Cultural Identity In Bone And The Reluctant Fundamentalist

How does one define their cultural identity? A difficult question to answer because in truth, there are several factors that one may use to come to define cultural identity such as, place, ethnicity, gender, what one wears, to the food they eat, there is no set definition. Cultural identity or the process to finding one’s cultural identity is constantly in a state of change, perhaps through experience or age but it seems to be an ongoing process. There are several factors that ultimately come to affect this process which bring changes to ones identity over time. In the novels Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward, Bone by Fae Myenne Ng, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid the factors that seem to affect the protagonists range from death

Ward writes, “in my search for words to tell this story, I found more statistics about what it means to be Black and poor in the South”(236), she continues with presenting statistics that she found on Black citizens that live in Mississippi. The statistics that she found delved into the issues of poverty, life expectancy, education, and the general state of living. Ward found that the living situation for blacks in Mississippi seemed to be filled with scarcity and despair, “By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, or racism, or poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing”(237). In this memoir she presents the reader with several relationships that she has had throughout her life, each having some

This is the last summer that I will spend with my brother. This is the heart. This is. Ever day, this is”(213). Joshua had been killed by a drunk driver, and here is where the frustration built. “The drunk driver was in his forties and White. My brother was nineteen and Black” she ends, “five fucking years, I thought. This is what my brother’s life is worth in Mississippi. Five years”(234-235). In the lives that were taken Ward became more aware of this overwhelming sense of difference and struggle that was faced by those in her community as well as, family. Culture can be defined in the way one comes to view life and Ward found that in these deaths a larger weight of nothingness had been placed on the young people of Mississippi, there was this idea and need to escape this place that was home because of what it brought on internally. “We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are nothing. We tried to ignore it, but sometimes we caught ourselves repeating what history said, mumbling along. brainwashed: I am nothing”(249). Though Ward could only speculate, it seems as though she leads to this point where she finds in time the people of her community continue on in this thought that nothing is all they can be, separated from this ideal of the American dream, where the only possible answer is perhaps drugs or death. Her culture and her thoughts lie in this community and they continue to change. She thinks leaving will