ABSTRACT
Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008) and The Blind Man’s Garden (2013) tell the story of 9/11 and the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan from the perspective of people living in Afghanistan and the nearby border regions of Pakistan. Aslam, a British writer born in Pakistan, constructs a vital critical perspective reflecting his position as a human being living between two cultures. Like his audience, he is already familiar with the dominant Anglo-American narrative of 9/11, which includes the celebrated novels of Don DeLillo, Claire Messud and Jay McInerney as well as the often-rehearsed arguments of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Aslam rewrites that familiar account, transforming a transparent, ahistorical and even cinematic narrative into an episode in a complex religious, cultural and political history whose opacity he constantly evokes. He evokes the difficulties of interpretation, areas of mutual ignorance and distortions of propaganda and mass-produced popular culture that fill up the empty space where Samuel P. Huntington sees two civilisations clashing. Where Huntington sees two, however, Aslam sees many which, throughout a long history, have not only battled, but also nurtured, each other; as Édouard Glissant put it, people and cultures ‘can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics’.
