H M Naqvi’s debut novel Home Boy is the story of three Pakistani men in a changed, post-9/11 New York, where “everybody is busy parceling myths and prejudice as analysis and reportage, and everyone has become an expert on different varieties of turbans”. The narrator Shehzad (a.k.a. Chuck) and his friends AC and Jimbo think of themselves as global citizens — very much part of a grand melting pot – and speak a language that mixes the rhythms of gangsta-rap with Punjabi slang. But we occasionally catch glimpses of their cultural confusion. This is an engaging, energetic book about a world that has shrunk so fast that many people are left with nowhere to really call home.
How did the idea for Home Boy come to you?
Sitting on a barstool at a bar in the Bowery in ’03, I scrawled a few lines of verse on a cocktail napkin. When I later transcribed the lines, I found myself writing the beginning of a novel.
You’ve taught creative writing at Boston University. Did your characters’ speech come from observing how Pakistani and Indian students behave?
Not at all. I don’t think I had a single South Asian student in my class. I have, however, spent a portion of my life in the States and in the States one comes across many Indians, Pakistanis, some off-the-boat, some second generation, some half or quarter desi. Over the years, I suppose, I absorbed their ways.
Since I was writing about the States, about New York in particular, I made a conscious attempt to fuse lowbrow and highbrow discourse, employ text and lyric, and summon hip hop and Yiddish, Urdu, Hindi, and Punjabi, to create a voice that feels native to the city.
As a Muslim man in the US, how did the world change for you post-9/11?
I found I had to explain myself more. Before 9/11, I could define myself any way I liked. Afterwards, I had to contend with imposed definitions. The heroes of Home Boy have dramatically different experiences. The period after the 9/11 tragedy was unsettled. An acute sense of insecurity pervaded. Men of a certain hue and persuasion were visited by the authorities. It was routine.
Globally, do you believe cultural paranoia is now the default position?
Although I would like to think otherwise, I think human nature is fundamentally tribal. Americans, like Indians, Pakistanis, Papua New Guineanians are tribal. In Home Boy, a character remarks, “When push comes to shove, we’re all the same.” When America was hit, she hit back.
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Did you grow up with both Western pop-culture and traditional south Asian influences? Was there ever a conflict?
We all grow up with Western pop-culture. Everybody knows Michael Jackson and, for some reason, everybody watched “Titanic”. There are even child soldiers in Sierra Leone who listen to gangsta rap. I first heard gangsta rap in Islamabad (I would, years later, walk out of Titanic.)
It didn’t really make me question my traditions. I enjoyed it just as I enjoyed qawwali and ghazal. Of course, there are also discrepancies in the traditions that one has to reconcile in some way or the other and in Home Boy, the protagonist, Chuck, makes a noble attempt at mediating them.
Who have your own writing influences been, both from the West and the East?
Poetry pervades our milieu. In our family, our parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts recited verse before, during, and after dinner. One was raised, then, on a diet of Ghalib, Mir, Anis, Iqbal, Faiz. One was raised to believe that poetry was integral to interpreting the world.
Since then, one has developed an affinity for English literature, from the canon of Russian realism to American postmodernism. English, however, has had a unique history in the Subcontinent. We’ve been employing the language since Din Mohammed and Mulk Raj Anand. In a way, one has come full circle.