Animals,others,and postcolonial ecomasculinities: Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden

Abstract

Nadeem Aslam’s novel The Blind Man’s Garden (2013) describes the post-9/11 international conflict in Afghanistan and its effect on a Pakistani character named Mikal, who ends up imprisoned and tortured by both Afghan warlords and American soldiers and remains especially cognizant of the multispecies nature of our world. In this article, I argue that even though the novel presents the toxic effects of hegemonic masculinity by depicting war, it also provides an alternative. In particular, Mikal, with his non-hierarchical response to the War on Terror, gender equity, and nonhuman animals, models much-needed helpful rather than harmful behaviours. I call this stance postcolonial ecomasculinity and link it to the way in which a snow leopard cub influences Mikal’s decision to rescue a US soldier by risking his own life and wellbeing. Even though the US soldier also befriends the same snow leopard cub, his hegemonic masculine desire for dominance makes it difficult for him to overcome his ethnocentrism. Similarly, Aslam’s novel depicts Rohan, who identifies with and appreciates nonhuman birds and trees, but because of his patriarchal privilege cannot see the ways in which women are also oppressed. As the novel ends, its women characters provide hope for Rohan, the blind man, to navigate through the garden, which is Pakistan, using a rope walk to connect Rohan to the plants and trees in the garden. These connections are symbolic of lessons in egalitarian masculinity, teaching not only Rohan but also two young boys how to live without domination and violence. As a result, we are left with images of pathways which broaden our vision of masculinity beyond the stereotypical.

Across time and across cultures humans imagine themselves through animal others.

(Gross, 2012: 5; emphasis in original)

In an interview with Amina Yaqin, Nadeem Aslam explains that the title of his 2013 novel refers to Pakistan: “the blind man’s garden is Pakistan” (Yaqin, 2015: 43; emphasis added). Seen through this garden frame, Pakistan’s natural world, with its human and nonhuman others, is an important theme in The Blind Man’s Garden (2013). Aslam goes on to say that he “wanted to tell the story of what happened to Pakistan, because Pakistan has paid a huge price for what has happened during the last ten years but also during the Afghan jihad” (Yaqin, 2015: 43). Here, the author refers to the ongoing and perpetual Afghan War and War on Terror and, because Pakistan is a garden in the novel, the huge price of the conflict, with its hierarchical and hypermasculine discourses, is paid by human and nonhuman alike. In Pakistan, the issue of “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005), which is “the privilege men collectively have over women” (Connell, 2002, n.p.), is especially fraught because the negative effects of patriarchy are exacerbated by war and its effects on ideations of masculinity. Andrew Ross contends that “women have turned to the ‘problem’ of masculinity in areas that cover a broad spectrum, from domestic violence, […] to rape, and to militarism, wherein men have played a unilateral role” (Ross, 1992: 216). Even though Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden presents the toxic effects of hegemonic masculinity by depicting war, I argue that the novel also provides an alternative postcolonial ecomasculinity that is enacted in connection with the ecological world including all human and nonhuman others, upsetting multiple hierarchies of dominance. The character of Mikal, in particular, with his non-hierarchical response to the War on Terror, gender equity, and nonhuman animals models desperately-needed behaviour which is helpful rather than damaging.

Regardless of whether his novels are set in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or England, Nadeem Aslam’s fiction often explores postcolonial themes of otherness and imperialism (Abbas, 2014: 184; Kanwal, 2015: 157). His novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (2006), depicts the ways in which women are othered by patriarchy and the toxic effects of hegemonic masculinity such as honour killings (Ranasinha, 2009: 304–305). Since hegemonic masculinity is “highly visible” (Connell, 2002: n.p.), it is the aspect that is most often discussed and critiqued. According to Greta Gaard, this type of masculinity is associated with “male self-identity and self-esteem based on dominance, conquest, […] economic accumulation, […] physical strength, […] and competitiveness” (Gaard, 2014: 227). As a result, hegemonic masculinity leads to and works in tandem with patriarchal hierarchies, violence, war, and imperialism.

However, just because hegemonic masculinity is the most visible doesn’t mean that it is the only one. Alex Hobbs has pointed out the importance of “trying to widen what is understood by masculinity” in order “to correct the notion that all men can be represented by the historical few who are recorded for their exploits in politics, war, or other stereotypic and historically masculine pursuits” (Hobbs, 2013: 384). In order to widen this kind of masculinity even further, we have to emphasize masculinity that is egalitarian toward not only humans but also nonhumans. Since the 1980s, ecofeminists such as Marti Kheel have insisted that patriarchy oppresses animals as well as women and that “we must develop a little humility toward the rest of the natural world” (Kheel, 1985: 44). Later, in the 1990s, Val Plumwood (1993) continued to encourage us to take animals seriously in our thinking. Since hegemonic masculinity is linked to capitalism, colonialism, war, and environmental crisis, as we take animals seriously it is important to develop and theorize an alternative masculinity that thinks through all these connections as postcolonial ecofeminists are now starting to do. ¹ Nadeem Aslam’s novel helps us see how racism and patriarchy oppress partly through discourses of hegemonic masculinity, and provides an alternative way of living in companionship with human and nonhuman animals.

The Blind Man’s Garden (2013) describes the post-9/11 international conflict in Afghanistan and its effect on a Pakistani character named Mikal, who ends up imprisoned and tortured by both Afghan warlords and American soldiers and remains especially cognizant of the multispecies nature of our world. Mikal’s relations with human and nonhuman others show that, unlike the warlords and soldiers who oppress him, he does not abide by an animacy hierarchy which, Mel Chen (2012) argues, “conceptually arranges human life, disabled life, animal life, plant life, and forms of nonliving material in orders of value and priority” (Chen, 2012: 13). She writes that this hierarchy is “shaped by the spread of Christian cosmologies, capitalism, and the colonial order of things” (Chen, 2012: 30). R. W. Connell would add that

gender is connected to […] the process of colonial expansion, conquest, resistance, and also neocolonialism and postcolonial globalization. It is increasingly recognized that these are crucial contexts for the making of masculinities, both in the colonizing powers and among the colonized. (Connell, 2002: n.p.)

Both capitalism and the colonial order of things very much relate to hegemonic masculinity. Dominance, especially, is part and parcel of Chen’s animacy hierarchy since hierarchies lead to situations of domination, such as war in general and the War on Terror in particular. In fact, Chen (2012) herself makes this connection between the animacy hierarchy and the War on Terror when she states that “the animalizations and dehumanizations of suspected ‘terrorists’ — discernible in the extrajudicial complexes of cages and discourses of ‘barbaric’ practices and militarized hunts […] — implicitly invoke economies within the animacy hierarchy” (2012: 43). When we think through the War on Terror as a conflict based on hegemonic masculinity, we are able to see the importance of working within a postcolonial ecomasculinities framework to examine the ways in which The Blind Man’s Garden explores and occupies the intersections of masculinity, contemporary imperialism, and our multispecies world. In doing so, my argument contributes to the existing scholarship on Aslam’s novels which have thus far eschewed both ecocritical and animal studies frameworks.

In what follows, I discuss characters, such as Mikal, whose connections to the natural world and animals are consistent with their egalitarian relations with others. I call this stance postcolonial ecomasculinity and link it to the way in which a snow leopard cub influences Mikal’s decision to rescue a US soldier by risking his own life and wellbeing. However, the novel shows that these connections to the natural world are complicated by privilege. Even though the US soldier also befriends the same snow leopard cub, and is, in many ways, Mikal’s double, the soldier’s hegemonic masculine desire for dominance makes it difficult for him to overcome his ethnocentrism. Similarly, Aslam’s novel depicts Rohan, who thinks through, identifies with, and appreciates nonhuman birds and trees, but because of his patriarchal privilege cannot see the ways in which women are also oppressed. Thus, I argue that the novel shows that a love for the natural world and animals alone is not necessarily enough to produce a non-hierarchical ecomasculinity. In the final section, I discuss the end of the novel which shows a world of connection, rather than hierarchy, associated with the natural world, and administered by women. These women provide hope for Rohan, the blind man, to navigate through the garden, which is Pakistan. This hope is symbolized by a rope walk which is constructed by Naheed to connect Rohan to the plants and trees in the garden. These connections are symbolic of lessons in egalitarian masculinity, teaching not only Rohan but also two young boys how to live without domination and violence. As a result, we are left with images of pathways which broaden our vision of masculinity beyond the stereotypical.

Hegemonic masculinity in a multispecies world

The novel’s concern with masculinity or how men should live is stated early on in The Blind Man’s Garden as Rohan, the blind patriarch, ponders 9/11: “How not to ask for help these days — from others, from God — when it seems that one is surrounded by the destruction of the very idea of man?” (24). ² As the war in Afghanistan rages on, we are shown such unspeakable violence that it becomes clear that we need another, new idea of man. Part of the problem is that violence begets more violence, and hegemonic violent masculinity is not limited only to Americans or warlords or Taliban or even to cisgender men. Moreover, the violence is directed at both human and animal others. For instance, when Jeo and Mikal cross the border into Afghanistan to help victims of the Americans after 9/11, they see how afraid people are of the Taliban because of the blood on the walls where many have been lined up and shot. Soon after noticing blood on a wall “at the height of a child’s head” (51), they watch the killing of a dog: “A grey dog yaps at the truck and a Taliban soldier jumps down and delivers it an expertly placed kick under the jaw and then, when it recovers and snarls back, shoots it dead with his AK-47” (51). Men, women, children, and dogs are all helpless in the face of this dominating and aggressive behaviour which is also in the victims. As Mikal tells Jeo, “You saw how these Taliban treat them. They will not leave even a sparrow alive in this place” (53).

The victims of the Taliban are also violent. In fact, Jeo is mistaken for Taliban and killed by a woman grieving for her husband: “This is for what your people did to my man” (60). In this way, the novel shows that all genders are capable of a dominating masculine behaviour that is violent toward human and nonhuman alike. According to Andrew Ross, “Men are no more innately competitive or domineering than women are innately cooperative or compliant. Masculinity, defined from context to context as a set of cultural standards to be observed and emulated, is shaped by social institutions” (Ross, 1992: 219). The character of Mikal is represented in a way that broadens and extends the possibilities of masculine behaviour within a society with patriarchal social institutions.

These patriarchal structures in the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan engage in both discursive and violent erasure of women. One day, when Mikal is recovering from his imprisonment by the Americans at the house of Akbar, a fellow prisoner who has also been set free by the Americans, he stumbles across a “framed family tree that displays only the names of males” (215). When women are absent from the family tree, their lives can become invisible and, by extension, devalued. Aslam shows how discursive erasure of women is linked with violence against women in the broader patriarchal society. Examples of such violence are listed at another point in the novel when Tara, who was imprisoned after she was raped, thinks about the plight of women:

During her adult life there has not been a single day when she has not heard of a woman killed with bullet or razor or rope, drowned or strangled with her own veil, buried alive or burned alive, poisoned or suffocated, having her nose cut off or entire face disfigured with acid or the whole body cut to pieces, run over by a car or battered with firewood. Every day there is news that a woman has had these things done to her in the name of honour-and-shame or Allah-and-Muhammad, by her father, her brother, her uncle, her nephew, her cousin, her husband […]. [M]ore often than not there are no second chances or forgiveness if you are a woman and have made a mistake or have been misunderstood. (101)

These are the toxic effects of hegemonic masculinity that oppress women in the society depicted in the novel. However, neither Mikal nor his brother Basie show the signs of hierarchical domination often associated with this kind of hegemonic masculinity.

In The Blind Man’s Garden, Mikal and Basie are two orphaned Pakistani children of communist parents who were friends with the artist Sofia. After their father disappears and their mother dies, they are adopted by Rohan, the widower and titular blind man of the novel who was also Sofia’s husband. When Rohan adopts the children, Mikal is ten and Basie is 18 years old, the same age as Sofia and Rohan’s children, Jeo who is ten and Yasmin who is 18 years old. While Jeo and Mikal become as close as brothers, Yasmin and Basie fall in love and marry. A closer look at Mikal and Basie’s characters reveals a tendency toward egalitarian relationships with all others, human and nonhuman alike.

Even though Aslam is careful to depict both religious and atheist characters in Pakistan and Basie strongly rejects religion, religious discourse is dominant in Pakistan. Characters such as Rohan and Mikal are religious to varying degrees, and one way to think about their relations with animal others is to read the Qur’an closely. In her reading, Sarra Tlili (2012) writes, “Whereas in the bible […] humans seem to stand somewhere between God and other animals […], in the Qur’an humans seem to be placed among other animals. They are as helpless as any other species” (Tlili, 2012: 91). Thus, when the novel is understood within the tradition of the Qur’an, its claims about humans and nonhumans as equals become more vivid. Both Mikal and Rohan are also deeply connected to the natural world, although we shall see later how Rohan’s privilege as a patriarch gets in the way of his ability to extend his egalitarian vision to others such as women.

Mikal, on the other hand, is so attuned to his environment that he arrives at Rohan’s house at the age of ten with “a book of constellations under one arm” (13). As an adult, he uses his knowledge to navigate by the stars and we are told “Mikal knows the names and locations of all fifty-seven navigational stars” (32). In addition, his relationship with nonhuman animals is very close, as exemplified by his arrival as an orphaned child with a puppy. Readers are informed: “The puppy he held in the crook of the other elbow would have to be given away within two months when it became apparent that it was a wolf” (13). This, too, foreshadows Mikal’s later adult life as he eventually adopts another wild animal, a snow leopard. While Mikal’s brother, Basie, doesn’t adopt animals or navigate by the stars, he too is attached to the nonhuman and finds comfort in the larger multispecies world in which he lives. At one point in the novel, when his devout father-in-law Rohan prays at dawn, the atheist Basie “goes up to the roof and finds comfort in the brightening sky, receiving his share of the earth through the five senses, the dawn glow of ochre and cinnabar, the light calling things into existence, the thin voices of birds” (233). Mikal and Basie’s openness to nonhuman animals and environment extends to the women in their lives as well. Basie’s loving companionship with his wife, Yasmin, extends beyond patriarchal gender roles as both work at the same school as teachers and make all decisions together.

As for Mikal, his tender relationship with Naheed is juxtaposed against the violence against women and hate of warring groups. Mikal starts seeing Naheed when he is 18 years old. “One day — after they had been exchanging letters and meeting in secret for six weeks — she mentioned the beauty of a neighborhood boy and@ then quickly offered something like an apology, in case his pride was injured” (33–34). Naheed assumes that Mikal’s masculine ego could be injured but he “just shrugged”, telling her “I am grateful that you love someone like me at all” (34). At the end of the novel, Mikal plays with Naheed’s necklace “that has little leaves all along its length, a string of foliage. ‘Did you play with your mother’s jewellery when you were a child?’ she asks” (288). Mikal responds that he used to wear it as well and then asks her to let him wear her necklace telling her, when she asks, that he doesn’t care that it is a woman’s piece of jewellery. Again and again we see the ways in which Mikal has no fear of emasculation because he does not wish to dominate any of the human and nonhuman others in his life.

Privilege complicates ecomasculinity

Mikal is the one character in this novel with the most contact with animals and the natural world, as well as militaristic nationalism. Even though his rejection of hegemonic masculinity is associated with his relationship with animal others, in this section, I show that privilege can complicate relationships with others. Although the novel depicts an American soldier who is in every way Mikal’s double, especially because of his relationship to the natural world, his American privilege in the War on Terror keeps him from extending his egalitarianism to suspected terrorists like Mikal. In this way, the US soldier’s masculinity is shown to be hegemonic.

Almost all of Mikal’s encounters and relations with animals are caring and nurturing. For instance, after the Americans release him from prison, Mikal shares what little food he has with stray dogs in Afghanistan. At one point, “He […] feeds the bones from his meat to a street dog, talking to it in words and whistles, much to the displeasure of the owner and the other diners” (353). But the fact is that, as humans, we don’t always understand animals. Veena Das writes that we must “inhabit the world with the animal other, even if the being of this other is not transparent within our form of life” (2013: 27). Even though Mikal mostly nurtures animals in this novel, he also fears those whose being is not transparent or who are particularly ferocious. In this way, the novel does not homogenize all animals and nor does it homogenize Mikal’s relations with different animals.

An example of animals whose beings are not transparent are the “three enormous Airedale dogs” (204) that Mikal comes across while recovering at his friend Akbar’s house. Perhaps because they are often chained up, he thinks to himself that aggression has “been bred into them” (204). When they surprise him one day, he suddenly becomes “certain that the three animals have killed humans” (246). His response is to reach into his pocket for his knife and keep the blade unfolded even after they have disappeared. Suvadip Sinha and Amit Baishya remind us that human–animal relationships can only be studied in their complexity “if we consider the vertiginous range of affective states instead of focusing exclusively on narratives of care and relatedness” (Sinha and Baishya, 2020: 3). While there are many prominent instances of Mikal caring for animals, he does have other reactions to them such as reaching for his knife when he sees the Airedales. This reminds us that we don’t always understand the animal other and our relationships aren’t always caring. However, the postcolonial ecomasculinity depicted via the character of Mikal shows that, despite the heterogeneity of animals and human–animal relations, we can still respect animal others and treat them with dignity. For instance, despite his fear of the three dogs, Mikal is shocked to find two of them dead after a raid by American soldiers. Even though he did not feed or care for them, he does bury them with dignity: “He digs a hole and then goes into the south wing and wraps the two dogs in a bedsheet and carries them out. Rather than break the stiff limbs he widens the hole he has dug” (301). There is a respect and sanctity for the dogs’ corpses that is equivalent to the way in which we would treat a human’s body. Further, this act seems even more complex given his fear that they have killed before. Whatever these dogs were, whether he understood them or not, Mikal’s way of dealing with them was never to dominate them. Instead, he shows them respect, even in death.

When Akbar’s sister Salomi gives Mikal a snow leopard cub, Mikal’s relationship with the cub is one that helps him heal after his imprisonment. The cub and Mikal are often together, they sleep under the same blanket, and Mikal even talks to the cub and imagines what it is saying to him. In the novel, Mikal’s own vocalization of what he perceives to be the cub’s thoughts are italicized. Mikal says, “The expression on your face says, Why do you keep looking in that direction? My answer is ‘No particular reason’” (209). In Mikal’s mind, he engages in a dialogue with the cub that continues throughout their time together. Mikal’s relationship with the snow leopard cub is shown to be one of his most important relationships in the novel.

Indeed, Mikal and the snow leopard cub are companions in the way that Donna J. Haraway (2008) claims when she writes, “Species interdependence is the name of the worlding game on earth, and that game must be one of response and respect […] I am who I become with companion species” (Haraway, 2008:19). Mikal not only responds to what he imagines the snow leopard cub to be saying, but also shows tremendous respect for this particular companion species. After a separation, when he and the cub are reunited, Mikal “is still astonished at the power the animal’s eyes have over him, the gaze captivating within an instant, a radiant dreamlike effect on his mind” (315). His bond with the cub is great. The narrator states that as “the leopard [sits] on his shoulder, the simple uncomplicated gravity of the creature [is] a relief to him” (333). The cub is not merely his companion but leads him to become someone who helps an unconscious American soldier he finds in the middle of the road whose “right arm is bleeding, the upper bone broken above the elbow” (312).

While it would seem that helping a fellow human should not require the urging of an animal, in Mikal’s case, his time with the soldier is very dangerous because he has recently killed two US soldiers as they were releasing him; thus, when he finds the soldier and the cub, he is a wanted man. The murders that he is wanted for are the result of the torture the Americans inflicted on him. He killed the men because he simply couldn’t believe that his interrogator, David Town, a character who was also in The Wasted Vigil (2009), would actually set him free after more than three months of advanced interrogation (193). He knows that his remorse cannot save him. Being a wanted man is dangerous enough and Mikal knows it. What he doesn’t know is that the US soldier he helps is the older brother of one of the men Mikal killed and recognizes him as the killer. Of Mikal, Aslam writes, “He climbs into the pickup, wishing only to be out of there as quickly as possible, but just as the headlights swing away from the American soldier the snow leopard raises its head from behind the man’s shoulder” (311). The cub’s presence convinces Mikal to save the American. “‘Don’t worry,’ Mikal tells the cub. ‘I am not going to hurt your new friend’” (316). Mikal sees no hierarchy between humans and animals. Thus, he is able to see that the US soldier is the cub’s friend because he is not operating within an animacy hierarchy.

However, the novel shows that a human’s connection with an animal doesn’t lead to their ability to overcome borders and boundaries with other humans when they are privileged. As readers we discover that the unnamed American Special Forces soldier “found the snow leopard during a raid at a house […] and in his rucksack are six of the several dozen tins of cat food he has had shipped from the United States” (299). Ordering food from the US clearly shows that the American has adopted the cub while Mikal was away, keeping him “inside his shirt” (299) as he travels. The US soldier’s companionship with the cub is similar to Mikal’s egalitarian relationship with the cub. But the American’s analysis of Mikal’s killing of his younger brother is very different from Mikal’s:

He should never have been freed — he never revealed his name and that should have been indication enough that he was a hardened terrorist […]. He should have been taken to Cuba for complete and advanced interrogation. The proof of it being that he shot dead two Americans the instant he was released. (300; emphasis in original)

The US soldier’s response to Mikal is one that is based on nationalism. He is angry that Mikal killed two Americans and demands more masculine domination of Mikal than he has already endured:

intravenous fluids and drugs against his will […]. Restraint on a swivel chair for long periods, loud music and white noise played to prevent him from sleeping, lowering temperature in the room until it was unbearable and then throwing water in his face. (193)

The US soldier’s desire to dominate demands that these techniques used in Afghanistan are not enough and those used in Cuba should have been part of Mikal’s future. As readers we know that Mikal was only trying to protect his loved ones by not revealing his name, that the torture was really too much for him, that he is an ordinary man with no ties to any criminal organizations.

Despite their complete inability to communicate with each other through words, Mikal at one point articulates an apology to the American: “I am sorry I killed your countrymen” (342). However, the novel shows that there is no way to get past the gulf of differences between them even though they have this love for the snow leopard in common. The US soldier’s connection with animal others does not rid him of his racism and hegemonic masculinity which continue to lead him to dehumanize other humans. The novel shows that Mikal gets past this ethnocentrism not just because of his relationship with the natural world but also because of his lack of privilege as an ordinary person who refuses to take sides in the war.

The exclusionary rhetoric that assumes guilt is present not only with the Americans but also with the people Mikal meets when he tries to help the US soldier. A young man actually asks Mikal if he would sell the American. He states,

“Aunt Fatima said they had imprisoned and tortured you.”

Mikal looks away.

“You should want to lick his blood. He’s your enemy.”

“Not like that, he’s not.”

“He’d do the same to you.”

“Then that makes me better than him.” (327)

Mikal’s desire to do the right thing despite the war that engulfs him keeps the reader wondering if a man like him can even survive. When Mikal looks at the American he thinks to himself:

The white man’s eyes are a doorway to another world, to a mind shaped by different rules, a different way of life. What kind of a man is he? Is he well spoken, a union of strength and delicacy? Is he in love with someone or is he oblivious? Does he, like Mikal, have a brother? (333)

The more time they spend together unable to communicate, the more it becomes clear that the US soldier is Mikal’s double. Both navigate using the stars, both have lost a brother in the war, and both love the snow leopard cub. But when the American sees Mikal, he sees only the killer of his brother. He doesn’t see Mikal risking everything to save his life. Even after Mikal saves him from several young men who encircle them in order to attack the American (321), at one point “He stands square to Mikal, a cold reptile calculation in his eyes” (335). This description of the American as cold and calculating is in stark contrast to the warmth in the descriptions of Mikal.

In terms of brothers, even though Basie is Mikal’s biological brother, who is eight years older, Mikal considers Jeo, Rohan’s son who is the same age, to be his brother who is lost to the war. They have been brothers since Rohan adopted Mikal at the age of ten. While Jeo studied for medical school, Mikal wandered, unable to succeed in school, unable to learn English, and unable to heal from the trauma of losing his parents. It is his love for Jeo that leads him to follow Jeo into Afghanistan after 9/11 to help keep him safe. When he is taken prisoner and released, he doesn’t even know that Jeo has been killed. But his love for Jeo is such that when Jeo enters into an arranged marriage with Naheed, the woman Mikal loves, he is unable to run away with her before the wedding as they had planned. This love for the brother is also in the unnamed American who carries all the information and physical characteristics of his younger brother’s killer, Mikal, with him in two satellite phones: “Loaded into the memories of both satellite phones are the photographs of the prisoner who killed his brother, taken when he was originally captured” (300). The US soldier can think of nothing but avenging his brother’s death. Mikal thinks the American is miserable because he has him in chains while he tries to find him medical help, worried that the people he meets would not understand why he would want to help him. But the US soldier is miserable because he cannot avenge his brother’s death; he cannot kill or at least arrest Mikal. While Mikal and the American share the misery of losing their brothers, the animacy hierarchy that has othered Mikal as a suspected terrorist keeps the US soldier from seeing that Mikal gives him food and water and actively keeps him alive because of the snow leopard cub. The US soldier has privilege and has taken sides in the war. He believes that “it is no longer a case of American happiness, American freedom, American interests, the American way of life. Now it is about the survival of America itself” (301). While his nationalism can be inclusive of the animals of that region like the snow leopard, he cannot include the people of that region like Mikal. Mikal’s lack of privilege and refusal to take sides in the war is part of what makes him different from the US soldier despite all they have in common.

Another way in which the American and Mikal are doubles is that they both navigate by the stars. The book of constellations Mikal brings when he arrives at Rohan’s house is indicative of his knowledge which helps him when he wanders and also helps when he and Jeo leave for Afghanistan. Similarly, the US soldier uses the stars to navigate with the snow leopard cub in his shirt. He expects to cross the border into Pakistan and return “in twenty-four hours” (300) because he is confident in his ability to find his way: “He is navigating by the stars as he walks, picking a new constellation every twenty minutes as the old one shifts direction with the earth’s rotation. Hercules. Ophiuchus” (301). However, the difference is that after Mikal is tortured, when he is released he is no longer himself. We know this because he kills two of the Americans and sees the sky as “a slab of unreadable black stone above him” (195). The effect of the torture is too great and he loses his ability to read the sky:

Lyra, Pegasus, Piscis Austrinus, and all the other constellations that he hasn’t seen since he was captured at the beginning of the year are now pulsing above him, but he cannot read them fully, the shapes tangled, or threadbare like beads missing from a piece of needlework. He has forgotten some of the names, while in other cases it is the shapes and locations associated with the remembered names that he cannot recall. (198)

When Akbar finds him, Mikal tells him that he “was trying to find the constellations” (200). The animacy hierarchy that operated in his imprisonment and resulted in his torture dehumanizes him and severs his connection to the stars. Even though the novel shows the ways in which Mikal and the American are similar, it also shows that the hierarchy provides a privilege to the US soldier that keeps him from attaining the compassion that Mikal has for all kinds of others. In fact, I would argue that this is the reason that the American is never named. We, as readers, are forced again and again to understand him as an American rather than as his name so that we are reminded of his unearned American privilege. This privilege as well as the hierarchy of the military and its hegemonic masculinity keeps the US soldier from attaining Mikal’s compassion.

Pathways for postcolonial ecomasculinities

Through the character of Mikal, Aslam’s novel The Blind Man’s Garden provides a vision of masculinity that does not dominate but rather functions through connections with human and nonhuman others. These egalitarian interconnections are supported and administered by a number of women characters in the novel. Moreover, just as love of the snow leopard cub is not enough for the American to overcome his prejudice against Mikal, Rohan’s love for birds and his garden is not enough for him to feel compassion for human others such as women. His wife Sofia is shown to love the natural world as he does but with more compassion for her fellow humans, especially women. She, like Basie, is another atheist character with a special connection to the natural world. Sofia is an artist, who loved the world and called it “the only Paradise she needed” (39). Even though Rohan wonders if God has the compassion to forgive an apostate, he has to admit that he cannot know.

But what he does know is that birds should not be harmed. When a stranger comes to his garden and asks if he can put up snares to trap some birds, Rohan listens to him carefully: “He explained that he rode through town with the cage full of birds and people paid him to release one or more of them, the act of compassion gaining the customer forgiveness for some of his sins” (7). He tells Rohan, “The freed bird says a prayer on behalf of the one who has bought its freedom. And God never ignores the prayers of the weak” (7). As Rohan wonders about what is right and, by extension, how we should live with nonhuman others, his response to the stranger’s request shows that he cannot help but think through this logic and imagine how the birds must see them. It is possible that the Muslim upbringing of both Rohan and the stranger may be responsible for their ability to imagine birds praying. In her close reading of the Qur’an, Sarra Tlili (2012) finds that the “depictions of some nonhuman animals represent them as moral beings, capable of facing and making moral choices” (Tlili, 2012: 72). Whereas the stranger sees the birds as weak, their weakness giving more power to their prayers, Rohan thinks of the birds as moral beings who might make moral choices just as humans would. Instead of thinking within an animacy hierarchy whereby his speciesism would keep him from seeing the world through the birds’ eyes, his worldview allows him to empathize with and think through the birds’ suffering: “he cannot help but imagine the fright and suffering of the captured birds” (7). Moreover, Rohan does not distinguish between birds and animalized humans when he sees the size of the cage the stranger has brought with him: “Rohan had remarked to himself that the cage was large enough to contain a man” (7). In Rohan’s thinking, pondering the imprisonment of birds leads to pondering the imprisonment of men. When Rohan considers the imprisonment of both birds and men, he is not distinguishing between men and animals and, as a result, refuses the stranger’s request.

However, Rohan is unable to see and understand the imprisonment of women within patriarchal social structures because of his privilege as a patriarch himself. Unlike Rohan, Sofia is painfully aware of the limitations that her patriarchal society places on her and other women. She lacks the male privilege that Rohan has and this makes her egalitarian behaviour more open to all others. Like Mikal and the American, Sophia and Rohan are both attuned to their environment but Rohan’s position of privilege gets in the way of his compassion.

Even though Sofia and Rohan found a school and teach there together, she “stopped teaching when he expelled a pupil whose mother was revealed to be a prostitute” (39). In fact, “Sofia raged at him. She wanted to go to the woman’s house and bring back the boy […]. There would be no eye contact with her for over a year after that day” (148). Sofia tries to leave Rohan because of this but, as a woman in a patriarchal society, she has nowhere to go despite her tremendous talent and gifts. In the novel, the woman Sofia defends, works hard to provide for her son who eventually becomes an ophthalmologist. Ironically, when Rohan ends up in his office for treatment, he states “With the new medical advances in the West there is no reason why he should ever be blind” (145; emphasis in original). But Rohan cannot afford the treatment and does go blind and is blind metaphorically too because he is oblivious to the plight of this woman.

While Rohan’s wife Sofia dies early in the novel, Naheed is alive at the end. Like Sofia, Naheed doesn’t create a hierarchy between humans and animals and appreciates the natural world while including women in her compassion for all. Even though she loves Mikal, she is forced into an arranged marriage with Jeo, Rohan’s son and a man she also grows to love. When the stranger puts up his snares in the trees despite being told not to, Naheed takes it upon herself to try to save some of the suffering birds in the garden. Like Rohan and Sofia, her relationship with the natural world is shown to be deep as she climbs the large Persian lilac tree: “her hands grab on to the branches and knotholes, branches thick as human limbs, making her feel she’s being helped up” (64). It is clear that she feels that the tree limbs assist her in her task:

Holding the blood-drenched heron against herself with one arm she begins to climb down, suddenly aware that she has been hearing a knock on the gate for some time, realizing also that the sound of the flies had disappeared a minute or two ago, as though they had gone elsewhere. (65–66)

Here, Naheed is made aware of Jeo’s death by the buzzing of flies leaving the bodies of dead birds for Jeo’s body which has been brought to her. At the end of the novel, when Mikal returns to her, “insects weave a gauze of sound in the air” (367) reminiscent of the sound of the flies at Jeo’s body. While the ending is ambiguous, her attention to this sound signifies that Mikal might also be dead. Regardless, Naheed’s compassion for the birds, sensitivity to the trees, and perception of the insects makes her a woman who is in tune with her environment and able not only to see the interconnections between the human and nonhuman but also the importance of egalitarian relationships with all.

Unlike her father-in-law Rohan and her mother Tara, Naheed sees and comments on the ways in which patriarchy excludes women. When they hear an announcement from the mosque’s loudspeaker addressing only men, “Naheed mutters to herself, ‘And what about us ladies?’” because she is unable to ignore these slights to her personhood as her mother Tara can (69). But Tara’s life has been shaped by the fact that when she was a widow, raising Naheed, and was sexually assaulted, she was thrown in prison for adultery because under General Zia’s Hudood Ordinances she couldn’t prove that her rape wasn’t consensual. ³ Since religion had helped her survive prison, she is unwilling to condemn the patriarchy of the mosque as her daughter does. Nonetheless, her love for her rose-ringed parakeet is such that when it dies, she wants to bury it under a neem tree according to tradition. “That was how she had met the family, though Rohan was also a very distant relative of her dead husband” (72). Again, the novel shows that a special attachment to the more-than-human world does not necessarily lead to compassion for all human others.

Naheed and Mikal relate to each other through the natural world. When she and Mikal are apart, Naheed imagines seeing him in the garden entering a walnut tree: “it is as though he had continued in his momentum and disappeared into the bark” (173). Her love for the trees in the garden and her love for Mikal come together again as she imagines him ascending through the trunk of a peepal tree: “Or perhaps he had gone down into the earth and walked through all the darkness and soil, the roots like wooden bolts of lightning around him, and then risen into the peepal” (173). Each possibility is connected to the trees of the garden showing her bond with Mikal (which is a feminist bond outside patriarchy) to be connected to the natural world. The reason for this is that Mikal is the man she loves but cannot marry. Their relationship is outside patriarchal marriage and she sees him travelling outside the time and space that keeps people from entering trees. Similarly, when Mikal thinks of Naheed, he thinks of her as a wilderness: “Human contact is as vast as any wilderness, he remembers thinking the day he approached Naheed for the first time, and demands all daring” (205; emphasis in original). This is the daring and bravery not of hegemonic masculinity but of postcolonial ecomasculinity where contact with human and nonhuman others is valued and worthy of courage. While hegemonic masculinity is “culturally dominant [and] […] signifies […] authority and leadership” (Connell, 2002, n.p.), postcolonial ecomasculinity is neither dominant nor authoritative and requires courage because it counters what is dominant.

The end of The Blind Man’s Garden finds the women characters, Mikal’s beloved Naheed and Basie’s wife Yasmin, living together and raising the sons of Mikal and Basie: “Yasmin teaches at the Aligarh Secondary and High School” and the school where she used to teach with Basie “is slowly being rebuilt. By the time it is ready Naheed herself will have qualified as a teacher” (365). Rohan is still alive and blind but much less of the patriarch than he was. The young women are clearly in charge. Yasmin and Naheed represent the future as they work and teach to support the household. Throughout the novel, Aslam shows the precarious nature of women’s lives in that Sofia cannot leave Rohan, Tara goes to prison early on and later is thrown out by her landlord, and Naheed is pressured to marry against her will. Nonetheless, despite these obstacles, the women make a life in the blind man’s garden that is Pakistan “no worse or better than most in this heartbroken and sorrowful land” (366). Teaching, making enough money to live, raising young male children in community together, these women are the hope with which this novel ends. As R. W. Connell and James Messerschmidt write, “focusing only on the activities of men occludes the practices of women in the construction of gender among men” (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005: 848). The reason for hope is the way in which the women are raising the young cisgender boys at the end of the novel.

This hope is symbolized in the novel in a very concrete way. Within the garden, Naheed

has tied a cord from place to place. They refer to it as the “rope walk” and it connects all the different plants and locations Rohan likes to visit. Rohan makes his way through the garden by holding on to it, feeling his way along the red line zigzagging through the trees. (366)

If the rope walk in the garden is a lesson in interconnectedness, teaching and helping Rohan to navigate the garden despite his blindness, then there is evidence that the boys are learning this lesson too and attempting to extend and apply it to the wider world: “Sometimes the children suggest that it should continue outside the house too, a thread connecting the house to the mosque, the bazaars, the houses of acquaintances” (366). The rope walk symbolizes the way in which the nonhuman plants and trees are connected to the people, and the boys extend this lesson because they want to connect to environments and each other beyond the garden. If the boys’ fathers could live in loving ways, choosing to connect with rather than dominate human and nonhuman others, then these women can teach these boys how to be men outside of hegemonic masculinity. The lesson of the rope walk emphasizes connection rather than hierarchy. Naheed “imagines what the boys will be like as young men — reserved in manner on the whole, but with a component of laughing wildness in the personality, revealing itself occasionally” (365). This contradictory combination of both reserved and wild captures the complexity of a kind of masculinity that is needed. Just as Naheed must first imagine what the boys will become before she can help them and teach them, Aslam’s novel helps us imagine postcolonial ecomasculinity before we, too, can live in these complex and more just ways.

Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden presents the reader with many themes of injustice and unearned privilege among cisgender men. But if we focus only on the human, we miss the richness of this novel which shows how interconnected we all are despite animacy hierarchies between American and non-American, men and women, and between animals and humans. The Blind Man’s Garden does not elevate humans above other animals but rather shows our connections with each other human and nonhuman. The unnamed American Special Forces soldier and Mikal have much in common but the animacy hierarchy provides the American with unearned privilege and this is the reason for the difference in their masculinities. Similarly, Aslam’s novel depicts Rohan, who thinks through, identifies with, and appreciates nonhuman birds and trees but because of his patriarchal privilege cannot see the ways in which women are also oppressed. By analysing this novel through a postcolonial ecomasculinities lens, we are able to imagine egalitarian relationships beyond racism and patriarchy. More importantly, we can imagine the ways in which “eco-masculinity/ies would enact a diversity of ecological behaviors that celebrate and sustain biodiversity and […] interspecies community” (Gaard, 2014: 232). In this way, by living in community rather than hierarchy with other humans and nonhumans, we can advocate for both social and environmental justice.