The Occidental Tourist

Critics, take note: Tightly crafted prose and lofty moral sentiments may have their place, but what really matters at the end of the day is the number of times a text mentions camels. “The first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page,” writes Jorge Luis Borges in his essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.” In what is perhaps the greatest (the only?) assault on the dromedary in prose, Borges goes on to deride the animal as an outrageously artificial exoticism, the employ of those lacking both imagination and a real understanding of their own culture. After all, the most authentically Arab work of all manages to do without: “In the Koran, there are no camels.”The illustrious Buenos Aires author was a little off: The Koran actually does allude to camels twice, in passages 6:144 and 22:36. But despite the humps in his logic, Borges’s argument still holds water. The unfortunate truth is that many books written by non-Western novelists in English—especially those by South Asian authors—rely on the equivalent of camels for effect, peppering works with spices and ceremonies, arranged marriages and zany in-laws: in short, deploying the stalest, most predictable tropes in the Orientalist handbook. Book reviewers stateside pat themselves on the back for compassing “world literature”; arts supplements splash their fronts with selections of the month like Anita Desai’s “Fasting, Feasting” or Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger.” Enthusiastic reception notwithstanding, however, the “local color” in which these books traffic reduces perceptions of the region to little more than cartoonish, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”-esque stereotypes.Harsh? Perhaps. Yet the breach between the possibilities for “diaspora” fiction and the lackluster reality is disappointingly vast. To pull a book from the shelf at random, take Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie’s 2002 “Salt and Saffron.” “The stories that [narrator] Aliya tells are full of the aroma of pilafs and the mouth-melting softness of kebabs,” promises the back flap; Shamsie is said to write with “warmth and gusto.” And the book is indeed a pleasing read, chock-full of family legends and tales of love that transcend caste boundaries. But the overwhelming feeling upon turning the last page is that all this makes Pakistan seem rather like a fairy tale: and that all this has been said before.The tendency for South Asian authors to draw from the same well of themes again and again, worn out and misguided as they are, likely has more to do with over-ambition than laziness. Walk into nearly any major bookstore in Mumbai, and literature will be divided into two sections: “Fiction” and “South Asian Fiction,” meaning books of the Adiga-Desai stamp. (A strain of nationalism too is on display: Books by South Asian authors on non-South Asian topics, or non-South Asians on South Asia, find no place on the latter shelf.) A book that “matters” enough to merit national pride often connotes a thick tome of realism—one that attempts to cram between its two covers either all the dramas of family life or an entire sordid cityscape.In practice, this drive toward realism prompts writers to turn to a set of stock cultural representations closely linked to historical portrayal by the west. And the issue hasn’t just got tweed-suited postcolonial theorists gnawing at their pencils. In the fifth installment of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures this Monday, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk waxed troubled before a packed audience in Sanders Theatre. The American writer, he said, has the luxury of dabbling in regionalist vernacular (a hat tip to his beloved Faulkner); in contrast, the Turkish novelist is doomed to make a “museum” of his fiction, preserving his culture and displaying it to Europe by packing in as many observations as he can. Rather than being a thing of beauty, this edifice crumbles under the weight of its own desperate attempts at self-preservation and hand-waving bravado.Pamuk’s own work evades this unpleasant end, but it’s the lucky escaped convict from the ever tighter conventions in which “third-world” novelists imprison themselves. Although some writers like Rohinton Mistry and Vikram Chandra do tackle traditional issues with a sure hand, the “South Asian novel” in general is approaching the self-caricature of modern Bollywood. In the Indian movie industry, the vibrancy of each film taken independently loses luster when held up against the genre: It’s always the same old song and dance.Yet first-generation South Asian immigrants, often guilty of penning the most terrifically clichéd novels of all, are also the most powerfully placed to guide the way out. Many Indian writers working in English live in the States or visit often, and they usually have the political freedom and socioeconomic means to innovate. Classmates in Jhumpa Lahiri’s creative-writing workshop at Boston University envied her for never having to cast about for topics, her own Bengali heritage lending her exotic source material every week; they should have criticized her for taking the easy path in merely penning realist snapshots of the immigrant lifestyle. Magical realism, stream of consciousness, science fiction: The number of roads not taken by the South Asian novelist boggles. In the end, a few camels may not be such a bad thing—but only if they can teleport. Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.