Sometimes what you read in a novel might actually illuminate something about your own identity. For author Mohsin Hamid, identity is an important theme that he explores throughout his fiction. Hamid visited campus last Wednesday evening to give a talk entitled "Constructing Fictions: Prose, Politics, and Pakistan" for the fall 2012 installment of the Soli Sorabjee Lectures in South Asian Studies, which was sponsored by both the South Asian Studies Program and the Brandeis-India Initiative. A large crowd of students, faculty members and even some residents of the local community came to the atrium of the Mandel Center for the Humanities to hear Hamid talk about his award-winning writing. Ultimately, the notion of identity became the connecting theme of the three topics in the lecture's title.

Before Hamid took the podium, Prof. Harleen Singh (SAS) gave a brief but thought-provoking introduction, leaving the audience to consider the notion that someone could be at home everywhere but at the same time nowhere, which she described as a "trope of a rapidly globalizing world." This seemingly oxymoronic concept provided a good segue to what Hamid expounded upon in his talk and was particularly apt considering Hamid's own global lifestyle and interest in how people identify themselves.

Hamid himself has lived in Pakistan, the United States (he graduated from Princeton University in 1993) and the United Kingdom, and he currently splits his time between these countries. He is the author of Moth Smoke (2000), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and named a defining novel of the decade by The Guardian; and the forthcoming How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, which was recently excerpted in The New Yorker.

Hamid first discussed his 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which takes place over the course of one night at a Lahore caf?(c) and follows a conversation between a Pakistani man and a man who is presumably American. Hamid did not say much else about the story's plot during his lecture, but I soon came to realize his reticence was central to the point he was trying to make.
The novel was on the New York Times Best-Seller list, and it was recently adapted into a film by Mira Nair, director of movies such as Vanity Fair and The Namesake. Hamid claimed that being involved with the film adaptation "has been quite educational," and he proceeded to go into how "strange" it has been for him to "see these characters come alive with these very talented actors." The cast includes such names as Kate Hudson, Liev Schreiber and Kiefer Sutherland.

According to Hamid, his involvement in the film adaptation process showed him that screenwriters have to do much of the same work as readers-that is, they have to create from what they are provided in the text. This, he added, accounts for why oftentimes people are disappointed with the translation of a novel to the screen; everybody creates differently.

Hamid told the audience that with novels, and his novels in particular, there is "a great deal of creation on your part. ... You are invited to create." This, I think, is why did not go in to a deep recounting of the plot of the novel or the implications of what he wrote. He is just as interested in the reader's psychology, what someone who reads his book brings to the story with them, as with what he intended to convey while writing the novel. At the end of the day, when reading a novel, you are really faced with is paper and ink, or as Hamid put it, "black squiggles on pulped wood." As such, the act of construction, of creating a personalized, vivid image, is naturally involved in the reading process.

Reading, Hamid informed the audience, allows people "to transcend their everyday experiences." He read the first page of The Reluctant Fundamentalist to show how this particular novel begs for the reader's involvement in creating, calling what he presents in the novel a "one-sided conversation," with the presumably American man merely listening throughout the novel. Hamid placed emphasis on the word 'presumably' when talking about this listener character. The Pakistani man who is speaking assumes that he is American, but Hamid never overtly states what nationality that the character is. "You, the reader, have to supply the rest of the story. ... What happens is up to you," he told the audience.

He mentioned the dominating "sense of menace in the world around us" today and how the reader might, for example, bring this notion of danger and fear into the novel, even if it may not really be there. It was interesting that Hamid never did say if he intended to convey a sense terror in his novel, and I was left thinking about how much of my own emotions and identity I project into the stories I read. The rest of the audience also got very quiet and still at this point, as if pondering some of their past reading experiences.

Hamid emphasized that what he writes is not autobiographical. He cited the example of Changez, the Pakistani man speaking in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Whereas Hamid thinks "hybridity is part of what I am," he described how Changez has a fear of it. "The attempt to simplify and define ourselves as one identity," as he expressed it, is something that both baffles and frightens him. Through writing fiction, he explores the concept of identity and ways to "blur our notion" of it.

"We live in a brand-saturated world," Hamid concluded. "Pakistan is a brand, Brandeis is a brand, ... just like Nike." He compared the way that Pakistan is depicted in news to the Friday the 13th film franchise, admitting that the frightening side that is shown definitely exists, but emphasized that is the only part people see. As such, in his forthcoming novel, he decided to avoid using the names of places and people, feeling this was a necessary technique. Perhaps in coming up with the title of the lecture, this idea of "constructing fictions," Hamid was also referring to how people are so preoccupied with labels, and tend to create rigid notions of their identities that do not encompass all of what makes them who they are.

The desire he expressed to remove these preconceived labels seemed to me to go along with his views on identity. His lecture once again provoked a sense of hyperawareness in the audience, leaving those listening to what he was saying to think about the possibility of a society in which these loaded, "prepackaged" labels do not exist. It's surely idealistic, but maybe we'd all be a little more in tune to who we really are, as opposed to being concerned about how we should label ourselves.