Return to Article Details Daniyal Mueenuddin Talking Back

Daniyal Mueenuddin is a recent star of Pakistani and English fiction. In 2010 his short story cycle In Other Rooms, Other Wonders won The Story Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Best Book, the O. Henry Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. Mueenuddin was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

Mueenuddin was born in the USA in a mixed family, in 1963. His father was a Pakistani landowner; his mother was an American journalist. Mueenuddin is a writer representative for the global world we live in. His life zigzagged between two countries, two cultures. After getting married in the USA, Mueenuddin’s parents came to live in Pakistan. Still, the writer was born in the USA as his mother had returned to her parents for the birth of the child. Daniyal Mueenuddin studied at Dartmouth College, then went back to Pakistan to manage the ancestral lands of his family. But this does not mean that America got out of Mueenuddin’s life. He came to the USA as a student at the prestigious Yale Law School and then again bounced back to his Pakistani homeland where he tries to live the life of a modern intellectual. Who knows what other tribulations may follow? Mueenuddin’s life is symptomatic for our globalizing world where homes, the here’s and the there’s coalesce into a many-sided spatial and cultural experience that is certainly enriching even if also painful.

Mueenuddin’s work has been commented by several literary critics. Jim Hannan, for instance, considers that the Pakistani-American writer “keenly observes the subtleties of power” (68) in a country where the economic and political power of the landlords is based on the “uneasy juxtaposition of residual feudalism and modernity” (68). The writer is able to descend to the have-nots and construct narratives where “[t]he fragility of an individual’s existence is made painfully and hopelessly unavoidable (68). The acute perception of Pakistani realities and eternal human truths by Mueenuddin is explained by Sabrina Tavernise through the writer’s own personal history. “Mr. Mueenuddin is also a landlord, though he prefers not to think of himself that way. His family’s wealth started in the 18th century with his great-great-great-grandfather, who grew rich as the governor of Kashmir, a territory that is now disputed by India and Pakistan”. Many critics do their best in order to situate Mueenuddin in a tradition and find his literary “relatives.” Muneeza Shamsie, for instance, notices “the increasing interest in English Pakistani literature” (691) and considers that Mueenuddin responded to a need of the American readership to understand Pakistan after the disaster called 9/11 when the pus gathering in Pakistan oozed out as the ideology that nourished the terrorists willing to sacrifice their own lives in order to destroy America. Sheela Reddy considers that Mueenuddin deserves to be placed in the company of the most canonized prose authors in the Western tradition. “What’s striking about his debut collection of ‘connected stories’, being variously compared to Chekhov, Turgenev, Faulkner and even, inexplicably, R. K. Narayan, is that for the first time possibly in the subcontinent, we have a writer who is not only a first-rate craftsman of words, but is equally comfortable writing about a fading feudal aristocracy as about a class of characters that has been largely absent in the English language fiction in the subcontinent: cooks, servants, electricians, hangers-on and thieves”. The same high literary respectability is given to Mueenuddin by Ed Minus who refers to the story “Nawabdin Electrician” as “an episode in the tradition of Rabindranath Tagore… but not squarely in that tradition, Tagore’s stories… are more muted, their worlds even smaller and much quieter than Mueenuddin’s” (332). Asim Karim notices the way Mueenuddin deals with the female body. The literary critic places Mueenuddin in the most prestigious literary constellation of contemporary English language Pakistani writers, such as Uzma Aslam Khan, Bapsi Sidhwa, or Nadeem Aslam, who “keenly expose the female body to the enactment of cultural power and various shades of female sexuality” (26).

It is beyond doubt that Mueenuddin’s literary case points to an evolution in the American republic of letters. Martha Cutter keenly notices that “writers who do not live in the USA are selected for American literary prizes” (5). The success of Mueenuddin, his cultural and identity between-ness, and the cultural histories he reaps show that “Americanness translates, disregards borders, changes its meaning, its borders are permeable” (6). Taking into account the fact that Mueenuddin belongs to two cultures and he has to change his performativity codes every time he moves to one of his two homelands, the reaction of Pakistani critics is of utmost importance. For instance, according to Omair Ahmad, “the audience [of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders] is clearly outside” (55). No wonder! The book is dedicated to Mueenuddin’s mother (therefore, to an American reader). Ahmad notices both the author’s dual identity as well as his condition as a performer who has to enter and get out of a role/identity each time he leaves a culture and get associated with another one. Here is Mueenuddin’s condition in Ahmad’s wording: “you change your emotional clothes and your moral clothes, and all sorts of clothes… It is almost like being an actor. You are playing a role in each case…” (54). Ahmad appreciates the web structure of the short story cycle although from a narrative point of view Mueenuddin follows the realistic narrative recipe and avoids the postmodernist experiments of decentralization. In Other Rooms, Other Voices is “a group of interlinked stories with K. K. Harouni somewhere in the middle, much like a spider in his web” (Ahmad 2010, 60).

It is easy for any specialized reader to think of the famous formula of the Empire writing back, theorized by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, whenever he/she tries to contextualize Mueenuddin in a literary and cultural tradition. There is – I think – a certain competition between two critical stances: namely, between “talking back” and “re-writing (back?)”. Which of them can be the more appropriate theoretical option for understanding of a writer, such as Daniyal Mueenuddin? While the three Australian theorists above-mentioned (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin) noted, with great sympathy and understanding for the colonial that the empire writes back with vengeance, they cannot get rid of some Eurocentric assumptions. It is the literature written all over the Empire that is compared with the metropolis and no vice-versa movement is envisaged. The variations in the English language as well as the development of new representations are taken into account but the metropolis remains the center even if the importance of the (post)colonial space and its creative potential is fully acknowledged. Writing back is a counterdiscourse whose oral roots are suggested more powerfully rendered by the “talking back” process. Oral traditions are extremely important in numerous colonies. Many of these peoples have a predominantly oral culture, with strong oral cultural roots, and the widespread illiteracy makes orality an important feature in the literary creation of these peoples even nowadays. Secondly, “talking back” presupposes a conversation, an exchange which equally valorizes the influence of the metropolis on the (post)colonial cultures and the influence of the emerging (post)colonial areas upon the culture formerly imposed by the colonial master. Christian Moraru advocates the term rewriting in an article which connects the colonial and the postmodern cloning of the influential grand narratives coming, of course, from the powerful and colonizing First World. By re-writing (back), the (post)colonial writers “respond to specific texts, styles, and motifs of metropolitan literatures through parody, pastiche, irony, mimicry, the burlesque and other similar techniques” (Moraru 2001, 20-21). The re-writings are formative, transformative, and constructive. They redefine, rethink, reshape. Although inspired by resistance to the overwhelming influence of the former master, the “re-writing back” texts do not exhibit the negative pathos of the subaltern. These revisitations, revisions of significant texts of the past are created with a view to the future, they are not simple repetitions.

Taking into consideration the important oral roots of culture and literature in the area that is nowadays Pakistan, as well as the contemporary importance of orality for the common people of Pakistan and the creators inspired by their lives, I think that the best term for the Pakistani-American writer Mueenuddin is “talking back”. In this respect, we follow very much the strategy of Mwangi who examines the African novels’ self-reflexive fictional strategies, their potential to refigure the dynamics of gender and sexuality in Africa and demote the West as the reference point for cultures of the Global South. Pakistan is also part of the Global South and this paper analyzes Daniyal Mueenuddin’s first published book, In Other Rooms, Other Voices, from the point of view of identity constructions and (post-)colonial cultural structures without neglecting gender and without any idealization of the West. The eight stories making up the short story cycle entitled In Other Rooms, Other Wonders could each constitute the chapters of a novel depicting modern Pakistan: characters “travel” through chapters, exactly as the author is on a constant mobility between Pakistan and the USA. A contemporary post-colonial human comedy! Mueenuddin maintains, from his possible French model (Honoré de Balzac), the temptation to realism and the tenacity to offer a totality, i.e. a picture of the whole society, as complete as possible. The old K.K. Harouni, an old landowner, symbol of a feudal system of domination links all these stories. It is this character that represents the solidity of the old, the respectability of a local past which is not deprived, however, of its flaws. Mueenuddin admires and loves this past, but he has also had the American experience and this influences his critical perspective. His inside out experience of both the United States and Pakistan does frame this short-story cycle.

It is significant that the writer chose to use in his first book a literary genre, such as the short story cycle, where he deftly combined the Western and the Eastern literary traditions. On the one hand, there is a recurrent figure of the wealthy land owner, K.K. Harouni, who unites all the stories and reveals to the foreign reader a social pattern characteristic of the social pyramid in Pakistan. On the other hand, all the stories are set in the present; they display a certain Augustinian timelessness and could easily be considered moral and social fables. The predicaments into which the characters fall, the blend of materialism and spirituality, the narrative voices, more precisely the preference for the third person omniscient narrator – only one story is told in the first person – the combination between a certain darkness and humor, all these show the way in which the American and the Pakistani cultures influenced Daniyal Mueenuddin’s literary personality, his way of talking back to the environments that shaped and in-formed his personality. The author takes special pleasure in romantically crying over the damages provoked by the passage of time and the social changes brought by time:

"…in the heart of the Old British Lahore … the great houses were gradually being demolished, – to make way for ugly facts and town houses. That all was passing, houses where carriages had once been kept, flags bowered at sunset to the honor of British commissioner. Gone, and they, the servants to the lawns of British commissioners. Gone, and they the servants would never find another berth, like this one, the gravity of the house, the gentleness of the master, the vast damp rooms, the slow lugubrious pace, the order within disorder." (Mueenuddin 2009, 59)

Characters are structured in a hierarchical pyramid. The short story cycle is dominated by the social arrangement around Harouni who is both the master that gives orders how the social pyramid shall be structured and the cocoon around which the pyramid is built. One of the most impressive characters for this network whose tradition goes back to feudal times is Nawab, an engineer, one of Harouni’s devotees. Depicted with a lot of affection by the author, Nawab is the model subordinate who cannot conceive his life besides hierarchy. His purpose in life is to serve his master, his happiness and wealth can only come from his master.

"… Nawab tended the household machinery, the air conditioners, water heaters, refrigerators and water pumps, like an engineer tending the boiler on a poundering steamer in an Atlantic gale by his superhuman efforts he almost managed to K.K. Harouni in the same mechanical cocoon, cooled and bathed and lighted and fed that the landowner enjoyed in Lahore." (Mueenuddin 2009, 15)

For the staff who orbit around Mr. Harouni serving him and occasionally fleecing him – because this is why masters exist, to be taken in – the master’s death is like the end of the universe. When this happens, Rafik’s eyes “were frightened, as if he didn’t understand where he was. K.K. Harouni had been his life, his morning and night, his charge, his wealth” (Mueenuddin 2009, 61).

Muneeddin’s portrayal of elites is very complex. He hesitates between admiration, love and critique. The upper crust of society is esteemed for having grown with the past and from the past. It is solid because of its hierarchical inevitability. No society can exist without producing some hierarchies. The problem is the value(s) around which these hierarchies are constructed. Those who belong to the haut monde are adulated for their past and present role in consolidating a societal Pakistani identity. Mueenuddin offers his readers a short story inscribed in the big story of modern Pakistan according to the framing rules set a long time ago in Arabian Nights:

"Some hundred and fifty years ago one of the princes had ridden that way, going to a wedding or a funeral in this remote district, felt hot and ordered that rosewood trees be planted to shade the passer-by. He forgot that he had given the order within a few hours, and in a few dozen hours he in turn was forgotten, but these trees still stood, enormous now, some of them dead and looming without bark, white and leafless." (17)

But the privileged of Pakistani society are also criticized for remaining stuck in their ivory tower, indulging in their privileges and paying too little attention to what is really going on among the poor and the have-nots. The critical shots are spices that enliven Muneeddin’s writing. Harouni is usually indifferent how his estate is run except when this “touched on his comfort – a matter of great importance to him” (Mueenuddin 2009, 16). The old man did not merely lack interest in the affairs of the servants – he was not aware that “they had lives outside his purview” (Mueenuddin 2009, 45).

But the elitist cream of society is composed of genuine leading structures only if they have been getting confirmed in time. There is certain distrust, even apprehension of the upstarts, the nouveaux riches in Mueenuddin’s short story cycle that comes from the Western realist prose. This type of realism reaped the harvests of the anti-feudal European revolutions but combined nostalgia for the European aristocratic past with some envy for the energetic insertion among the have-nots. Look, for instance, at the Waraiches, they are “a family no one had heard of just five years before” (Mueenuddin 2009, 61). Harouni looked at them “with condescension overlaying his envy” (Mueenuddin 2009, 61). The Waraiches are not elite, they are the upstarts whose lives inspired a tradition in the realist novel. Mueenuddin admires, challenges, and complicates this lore of European modernity by introducing the post-colonial background.

The whole social pyramid of the Pakistani society is equally layered: Jilani, Harouni’s administrator, is to his inferiors/subalterns like Harouni himself. Although an upstart who nibbles on his master’s land, Jaglani never broke his feudal allegiance to Mr. Harouni. This would mean breaking his own code of honor. In his turn, Mustafa, the driver, “took care to make requests that reflected Jaglani’s interests, or at least would not harm his interests” (Mueenuddin 2009, 64-65). When the Makhdooms, “hereditary saints who controlled huge areas of land nearby” offered to support Jaglani in his political career, Jaglani “went to Lahore and received the blessing of K. K. Harouni” (Mueenuddin 2009, 79). Without this consecration, Jaglani would become a parvenue, or this social climber clings to tradition and the respectable old ways.

On the other hand, Mueenuddin does not hesitate to depict these elites (or most of them) in dark colors. They often prove to be very selfish and narrow-minded. Instead of defending public property and trying to improve what the British left behind, they only think of getting richer and richer. The Punjab chief minister, for instance, lives in “a large shabby building constructed on public land, formerly a park, which he had condemned and appropriated as soon as he attained office, throwing a wall around it” (Mueenuddin 2009, 83). The author desperately points to the corruption that is like a cancer for post-British Pakistan because it has grown from the century-old selfishness and haughtiness of the ruling classes. For instance, “a narrow and pitted farm-to-market road” (Mueenuddin 2009, 13) was “built in the 1970’s when Harouni still had influence in the Lahore bureaucracy” (Mueenuddin 2009, 13). Common interest is not an incentive for such projects that should, firstly, be beneficial to the community. Corruption is symbolically represented in the houses of the rich under the form of pests that can’t be exterminated. For instance, in the headquarters of the servants Suleema holds “the sleeping baby in her arms, watching the cockroaches scurry across the dirty floors” (Mueenuddin 2009, 56). Here they are visible, but this does not mean that these bugs limit their movements to the areas of the compound inhabited by the servants.

The Pakistani woman is, definitely, the significant Other for Mueenuddin and her significance grows beyond her traditional representation as being the passive, the silenced, the submitted counterpart. The Pakistani woman works hard to ensure the comfort she thinks her master, her husband, and her family deserve. For instance, upon coming back Nawabdin was “finding her [his wife] always in the same position, making him tea, fanning the fire in the little hearth” (Mueenuddin 2009, 18). Her husband’s comfort is her only preoccupation. She seems to have stayed in the same position for a whole day, bent in front of the altar of her husband’s domestic comfort. Meals are served in symbolic order. “Nawab ate first, then the girls, and finally his wife” (Mueenuddin 2009, 19). Few aspects of the Pakistani family life represent gendered subordination and hierarchy better. A very interesting female character is Saleema, a servant whose husband is a drug addict, and who has to open “her legs for the cook” (Mueenuddin 2009, 30) in any house where she has served. Still, she does not abandon her husband. Mueenuddin offers, however, a sign of hope, a marker of modernity. Saleema succeeds in having an alternative family with Rafik, the steward of the Harouni household. They have a child who is born in Saleema’s house from the countryside. “The old midwife from the village, with filthy hands and a greedy heart, brought the baby in the world, a tiny little boy” (Mueenuddin 2009, 52). Poverty and pecuniary values will mark the infant’s life but his gender is a sign of hope. Male children are much better received in Pakistani society than girls and the tradition still continues.

Besides the working-class women, Daniyal Mueenuddin also portrays, fugitively, the elite Pakistani women. Although they live a life of luxury and comfort, they do not seem to find too much sense, too much meaning in their lives. So are, for instance, Harouni’s daughters: they all live far away from their ancestral home and come back only in moments of crises. Sarwat lives in Karachi and married a rich industrialist, Kamila lives an independent life in New York, and Rehana is the most relevant case. She is “the extraordinary middle daughter, who lived in Paris and hadn’t returned to Pakistan in years” (Mueenuddin 2009, 57). She never forgave her father for having dumped her in favor of other women.

An interesting female personage is Husna, the upstart, who becomes Mr. Harouni’s old age mistress. A gold digger, Husna changes her status thanks to her flattering behavior. She knows how to rub Harouni the right way. Husna’s advancement is quickly perceived by “washermen, drivers, household servants” (Mueenuddin 2009, 125), by those who surround and serve Harouni. The lower echelons of Harouni’s domestic pyramid rejoice because one of them has succeeded in climbing some social stairs and envious because Harouni’s good will did not favor somebody else. Husna’s consecration – typical of a farming culture and a society where eating to one fill is a privilege – is through food and the quality of her nourishment. “A servant boy brought her a tray of food, the same food that the cook served to K. K. and his guests” (Mueenuddin 2009, 126). The reader feels Harouni’s curious household eavesdropping and feasting their eyes on what is going on in Harouni’s bedroom.

Globalization introduces a new character in Pakistan: the foreign woman who wants to marry in Pakistan. Obvious autobiographical elements are to be perceived here. The very delicate story Our Lady of Paris is extremely relevant in this respect. Helen and Sohaila, the son of a rich Pakistani family related to Mr. Harouni, want to get married. They meet Sohail’s parents in Paris. The story is about the growing clarification inside Helen’s mind that they do not fit. Written according to the recipe of literary impressionism, the open-ended story also includes some interesting intertextual references to Hemingway’s A Cat in the Rain. Although I do not have very precise information that Mueenuddin is acquainted with Hemingway’s story, it is not impossible that he knows it taking into account the circumstances of his life. The difference between the main female character in Hemingway’s story and in Mueenuddin’s text lies in the connection with matrimony. In Hemingway’s story, the unnamed main female character is already in an unfulfilling matrimony. Mueenuddin’s Helen is before matrimony. The symbolic cat connects the two short stories. Like the woman in Hemingway’s text, Helen identifies her misfortune, her hesitations with “a fat black kitten” (Mueenuddin 2009, 166). The diversion created by the cat with “its little white paws flashing” (Mueenuddin 2009, 166) makes Helen realize that the object of her affection can change. The words of Sohail’s mother echo in her mind: “it’s as difficult to have a meaningful life with a lot of money as without” (Mueenuddin 2009, 161).

The story of “Leila, or Lily as her friends called her” (Mueenuddin 2009, 170), an emancipated Pakistani woman who marries one of Makhdoom aristocrats, Mr. Murad Talwan, nephew of the great Makhdoom Talhwan, is another open-ended story. This text points to the difficulties of modernization and the bumpy road towards real decolonization. “The British should come back” (Mueenuddin 2009, 215), cries Murad to Lily. The independence has not been valorized by the Pakistani as it should have been. This heavy heart is characteristic of the post-colonial condition.

The changes brought about by independence and modernity in Pakistani society are everywhere, even in one’s private life. The essence of the modern marriage is “being alone together” (Mueenuddin 2009, 307). For Murad, this is easy as he has the farm where he intends to introduce new economic practices. Bur for Lily, this is extremely difficult. Separation, suicide, or reconciliation “by becoming old and wise, old and self-forgiving” (Mueenuddin 2009, 220) still loom at the end of the story as possible denouements. The modern Pakistani woman, unstable and unable to act in the absence of strong motivation, will have to accept, finally, the submission to tradition. Only by yielding can she have peace in her home, happiness is not an issue.

The last short story in the cycle, A Spoiled Man, responds to the first one in a circular way. This sample of the eternal return points to the difficulty of changing century-old structures of oppression and exploitation. Modernity still has to toll its bells in this society. Mueenuddin takes pleasure and has expertise in depicting such characters as Nawadin, the electrician, or Rezak, the gardener. For these ideal(ized) servants created by a cultural tradition based on subservience and conformity, life only means well done work and devotion to the master. Religion is not without impact here. Islam means obedience, conformity.

We find out in this short story that Sohail did not marry Helen but Sonya, another American woman, who tries hard to fit in and blend in. The inefficiency and the corruption of the state apparatus in contemporary Pakistan almost lead Rezak to death. The author mocks at the American wife’s effort to alleviate what she thinks could be alleviated. Her good intentions paradoxically lead to hell. The wife’s strife to do the work of the good Samaritan goes against a background of corruption. The owner of some poultry sheds neighboring a pine forest “bribed the warden to allow construction extending into the forest and each summer his men set fire at the base of the pines planted by the British one hundred years ago in order to kill the trees and open more space” (Mueenuddin 2009, 223). Although the American wife repeatedly said that she loved Pakistan, “sometimes it all became too much. ‘I hate it, everyone’s a crook, nothing works here!’ she would sob fighting with her husband” ( 226).

Mueenuddin’s talking back also implies a complex relationship with the mimicry of Western attitudes or cultural patterns. Jaglani, for instance, Harouni’s administrator, feels the need to put down his thoughts, his impressions, the moment he finds out that he is dying with cancer. But all he has is “an invisible notebook” (Mueenuddin 2009, 89); he is “never able to find a pencil, holding the pad in the air and writing shakily, illegibly” (89). Jaglani cannot become the writerly “I”, the individual who is his own chronicler and who thinks that his life has a value in itself. This is the Western paradigm that began in the specific circumstances of Western early modernity and it cannot be reiterated identically in Pakistan.

The same attraction-rejection forma mentis makes Mr. Harouni entitle his memoirs cautiously: “Perhaps, this happened” (Mueenuddin 2009, 113). History hesitates, it is based on personal impressions. The diarist is fully aware of his subjectivity and does not compete with the historian.

There is also in Mueenuddin’s writing back a streak of poetry, a lyrical element that strikes the reader and makes this author unique. The humaneness of the characters – especially, the common people – leads to forgiveness. Here is, for instance, Saleema, the Other Woman in Rakif’s life finally abandoned by her lover who returns to his un-loved wife out of a sense of duty. “You know, don’t you …” he said. The well inside her stirred, all the sorrows of her life, the sweet thick fluid in that darkness which always lay at the bottom of her thoughts from which she pulled up the cool liquid and drank. ‘I know.’ And they knew that she forgave him” (Mueenuddin 2009, 57). Two years later she was on the streets and on drugs. “And then soon enough, she died and the boy begged in the streets, one of the sorrows of Lahore” (61). Bygone lives whose only mission seems to be to go by! They only add something to the pain of the world.

Mueenuddin does not openly talk about Islam but this importance of religion is huge given the double entendre of all the texts. One has to conform, Islam is obedience, conformity. The deep sense of duty and docility leads to a religious orthodoxy (an Islamic one, of course) and a certain resignation with reality. Mueenuddin’s postcolonialism is not revolutionary. From the epistemic point of view, the writer deplores the flawed present, condemns colonialism but is reconciled with the post-British realities which can only be surpassed by slow transformations and reforms. Undoubtedly, his inbetween-ness the USA and Pakistan is the explanation of this position. The recent withdrawal of the American forces from Afghanistan after the two decades’ strenuous efforts to modernize this country bring us images that indirectly support Mueenuddin. Cultural imports should not be imposed, they must be insidiously integrated. And this may take centuries, not decades.

In conclusion, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s writing back is love, understanding, empathy, a touch of humor and irony, belonging and unbelonging, a complex and intermittent form of deterritorialization. Talking back to the world, talking back to Pakistan, Daniyal Mueenuddin proves to be a very significant personality of the world we live in, a world where cultures, individuals meet and talk to each other much more than before. Daniyal Mueenuddin’s writing is significant for the contemporary world’s conversation.

 

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