Alternating focalization renders a cultural divide permeable and challenges fixed borders.

Evidence

Like Le Carré, Fesperman employs an alternating point-of-view technique that sees chapters focalized by Skelly, Najeeb, and Daliya in sequence. This technique allows for a view from either “side” of what at first appears an unbridgeable cultural divide but as the novel goes on becomes increasingly permeable as characters confront and cross their own mental borders. Indeed, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the book is only ever notional. The porosity of the actual border in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas soon becomes clear to the disorientated Skelly as he ventures across unmarked terrain, all of which looks the same to him. Najeeb tells him: “Up here the border does not matter” because tribal divisions are more pertinent, and Skelly soon comes to think of the idea of borders as “a construct of foreigners” and a colonial hangover. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 342

Categorization

• XREF: Alternating focalization is Morey’s close-reading instrument — a technique directly transferable to Naqvi’s Home Boy (Changez’s dual narration) and Hamid’s alternating voices.
• DEFINE: Focalization (Le Carré-style alternating point-of-view chapters) as a device for undermining the fixed cultural border — a usable term.
• SHARE: The Afghanistan–Pakistan border as ‘a construct of foreigners’ and a colonial hangover, with the ‘border is sealed’ farce, would land well with a colleague studying borders or colonial cartography.