life outside of Pakistan. But I know that I have, and it’s deeply shaped every aspect of who I am: my attitudes toward life, toward other people and so on. But that’s not very unusual. There are people who’ve lived their entire lives, 70 or 80 years, in Lahore, and in that time it’s changed completely. At one time the city was full of Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims; in 1947, partition (from India) happened, and the city lost virtually all of its Hindi and Sikh population. People lost two-thirds of their neighbors, kids they grew up with. And then more recently, in the 1980s, we had a dictatorship that tried to impose what it called Islamization on Pakistan. So people who grew up in a Lahore that had bars and nightclubs suddenly found themselves in a city where alcohol was illegal. And so on and so forth. Similarly, people who live in New York or Chicago have seen those cities change very much. Manhattan is no longer a place where a young, struggling musician without his parents’ backing or a trust fund can get a cheap apartment and embark upon a career and scrounge a livelihood. It’s now a city that’s very expensive. So even if you stay put, time is a kind of migration. Having moved through a lot of places, I used to think I was weird and different, and then I realized that everybody thinks they’re weird and different. Everybody’s a migrant, through time if not geography.
Q: If there’s anything you define in the book as the greatest good, it’s pluralism, which you say the world needs much more of.
A: Well, we have to live among people who are not like us. There’s no other way around it. Much as one might wish to live in a community that shares one’s political values, attitudes toward religion, sexuality, family, art — communities like that don’t really exist. Even the most liberal cities have deeply conservative residents, and the most conservative areas have deeply liberal residents. So for me, the big challenge is how do we learn to live together without killing each other or imprisoning each other in various forms of concentration camps? Pluralism is my notion that doing so is a good thing. The opposite would be a kind of tyranny, where more like-minded people who are more powerful just oppress people who are different. I see it all around me in Pakistan, the state and individual actors trying to stamp out beliefs or practices that they think are abhorrent. But we see it to a certain extent in America, too. There was a moment, you know, when we thought that multiculturalism was the future, a time when all sorts of people would come together and migration would be seen as a good thing. Globally, the high-water mark of that was in the latter part of the 20th century. Now, many places are regressing into a kind of tribalism, where migrants aren’t welcome, people who look different aren’t welcome. And that, I think, is a danger. Not to say that in pluralism everybody’s belief system is equally legitimate. I don’t believe that at all. But I don’t think it should be our objective to eliminate, or separate from, those who are unlike us.
Q: You have an essay in the book in reaction to an early, conciliatory speech by President Obama regarding the United States’ relationship to the Muslim world. You were heartened by that speech, but to what extent would you say its promise has been fulfilled?
A: Well, the election of President Obama really was a wonderful historical moment. A great many people I knew all over the world felt real joy. But I think that if we look back at his foreign policy over the past six years, while it was nowhere near as disastrous as that of President Bush, it’s not been great, either. A lot of foreign war has been conducted on President Obama’s watch. Continuity with his predecessor has been maintained on detention policy, on national security policy. And in terms of confronting powerful U.S. lobbies in some of these sectors, Obama’s administration has not been very successful. So yes, I feel disappointed in him. That said, it’s important to acknowledge that he encountered a perhaps never-before-seen brand of hostility in the political opposition to him. Even so, I would have hoped that he would have said more of what needed to be said, taken positions that were less popular and perhaps been a one-term president who stood for what he believed was right — like Jimmy Carter was. Now of course, Jimmy Carter has not gone down in history as one of the greatest presidents of the United States, but outside of the U.S., Carter remains a very, very respected figure. He’s a statesman who retired to the same house he had before he became president, who didn’t want offensive wars, who has incredible principles, who doesn’t take speaking fees. He’s a different breed. Perhaps I hoped for Carter’s ethics married to Obama’s charisma. I feel sad to say that, because if I were an American citizen, I would certainly have voted for Obama twice. But there have been very severe shortcomings in his presidency.
Q: Of course, President Obama has become closely identified with the so-called drone war, much of which has been conducted in Pakistan.
A: I think that contributed to the impression here that President Obama is just another politician, not particularly different from other U.S. presidents or politicians. I think it was a big mistake to have this drone campaign in Pakistan, which made people feel that enemy robots were killing their own citizens in their own country. I think there is an opportunity for cleaning up Pakistan, which is a hugely important thing, but the responsibility for doing so should rest with Pakistanis. Mostly, terrorists in Pakistan attack and kill people in Pakistan. And the Pakistani state has waited far too long a time to deal with these extremists. Doing things half-heartedly, playing both sides — it’s been a disaster for Pakistan. But the solution to that disaster is that Pakistan has to make up its own mind that this is a fight for the country’s survival. It must stop being ambivalent about it, and must pursue wholeheartedly a real solution. It’s not for the U.S. to police Pakistan. Pakistan is coming up on being two-thirds the size of the U.S. in terms of population; it’s a huge country, twice as big as Afghanistan and Iraq put together in terms of population. And any country that size has to sort out its own messes. But the U.S. involvement has allowed Pakistanis to blame the Americans for what are largely Pakistani-created problems, and thereby shirk their responsibility to solve them. So the drone war hasn’t helped; it has actually made things much worse.
Q: You had lived in the United States for a number of years before 9/11, and had moved to the United Kingdom shortly before that event.
A: I left New York for the U.K. in 2001, thinking I’d be there for a year and then come back to New York, a city I loved. A month after I left, the attacks of Sept. 11 took place. And the United States, and New York in particular, in many ways ceased to be the places I left; they became something different. A year later, when it was time to return, I put off returning, first by a year, and then two, and eventually didn’t go back. That said, almost 14 years later, I dream, at least once every few months, of moving back to New York City and starting a life there. I have a real affection for the place, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Q: And why did you eventually return to Pakistan?
A: It was a few different things. One was that my wife and I had always talked about how one day we would live in Pakistan again, at least for a while. And I began to worry that if we didn’t do it soon, maybe we would start thinking of the place as too dangerous; we’d start believing the press. Another thing was that of course I’d written about Pakistan in fiction and in essays, and I felt that if I didn’t go and live there again, I would begin to question my own views of the country. What did I really know about Pakistan after all these years abroad? If I didn’t go back and live there, I should start writing about the U.K., perhaps, or someplace else. Thirdly, I thought that there might be an opportunity to contribute to the society here in some small way. But the fourth and most important thing was that we had a baby. And it seemed to me very sad that the first grandchild of my parents and my wife’s parents would grow up unable to spend time with her grandparents. Now, I very much like the idea that every day, my son and my daughter get to play with my parents. That’s how I grew up, with my grandparents nearby, and I think it’s something I really believe in. I believe in tri-generational relationships, the old and the young and the people in the middle all mingling. My parents happen to be here in Lahore, and that anchors us here. Of course, in two or three or five years, we might leave.
Q: So you don’t necessarily see yourself there for the long haul.
A: I can see us staying, but I can also see us leaving. I feel a bit like a sailor who comes back after many years at sea and is land-sick when he starts walking on terra firma again. I think when you’ve traveled as much as I have, part of you always feels this impulse to wander.
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. Twitter: @KevinNance1
“Discontent and Its Civilizations”
By Mohsin Hamid, Riverhead, 226 pages, $27.95