To me the most interesting part of We’re Not Jews was the “twist” ending in which Azhar is revealed to be an “outsider” within his own culture, or at least a culture that is attributed to him by the racist society he lives in. I don’t think any of the stories we’ve read have had this exact same aspect in them. Usually it seems the characters in South Asian literature are some how more closely related to their heritage than Azhar seems to be. He doesn’t speak the language that his relatives do.
It seems the story is almost more about society’s reaction to what it perceives as “Other” and how it treats those individuals than it is about Azhar’s family or culture specifically. In this I got a sense of some kind of irony because of Azhar’s father’s attempts at being a writer, using the English language. The father seems to be trying ceaselessly to “break into” his adopted culture while for this same reason his son is tormented for being an outsider even though he (Azhar) is closer, through his mixed parentage, to the society that rejects him.
Similarly, it’s interesting that Azhar’s father can’t enter into the cultural sphere of his new country because of a language barrier while Azhar can’t really access his own heritage also because of a language barrier.
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