"Pull a thread here and you'll find it's attached to the rest of the world": Perpetration and Community in Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil

Details

Supervisors

Bragard, Véronique

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation générale

Abstract

enAfter the tragic attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, there has been an increasing tendency to consider only Muslims as responsible, as demonstrated by their almost constant demonization in post-9/11 novels. Chapter 2 will show that most authors have reproduced a dichotomic discourse about terrorism – considering, as pointed out by Edward Said, that ‘we’ are never terrorists, ‘they’ always are. The last chapter eventually conducts an analysis of Nadeem Aslam’s novel The Wasted Vigil, which offers a completely new perspective. The present dissertation aims to show how the Pakistani novel blurs the lines between the subject-positions of victims and perpetrators – which are both investigated in the first chapter of the present work. Aslam, through his historicization of 9/11, manages to place this event alongside other historical moments in his novel, consequently suggesting the existence of a causal relationship between them. Eventually, the analysis demonstrates how the novel, because it echoes Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory”, manages to create new forms of solidarity which emerge thanks to the characters' realization that they all have two things in common: while they can unite because they have all lost someone they loved, they also understand – thanks to novel’s polyphony and intertextuality – that the countries they come from are all responsible for the destruction of their lives.