Introduction

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Sonja Lehmann
of his “invisibility” to most English people which results in the self-sufficiency he
shares with the English patient (EP 209).
His desire to affiliate with England does not solely stem from his friendship
with Suffolk, though. As Younis explains he began to “love the English at an early
stage” and does not view them merely as colonizers even though his family is
negatively affected by the colonization of India (“Nationhood” 5). After all, his
brother is in jail as a consequence of his anti-colonial resistance (EP 287-88). Nevertheless,
Kip “seems to have a more fluid sense of the relation between nation
and identity [and] seems to reject the stark binarism that characterizes a number of
accounts of the relationship between colonial expansion and post-colonial affirmations
of independence” (Younis, “Nationhood” 5). Thus, he defends his choice
to fight in an English war even though he is Asian and Asia is colonized by the
English. For Kip loyalties are a much more differentiated matter: “Japan is part of
Asia, I say, and the Sikhs have been brutalized by the Japanese in Malaya. But my
brother ignores that” (EP 230). He defiantly struggles to defend his transnational
self-understanding, even if it means that he has to disagree with his family.
The patient on the contrary may have forgotten his nationality but he certainly
has not forgotten his hatred of the very concept of nations. During his time in the
desert he develops a strong desire to “Erase the family name! Erase nations!” by
which he claims people are deformed (EP 148). As a consequence he reconfigures
the formerly transnational space of the desert into a postnational “pure zone” (EP
262) devoid of all markers of nationality and belonging. He states:
The desert could not be claimed or owned – it was a piece of cloth carried
by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names
long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted
Europe and the East. Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures,
left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European
homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of
our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape. Fire
and sand. (EP 147-148)
This is the place in which, according to the patient, the former desert Europeans
become “their best selves” (EP 262), which are “nationless” (EP 147) and their
“own invention[s]” (EP 262). The postnational idyll lined out here, however, must
be considered very critically because by turning the desert into a postnational
space, the patient denies the existence of the histories and cultures of its inhabitants
who, according to him, “left nothing behind”. His behaviour has consequently
been described as “arrogantly Eurocentric” (Kemp 143) and “a form of
grotesque narcissism” (Shin 218). In addition, the patient refuses to notice that
not everyone shares his naive view of the desert and that his charting of it will
inevitably be used for imperial pursuits, which makes him responsible for its destruction
(Papayanis 223). The ones who attempt to be postnational are as a result