During the last two decades many Pakistani writers, poets and artists have visited Western countries, and written travelogues, yet their main interest has revolved around the intimate conduct of the American way of life. In Urdu, these safarnamas have quite a success, and were best sellers, but quite frankly these writing only gave surface information about the United States, and its multicultural society. Lately, however the problems of Pakistani families in the United States have appeared as the major theme of Urdu fiction. These short stories have focussed on the difficulties of maladjustment in the host country. The cultural contradictions appear to cause uneasiness in feminist novel and short stories. But no writer has touched the essential state of American culture and has seen it in a transcultural and global perspective. Javed Amir has treated this much neglected aspect in his latest collection of writings titled Writing Across Boundaries.
It is an interesting work of intellectual realism, a pleasant cross section of learned opinion in American society. It makes smooth reading and opens up a scenario, which is not normally available to readers in any other medium. It is non-existent in Urdu writings.
This fascinating book has been published in Lahore; its writings draw their view-line from the West, and look upon an extended human scenario which is at present confronted with many challenges. Javed Amir is a retired diplomat and an old Ravian, and a keen observer of cultural undercurrents. He is perhaps the first Pakistani intellectual and writer who has formulated the question about the dilemma of becoming an American. His insight is enlightening, sympathetic and full of appeal. Unlike other Pakistani intellectuals, working in the universities in the United States, Javed Amir has rationalized the situation of a Pakistani immigrant against the amorphous state of cultural adjustment in the host country.
As an immigrant in multicultural society, Javed Amir has raised the primary question about his identity: Who I am? He states that an unbalanced and unresolved outsider-insider equation underlies the sensibility of an immigrant. There is centrifugal pull, which operates between the immigrant’s original culture and the culture of the host country. In the common jargon, the immigrant has been variably described as an exile, an alienated human being, a person who is historyless, rootless and homeless.
As a person out of his own country, the immigrant has carried the burden of a nomadic existence which fails to provide him a spiritual shelter in a culture which has raised its foundations on material values. His race, color, language, religion and even his personal name make him an outsider, and deep in his psyche, his true self as an insider from a distant land, remains concealed to the view of the white population that makes the panorama of his environment.
All this may be an acute predicament for a less sophisticated individual, but in Javed Amir’s case, it provides him with a double vision. His concern with writing, he points out, has saved him from identity crisis. Thus he has seen the outside world from the different cultural perspectives, and has redefined his movement from city to city, and from country to country as a free person, who has rediscovered his freedom in the shifting scenes of Western life.
All this gives him a strange sense of joy. He ceases to be an exile, a person without a country, a hermit, a refugee. He succeeds in placing himself in an emerging universal nation. This awareness, Javed Amir writes, has been provided to him by being an immigrant—a member of the America of the immigrants—which is growing in size, demographically, and multiculturally. As an immigrant, the man in his situation eventually becomes a past of America’s future.
Nevertheless, in another essay on American cultural identity, his view has turned critical, and he has discussed the concept in the developing American intellectual opinion. He says that the word ethnicity has by now lost its sting of the other who is inferior, and a part of the brain dead Third World. The non-white population, it is suggested, has become 1/3rd by 2000 and by 2030, it is calculated to outnumber the white European population in the United States.
This demographic phenomenon has gradually made the other, the Ethnic, an equal member of the society and democratically it has made its presence felt meaningfully in the politics of the host country.
His essay titled Western intolerance of Islam is critical and enlightening, and it has placed the present state of Western attitude toward Islam in a right-size perspective. Javed Amir has quite clearly stated that hatred of Islam in the West, and the allegations about its apparent form in some circles of the American life are a legacy from the Milddle ages. The West, he writes, has never outgrown its medieval schizophrenic conception of Islam.
He has reminded that in 1730, a French intellectual had portrayed the founder of Islam as a forerunner of the Age of Reason. He has also quoted Japenese Islamologist Murata who has defined Islamic values as “gentleness, love, compassion and beauty.” Javed Amir writes: ‘Modernism and liberalism are nothing new in Islamic culture. The liberal thrust of brilliant civilization in Muslim Spain was a result of the teachings of Muslims sages like Ivicenna and Averroes.”
Whatever be the nature of other problems in the life of an immigrant in the United States Javed Amir’s experience has proved that the immigrant rediscovers his essential being in that situation. He succeeds in watching his own soul in the mirror of a multicultural environment. This experience has also enabled him to look upon the scenario of human society in a constructive and positive manner, which has been an added attraction of his living in a country, which is shaping its future in multicultural dimensions.
******************
Editor’s Note: Javed Amir’s book, Writing Across Boundaries is available at Amazon.com for $22.95 plus S&H or at a discount by mailing check or money order to Milestone Publishers, P.O.Box 1005, Beltsville, Md. 20705 or by calling (301)595-5372 or through Email: javedamir@hotmail.com. This hardcover book with a 4-color cover, 14 literary essays and 12 fascinating illustrations and photographs by Rima is discounted by the publisher at $14.95 plus $3.00 shipping and handling.
******************
