Two-thirds in to American Fever, Hira, the 16-year-old protagonist, and her good friend Zahra – each on research change schemes from Pakistan – are discussing “Americanness” and American tradition. Hira’s host household are white, and based mostly in Lakeview, Oregon, whereas Zahra resides with a Pakistani household in New Jersey, prompting them to debate the “authenticity” of their experiences. When Hira argues that there’s worth in residing with individuals totally different from you, Zahra shrugs, “So long as they’re not the white children at college, whose first query to me is at all times ‘The place are you from?’” To this, Hira shortly replies, “However you’re from elsewhere, yaar.” It’s the sharpness, and shock, of Hira’s assertion – and there are a number of such moments all through the novel – that makes Dur e Aziz Amna’s coming-of-age, coming-to-America debut novel stand out.
Again in Pakistan, Hira hadn’t been dreaming of America “desperately, passionately, just like the Hollywood foreigner’s craving for America, just like the third worlder’s slobbering”. Largely, she had needed to flee the stifling smallness of highschool and residential: the identical schoolgirls, who referred to as their intervals their “guests”, and the identical married women, “who wore their piety and innocence like goddamn medals to be polished each evening earlier than bedtime”.
As soon as within the US, Hira turns into a cultural ambassador for her nation and a translator between languages and practices. She feels “straitjacketed by English” and self-conscious about her religion, defending her causes for fasting throughout Ramadan. She faces micro-aggressions and her personal insecurities, formed by the unholy trinity of racism, sexism and Islamophobia in a post-9/11 United States. She makes failed makes an attempt to assimilate; she discovers her inside fury – and willingness to combat for what she holds expensive. Whereas within the US, Hira modifications, however after all, “one was solely what one might ever be”. All through, she is steeped in homesickness, and later, illness – her tuberculosis worsening till she’s underneath quarantine.
That is 2010-11, when “America remains to be king of the world, the cool man’s within the White Home”, and but, as Hira factors out, “a half-black American in energy remains to be an American in energy”. It’s a spot that will “upsell you on the thread depend in your deathbed”, that thinks it could actually transcend historical past. The extremely quotable Hira is a drive to be reckoned with. Her spiky prose model provocatively undercuts obtained narratives in regards to the “American dream” from the immigrant’s perspective.
Hira describes how throughout her time within the US she “peddled in a single stereotype or one other, taking succour of their affirmation”. And but, “this isn’t an account of how America was”, she clarifies, “it’s an account of how I used to be”. American Fever, at its coronary heart, is a narrative about self-discovery. The reality is that Hira, a bored teenager, finds that “America was an idea, a metaphor, and never the factor itself”. It’s this liminal area between the place one imagines and the place one lives in that Hira should come to phrases with as she crops a foot in every of her two worlds.
If the narrative units up a binary inherent to the immigrant story – between Pakistan and America, house and away – it does so solely very calmly. On a deeper stage, greater than her cruel criticisms of the US it’s Hira’s recollections of house that depart an impression on the reader. For her, “house is the only panorama of desires, the one place that may ever persuade you that its failings, its bounties, its excesses, and caresses are all your individual. In any case, the place does it finish and you start?” In making Pakistan her panorama of desires, Hira but once more subverts the dream of migration. The place you come from issues as a lot as the place you go. “Maybe when you think about a second lengthy sufficient, it begins to exist exterior of time,” Hira says. There’s a dreaminess to coming house. “The chai is at all times pouring. The tree by no means dies. It’s raining for ever.”
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