Fragments of a World That “Doesn’t End”: The Apocalyptic Impulse in a Time of Perpetual War

9/11 and the subsequent "War on Terror" have produced temporalities of indefinite deferral and perpetual war. Literary scholars have noted the pervasive presence of this phenomenon in contemporary Global Anglophone fiction.1 Debjani Ganguly, for example, describes new developments in the global, contemporary novel beginning in 1989, where war is experienced "as an everyday horizon of living — as a condition and not an event,"2 an impression underscored by the prolonged "War on Terror" initiated after 9/11. While Ganguly's archive of terror texts has a 9/11 bent, Bilal Tanweer's novel in short stories, The Scatter Here Is Too Great, resists an American-centric/War on Terror focus, instead circling around a bombing at the Cantt train station in Karachi and the inhabitants' experience of perpetual violence.3 The text is organized into five sections of short stories, or fragments. Through these fragments, Tanweer's novel asks how narrative representations of time and space can uniquely depict the sudden occurrence and aftermath of a bombing event: the un-anticipatable acts of violence, the trauma of terror, and the extraordinary times of perpetual war and violence that increasingly characterize "ordinary" life.4

The Scatter Here Is Too Great is one example, I contend, of formal innovations in Global Anglophone fiction related to time, temporality, and terror. Like "postcolonial" before it, "Global Anglophone" as an organizing principle or category is susceptible to critiques of its effacing tendencies—does the term merely rebrand "world literature" for the twenty-first century? Do we gloss over postcolonial histories and decolonial projects when we turn "global?" And of course, there is the neocolonial charge of privileging the Anglophone over other languages, once again. Tanweer's text is certainly "Anglophone," but what makes it "Global," in my view, is not only the way the novel circulates to a global audience, but the way it communicates a consciousness of time and space not limited to the inhabitants of Karachi or Pakistan, nor the time of postcolonial aftermath alone. In a recent PMLA essay that meditates on the efficacy of the "postcolonial" after empire, Kavita Daiya argues that "scholarship about 'the American century' and post-1945 culture provincialize America, unveil the fact of American imperialism in the world, and acknowledge the constitutive intimacies of the world's continents."5 Though Daiya is not concerned with "Global Anglophone" fiction, I am inspired by her formulation in my own view of the "Global Anglophone" as a category that can cast an even wider net, provincializing both America and Europe while still attuned to the fact of continued European and American imperialisms, and to the intimacies forged in global space. While "Global Anglophone" tends to evoke the spatial — texts that "world" literature and are oriented toward a global audience — my reading of The Scatter Here is Too Great suggests that we can and should be equally concerned with the time-consciousness of Global Anglophone texts.

My sense is that terror in Tanweer's novel embeds a specific time-space sensibility, specifically through characters who posit apocalyptic time in contrast to the static time of perpetual war. Despite references to U.S. American imperialism in an section centered around the character Comrade Sukhansaz,6 the novel's setting is primarily restricted to Karachi and the accumulated ruins resulting from successive experiences of bombings and terror.7 In this way, the novel directly interrogates the temporality of after — after a bombing, after loss, and, I will suggest, after the end of a world. The friction of these two modes of time—the eschatological telos of apocalyptic time and the temporality of perpetual war — is especially evident in the section "The World Doesn't End," which recasts apocalyptic time to demand that we frame each bombing, small or large, as "world ending" in its own way. Through the characters in "The World Doesn't End," Tanweer asks us to consider how apocalyptic time can be used to cope with the "after" of a bomb's aftermath.

The characters and the city alike confront the bombing's aftermath and the ways it changes their perceptions of the past, present, and future. For example, faced with endlessly repetitive violence, the writer in the city explains that here, grieving is impossible, because "[g]rieving is only possible when you know you have come to an end, when there is nothing more to follow."8 I submit that the apocalyptic impulse exhibited by some of the characters, as "an organizing principle imposed on an overwhelming, disordered universe," provides a way to posit the "end" that perpetual war and violence seem to defer indefinitely.9 Rather than a desire to end time itself, the apocalyptic impulse in The Scatter Here is Too Great describes the lived temporality of characters who posit the end of the world. This urge is particularly striking in texts that concern terrorist acts and bombings, which already exhibit a desire to bring about the end of one's world through destruction. But against these other kinds of "terrorist texts," I want to carefully delineate the apocalyptic impulse in Tanweer's novel, which I read as oriented differently toward a future world. Here, as I develop below, the characters take refuge in the desire to end the world because it interrupts the static temporality of perpetual, unending war, and produces a temporality of self-preservation, rather than self-destruction.

In other words, my reading of the novel suggests that if war and violence are experienced as "perpetual," or unending, then we might read the apocalyptic impulse as a desire to bring an end to otherwise unceasing violence. This view of the political possibilities of apocalyptic time draws but also departs from other scholars' understandings of apocalyptic time and fiction. For David Scott, apocalyptic time emerges from the temporality of "aftermaths," of "immobility and pain and ruin," a "stalled present" that may encourage a turn to apocalyptic, or messianic temporalities.10 Peter Thompson surmises that the apocalyptic might be viewed "not as the first breath of something new . . . but as the final gasp of something old."11 For both, the apocalypse signifies the transition of time rather than its ultimate end, and the increasing prevalence of apocalyptic sensibilities in Global Anglophone fiction might be tied to a similarly increasing sensibility of crisis, uncertainty, and unpredictable change—a sensibility embodied most vividly in the experience and spectacle of terror.

In "The World Doesn't End," Tanweer links ruins, wreckage, and apocalyptic time to dramatize the temporality of the aftermath. The story is focalized through the brother of Akbar, an ambulance driver. Akbar responded to the Cantt train station bombing, and, in his mother's words, returns home without his soul in him.12 Akbar alludes to the traumatic scene he witnesses when he confides, "'I held the dead body of a boy today. He was an angel I tell you. An angel.'"13 In response to the trauma of the terror, Akbar seeks solace in apocalyptic time. He raves to his family, "'You don't know—doomsday is here. I have seen them with my eyes . . . they are here! Rectify your end! There is no time left now!'"14 His brother later clarifies that Akbar believes that he saw Gog and Magog, "the harbingers of the Day of Judgment," walking among the dead bodies at the blast. Akbar situates the Cantt bombing in terms of the religious apocalyptic vision heralded by Gog and Magog, who will "bring strife and disharmony and, ultimately, the apocalypse to the world."15

The turn to apocalyptic time allows both Akbar and his brother to imagine "end times" as an alternative to the temporality of perpetual war and violence. In contemporary, "postmodern terror," Jean Baudrillard argues, "Everything exists in a state of suspended animation."16 The temporality of suspension and waiting results not just from the immediate bombing trauma, which Akbar experiences, but also secondary trauma, as he relates what he has seen to his brother. For those living in a state of perpetual war, Paul Saint-Amour argues, "prophecy, prolepsis, foresight, foreclosure, anticipation, and expectation" become "modes . . . of living in a particular present-and of living toward a future that seemed, for retraceable reasons, to be written in advance."17 To cope with the anxiety and unpredictability of sudden bombings and their aftermath, Akbar posits the end of the world, which would bring the temporality of suspension in the meantime to an end as well. Thus, the story concludes with both Akbar and his brother conceding to a sense of apocalyptic time. Akbar's assertion that "doomsday is here"18 affirms the tragedy of the bombing he witnessed, and also serves as a call to action, to "Rectify your end!" The turn to apocalyptic and eschatological time, as Akbar predicts the imminent end of the world, allows him to feel in control and to make sense of the otherwise senseless bombing. His brother echoes this sentiment, noting that he felt like "we were trapped in the middle of a story we did not know, and had no control over."19  The brother attempts to track down Gog and Magog, which leads him to a painter and palmist who offers to read the future. The man ends up giving a more general prediction: "this city is dying."20 The brother concedes, "[T]he city was dying, this world was ending," and he begins to wait and prepare for the end of the world.21 Unlike Akbar, who no longer "has the same zest for life," the brother feels liberated as he embraces the waiting with open arms.22 In waiting for the end of the world and embodying an apocalyptic orientation toward the future, Akbar and his brother control the narrative of the future through prophecy and prolepsis to anticipate and explain the future. While Saint-Amour argues that these temporal orientations emerge out of the experience of living in perpetual war, my reading suggests that they are modes at odds with the static temporality of perpetual war, and work instead to undermine that oppressive temporality.

For the characters of The Scatter Here Is Too Great, the temporality of waiting paradoxically characterizes both the anticipation of terror and its aftermath. To cope with the aftermath of terror, the characters in "The World Doesn't End" posit apocalyptic time; the title of the section embeds the tragic irony that the world will not end despite their desire for it. The characters of "The World Doesn't End" deal with the terror of perpetual violence by embracing apocalyptic "end times"—and in the process the function of "apocalyptic time" itself is transformed. As a Global Anglophone novel, The Scatter Here Is Too Great importantly widens the frame of "terror texts" beyond 9/11 or War on Terror texts to consider the temporal experience of perpetual violence more broadly. Finally, the novel asks us to consider terror and its aftermath as a formal structure in fiction, one that embeds and responds to the pervasive global temporalities of waiting, suspension, and perpetual war.

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Amanda Lagji is Assistant Professor of English and World Literature at Pitzer College. Her most recent work appears in Mobilities, Safundi, South Asian Review, Law, Cultures and the Humanities, ARIEL, and African Literature Today. She is currently working on her book project Waiting for Now: Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time, which theorizes a 'temporality of waiting' across postcolonial fiction.

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