Theme Of My Son The Fanatic

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Since the height of Colonisation, literature has been fascinated with concept of the East. The people, the culture and, the imagined promiscuity of Oriental nations, enabled a powerful, although fabricated, dichotomy between the morally abiding occident, and the liberation of the Orient. However, this literary convention of representing all Eastern nations as one homogenous culture which is exterior to England, creates serious issues for identity construction post-colonisation, as many Englishmen maintain strong links to their Eastern heritages, despite living in London.
The identity crisis this creates for colonised people living in the motherland, is explored within the short story 'My Son the Fanatic ' as 'Pakish ' men, Parvez and Ali, struggle to make peace with their hybrid identities as a result of the linguistically constructed, East/West binary opposition. Their internalisation of this literary convention, acts as a catalyst for their intergenerational conflict as Parvez - born in Pakistan but, living in London- unsuccessfully attempts to mediate between the two cultures, while his English-born son Ali, rejects his …show more content…

In turn, this creates an intergenerational conflict with his father as he believes that Parvez is "too implicated in Western civilisation" (Kureishi 125) and needs to be saved from the "the Western materialists [that] hate us" (126), despite never experiencing life in Pakistan for himself (126). Hence, a contradiction arises in Ali 's perception of the Orient as he exteriorises the culture as something exotic and alluring, by associating "paradise" (Kureishi 126) with the Muslim tradition of Jihad, although he maintains that it is the only law-abiding

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