Halfway through Dur e Aziz Amna’s debut novel, her narrator Hira is in an American church, standing in front of a congregation, explaining the concept of Ramadan, although she realizes that “I sounded like an Islamiyat textbook or the wikipedia page on Ramzan.” After the speech, Hira realizes that she “found no pleasure in translating culture, in working towards a greater understanding between one pack of duffers and another.” Hira’s in the United States on a one-year study abroad program from Pakistan. I already liked Hira as a narrator, ornery as she was, resistant to fitting into anyone’s preconceived story about the immigrant experience.
When American Fever begins, 16-year old Hira lives in Rawalpindi with her parents and younger brother. She’s a wicked smart teenager who’s unimpressed by the world around her, attuned to the small and large injustices in the world. She reads the morning paper at home in Rawalpindi, making sure to tell her younger brother about what’s happening to Ahmadis despite the fact that her parents refuse to discuss it because it’s “too painful.” She notes the way her parents say they treat their house help better than others, while still keeping a separate steel cup for them to drink from. She complains about the land mafia to her driver during school drop off. Amna writes Hira from the perspective of an adult who’s looking back at her time on this study abroad, she’s able to empathize with her younger self as well as have the necessary reflection to correct young Hira’s views of the world.
For her study abroad program, Hira is placed in rural Oregan. She’ll spend ten months with a white family– a single mom and her daughter– as a part of a cultural ambassadorship program. But Hira isn’t going to the United States because she’s been “desperately, passionately yearning for America.” She just wants to get out of the smallness of her life in Pakistan, which she feels stifled by. Still, she must balance conflicting, conflicting advice like that of her abbu who says: “We want you to take advantage of every opportunity America gives you…but you cannot forget who you are. You have to represent yourself as a Pakistani, a Muslim, and a girl.”
There is a local pleasure to reading Amna’s writing, especially in the scenes that are set in Pakistan: the specificity of girls drinking kashmiri chai after wrangling permission to leave the school grounds, an all-girls-school teacher measuring the distance between the end of a kameez and a students’ knees. When Hira gets to the United States, it’s that same specificity that makes the world she inhabits so fully realized: Hira’s surprise that a black woman cashier at Walmart is Muslim, how “straightjacketed” she feels by language, her surprise at the way her host mother often politely defers to her daughter’s bad attitude. But there’s also a wonderment in reading Hira’s sometimes incredulous narration: after her host sister complains that Hira refuses to strip down to her bra in front of a group of girls, her host mother chides her “Not everyone grows up with the freedoms you take for granted.” Hira thinks, “there were freedoms I had wanted to jealously claw at my entire life– walking alone on empty streets, whistling in public, holding the ember tip of a cigarette between my fingers - but I had never considered stripping to my bra as a freedom before.”
Every immigration story inherently sets up a binary– there’s the place you’re from and the place you’re going or there’s the person you were there, and the person you’re becoming here. Having a narrator who’s so tired of that same-old dichotomous immigration experience is useful, because it results in lancing criticism like when Hira scoffs at her host mother’s concern about Hira in Pakistan: “Americans are worried about everyone else’s safety, sated in the knowledge that their nook of he world is far safer than elsewhere, although don’t tell them why that might be.” But that same disdain is also helpful when later Hira is incapable of resisting falling into he binary herself: “In the coming days, it would strike me as an oddity, even a lack of imagination, how often my points of reference flitted to that other continent.” She misdiagnoses it as being due to her newness to America, not the “forever condition of anyone living away from the city, town, street she had known to be the world.”
Hira spends her time in the United States largely spending time with two other study abroad students, where they “talked incessantly about the gap between here and there.” One of the other students is from Oman, the other from France. Hira explains that “with each articulated difference, we flattened ourselves and let America define us. We were only ever what it was not.” I wanted very much to hear about what they were not, what parts of America they made fun of and in which ways they found commonalities between each other that did not exist– how in flattening themselves they did not realize the ways in which all immigrant experiences are varied.
American Fever is a beautifully written book with some outstanding sentences like, when, a few months into her time in the US, Hira explains, “There’s a strain of story this could fall into. The foreigner trying to fit in, hindered by accent and Fahrenheit and the Imperial system…The entranced documenter of America. The truth — I was bloody bored.” Hira is a teenager in small town America where constant state of life is that of epic boredom, but her scathing critique is coupled with a rare insight – “Abbu had moved to Pindi from the village in his twenties, and sometimes talked of the richness he had abandoned, swapping a place he understood in all its complexities and contradictions for the bland offices of the twin cities.” In her boredom, Hira strikes up a long distance friendship with Ali, a sophomore at NYU, who reminds her of the familiar. Through Ali, Hira is able to talk about the idiosyncrasies of the United States, though Ali is quick to tell her about the vastness of the South Asian diaspora outside of the small Oregon town she’s in.
From the opening of the novel, however, Hira has also let us know that her time in the United States will be punctuated with a diagnosis of tuberculosis. By the time the narrative timelines catch up, Hira’s justifiably disillusioned with the United States – a latent bacterial infection has become active in a country that prides itself on its reputation of largesse and excess. For months Hira has struggled with a cough while her host mother has ignored the symptoms. Both the illness and the treatment take their toll on Hira who’s unable to leave the house, placed in a strict quarantine.
Eventually, Hira does return home to Pakistan. Unsurprisingly she is changed – I could have spent another 20 pages returning to Pakistan with Hira, a narrator whose insight and skepticism is addictive. I will not spoil the ending by telling you more, but I will leave you with this:
In one of the most evocatively drawn scenes in the book, Hira asks her host sister what she daydreams about: I’m prom queen, I guess, Amy, the host sister replies. Her crush is kissing her, everyone is cheering. It’s a quintessential small town American dream. Hira’s dream on the other hand is harder to convey to Amy: “There’s a highway that runs between my city and Islamabad. I’m driving on it alone. I’m smoking a cigarette and ashing it out the open window.” Amy doesn’t quite understand, she asks Hira if there’s more, if there’s someone watching. “I’m on the road,” Hira replies. “The whole world is watching.”
It’s one example of what makes American Fever an excellent book– not only does Amna understand Hira and Hira’s desires, she’s able to make us understand them as well.