The Boston Bombings: the failure of a Marriage and a Migratory Project

In the aftermath of the Boston bombing, there is a tremendous amount of speculation regarding the motives of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who appears to Americans as a walking contradiction in terms; being on the one hand a well integrated American immigrant boxer, living in wealthy Boston suburbs with an all-American wife and daughter and appearing on the other as a fundamentalist Muslim terrorist engaged in a punitive jihad against the United States. The difficulty Americans seem to have with merging the two images is very telling as to how far apart these two "characters" are in the social drama projected by the media to white middle class America. Equally telling is the puzzlement about his racial origins. Despite being a prototypical Caucasian, he was described as "dark skinned" in the initial media reports; betraying a pressing desire to conflate the categories of non-white foreigner, Muslim and terrorist. And the attempt to find an outside agent who taught Tamerlan radical Islam shows how difficult it is to accept that violent terror can develop from within American society, rather than stemming from some form of external contamination.

Tamerlan's parents. His father is to the left, while his mother, bearing a passing
resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor, is in the centre holding the baby Tamerlan.

I think an alternative interpretation of Tamerlan's motives is possible, which would focus on his family's status as migrants eager to live the American dream and integrate fully within US society. As their upwardly mobile social aspirations were blocked, it seems that the modern ambitious fashionably dressed young lawyer-couple who were Tamerlan's parents (pictured above) grew increasingly disillusioned about their own prospects within the society. In fact his father had to adopt a manual job as a mechanic and his mother was reduced to administering cosmetic facials at home to make ends meet. It seems that they responded in different ways to their predicament, with the mother turning to fundamentalist Islam in an understandable attempt to draw upon her roots to fashion an alternative Muslim subjectivity which could preserve her dignity in the face of the modern "Western" civilization, which increasingly rejected her. By contrast the father took an alternative route: continuing to maintain an agnostic secular modern identity, while simultaneously growing increasingly distant from his wife and his elder son. 

The internal tensions between the couple exploded when the Tamerlan's  parents' marriage broke up and his father returned to Dagestan. Against this background, his mother's arrest for shop-lifting a year after her husband left is revealing, particularly because one of the charges was for wanton damage to women's clothing. Bearing in mind that she was trained in cosmetics and how concerned she was to dress fashionably in a Western style when she entered the United States, the shop-lifting episode reads like an unconscious revenge against the system of aesthetic values which initially attracted her and represents the nadir of her migratory journey. Not only was this ideal of beauty, which she had once successfully sought to internalise and now regarded as un-Islamic, emblematic of a society which ultimately rejected her and her family. It also stood between her and her husband as indicated by her response to her husband's criticism of her decision to wear the hijab: "This is what Muslim men are supposed to want." Thus the division between Tamerlan's parents reflects different and radically opposed solutions to the failure of their migratory project:

The couple now: Tamerlan's father somewhat resembles Brad Pitt,
while his mother seems to have walked out of a medieval Persian manuscript.