Reflections of the Self in “Infidel”

As I prepared to teach Pornsak Pichetshote, Aaron Campbell, and Jose Villarrubia’s Infidel this semester, a lot of things stuck out. However, when I reread the haunted house story where the monsters that terrorize the characters are the manifestations of racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, I became intrigued by a few specific scenes where the monsters appear in the reflections of objects such as knives and mirrors. Today, I want to look at those scenes and discuss them within a larger context of ideas that I have been exploring on this blog and in my other writings.

The main scene I want to focus on occurs at the end of the first chapter and at the beginning of the second chapter. Here, Aisha, a Pakistani-American Muslim woman, sees the monsters and they attack her. During this episode, she grabs a knife and stabs at them. When she comes out of the moment and the monsters disappear, she discovers that she has stabbed at her mother-in-law Leslie, tearing a hole in her nightshirt.

Throughout the first issue, Leslie’s Islamophobia lurks underneath the surface. She tells Aisha that as a thank you for helping her connect with her granddaughter Kris she’ll teach Aisha how to make one of her son Tom’s favorites dishes, a baked ham. Tom overhears this and chastises his mother for forgetting that pork is haram in Islam and that Aisha does not eat pork.