In Graham Greene’s 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory, the unnamed protagonist, a “whisky priest,” utters the book’s most resonant line. “Hate,” the priest says, “was just a failure of imagination.”
Amitava Kumar, a professor of English at Vassar College, picks up that sentence and runs quite far with it in A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, his perceptive and soulful — if at times academic — meditation on the global war on terror and its cultural and human repercussions.
Kumar’s book isn’t especially long, but it is a many-tentacled beast. In part it’s a deft survey of post-9/11 art, from its fiction and nonfiction (Kumar appears to have read everything) to its foreign films and obscure works of performance art.
At its heart, however, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb — the excellent title is a riff on the title of Edmond Jabes’ 1993 book, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book — is about the ordinary men and women, brown-skinned in general and Muslim in particular, who have had their lives upended by America’s enraged security apparatus. Kumar calls them the “small people,” and to them he extends his own impressive and trembling moral imagination.
Kumar —a Hindu married to a Pakistani Muslim — opens his book with a stunning image, a complicated moment he fights to see clearly through his own repulsion. He is watching a British television documentary about the spectacular 2008 terrorist attacks on various locations in Mumbai. Indian authorities managed to tape a telephone call between a young terrorist and his handler (“the voice of pure evil”) back in Pakistan, and the documentary allows Kumar to listen in.
“What saves me from the annihilating hatred, if only for a moment, is the voice of the terrorist on the other end,” Kumar writes. “When being urged to quickly set fire to the curtains and carpets in the opulent Taj Hotel, he is more interested in describing to his superior the rooms that he says are large and lavish. It’s amazing, he says, the windows are huge here.” The young man has never seen flat-screen plasma television sets, so he tells his handler about the huge computers on the walls.
“Rightly or wrongly, I’m caught by the drama of the displaced provincial, the impoverished youth finding himself in the house of wealth,” Kumar continues. “He is using terrible violence to set fire to this palace of dreams but he is in a daze: a murderous thug who is a figure in the invisible machinations of people and plans that are larger than anything he can imagine.”
Kumar writes about many such men in this book, most of whom aren’t terrorists at all but bunglers and fools who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or were, quite arguably, the hapless victims of entrapment. Kumar doesn’t deny that there are bad men in the fundamentalist Islamic world, men worthy of the American military’s attention. The problem is that we seem to be filling prisons with very minor characters.
He describes one man, imprisoned at Guantanamo, who was a cook’s assistant for Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Kumar quotes one observer’s bitterly funny observation: “OK. We have the assistant cook. Where is Mr Big? Where is the cook?”
One case Kumar pays close attention to is that of Hemant Lakhani, an elderly and somewhat delusional Indian-born British clothing merchant arrested after ostensibly delivering a shoulder-to-air missile to an FBI informant in an Elizabeth, New Jersey, hotel room. The problem, Kumar writes, is that it wasn’t Lakhani’s idea to sell missiles.
He could never have produced one himself. The FBI found him an arms dealer, gave him the money to purchase the thing and took it to the hotel. The real argument against Lakhani, Kumar adds, seemed to be that “he had the immoral nature of someone who might be a terrorist.” Kumar likens this sad man to Willy Loman and writes about Lakhani’s hatred of America: “Doesn’t that hate also spring from a species of failure, a failure in which the United States is seen as having a hand?”
There are many small, tart observations in A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. Kumar is particularly good on the literature that has emerged from America’s recent adventures in the Middle East. He describes the Islamic terrorists in the work of novelists like Martin Amis and John Updike as “unreal and wholly unconvincing.”
The unpalatable truths in Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, a memoir of the Persian Gulf war, make that book more important and eye-opening, he writes, “than anything written by the likes of Noam Chomsky and the rest of the admirable antiwar brigade.”
Kumar’s book is eccentric, and thus human, on multiple levels. While visiting Lakhani at a prison in Springfield, Missouri, he winds up one evening at a strip club called Teasers. When a dancer asks what brought him to town, he tells her. She replies, “That’s not cool.” She changes the subject by asking him a question he finds oddly inspirational: “So, how was your Fourth of July?”
At times this book is stiff and awkward, as if poorly translated. Kumar, writing from the left, is relentless in his critique of America’s post-9/11 behavior, and his book will anger those who believe that the war on terror’s collateral damage has been minimal or largely unavoidable. Kumar stacks his deck but only in the way an anti-death penalty debater would necessarily linger on the innocent people who have been executed.
Kumar returns again and again to his small people and his bunglers. He suggests that America, unaware of the image it is projecting in the Muslim world, has been the biggest bungler of all. He quotes the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who asked us to understand “why millions of people in poor countries that have been pushed to one side, and deprived of the right to decide their own histories, feel such anger at America.”
A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb carries in the crook of its own arm Kumar’s plaintive appeal. If we’re to bridge the perilous divide that separates us from those poor and unnamed people who resent us, we first need to see them, to look into their eyes. We need, Kumar writes, “to acknowledge that they exist.” This angry and artful book is a first step.
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