Narrated language shifts place readers inside a polyglot world beyond Anglo-English hegemony

Evidence

The reader’s perspective is, therefore, being carefully manipulated in the opening pages and, in fact, throughout the novel. There are points where we discover that we have been subtly wrongfooted: as when at the end of an intimate conversation between Hiroko and her new friend Elizabeth (Ilse) Burton we are told retrospectively that they have slipped from English into German (70) and later when we hear that their respective offspring, Raza and Harry, have been switching from Urdu to Pashto via German (163). In a novel written in English, such shifts are merely narrated and not shown via any transcription. They serve as gentle jolts reminding us that we are entering a polyglot world, on the fringes of Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking hegemony, where deeper feelings are best expressed through vernacular forms closer to the characters’ emotional life-worlds. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 421

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to reading Home Boy: Naqvi’s code-switching is similarly reported rather than transcribed. A transferrable close-reading tool for the two novels. — connects to: Reader positions determine what Indian English fiction can signify — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1963; Rushdie’s implied reader is a global postcolonial migrant sharing filmic and literary echoes — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 200; the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”