Concealed Identites / Features / Untitled Books

The concealed identity has long seemed to me a rich and complex vein to mine, far more intriguing than mere disguise.

Concealed Identites

KAMILA SHAMSIE, author of Burnt Shadows, finds an affinity for the literary sleight of hand of Michael Ondaatje and Ali Smith.

It is no coincidence that he is shown to us to be the child of England, Russia, America and Afghanistan itself, each of those countries plays a role in making Afghanistan what it is today.

As a child, I went through a phase - actually it was probably about two weeks - during which I enjoyed disguises. I recall putting talcum powder on my face to turn my skin a ghostly-white, layering towels on my shoulders beneath a bathrobe to look hunched, and - weirdly - putting a shower cap over my hair (perhaps this seemed to lead on naturally from the bathrobe). What resulted was a strange looking version of me, trying very obviously not to look like me. In this strange ensemble I could walk into a room and surprise my parents and their friends, draw cries of horror and, then, laughter. And that was the end of that - a 10 second reaction, and then game over.

Compare this to my feeling of walking through London's tube stations shortly after the 7/7 bombings. Many of my Pakistani friends had tales of being pulled aside by the police, of being glared at, shouted at or even spat at by passers-by - but as a result of having a German grandmother I don't look recognisably Pakistani, and so I used to walk past the police officers, and the crowds with this strange (and admittedly, rather paranoid) sensation of having got away with something: you don't know I'm Muslim, a voice in my head used to say. I wasn't in disguise, I wasn't trying to appear other than I am, and yet I knew that some aspect of my identity - an aspect that was of great significance at the time - was concealed.

The concealed identity has long seemed to me a rich and complex vein to mine, far more intriguing than mere disguise. A disguise, after all, lends itself to easy moments of revelation - the fake moustache slips off, the 'put on accent' falters in moments of heightened excitement. The disguise also speaks so obviously of the desire to deceive - but the concealed identity can suggest something unknown rather than deliberately hidden.

In The English Patient the concealed identity of the title character is a result of horrific wounds - he is so badly burnt in an accident that it is impossible to know what he might originally have looked like. When he starts to tell the story of a group of explorers, we know he must have been one of them. But which one? The wronged husband, Clifton? The loyal friend, Madox? The brooding Hungarian, Almasy? To start with the last seems the most unlikely, given that the only thing that is known about the patient is his Englishness. But, of course, that leads to the question of why anyone is so certain of his nationality other than his accent. In a novel of war and its consequences it's a potent symbol to have a man whose identity is so hidden by his wounds - is nationhood really just skin deep? And why doesn't he tell anyone who he is? Does he want to hide the truth about himself, as the thief Caravaggio believes? Or does he feel entirely dissociated from his former self - the war has reduced him to a husk.

At a certain point in Ondaatje's narrative we do work out which of the explorers the Patient is, but in Ali Smith's The Accidental the fixed identity of the character Amber remains concealed. Or rather, as readers we must form a picture of who she is based on the conflicting views that the other characters in the novel have of her, as well as her own mysterious comments. Is she, in fact, even real? It is characteristic of Smith's playfulness with the nature of fiction to force us to ask such a question about a fictional character. In a brilliant section two-thirds of the way through the book Amber leads us through what can best be described as potted history of cinema in a short chapter - and then reveals that the cinema house in which all these great moments of celluloid were projected was the 'Alhambra' - 'place of my conception, for which I was named.' So Amber isn't even Amber. And does 'place of my conception' refer to her parents having sex in the darkened theatre, or does it hint that she is a character who is an amalgamation of the most powerful narratives of film - a character of fiction, yet entirely potent and with great transformative powers? What we know and how we know it - the truth and power of fiction - these are all questions Smith takes us and asks us to consider through the chameleonlike Amber.

While Ondaatje's and Smith's characters know more about themselves then they let on, in Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil it is us, the readers, who know the true identity of one of the central characters even while it remains hidden from him. Near the start of the novel we meet Marcus, an Englishman in Afghanistan who is searching for his grandson. The boy's mother - half-English, half-Afghan - died years ago, and little is known about the fate of his Russian father. For a short time, an American man - David - played the role of step-father to the boy, but when Marcus' daughter was killed the boy disappeared. David recalls the first time he saw the young boy and his mother - a ball of red string plays a pivotal part in that memory A little later in the book Casa, a young Afghan being trained by terrorists, talks about his earliest memory, which involves his mother and a ball of red string. When Casa later finds himself living in the same house as Marcus and David, in order to hide from a dangerous situation, he conceals the identity he thinks of as his true identity - that of a young jihadi, a trained suicide-bomber. But we who are reading the book know that this is Marcus' grandson, David's stepson of sorts. The poignancy of Casa's warring impulses - to give in to everything of darkness and hatred that he has been taught, or to follow his attraction to this other world of culture and friendship which he finds in the house - is made much sharper through the knowledge we have of Casa which is concealed even from him. In the end he tragically symbolises a nation cut off from its own old, highly cultured past, with nothing to fall back on for self-definition beyond the last 20-something years of war. It is no coincidence that he is shown to us to be the child of England, Russia, America and Afghanistan itself, and that he was torn away from his mother and, thus, his history, in Pakistan - each of those countries plays a role in making Afghanistan what it is today.

The narrative of the War on Terror and concealed identities is nowhere more present than in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. A Pakistani man in Lahore is talking to an American. The entire novel is a monologue so we have nothing to rely on but the narration of Changez, the Pakistani - we have little reason to believe we can trust him, yet little proof that we can't. Is he a terrorist? Is the American a CIA agent come to kill him? Are they both men who assume the worst of each other, because their minds are so steeped in stereotypes? Do either of them know who the other is? Can we pick up enough clues from the narration to correctly guess who either is, or do we find our own stereotypes of 'Pakistanis who left America' and 'Americans in Pakistan' clouding our judgement?

And, of course, there is that other aspect to concealed identities and novels - when we write fiction, how much of ourselves do we place in the stories and the characters? Do writers conceal their own identity in their work, or do they, in the end, reveal more about themselves than you might learn from hours in their company?

Tuesday, 10 March, 2009