Changez is educated in the traditions and culture of Pakistan and Islam and is also educated in American schools and culture.
4.1 Meeting with “The Others”
Meeting with colonialism is also meant the collapse of a building identity. Through civilizing mission, the arrival of Europeans to the
colonies, and colonial policies, natives are taught in a new culture introduced to him as an advanced and modern culture. The experience of
this culture clash becomes more complicated because the construction of identity for indigenous Eastern European-made inferior spread and
embedded in indigenous soul. “Perhaps it was my speech: like Pakistan, Amerika is, After all,
a former English colony, and it stands to reason, therefore, that an Anglicized accent may in your country continue to be
associated with wealth and power, just as it is mine” Hamid 2007, 41-42
Colonial education although it may save the natives from illiteracy, create a permanent duality in self-indigenous because it teaches the
knowledge and history that was not theirs. Duality in Changez is shown with the pull between traditional values and religion in Pakistani culture
with the values of modernity and religion in European culture. Inferiority is ingrained in Changez as a native, from European-made construction,
making Changez want to be together with its European friends. Be Changez a mimic man. This is shown by the business Changez who
always imitate European dress code at the beginning of education in America.
“I did not think of myself as a Pakistani, but as an Underwood Samson trainee, and my firm’s impressive offices made me
proud” Hamid 2007, 34 “in a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of
the color spectrum” Hamid 2007, 33 “it struck me then…that shorn of hair and dressed in battle
fatigues, we would have been virtually indistinguishable” Hamid 2007, 38
“Then he said “you are polished, well-dressed. You have this sophisticated accent” Hamid 2007, 8
“I….wore a starched white kurta of delicately cotton over a pair jeans” Hamid 2007, 48
However, Changez mimicry in this case is alienation. Changez alienated from its European friends, although he had to imitate European
dress. He never considered the same by his friends, because he will always feel weird also deemed too ridiculous. Impossibility itself treated the same
by its European friends. “On the street corners, tourists would ask me for direction. I
was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker” Hamid 2007, 33
“I felt a peculiar feeling; ..perhaps it was because I had recently lived such a transitory existence-moving from one dorm room to
the next- and longed for the settled nature of my past” Hamid 2007, 50
“that I was a man lacking in substance and hence easily influenced by even a short sojourn in the company of others”
Hamid 2007, 125
He felt himself confronted with the European civilization that never asked for but make him proud but still foreign to him at once made him
estranged from his past. Changez is the outsider to the culture of Europe as well as for Pakistani culture.
“there are adjustments one must make if one comes here from America; a different way observing is required. I recall the
Americannes of my own gaze when I returned to Lahore…. I was shamed. This was where I came from, this was my provenance,
and it smacked of lowliness…. I had changed; I was looking about me with the eyes of a foreigner, and not just that particular
type entitled and unsympathetic American” Hamid 2007, 124
He no longer felt as a Pakistani, because what the people of Pakistan did can not be understood by him and ethnocentric view of Europe is in a
static society. For those of Changez, Pakistan now is the other. Alienation Changez against tradition analogous to the relationship
with the brothers and the surrounding community. Meeting with European knowledge to open a different perspective, so that tradition and religion
foreign to him like the alienation of himself against his culture. After living many years with them, one day he realized that his birthplace to be
foreign to him.
4.2 In BetweennessThird Space
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