Discontent and its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London Paperback – February 2, 2016 by Mohsin Hamid , Riverhead Books. In a collection of essays, Mohsin Hamid looks at Pakistan’s role as villain within the global news industry

Discontent and Its Civilizations – Pakistan’s place in the world

In a collection of essays, Mohsin Hamid looks at Pakistan’s role as villain within the global news industry


In 2010, Mohsin Hamid was asked by Granta to contribute to a piece entitled “How to write about Pakistan”. Other poets or novelists might have railed against accounts littered with mullahs, military generals, secret agencies and American drones. Hamid, characteristically droll, drew up a list of 10 commandments of which the first three were: “Must have mangoes”; “Must have maids who serve mangoes”; “Maids must have affairs with man servants who should occasionally steal mangoes.”

In Discontent and Its Civilizations, a collection pulling together essays and reviews from the past 15 years, he talks about the way in which Pakistan “plays a recurring role as villain in the horror sub-industry within the news business”. In his eyes, the nation in which he grew up, and to which he returned in 2009 after lengthy stints living in cities on both sides of the Atlantic, is less diabolical; he loves the “out-of-character Pakistan, Pakistan without its makeup and plastic fangs, a working actor with worn-out shoes, a close family, and a hearty laugh”.
Hamid, author of novels such as Moth Smoke (2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), left Lahore at the age of 18. He’s a Princeton graduate, a former McKinsey consultant, describes himself as a “nomad” and seems on the surface to be a member of that gilded elite of transnational Asians who, at least before 9/11, were seen as exemplars of a new kind of progressive postcoloniality.

That identity was always a bit shaky. Writing in 2000, he evokes the cruel theatre of modern travel for those with the wrong background: he goes to the Italian consulate in New York to get a visa for a trip to see his girlfriend, but worries about missing a patch beside his chin and exposing his stubble: “Fundamentalist stubble. Ayatollah, Hezbollah stubble.” Is that paranoid? Soon an official says he needs a notarised letter and a copy of his Italian partner’s passport to confirm their relationship.

Years later, even though he’s a father and a successful writer, his family’s typical entry to any country ends up with them being “the last passengers on our flight to claim our luggage, a lonely set of suitcases and a foldable playpen on a now-stationery baggage carousel”.

Hamid insists that Pakistan is really a series of Pakistans. It’s a “patchwork of cultures, ethnicities, languages and sects. Since independence, we’ve tried to use Islam to bind us together, to undo our inherent and pervasive minority-ness.” Perhaps, he suggests, it should be seen as an ongoing experiment, “a test-bed for pluralism on a globalising planet that desperately needs more pluralism”. He writes with great passion about the country’s Ahmadi, who are deemed heretical by orthodox Muslims.

Hamid admits his optimism is sometimes a little forced. He talks up the nation’s free media, but also says that to switch on the television “is to find oneself entering a world permeated with conspiracy theories, an almost mythical space in which a refusal to accept that Pakistan can take the lead in solving its various crises seems not misguided but commonsensical”. Shortly after he moves back to Lahore, a suicide bombing makes him wonder if he should get blast-resistant film fitted for his daughter’s window. His mother’s eye doctor is assassinated while taking his son to school; the boy is shot in the head.

In one essay, Hamid says he’s in “self-exile from the United States”. His reflections on that country are pointed. Discussing “the Great American Novel”, he observes that “‘the’ is needlessly exclusionary, and ‘American’ is unfortunately parochial. The whole, capitalised, seems to speak to a deep and abiding insecurity, perhaps a colonial legacy.”

Rather too many pieces – on fatherhood, ebooks, Obama’s election – feel dated or too short. Then again, as he proved in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, brevity has its virtues. Writing about Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Maintains, he claims: “Novels are like affairs, and small novels are affairs with less history, affairs that involved just a few glances across a dinner table or a single ride together, unspeaking, on a train, and therefore affairs still electric with potential, still heart-quickening, even after the passage of all these years.” It’s a lovely notion and Discontent and Its Civilizations has just enough others to make it worth spending time with.