There are three stages experienced by one coming face to face with someone from Pakistan, explains Samira, the protagonist of Welcome to Americastan. First, disbelief that someone from the world’s most notorious brown country
ended up in the same room as you; second, fear and excitement that this Pakistani could have sinister ties with some of the terrible news events; third, the formulation of a bone-headed comment: You gave Bin Laden a house before our boys took his left eye out. Or, what an interesting time to be from Pakistan. With all the terrorists being from there and all.There is method in the crazy humour.
I caught up with Jabeen Akhtar when she was in Delhi last week for the release of her first book, Welcome to Americastan. Akhtar is light-hearted, “cool” and surprisingly clear-headed. “It’s okay. We can survive people laughing at us,” she says before breaking into a giggle.
“It’s important to just sit back and laugh at ourselves and let other people laugh,” says Jabeen. “Humour is missing in any idea or literature about Pakistanis and Muslims. All the heavy elements on the subject have been out there for some time now, I wanted this book to give a kind of fresh
perspective.”
Welcome to Americastan deals with a peculiar Pakistani family that she calls “almost dysfunctional”, with each member seemingly headed in a different direction, with zero idea of what’s right or wrong.
It has a dramatic opening, throwing us right in the middle of a mother-daughter brawl. “Haramzadi! Awara! Bewaqoof!” Samira’s mother screams at her. Samira, or Sam, has come home, in Cary, North Carolina, after losing her job and her boyfriend of eight years in Washington, D.C., besides managing to get her name on the FBI’s terrorist watch list. None of this is known to her parents who think their daughter is home for a weekend. She bargains with her siblings to help her tow in her luggage secretly but is caught red-handed.
Here is a bizarre family in a state of disarray. Samira’s sister Meena doesn’t mind giving a blow job to a stranger at a party to get some weed for her heartbroken elder sister. Later she brings a female date to the elder brother’s Muslim wedding. Khalid, the elder brother who is about to get married, can think of
little other than videogames. He blows up the money saved up
for his marriage to get a fancy gadget.
The parents on the other hand carry deep memories and a longing for Pakistan. The father narrates how his date of birth was “estimated” after his mother
said he was born around an epidemic in India, on a cold rainy night with ber littered around trees. The children are unable to relate to any of this.
A new trend in the expatriat community comes across. “The concept of identifying with geography is becoming more and more irrelevant for second generation children in the US,” says Akhtar. “You don’t get a sense of ‘I belong to this country’; it’s more like I’m just out there, floating about in the world’.”
The author, who was brought up in the US, says she had been in Pakistan for less than a fortnight in her entire life. “It was nothing like I had imagined it to be. I had thought people there would look like me, think like me, be cool... but it was nothing like that. A lot of things I did there were inappropriate.”
Much like Akhtar, her protagonist also rejects being classified as either an American or Pakistani or Pakistani-American.
Back home, Samira looks for ways to recover from her heartbreak. She begins to help her father at PAC-PAC, a civic organisation he started in the aftermath of 9/11.
Samira has a brush with racism at a store when an angry woman swears at her, “F***ing Arabs”, and then adds, “Welcome to America.” Samira is surprised to find people around her more angry and upset at this than she is. Despite being the “victim”, she has to comfort and pacify the crowd.
Later she thinks of the retort that would have trounced her opponent, “Hey b***h, didn’t you hear? It’s called Americastan now.”
Still unable to get over her ex-boyfriend Ethan, Samira ends up in an affair with a guy at her gym. Meanwhile, at PAC-PAC things begin to get difficult as some members oppose helping non-Muslim Pakistanis through the organisation. At one of the meetings the debate even turns into proving who is a better Muslim.
The fact that Samira had been put on the FBI’s terror list is revealed to her father at a crucial PAC-PAC meeting. The author puts Samira’s brush with law in a comic light: After realising that her boyfriend had left her for her bestfriend, she chases them and tries to run them over. She is caught by the cops and becomes a terror suspect. However, when she returns home, nothing troubles her more than the end of her relationship with Ethan. Being on the terror list seems to be the last thing on her mind. “It would be difficult for someone who thinks about his/her identity all the time to come out of such an experience,” says Akhtar. “But for someone for whom identity is not an issue it would be a joke.”
Meanwhile, Khalid is going to get married to his girlfriend, a white catholic, much to the dismay of his parents who insist on a Muslim wedding by a maulvi from Pakistan.
At the wedding Ethan is also invited and Samira prepares for the final faceoff.
The story has a young, hip tone. This is the view of the world from someone who doesn’t listen to newsroom debates or reads winding editorials.
The narrative does begin to lag towards the end, sounding nothing more than a girl’s pursuit of her ex-boyfriend. But humour being the touchstone, it keeps the story together.
Akhtar takes an unapologetic view of Pakistani expats. She doesn’t feel the need to “appear” American or even Pakistani. Like her, Samira belongs to an increasingly threatened brand of liberal-minded people. But her beliefs are not shaken either by the “terrorist” label or by a peer group that doesn’t share her views. Neither does she come across as a smug rebel. “Rebellious?... Oh, it’s nothing that glamorous. We’re just suburbanites,” she says.
Akhtar cleverly inserts thought into a largely humorous novel. She often manipulates farce and gives it a surprise sentimental twist. The father, for example, time and again uncovers his “Partition-era” scar for the children to see. The display is followed by a “scar speech” to remind them how hard the struggle was and how privileged they had been. This comic family scene takes a sharp turn in the end. “It is a part of me,” father tells Samira, “and it follows me wherever I go, but all I have to do is put on a shirt, you see. Cover it up and I can start over… that is why everybody comes to America.”
