At a press briefing in 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked about the missing evidence of Iraqi linkages to “weapons of mass destruction.” In reply, Rumsfeld coined the now notorious phrases “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.”
“[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
When you turn to page 186 of Zia Haider Rahman’s novel In the Light of What We Know, you encounter an equally complex, and mischievous illusion. The novel’s text is broken by an illustration: a diagonal line runs from top left to bottom right, interrupted by a vertical rectangle. On the other side of the rectangle, two diagonals slope downward. If you are not particular about the condition of your books, you will want to fold the page to better work out the optical illusion. It appears as if the descending diagonal line continues along the upper diagonal on the right. But folding would reveal the opposite – that it is the lower diagonal that it is joined with.
Named “Poggendorff’s illusion,” after the nineteenth-century German physicist Johann Poggendorff, the illusion obsesses Zafar, this novel’s British-Bangladeshi protagonist. As with meticulously plotted diversions within Rahman’s novel, Zafar does not finish the story. It is up to the narrator to fill in the gaps, after “consulting pages on the Internet,” as one of the novel’s many David Foster Wallace-style footnotes inform us.
Even after the optical dislocation has been explained – in dialogue and an expansive reference to the Müller-Lyer illusion – the reader will be drawn back to page 186. The illusion stubbornly refuses to budge. As Zafar underscores, “Knowing doesn’t fix things.” We might add, too, that knowing doesn’t overcome the desire to have faith in the unknown, the unverifiable. Immanuel Kant’s idea of the sublime affirmed the capacity of human reason to comprehend and size up that which cannot be perceived by the faculties.
Kant described three kinds of emotions evoked by this comprehension: wonder, beauty, and terror. A volatile combination of these three forms of the sublime permeate the pages of this acidic, inventive novel.
The two protagonists in In the Light of What We Know, Zafar and the British-Pakistani narrator, were friends at Oxford, drawn to each other as one of the few Asian faces at that elite institution.
At some point in their lives, their post-school arcs separated, and they fell out of contact. The story sets off with the sudden return of Zafar to the narrator’s home, and most of the book is taken up with his elliptical description of the intervening years.
The two characters take turns struggling with the limited horizons of their future – the moment when the smooth journey was interrupted, when things came apart. For our narrator, everything seemed to have gone right: posh English school, family wealth (doubtless smuggled out of Pakistan during one of the many military coups), an ideal wife.
The decentering takes place after the collapse of his Tom Wolfe-style “masters of universe” finance industry job, twinned with the slow-motion implosion of his marriage (its doomed trajectory reminiscent of Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy).
For Zafar, whose family is from a Bangladeshi village and lacks landed wealth, events are always on the edge of a cliff. Even as he assumes the role of host at a dinner, the concealed menace of English sarcasm makes us tense up. Something bad is about to happen, your mind whispers.
In the spirit of Poggendorff’s illusion, the book teems with textual illusions as well. Even the novel’s climactic act of intimate violence, inside a room, is only hinted at through two epigraphs. The reader cannot quite connect the lines – interruptions derail us and move our eyes away.
Both Zafar and the narrator studied mathematics at Oxford, and an obsession with this discipline as the Rosetta Stone for many of this past century’s foibles runs through the novel. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (“a theorem that denies certainty”) is one such concept, and there is a recuperative project at work in the book. While Einstein’s relativity theory, or Crick and Watson’s double helix discovery, gained recognition by being “useful,” Gödel’s theorem became an elegant concept beloved of mathematical thinkers, but unknown to lay audiences.
Mathematics provides not only a framework for understanding what is happening to humans, but for Zafar it is also a refuge from England’s relentless class war. It’s why Zafar fervently believes that “mathematics doesn’t care about authority, it doesn’t care about who you are, where you’re from, what your eye color is, or who you’re having supper with.”
The egalitarian dream of mathematics as the great equaliser is undone finally by the collapse of financial markets. Here we see the flaws in the dream of a supercomputer, able to execute thousands of trades faster than a human can jot down a thought. Why bother with human inefficiency, aging, and hesitation? High-speed math prevails until the day when everything goes wrong and the machine cannot stop itself from hurtling over the cliff of meltdown contagion.
The novel is keen about mathematics, as both an answer and refuge from the world’s crises, including the rise of earthly and ethereal dogmas. But the world cannot forever be held at bay, especially the way class hierarchies enervate British society (Zafar widens the canvas beyond England when he says, “Aren’t all class structures terrible?”).
The two protagonists – Pakistani elite scion and Bangladeshi village-to-Oxford self-made man – are both visible outsiders to (white) British upper class society. As the novel reveals gradually, even after they have succeeded in school and jobs, there are still subtle ways they can be reminded, to paraphrase Morrissey’s notorious song about British-Bengalis, you don’t belong here.
Correct your girlfriend’s comment about Samuel Butler’s Erewhon – she thinks it is “nowhere” spelled backward, but Zafar points out that it is an anagram – and she will wait four pages to strike back with a correction of your pronunciation of Beauchamp wine. Zafar quietly concludes, “One way or another, I thought, the English will get you, even if it’s with their French.”
Indeed, everyone inside this bitter social satire recognises, lets slip, and is reminded of their social position at every occasion. A family called the Hampton-Wyverns are described as “coming from the stock that populates the foothills of the aristocracy, a buffer zone,” and we’re left to wonder if the hyphen in their surname is a tacked-on nobility.
Our suspicions increase when Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern asks a question about MDF and ply furniture. Since we have already noted that she did not ask for an expansion of the acronym (there is never an unplanned moment in this novel), we can intuit that she knows things that are outside her current “social station.” The reader glimpses that she has travelled that other arc of English class hierarchy – the erasing of one’s “lesser” past during the journey upward, toward a life of grouse shooting in Scotland.
Of course, not everyone can blend smoothly into the English national narrative. Race can trump class, and race and class together create prisons. We already know that immigrant over-achievers can be instrumentalised to reinforce the immiseration of other communities of colour while safeguarding the position of white privilege. Even for those who may have imagined themselves to be distant from the derogatory “Macaulay’s children” and closer to the Duboisian “talented tenth,” days of reckoning do finally arrive.
Zafar, ejected from the plush life, has returned to remind the narrator that their position is as permanent outsiders. Between the two, Zafar has always felt the bite of the British class war more directly. The narrator has a father able to gift single malts from Harrods or buy entire rows of seats at the ballet. Zafar, on the other hand, is made uncomfortable by party chatter about servants in South Asia not for the usual reasons of “culture,” but because, “My family were the staff.”
In these moments, we understand Zafar’s embarrassment about his parents’ visit to Oxford, the dismissal of the possibility that they would make a wedding speech in English, and the condescension about Bangladeshis as inquisitive about family ties. It is perhaps not the curiosity that upsets him so much as the fact that the “lineage” question will eject him from a vaunted position attained only through education.
Although otherwise a defiant figure, Zafar is unwilling to assault class condescension directly by flaunting his subalternised position against white manor privilege. I yearned for the defiance of the autodidact Richard Wright against the elitism of the American literary establishment. Or the steadfastness of Langston Hughes, in his poem I, Too: “Tomorrow,/I’ll be at the table/ When company comes./ Nobody’ll dare/ Say to me,/”Eat in the kitchen,”/Then.”
Zafar handles the perpetual othering of the “Where are you from?” question with teeth-clenched patience. His recursive dialogue with the questioner echoes an encounter in Zadie Smith’s first novel White Teeth – in which Samad Iqbal famously said, “I’m not actually from India, you know?”.
British Bangladeshis occupy a unique position in British migration history, spanning a gamut of events from the 1978 murder of Altab Ali (which inspired the Rock Against Racism movement) all the way up to today’s “cool Britannia” appropriation of Bangladeshi enclave Brick Lane (think of the whiteout via gentrification of black Brooklyn).
With the majority trapped in an economic undertow, the position of Asian working class communities has been the material for fierce narratives such as Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (“shudn’t b callin us Pakis, innit?”). If you believe the hysterical UK tabloids, Asian migrant youth are forever vacillating between the binaries of Hizbut Tahrir and Cambridge scholarships.
Although Zafar’s class origins trouble him on a psychic level, this novel is not located within the working-class milieu of the majority of British Asians. Instead, the story navigates a space of temporary privilege, where the Pakistani and Bangladeshi characters, after the right schooling and jobs, can enjoy an encounter as equals.
Given the enduring open wounds between the characters’ two countries of origin, the brutal 1971 war does surface repeatedly. The novel does this quietly, through references to “why don’t you speak Urdu” taxi drivers, Henry Kissinger’s wartime role in the White House (he makes a larger cameo in the fiction of K Anis Ahmed), the China ping-pong talks (“These days no one needs Pakistan as an intermediary…”), and mass rape during the war. In the end, the war’s embedded trauma manifests through an act of unspeakable betrayal.
In many of the post-2001 novels, wars internal and external, at home and abroad, are a palpable presence within lives out of sync. In the Light of What We Know traverses one of the less discussed phenomena of the “war-on-terror,” the ascendancy of the NGO-industrial complex. Analysed deftly in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, and made solid through the fakery fiasco of Three Cups of Tea, the black comedy of post-war reconstruction projects is harpooned in the book’s final act.
Bangladesh is an appropriate entry point, since the country’s NGOs have participated in some parts of post-war reconstruction work. Zafar even briefly encounters a fictional version of Dr Kamal Hossain, the former UN special rapporteur for Afghanistan. In Kabul, the novel follows a depressingly familiar post-9/11 arc: things fall apart; there is no centre, only illusions of friendship and trust. The world is not mathematics, as Zafar learns. Authority and motivation do matter, in dreadful ways.
Let me come back to Poggendorff’s illusion, where I began. Zafar is fascinated by this concept, and so is the narrator, as he discovers that it also helps to “explain” the British flag. The design of the Union Jack was engineered so that the saltire of St Patrick, the red diagonal cross, was mildly displaced, so each spoke appears aligned with its opposite spoke. The flag design preceded Poggendorff; even though he formalised the optical conundrum, its effect was already known.
While reading the passages about the flag, my mind wandered over to scholar Paul Gilroy’s genre-breaking There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, which bears the influence of cultural theorist Stuart Hall. The research of Hall and the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, as well as his inheritors such as Gilroy, permanently altered the way England now thinks of race and class.
Although In the Light of What We Know does not make references to this scholarship, this novel exists in a post-Birmingham mode of speaking about these questions. The Birmingham School approached British racism as a deadly toxin that needed to be named directly. This novel is received in a different manner partially because of the foundational work done by the Birmingham scholars.
One can even imagine Zafar providing the narration for the iconic TV special in which Stuart Hall first spoke about the racial coding of Britain’s panic over “mugging.” Hall leveraged his access to the markers of elite Britain to attack that same privilege, always with empathy for the vast underclass. Parts of this novel also carry out an attack on British privilege, in a more indirect, poetic mode.
The novel’s poignant finale includes a meditation on the friendship between Einstein and Gödel. I looked wistfully at this episode and wanted to insert, in the spirit of the novel’s digressive style, the figures of Satyendra Nath Bose and Srinivasa Ramanujan. Both these mathematical geniuses were underappreciated in their lifetime by the Euro-American academic axis.
Bose’s paper on the quantum statistic of integer spin particles (bosons) was rejected until he sent it to Einstein who arranged for its publication. Bose-Einstein condensation is a form of matter that Einstein discovered based on Bose’s work. Ramanujan’s story was an autodidact “natural genius” (more so than Bose who had university degrees, although no PhD) with very little formal training. Ramanujan’s letters to academics were ignored until he wrote to GH Hardy, who arranged for him to come to Cambridge to work with him. He was appointed Fellow at Trinity College, in spite of not having finished college, but this was all cut short when Ramanujan became ill and died at age 32.
I want to imagine Bose and Ramanujan quietly entering the final chapters, and Zafar might find in them kindred spirits, especially after his own steep fall from the high citadel. He could launch another sinuous anecdote, weaving in stories of the links between British India and Europe, and why Asian scientists were written out of the script of the age of scientific upheaval.
Among the many things we continue to know is that we don’t live in a post-racial world, no matter what smooth narratives may be whispered to us. I do not ask a novel to address all of these issues; it is fiction after all. But the role of literary critics can be to open the conversation further, in rambunctious dialogue with this beautiful book.
