Psycho-scapes: Fictionalising Nations and Nationalisation of the Self in Bilal Tanweer’s The Scatter Here Is Too Great

Abstract

Bilal Tanweer’s debut novel, The Scatter Here Is Too Great, brings to forefront the metaphor for living in the Pakistani society and discusses what it means to be a nation through blending narratives imbibed in its social milieu. The fiction not only speaks of a nation wrought in a nationalist consciousness culturally, emotionally and aesthetically but also questions what it means to be separating the ‘world’ from ‘home’ and the ‘self’ from the ‘nation’ itself. Through the representation of the private psycho-scape, the ‘I’, Tanweer captures the scattered imaginings of various identities into a national domain. The novel is explored through several features of conscious interiority, mind words and metaphorical mental idioms where the characters are ‘introceived’ through poetic examination of internal organs such as the heart, eye and mind which ironically have become a part of the scattered clutter outside like the body parts after a violent explosion. In an interview, Tanweer agrees that, ‘When you visit a country, you actually visit a city. You rarely visit a country’ (Rehman, Interview by Bilal Tanweer, 2018). For him, the cityscape of Karachi becomes the microcosm of a maelstrom whose macrocosm significantly is Pakistan. His literary craft rejects monolithism and weaves through sensibilities among the lowest strata of the society to portray a conundrum which becomes the final representation of his nation.