3

‘Fellow Humans’: Cosmopolitan

Citizens in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps
for Lost Lovers

In ‘Looking Back, Moving Forward: Notes on Vernacular Cosmo-

politanism’, Homi K. Bhabha’s recently added preface to The Location
of Culture, he observes that ‘In another’s country that is also your own,
your person divides, and in following the forked path you encoun-
ter yourself in a double movement [...] once as stranger, and then as
friend’ (Bhabha 2010 [1994], p. xxv). Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost
Lovers (2004) encapsulates precisely Bhabha’s notion of double-vision
or ‘movement’ of this cultural and cosmopolitical fusion. Now living in
North London, Aslam was born in 1966 in Pakistan but moved to the
north of England with his family when he was 14. Although born into
a Muslim family, Aslam describes himself as a ‘non-believer’.1 His family
relocated to Huddersfield because his communist father sought political
asylum from the regime that he was fleeing. In a discussion with Aslam,
Salil Tripathi writes that

Nadeem was the second of four children, and the responsibility of

bringing them up meant his father, who was a poet, could not pur-
sue his writing. He wrote his poetry under the name Wamaq Saleem.
‘There’s always a wound in my father that his real life did not hap-
pen. He wanted to be Wamaq Saleem.’ In all his novels, Aslam makes
room for a character, a great poet, called Wamaq Saleem. The Aslams
moved to Britain in 1980, as General Zia began his crackdown on
dissidents. ‘People like my father were saying – don’t support the
Mujahideen, but billions of dollars and weapons were given to them.
Those who opposed, like my uncle Mukhtar, were tortured,’ he adds.
(Tripathi 2008)

77
F. McCulloch, Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction
© Fiona McCulloch 2012
78 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

As such, the poet Saleem occurs in Maps for Lost Lovers. This novel took
Aslam over a decade to write, a vast timescale that accentuates its poeti-
cally epic content and sweeping painting-like feel of a panoramic canvas.
This is emphasized by intertextual references to other major literary works
like James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), offering a fusion or bricolage of different
art forms and cultures. Though set in England it is an orientalized, exotic
England, with references to ‘parakeets’, ‘mosques’, ‘incense’ and the rich
spicy cooking of Asian culture. As Bhabha notes, ‘the truest eye may now
belong to the migrant’s double vision’ (Bhabha 2010, p. 8).
Maps for Lost Lovers traces the routes/roots of racial tensions and
religious divisions in contemporary British society. Amidst its multiple
diversities and conflicts the common denominator of love appeals for
a universal empathy towards our ‘fellow humans’ (Aslam 2004, p. 369).
Love itself, however, serves as a metaphor upon which the acts of
humanity pivot, be they honourable or heinous, given its capacity for
union or division. At the interstices of the cultural divides in the text
lies the space in which individuals strive to make sense of their world
and their position within it. As a writer existing within yet simultane-
ously at the peripheries of British society, Aslam is critical of the hypoc-
risies carried out by blind faith, be it within Muslim, Christian or secular
cultures. The novel suggests that only the isolated artist, constantly at a
cultural crossroads, yet with the necessary distance to create a balanced
perspective, is able to transcend the trappings of cultural discourses.
British citizenship for the Asian characters portrayed is under continual
negotiation, as their identities are subject to cosmopolitical hybrid
states, which can only be mapped by the perpetual gains and losses of
love. Just as ‘G.W.F. Hegel employs the concept of love to summarize his
cosmic conception of a unified, all-encompassing worldview’ (Solomon
and Higgins 1991, p. 7), Aslam philosophically views love’s potential to
bridge the gulf between ‘fellow humans’. For Linnell Secomb,

Philosophy is not wisdom itself – for the attainment of wisdom, if it

were possible, would be the end of philosophy – but a fascination,
an infatuation, with thinking [...] It is not closure or completion but
unending intrigue. Love, too, is an incompletion [...] love is media-
tion not fulfilment. It is a movement between lack and comple-
tion, between Poverty and Plenty, between ignorance and wisdom,
between monstrosity and beauty. (Secomb 2007, p. 157)

Aslam too portrays the ‘incompletion’ of love, given its capacity

as a bridge rather than a final destination between individuals and