Stunt Casting

Literature, as a form of social anthropology, finds itself divided into categories to satisfy historians, readers and publishers alike. Over the last two decades, increases in immigration, globalization and the availability of cheaper airfares have resulted in a literary category best described as multicultural. Such literature has enjoyed immense popularity and sales, as books fly off the shelves of Amazon.com and Borders franchises the world over.

Multicultural literature is stippled with the names of some extremely credible writers. It is here that we find the author species of the old guard, like A.S. Byatt, as well as more recent types like Zadie Smith. What binds these authors under the same umbrella is that their storylines are punctuated with anxieties that accompany questions of identity and nationality. At best, such work is insightful; cross-breeding makes for more ingenious and unique prose. At its worse, bad multicultural literature is just bad writing.

Imad Rahman’s debut novel, I Dream of Microwaves, is a collection of short stories that follow the character of Kareem Abdul-Jabaar. Jabaar is a down and out American-Pakistani actor who forlorns like Job and wanders through the halls of life aimlessly. When we meet Rahman’s character for the first time, Jabaar is in the midst of dropping his job portraying “ethnic” criminals on America’s Most Wanted. Additional reading finds us following Jabaar as he manoeuvres through a myriad of escapades to further his suffering acting career and love life. We witness Jabaar pushing drinks as Zima Zorro, entertaining B-grade porn stars and dealing with an ex-wife who somehow appears in a Discovery Channel documentary on piranhas.

The point of the existence of Rahman’s character remains unknown. What we are given is a one-dimensional character that remains static throughout the entire book. Jabaar does not seem to change or get any better at what he does—even if it does involve being pathetic. His character does not incite empathy from the reader, but rather, creates a growing indifference. You begin to not care about Jabaar and what he does.

To make matters worse, Rahman’s stories are relatively unbelievable. True, stranger things have said to have happened, but being hired to hunt someone down for not returning a video? Or a Pakistani being able to pass off as a Bosnian? One wonders if the reader should bear insult or hope that the characters in the stories do not represent the capacities of your average American. Not to mention that the dialogue is lacks depth, style and comes across as irrevocably crass.

Bad writing aside, it would be unfair to expect I Dream of Microwaves to produce the same effect as Ken Loach’s movie, Ae Fond Kiss, or Hanif Kureishi’s Black Album. All three works have Westernised males with Pakistani backgrounds as their protagonists, and all stories take place in Western suburbia. However, what makes Rahman’s novel distinct is that it makes no attempt to deal with cultural differences. Sad to say, Rahman defers from touching the subject unless making poor clichéd jokes and paltry associations with the East. One cannot help but get the feeling that all non-Anglo-Saxon American references exist as token mentions. Like the token Afro-American in generic films, Rahman’s work would remain largely unchanged if references to Karachi or Bollywood were omitted.

One has to consider that Rahman, who lives in Wisconsin, could have consciously refused to write a novel that embodied the multicultural stereotypes of East vs. West, tradition vs. modern, individual vs. the collective. Maybe Jabaar was meant to be embracing paltry Western ideals and free himself from his Pakistani heritage. But if that was the intention, culture should not been a card placed on the table. It becomes cheap trick, a mockery, an underhanded attempt to play on a notion one had no intentions to explore.

In his work, Between Worlds, the late Edward Said wrote, “It is far more challenging to try to transform oneself into something different than it is to keep insisting on the virtues of being American in the ideological sense.” I Dream of Microwaves seems to be a prime example of such “insisting.” In the novel, Kareem Jabaar is constantly exerting his “American-ess” by exhibiting his liberation from the kind of cultural dilemma that those of us with multicultural backgrounds cannot run away from. A consequence of this is that reading Rahman’s novel conjures uneasiness; the author seems to be in denial concerning who his characters are, where they come from and where they are supposed to be.