H.M. Naqvi's - Home Boy
The Other “We” in H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy
The attacks on the World Trade Centre heralded a break between America’s
past and future. The very beginning of Naqvi’s Homeboy (HB) dramatizes this turning point in American history as a
temporal split with traumatic consequences for the national consciousness and
the creation of a new racialized “other” that touches more than the lives of
Naqvi’s home boys: “AC, Jimbo and me” (HB 3).
The beginning then not only introduces the reader to
an autodiegetic narrator and the two other protagonists of the novel, the
deceptively simple anaphoric constructions of the first lines also foreshadow
the temporal structure of the whole novel: (“We’d become […]”. “We weren’t
before” (HB3) as anachronological, indicating an alternation between flashbacks
to a “before”, while continuing to narrate the consequences of the unnamed yet
pivotal event in the “after”. As is implied in the “had become” of the first
sentence, the narrating I has achieved a noticeable distance from his mimetic
American consciousness of before. good The process of becoming a racialized
other has already been completed. By the time he pens down this story of “AC,
Jimbo and me” (HB 3), he possesses a certain awareness of being categorized as
part of a seemingly homogenous group that is constructed as a subaltern other.
The staccato of the short rather monosyllabic sentences, furthermore, point to
a rather abrupt transition for the protagonists. The pejorative triplet “Japs,
Jews, Niggers” (HB 3) indicates that fundamental change in perception and loss
of status, which is also reflected in the change in register and the succession
of seemingly brutal paratactic constructions. This impression is only
heightened by the juxtaposition of a “we” that had assumed not only
Americanized names like AC or Jimbo, but also the superior consciousness of the
“self-invented” and “self-made” American, representing itself in the discursive
terms that constitute a young, educated and fashionable Americanness with a
marginalized other, the homeboy who, described in pejorative terms, is firmly
outside of the epistemological construction of the American subject. good! Thus,
Naqvi’s novel seems to confront the reader already at beginning with a fait accompli, the results of a process
of othering, thrusting the them into a somewhat familiar story, of how “we”
became a racialized category, of how “we’d become Japs, Jews, Niggers” (HB 3).
However, with this initial inversion of beginning and
ending, the reader like the narrator is placed at a certain distance from text,
allowing right from the beginning for a critical reflection on exclusionary
norms and the category of the “we” in a greater American context. Taking a
closer look at the rhetorical subtleties of the “incipit”, the construction of
this beginning, the anaphoric repetition of “we” in combination with the
enumerative triplets at the end of sentence 1 and 3, not only adds further
details to the narrative frame, the syntax seems to implicitly invoke the
founding document of the United States, its ideals of life, liberty and
equality and quasi-mythical force of the American Dream. However, the ideal of an
e pluribus unum- “we” from the
Declaration of Independence that “beholds certain truths to be self-evident”
also stands in sharp contrast to the broader the socio-cultural scope and
temporal frame this incipit also invokes. Inviting the reader to draw parallels
between the treatment of the newly racialized “we” and what Irum Sheik calls
the creation of “domestic enemy aliens” (Sheik 2011, 2) throughout US history.
yes, interesting The narrator makes the specific analogy between the “we” and
various historically marginalized groups: the Japanese Americans who in the
wake of the attack on Pearl Harbour (12/07/1941) were relocated and detained in
camps, the Jewish minority and the presence of anti-Semitism in US history and
the prevailing racial bias against can African Americans, implying that the “we”
has become a “disfavoured group” (Sheik 2011, 8) and is now faced with the same
or a similar fate of exclusion and loss of “unalienable rights” because of
religious, ethnic and/or racial bias.
The incipit of Homeboy,
then, works on multiple levels. Juxtaposing different notions of “we” the
narrator and his group of friends, the Melting Pot ideal of “we”, the
mainstream “we”, the ethnic “we”, the religious “we”, the racialized “we”, the
reader is forced to critically engage with the category of “we” and questioning
the political and cultural reasons for its construction, wherein lies the
potential of subversion. The incipit then seems to remind the reader, that race
or ethnicity in a post-9/11 America with its heightened sense of nationalism is
not a choice or, to borrow David Hollinger’s term, something the “we” plays, it
is made in opposition to an implied normative “we” and constructed by seemingly
re-activating familiar tropes of colonial discourse.
Works Cited:
Hollinger, David. Postethnic
America. Beyond Multiculturalism. 1995. New York: Basic Books, 2006.
Naqvi, H.M. Homeboy. Uttar
Pradesh: HarperCollins
India, 2010.
Sheik, Irum. Detained without a
cause. Muslims’ Stories of Detention and Deportation in America after 9/11.
London: Palgrave, 2011.
Review:
The Guardian.
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