Characters’ emotions in vernacular languages signal resistance to monolingual Western hegemony

Evidence

This approach is of a piece with the book’s concern for communication beyond the level contaminated by considerations of status and nation. When Raza is suspected of participating in Harry’s assassination and goes on the run from his American pursuers in Afghanistan, he glimpses, while hiding under a pile of sacks on the back of a truck, a group of colorful nomad women making their way across the desert. We learn that “just that glimpse moved Raza into a profound melancholy. No, not melancholy. It was uljhan he was feeling. His emotions were in Urdu now, melancholy and quiet abutting each other like the two syllables of a single word” (332). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 421

Categorization

• XREF: The uljhan passage is prime evidence for how fiction makes translation itself a theme — usable alongside Naqvi’s and Hamid’s own language negotiations. — connects to: the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”; the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”
• SEED: Angles for an essay: un-translatable affect (uljhan, wabi-sabi) as a device for contesting rather than reinforcing Islamophobia.