~ How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, by Tabish Khair ~
A very erudite and charming little novel from beginning to end.
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Our unnamed narrator-protagonist is not unlike the author himself, a South Asian who lives in Denmark and works as an academic in Arhus university, “the Eng Lit type”, as Ravi teases. Ravi seems as much a protagonist in this tale, with his larger-than-life personality, his tremendous charisma and confidence, suave intellect, witty articulateness, social graces, and his ever dissenting, critical, but humorous take on all topics. A very affluent, privileged, upper-class Hindu Indian (with his surgeon father and socialite mother), both narrator and author depict Ravi as extremely gifted, a natural polyglot, charming and personable universally, delightfully idiosyncratic, generous to a fault, sartorially elegant, extremely handsome, an original, one-of-a-kind.
At the start of the story, the unnamed narrator and Ravi are seeking a flat to share, and by chance, Ravi discovers that a taxi driver he charmed into easy conversation, Karim Bhai, has rooms available for let.
Guess what, bastard, he said to me. Bastard was a term of affection between us, as it usually is in the subcontinent between men who share a Catholic missionary education. Guess what, bastard, Ravi said, I have found us a fucking flat.
p6
The plotline is beautifully peppered with such insights into the South Asian culture with its sharp class divides, and comments on the Danish culture too from the point of view of outsiders, with occasional comparisons of the two.
For example, Khair writes that after a trip together, the narrator’s girlfriend
complained about how difficult it was to travel with Ravi. ‘He always tried to pay for everything,’ she said. ‘ If you don’t watch out, he pays for your drinks behind your back. After some time, you hesitate to order anything with him around.'” […] “We knew […] that Ms Marx and Lena, like all our Danish friends and colleagues, always paid for themselves and seldom offered to pay for others. It was not that they were tight; their generosity was occasioned and premeditated. There was just no excess to it. It was another kind of generosity, or so I felt. I mentioned this to Ravi […], ‘Nonsense, yaar,’ he retorted, ‘generosity is always in excess.’
p113
Ravi is less tolerant than our unnamed-narrator about the cultural differences between Danes and South Asians, quicker to call out either side where he perceives hypocrisy or lack. The unnamed-narrator is more hesitant, less socially assured, more compromising, perhaps as a result of less financial security and social capital to fall back on or be cushioned by.
Similarly, while the unnamed-narrator is determined to perform his elected secularism without apology despite being culturally a Muslim, Ravi who is frequently irreverent, is nevertheless openly fascinated by Karim’s brand of Muslimness, even asking to be tutored in the Muslim prayers. The unnamed-narrator carefully avoids being involved in any of Karim’s prayers or Islamic discussions or friendships. Ravi on the other hand, joins in Karim’s Quran sessions, appreciating their honesty even if the unnamed-narrator may see it is bigotry; and able as Ravi customarily is to charming birds out of trees, is made quite welcomed by the attendees of Karim’s prayer meetings, who “got along with Ravi and felt flattered by his interest” p131. The unnamed-narrator observes but gives them a wide berth. It would appear that the narrator, given his Muslim background, is warier than the Hindu Ravi where it comes to possible Islamic fundamentalism or even just hard line Muslimness, so to speak. He is more suspicious of Karim Bhai, more distrustful of his motivations from the start.
Early on in their flat-sharing with Karim Bhai, the narrator and Ravi have a lively exchange on this topic:
‘I know all about the politics,’ I retorted.’ I grew up with politics beating down on me. Basically it all boils down to three points: the Quran is the original hand-autographed word of God; the West is fucking us; the Jews are fucking us via the West.’
[…]
‘Listen to yourself, yaar. You sound like a Danish tabloid. What do you think they are? The secret Arhus cell of Al Qaeda?’
‘Who knows?’
‘Karim Bhai, a terrorist! Really, have you ever come across a person with more seriousness of purpose, more consideration for other people’s space, you fanatic? He lets us drink in his flat, and you know what alcohol means to people like him.’
[…]
‘Who knows? He works all the time; he disappears suddenly; he gets strange phonecalls; you cannot deny he needs the money for some reason.’
‘The same reason all immigrajnts except fucking privileged ones like us. He probably sends money home to family. You know, bastard, you have been in the West too long; go back home. You need a shot of sanity.’
[…]
But Ravi was right. I was arguing just to irk him. I did not really suspect Karim of being a radical Islamist, let alone a terrorist. Not yet.
p30-31
The central storyline of the novel is a gentle tease, parodying the Islamophobia of the Danish/West by building up the portrait of Karim Bhai, the taxi driver, as a very devout Muslim, rigid in his adherence to his code of ethics, disclosing little about himself or his past, private and reserved to the point of secretiveness, often called away mysteriously, always seemingly needing to earn more money, socialising very limitedly. Karim Bhai also seems rather unforgiving, refusing to see his old friends and neighbours when he learns that his friend is homosexual.
The novel plays on the Danish/Western prejudice and media-hyped distrust of the publicly visible other, the Muslim immigrant. A critic, Afrin Zeenat (2014, South Asian Review, Vol 35, No 3) writes,
Khair borrows the popular trope of the terror plot to simultaneously reinforce, somewhat bathetically for the astute reader, and subsert the numerous stereotypes of Muslims.
p118
Zeenat explains that the “missionary position” in the novel’s title refers to both the sexual position and the narrator’s missionary school education background. It is possibly in the title also for the humour and provocation value it engenders. teasing the over-serious reader, just as Ravi teases both the unnamed-narrator and Karim Bhai occasionally, tugging at known sensitivities, not out of any intent to hurt, mostly out of pure mischief. Protected by his affluence, background and considerable personal social capital, Ravi while seldom unkind or ungracious, has a wicked sense of fun that perfectly understands the earnestness of others, without feeling any need to tiptoe around personal or political sensitivities.
Ravi is more critical of Danish norms and habits than the narrator, but when he falls in love with the elegant, poised, extremely-Danish Lena, his political stances seem softened for awhile, until ‘the state of niceness’ grates on him too far for him to accept Lena’s determined niceness manifested in her lack of expressed passion, as a virtue. While in love, however, Ravi is determined his friend should also be paired off, and upon demanding to know and being told of which woman his friend fancies but stood no chance with, Ravi takes it upon himself to assist that woman, Ms Marx, to find his friend attractive. He tells her tall stories about the unnamed-narrator’s parents and background, exoticising him blatantly.
“Well, we all know how it is with you fucking fundus in Pak: veiled mother, bearded father, married at the age of fifteen, son divided between his halaal mentality and the desire to make it in the pork-eating West, unwilling to acknowledge his religious background in public and unable to relinquish it in private, etcetera, etcetera.”
p89
This of course is largely untrue, and the unnamed-narrator’s parents and background are in fact not dissimilar to Ms Marx’s own, but Ravi plays up to his understanding that this formula is what is expected by the Danish, and what renders the South Asian immigrant attractive and sympathetic. The unnamed-narrator, less fluid in his social identity than the high-class Ravi, is far less willing to capitalise on the privileges which could accompany victimhood in such a society, and so stubbornly suffers making less social headway than Ravi does, out of some ambivalent notion of retaining his integrity. Both he and Ravi are postcolonial immigrants, but with differing positionalities, and therefore, differing resentments of Danish society.
Tabish Khair himself, whose heritage like the unnamed narrator is basically “cosmopolitan Indian Muslim culture”, in his article on “Postcolonial Resentments” in The Massachusetts Review (2017, Vol 58, No 2) beautifully explains the similarity of resentments a postcolonial immigrant may feel, to Freddrich Nietzche’s notion of ressentiment – the latter “arises from the sense of one’s own inferiority/failure” ; while the resentment is not based so much on a feeling of inferiority, but of “deep personaol and historical injustice”, possibly even with a “feeling of superiority behind such resentment: its bitterness rooted in a conviction of unfairness, of speriority or at least equality thwarted by circumstances” (p261). As Khair explains in this article, the coloured immigrants in Denmark move not just up the economic scale but down the social scale, possibly earning more as an immigrant but losing prestige and place.
This novel plays with tropes of the unreliable narrator, neoliberalism, the role of the media, cultural differences between East and West, immigrants’ issues of assimilation, class, the translation or imperfection of translation of social capital across countries and societies; and for such a slim novel, packs a surprising amount within its covers. Avoiding the cliched and predictable, it does so with eloquence and elegance, taking on a range of different but intelligent positions simultaneously, always warning against the temptation to oversimplify, totalise, homogenise. A utter joy to read actually.
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