Peter RuddFiled under: the sweet life | Tags: daughter, father, gender, Islam, murder, novel, Salman Rushdie, shame, Sufiya Zenobia, violence, women
Shame leads to violence. It is like a contagion that at its induction freezes and isolates and traps; and over a lifetime eventually surfaces in rage. Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame is structured around a real life event of shame: a father in London kills his daughter, in the street, because she has slept with a white boy. Rushdie changes the story for the book. In it a father shames his daughter from birth, because he wanted to have a boy. She becomes a lightening rod for shame with a capacity for holding more and more of it. And the men around her match her capacity for being shamed with their own capacity for perpetuating it. Eventually she takes a revenge of sorts, by seducing and decapitating four men.
Rushdie’s characters are metaphors for Pakistani politics in the 1970’s. The phenomenon of shaming and its relationship to violence exists at the micro and macro level. It is viral and corrupts an individual life and a state at the same time.
Here is a description of the topic of shame in the book, by Abdulrazak Gurnah. You can read the entire article here.
Sufiya Zenobia is born a girl when Raza Hyder wanted a boy. At her birth, he rages at the medical staff as if somehow his anger will force them to change the baby’s gender. Sufiya Zenobia blushes for shame. From the moment of her birth, Sufiya Zenobia is made inadequate, shamed by her gender. As the novel progresses she comes to represent an unavoidable capacity for feeling shame while the world that dictates to her, the world of men, cannot restrain itself from shamelessness. Rushdie’s argument suggests a gendered sense of ‘honour’, a public sense in which men fraudulently disguise cynicism by investing honour in the conduct of women, in the process dictating to them, while conducting themselves with cruelty and self-indulgence. Women, who are required to submit to what has been invested in them and are made inadequate by this submission, feel shame. Sufiya Zenobia cannot prevent herself blushing for shame, and is a literal representation of this gendered condition, which is attenuated further by making her retarded by illness to a permanent mental age of a six-year-old. So her blushes, in other words, are not from a heightened moral sense but the metaphorical conditioning of her gender.
In Rushdie’s argument, humiliation and shame will inevitably lead to violence, which is as much about the oppression of women in Pakistan (and Islam) as about the whole society. It is Sufiya who demonstrates this argument. The first occasion is when she tears off the heads of 218 turkeys, ‘then reached down into their bodies to draw their guts up through their necks’ (Shame, p.138). Later, in the novel’s closing stages, she fulfils what this early outburst of prodigious violence promises. She tempts four nameless men to have sex with her, inverting the right of Muslim men to take four wives, then she pulls their heads off:
Shame walks the streets of night. In the slums four youths are transfixed by those appalling eyes, whose deadly yellow fire blows like a wind through the lattice-work of the veil. They follow her to the rubbish-dump of doom, rats to her piper, automata dancing in the all-consuming light from the black-veiled eyes. Down she lies […] Four husbands come and go. Four of them in and out, and then her hands reach for the first boy’s neck. The others stand still and wait their turn.(Shame, p.219)
Her humiliation at the hands of men who should have loved her, her father Raza Hyder and her husband Omar Khayyam Shakil, have turned her into a Beast. Rushdie celebrates Sufiya’s violence as liberation, or makes Omar Khayyam Shakil ponder along these lines, but the real force behind this figuration of women is not so much to suggest a route to fulfilment, but to issue a warning to the rulers of Pakistan. Out of the encounter of shame and shamelessness will come violence. Not surprisingly, Shame was banned in Pakistan, although it was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
Filed under: brave new world | Tags: Al Franken, comedy, George Carlin, Michael Kinsley
In his opinion piece ‘The Real Joke in Minnesota’ for the Washington Post, Michael Kinsley digresses to talk about hamfistedness.
His essay is about how politicians try to control gaffes whereas comedians must risk them. In the case of Al Franken, professional comedian morphing into professional politician, his past gaffes could become liabilities. But, says the author, the risks he took over the years make him an interesting man which is an asset to the senate.
But back to the digression: Kinsley takes some time to describe how a joke works. You can draw and, with abandon, cross the line of social acceptability to shock. Or you can dance up to and around the line of social acceptability to amuse. He says George Carlin did mostly the former and wasn’t very funny. I think a lot of American comedy does the same thing: there is a dark undercurrent of anger and maybe fear in much of it and virtually no sense of self knowledge and deprecation that is essential to help people to laugh at their condition. That’s hamfisted … and smug.
Here is the excerpt from Kinsley’s article. Read the whole piece here
The surest way to stumble into a gaffe is to tell a joke. Jokes are risky; they are a game of percentages. That is why jokes are best left to professional jokesters. Certainly they are too dangerous for politicians to play with. Any joke that doesn’t offend at least a few people is unlikely to be funny. You have to hope that many more will be amused than are offended. You have to come as close as you can to the line of justifiable, widespread offense without crossing it. This is why I never found George Carlin, who died last month, terribly funny: He walked up to the line and simply crossed it. Where is the art in that?
~The Real Joke in Minnesota, by Michael Kinsley, The Washington Post
Filed under: brave new world | Tags: high wire, journalist, man on wire, Philippe Petit, police, tight rope, World Trade Center
This is from the recent review of Man on Wire the new documentary of Philippe Petit’s high wire stunt at the World Trade Center. What is striking about this description of the journalists who swarmed the scene as the Frenchman was being led from the building’s lobby, is that the press asked why he did it, and not something else. ‘Why’ is full of existential potential; even the film critic calls the question absurd. And yet Petit scoffed that the question is scolding and very American. Here is a puzzling difference of opinion. Which is it, moralizing or absurd?
Consider the scene: the tallest bank towers in the world, police, handcuffs, the press, the 1970’s energy crisis, perhaps. And now put in it the diminutive Frenchman, outsider, lawbreaker, artist, pariah. The scene is indeed an absurd imbalance of power and law over art and human will. But, and unbelievably, the press are motivated to ask ‘why’ by narrow moralism.
Here is the excerpt. Read the entire film review
Frenchman Philippe Petit walked on a wire between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974, and when he came down (in police handcuffs), American reporters pressed close to ask why, why, why. The question, of course, was absurd. A third of a century on, it still gets Petit going: “Very American finger-snapping … I did somezing magnificent and mysterious and I got a ‘why,’ and ze beauty of eet is zat I don’t have a ‘why.’”
Folie a Deux: A heist picture about one of the greatest stunts in New York/a>< history,” David Edelstein
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