Ethics and Poetics

Ethics and Poetics: Ethical Recognitions and Social

Reconfigurations in Modern Narratives

Edited by

Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion and Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva

Ethics and Poetics: Ethical Recognitions and Social Reconfigurations in Modern Narratives,

Edited by Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion and Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva

This book first published 2014

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2014 by Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion, Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-5641-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5641-6

CHAPTER FOUR

ASHAMED OF WHO I AM: LEVINAS AND DIASPORIC SUBJECTIVITY

IN SALMAN RUSHDIE’S SHAME

ZLATAN FILIPOVIC In shame, the subject thus has no other content than its own desubjectification; it becomes witness to its own disorder, its own oblivion as a subject. —Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz

Everything is torn from the past. —Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind

“SHAME,” writes Emmanuel Levinas, “is, in the last analysis, an existence that seeks excuses” (On Escape 65). While not being the pivot of his later writing, shame seems to be a conceptual knot that in fact underlies the articulation of subjectivity in Levinas as being infinitely responsible to the other.1 Already in one of his earliest attempts to define the ontological terms and break away from what he saw as the horror of being that attaches to our existence like an enchainment, Levinas mentions shame as one of the ontological affects that reveals both our impossibility of escaping the absolute fact of being and the exigency of our need for escape.2 For Levinas, shame is an affective experience distinguished from what he sees as purely moral concerns and what is its fundamentally social aspect.3 The lived experience of shame that affects the subject, who in shame is cornered and without recourse, is part of the ontological makeup that manifests the very fact of being for Levinas or, in Rolland’s more unforgiving terms, “the fatality of being-riveted to that which one cannot desert” (75). It is the very brutality of the fact that we are attached to an existence we cannot escape that the experience of shame makes manifest for

Chapter Four

82

Levinas. In shame, in other words, we wish we were otherwise than being while, at the same time, we are painfully consigned to the impossibility of being otherwise.

Even if On Escape, where all these concerns are most explicitly articulated, is one of his earliest works, first published in 1935, it provides a phenomenological backdrop for all the ethical concerns Levinas will come to develop in his more mature writing. The fundamental malaise of being is given here in terms of nausea, shame and pleasure, tracing all along the difficult, even impossible, relief of our need to escape the claustrophobic ontological embrace of being to which we are riveted. Escape, says Levinas, is “the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the self [moi] is onself [soi-même]” (On Escape 55, emphasis in the original).

Although being an affect of ambivalence, as we shall see, shame is often seen as socially and politically disabling. In the context of postcolonial and subaltern subjectivities, shame becomes the only proper response that validates the colonial identity and the presupposed metropolitan privilege of the Western value systems. For Fanon, the transformation of subjectivity from the agency of the subject to the objectified other constitutes the very encounter with the colonial gaze, and the only way to recover a sense of dignity and belief in the cultural identity of the colonised, according to Fanon, is through liberating, remissive violence.4 In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir associates shame with sexual difference and the exposure of the oppressed female body. Woman’s shame is lived as the social alienation of the female body to which she is nevertheless inescapably bound.5 For Agamben, on the other hand, shame is the instance of the emergence of the subject in the act of de-subjectification. In Agamben’s phenomenological register, shame reveals us to ourselves. One is both subjected to the gaze and is a sovereign subject cognizant of one’s being manifested, seeing oneself, at the same time.6

Shame is thus often seen as a negative affect. To feel ashamed is to feel degraded and invalidated as a subject. In shame, one’s integrity, what holds one together, is threatened and viscerally undone. The torsion of abjection shatters the subject’s defences leaving nothing but the exposed body to react. One feels defenceless, as only when all defences are breeched does one involuntarily blush, like a twitch of a

Ashamed of Who I Am

83

nerve one is helpless to hide. Hence, the need to “cover oneself” (from P. Gmc. skem- or kem- “to cover”) that “shame” derives from, but also the burning need to escape one’s predicament of being cornered in one’s very skin that by blushing reveals the impossibility of escaping without blame. Shame is a passionate care for one’s own loss of integrity, which is why it is usually seen as politically and ethically disempowering. The state of abjection that encircles the subject disables any agency and compounds the experience of marginalisation and exclusion. In shame our vulnerability and our imperfections are all flashed out and our nakedness is exposed. To be ashamed is to have no recourse. It is to be turned inside out, subject become matter, and worse yet, because matter does not feel.

The early phenomenological analyses of shame in Levinas seem to testify to the most exigent need to restore the integrity of the subject that has been put in question. While exposing thus the vulnerability of human subjectivity, which, Levinas says elsewhere, is “more passive than matter by [the very fact of] its vulnerability, its sensibility” (Collected Philosophical Papers 147), shame also exposes the paramount need to hide it by covering oneself in order to re-establish the mastery of the ego which cannot be assumed. This is why one is ill at ease in one’s own skin that one would shed but is fatally destined to endure. As such, shame reveals our subjectivity as timidity itself that is naked and impoverished, open to scrutiny and hurt. Following Levinas,

[s]hame arises each time we are unable to make others forget [faire oublier] our basic nudity. It is related to everything we would like to hide and that we cannot bury or cover up. The timid man who is all arms and legs is ultimately incapable of covering the nakedness of his physical presence with his moral person. Poverty is not a vice, but it is shameful because, like the beggar’s rags, it shows up the nakedness of an existence incapable of hiding itself. (On Escape 64)

Shame is thus an affect sustained by a conflict whereby the ego is

burdened by its own visibility or presence to itself that it strains powerlessly to escape. However, like poverty itself, the ego in shame is crippled and stripped of its prerogatives, open to blows and scorn it can no longer evade, which only exacerbates the pathos of its predicament.

Chapter Four

84

But this extreme vulnerability, this exposure to others, is precisely what constitutes intersubjectivity in later Levinas and the possibility of ethical relation. Shame is fundamentally relational. It requires the presence of an other, a witness before and for whom one is laid bare. For all the intimacy of experience that Levinas claims for shame in its distinction from social concerns, shame is nevertheless symptomatic of a certain insolvency of responsibility which we have failed to assume and which now reveals us as irredeemable. In the experience of shame, Levinas suggests, we are left without the possibility of escape, but this also means that shame reveals us as the irremissible captives of our responsibility. Levinas’s notion of shame thus seems to reveal the originary openness to others as the fundamental structure of subjectivity and it is this ascendancy from the intimacy of experience of shame to its social and political significance that we will try to solicit in our reading of Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame.

The ethical implications of shame in Levinas are fully developed in his more recent writing in the movement of what he now calls “bad conscience”9 that is associated with the same powerless “nonintentionality” of consciousness that no longer objectifies or thematises the world and the “nakedness” that in On Escape constitutes subjectivity laid bare in shame. “Bad conscience,” says Levinas, is “without intentions, without aims, without the protective mask of the character contemplating himself in the mirror of the world, self-assured and affirming himself.” It is “[w]ithout name, position, or titles. A presence that fears presence, stripped bare of all attributes. A nakedness that is not that of unveiling or the exposure of truth” (Entre Nous 129). And, for Levinas, the subject first comes to itself in the movement of “bad conscience” or accusation. The “I” is not an “I” that asserts itself in freedom, but a “Here I am,” he says, “for you” alone, thus already constituting itself as a response to the call of the other.10 The subject is not an “Ego” or an agent acting upon the world in order to appropriate it according to its needs, but a “me,” an object in the accusative, already responsible and under obligation, “answering for everything and for everyone” (Otherwise than Being 114). The presence of the other person, the unabated pathos of his need and vulnerability, reveals me both to my own shame and to self-effacement for the very indiscretion of my own presence, of my being-there:

Ashamed of Who I Am

85

My “being in the world” or my “place in the sun,” my home—are they not a usurpation of places that belong to the other man who has already been oppressed or starved by me? Let us quote Pascal again: “This is my place in the sun.” Here is the beginning and the prototype of the usurpation of the whole earth. (Levinas, Entre Nous 130) It is the other’s vulnerability, their mortality, that exposes the

injustice of my selfish will for which I am ashamed. That “[m]orality,” as Levinas writes, “begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent” (Totality and Infinity 84), suggests the presence of shame as the very structure and possibility of ethical consciousness.

The complex experience of shame that in Levinas seems essential to subjectivity in its encounter with others will constitute a phenomenological and affective grid of this chapter, enabling us to consider how this might inform our understanding of diasporic identity in Rushdie’s novel Shame. The unresolved affective drama of the displaced subject in Rushdie’s novel is often given in self-conscious, metafictional parabases that expose a deeply troubled, split subjectivity unable to assume responsibility for its own past. The experience of shame, arising from the aporia of the subject’s inability to assume what it cannot abandon, and which further defines the affective landscape of diasporic experience, is reflected both structurally in the novel’s inability to master its own narrative and thematically in a politically conscious aesthetic of magic realism. It is the shamelessness of political power in Pakistan that becomes the target of Rushdie’s incisive critique. The critique is embodied in the character of Sufiya Zinobia, who, having suffered a brain fever at the age of two and the torment of chronic blushing, comes to expiate for the unfelt shame of her father, representing the political élite of a traumatised country, and is eventually taken over by the fiery and ravenous beast of shame feeding on the world that has none. It is the unfelt presence of shame, in other words, that in Rushdie’s eponymous novel seems to prevent truly ethical experience.

Shame of Hybridity

Shame in the context of cross-cultural and displaced identities Rushdie unravels in his work may be symptomatic of a more

Chapter Four

86

fundamental vulnerability of subjectivity that is exposed to the contradictory demands of being assigned to what one no longer identifies with, which, for Levinas in On Escape, constitutes “shame’s whole intensity” and everything in it “that stings us” (63). The process of self-identification and access to meaning in a diasporic, hybrid or displaced identity, that the narrator of the novel reveals in his narrative incursions, is constantly compromised and pulled apart by the gravitational forces of opposing cultural values. Shame, in this case, is not only felt as inferiority in the face of the metropolitan discourse that one can only mimic but also, and crucially, in the face of one’s inability to appropriate, maintain or recover the historical and cultural heritage supposedly one’s own. The familiar world grows just as alien and reflects back, with the same venom, one’s own shame. What I am suggesting, in other words, is that shame is a dominant sentiment that informs and shapes the experience of the displaced subject on all sides, and Rushdie’s novel bears the signs of this displacement and of its often traumatic transformations.

In Shame, the intrusive narrator, a mohajir7 who, like Rushdie, sees himself as “a bastard child of history,”8 is frequently at pains to excuse his bankrupt sense of belonging and justify his loss of “gravity” to the countrymen who see him as a “trespasser” and an “outsider” (28), someone who has forfeited his right to the history of Pakistan. Visiting an old friend after his arrival in Karachi, the narrator, in one of his politically charged digressions from the fictive events in the story, is impatient to discuss the social upheavals in Pakistan following the military coup staged by General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq in 1977 and the subsequent execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979. The narrator is suddenly halted in his queries due to the likely presence of “informers,” feeling the interrogating gaze of others that prompts self-examination and an attempt at justification:

Outsider! Trespasser! You have no right to this subject! . . . I know nobody ever arrested me. Nor are they ever likely to. Poacher! Pirate! We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign language wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about us in your forked tongue, what can you tell but lies? I reply with more questions: is history to be considered the property of the participants solely? In what courts are such claims staked, what boundary commissions map out the territories?

Can only the dead speak? (28, emphasis in the original)

Ashamed of Who I Am

87

The narrator is already surreptitiously addressing his defence in the face of incriminating eyes, indicative of a miscarried identity he can no longer assume, metaphorically represented by a flag whose allegiance he has betrayed. Although identity spills over national borders which cannot contain it, nationality still remains its primary trope and the difficulty of distinguishing between the two is nowhere more visceral than in the experience of the culturally displaced subject where both the possibility of revealing the constructed nature of identity in terms of its national belonging and the impossibility of looking beyond it are equally present. It is, in fact, in the process of deconstruction of identity, exposing national belonging as an arbitrary assignation, that the impossibility of relinquishing its claim on the displaced subject becomes apparent, which is precisely what produces the affective torsion that tears the subject apart. One is here not guilty for what one has done, but rather ashamed for what one is. Rushdie, throughout the novel, is aware of the diasporic conscience being claimed and constantly pulled back by “the elastic bands” of history one reveals as arbitrary but is helpless to leave behind. The narrator, whose distinction from the author becomes increasingly attenuated, is thus faced with the impossibility of “leavetaking” that the writing of this novel should afford:

I tell myself, this will be a novel of leavetaking, my last words on the East from which, many years ago, I began to come loose. I do not always believe myself when I say this. It is a part of the world to which, whether I like it or not, I am still joined, if only by elastic bands. (28) The social and political grid where hybrid and diasporic identities

are formed and negotiated, as Homi Bhabha suggests, leads to the articulation of “the Third Space of enunciation,” where hybridity “carries the [whole] burden of the meaning of culture,” which, contrary to the onto-ethnic demands of totalising cultural binarism and identity politics, is inherently heterogeneous, dialogic and ambivalent, “the in-between space” that appropriates Derrida’s notion of différance or trace,9 as being both a part of each opposite but which also does not quite belong to either, which remains a-part. “And by exploring this Third Space,” Bhabha writes, “we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves” (56). As shame in diasporic

Chapter Four

88

identity implies severely fractured subjectivity with often contradictory cultural claims decentring the subject and the concomitant affective experience of shame, hybridity, that in Bhabha conspires against the ethnocentric closures of identity, does not alleviate the indiscretion of subjectivity. Shame does not disappear in Bhabha’s notion of “the Third Space” where cultural hegemonies are renegotiated. The mythical notion of home, of “roots,” as the narrator in Shame suggests, is still the “gravity” of one’s being, even if the narrator is aware that “roots” are nothing but “a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places” (86). There is still the psychological crisis, almost a pathology, a defensiveness and shame for having “come loose” from one’s ties, for having forfeited one’s belonging, one’s “gravity,” one’s “roots” and one’s language in a diasporic identity. In his collection of essays, Imaginary Homelands, looking at a photograph of his childhood home in his study, Rushdie writes:

“The past is a foreign country,” goes the famous opening sentence of L. P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between, “they do things differently there.” But the photograph tells me to invert this idea; it reminds me that it’s my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time. (9) The trace of cultural difference that constitutes the hybrid subject

is impossible to sublimate—it is often in one’s skin—and it is this trace of quasi-belonging, of being a part while remaining apart, that fractures the subject unable to take root and fix identity, and, in this case, the novel itself. Through its metafictive techniques, non-linear narrative, disrupted chronology and invasive authorial digressions, the novel formally reflects the fragmented worlds of diasporic perception. Hybridity, in other words, still carries the wound of displacement and uprooting and may even be seen as a subterfuge of a split subjectivity to consolidate itself anew. The novel’s magic realism, introducing plural and alternate visions of reality, relying on myth and miracle rather than the logic of exposition and justification which distinguishes the positivistic thought of Western discourse, and the formal hybridity of composition in general that distinguishes the novel both reflect the fragmentation of the displaced subject writing it. The fact that the distinction between the narrator and the author of the novel becomes problematic, if not impossible to make, is certainly

Ashamed of Who I Am

89

part of Rushdie’s strategy to collude fiction and reality in order to question it. The reader is, indeed, often thrown off his guard by a change in discourse when a historical account is introduced that seems to make us question the objective domain of history and its strictly policed borders against fiction. However, more importantly, the author’s intrusive presence in the novel also seems to reinforce his need to expiate for the lost “gravity” of his own compromised identity:

I, too, know something of this immigrant business. I am an emigrant from one country (India) and a newcomer in two (England, where I live, and Pakistan, to which my family moved against my will). And I have a theory that the resentments we mohajirs engender have something to do with our conquest of the force of gravity. We have performed the act of which all men anciently dream, the thing for which they envy the birds; that is to say, we have flown.

I am comparing gravity with belonging. Both phenomena observably exist: my feet stay on the ground, and I have never been angrier than on the day my father told me he had sold my childhood home in Bombay. But neither is understood. We know the force of gravity, but not its origins; and to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths spouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places. (1995, 85–86)

The author’s shame, manifested in his being riveted to the past he

can no longer assume, usually takes the form of a subterfuge in a postmodern revelation of uncertainty that questions the binaries and leaves them empty of their signifying weight, as the case is here, where the notion of “roots,” always charged with significant emotional investment in a diasporic identity, is revealed as a mere metaphor with no referential weight to back it up. But the uncertainty that Rushdie teases out belies a subjectivity cornered by shame from both sides of the cultural divide and looking for exits. The fact that a migrant is the location and origin of culture becomes a ruse that validates the bankruptcy of the subject’s cultural integrity in the face of what now becomes an accusing, vindictive and prejudiced gaze of one’s own countrymen who “don’t know any better.” Like all migrants, and in spite of his persistent attempts at their disavowal, Rushdie has not

Chapter Four

90

been able to shake off the idea of roots and identity which is also why the exigent need to denounce them is manifested in the frequent loss of authorial control whenever the story in Shame is interrupted by an intrusion of his own uncensored views on the history of Pakistan:

May I interpose a few words here on the subject of the Islamic revival? It won’t take long. . . . So-called Islamic “fundamentalism” does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people. It is imposed on them from above. Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith, because people respect that language, are reluctant to oppose it. This is how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked.

But the ramming-down-the-throat point stands. In the end you get sick of it, you lose faith in the faith, if not qua faith then certainly as the basis for a state. And then the dictator falls, and it is discovered that he has brought God down with him, that the justifying myth of the nation has been unmade. This leaves only two options: disintegration, or a new dictatorship . . . no, there is a third, and I shall not be so pessimistic as to deny its possibility. The third option is the substitution of a new myth for the old one. Here are three such myths, all available from stock at short notice: liberty, equality; fraternity. I recommend them highly. (250–51, emphasis added)

If shame, as Levinas says, is “an existence that seeks excuses,”

Rushdie’s novel does not only unravel the vicissitudes of shame thematically, to which we will come back later, but also reveals an author burdened by disparate cross-cultural fidelities he is persistently trying to redress. What makes up a nation here is once again demystified as a “myth,” equally fallacious as any other myths that would come to replace it. The mythogeny of body, birth, origin, nation, faith and all the other tropological reinscriptions of pure community are, for Rushdie, only quasi-political closures of identity that produce fixed semantic economies of meaning. Hybridity is what cannot be accounted for by these economies insofar as it is what constitutes both the surplus of being more than pure and the shortfall of being less so at the same time. Hybridity, in fact, intervenes in received historical representations of identity and reactivates undecidability upon which they are established in the first place, reminding us of a fundamental contingency of who we are. However,

Ashamed of Who I Am

91

what does not end is the political and ideological reinscription of hybridity in recognizable systems of meaning that reject it as secondary and deficient. “[T]here are times,” says Rushdie in Imaginary Homelands,

when we seem, to ourselves, post-lapsarian men and women. We are Hindus who have crossed the black water; we are Muslims who eat pork. And as a result—as my use of the Christian notion of the Fall indicates—we are now partly of the West. Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy. If literature is in part the business of finding new angles at which to enter reality, then once again our distance, our long geographical perspective, may provide us with such angles. Or it may be that that is simply what we must think in order to do our work. (15–16)

Hybrid identity is both “partial” and “plural” at the same time,

partial because the world that used to tether it is lost “in a lost city in the mists of lost time,” plural because it is never completely lost but cuts across subjectivity and divides any perception of the present. Shame in the diasporic subject is the trace of this division, of being partial and plural at once, of the impossibility of being one and the same. As Rushdie suggests, the fall of humanity is allegorically figured in the displaced subject who has lost the “true” idiom of his identity, who no longer signifies the immediate presence of his cultural difference and is now exposed to the unforgiving gaze of those who assume its full expression. According to Levinas, shame is an exposure related to our failure to hide that which reveals our absolute vulnerability, it “is related to everything we would like to hide and that we cannot bury or cover up” (On Escape 64). The first experience of the postlapsarian subject is the shame of his exposure before God, the shame of nakedness that was not present before the Fall and that symbolically represents our entrance into the world. It is this experience of shame that signals our humanity that Rushdie explicitly associates with hybridity.

The narrator/author of Shame also testifies to the pathos of the hybrid condition that is present in Rushdie beyond the surface appeals of postmodern eclecticisms and that belies the somewhat naïve

Chapter Four

92

triumphs of enlightened liberalism and ambivalence prevalent in his work. This is not to suggest that there is any recuperation of lost subjectivity at work in Rushdie that would reentrench the binarisms and the exotic charisma of authenticity that has become the neoliberal mainstay of cultural difference; what it does suggest is the affective experience of fragmentation that is not assimilative to experience but that conditions experience itself. Migrancy flags up not only the failure of cultural appropriation to stabilize itself on the reassurance of its binary structures but also, and at the same time, the fact of its irremissible triumph. Migrancy reveals both the absolute failure of identity in the affective experience and its absolutely overbearing ascendancy in the grip of which one’s need to reappropriate it continues unabated. And it is not “the land” the migrant needs to reclaim but the very “emptiness” that constitutes “one’s luggage,” the empty suitcases of one’s identity filled to the brim with stock representations of a collective history that homogenize cultural identity:

When individuals come unstuck from their native land, they are called migrants. When nations do the same (Bangladesh), the act is called secession. What is the best thing about migrant peoples and seceded nations? I think it is their hopefulness. Look into the eyes of such folk in old photographs. Hope blazes undimmed through the fading sepia tints. And what's the worst thing? It is the emptiness of one’s luggage. I’m speaking of invisible suitcases, not the physical, perhaps cardboard, variety containing a few meaning-drained mementoes: we have come unstuck from more than land. We have floated upwards from history from memory, from Time. (Shame 86–87)

Apart from hope that only devastation and hopelessness can give

rise to, there is also the preponderance of what has now become the mythologised memory of collective identity harboured in the displaced subject as the authority that confers identity to which one is no longer entitled, which also leads to the fetishisation of the past in the diasporic experience. Shame with the crushing force of an entire nation and its history is nested precisely in this impossibility of one’s representing it, indeed, of being unable, as Levinas writes, “not to identify with this being who is already foreign” (On Escape 63). However, memory, as Bhabha suggests, and “the guise of pastness” that weigh heavily on the narrator/author in Shame are “not necessarily a

Ashamed of Who I Am

93

faithful sign of historical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the artifice of the archaic” (52). In other words, the social and political constructs of the past that totalise cultural identity by romantic and aesthetic investments in the pathos of cultural history legitimize the consolidation of identity around the delusions of homogeneity and sameness. But “the migrant” is complicit in this process rather than merely victimised by it: “As for me,” the narrator/author confesses,

I, too, like all migrants, am a fantasist. I build imaginary countries and try to impose them on the ones that exist. I, too, face the problem of history: what to retain, what to dump, how to hold on to what memory insists on relinquishing, how to deal with change. (Shame 87–88)

The “artifice of the archaic” is performative in both senses of the

word: insofar as it is an artifice, it is a performance of identity with all the accoutrements, trappings and the ventriloquy of cultural symbolism that supplements the arche-aic; however, it is also performative as identity is articulated in “the archaic” alone, which enables totalisation and the exclusionary structures of binarism. The demand of cultural identity, couched in terms of exoticisms and the urgings of the past is, nevertheless, imperious and devolves on the displaced subject as a responsibility one can no longer assume. Shame in diasporic identity only emerges against the depths of exorbitant responsibility for one’s past one no longer identifies with and yet is irremissibly riveted to. This past clings to one like a skin no longer one’s own and is reflected in the eyes of all those who still share its visible scars, welts and burns that no history can sublate into meaningful narratives, whose comfort in humanity has been rent by colonial oppression, by gunfire, famine, social and political upheavals and atrocities that traumatise historical progress. It is to the other’s pain and vulnerability that one responds with the absolute inadequacy of one’s own, and shame then emerges as a testimony to one’s own selfishness but, also, and at the same time, as one’s own expiation. Shame, in this case, is a provocation of history, and it emerges in the presence of those whose suffering represents it. The narrator/author in Shame is unable to give up “the ‘roots’ idea” (88), even after its deconstruction, precisely due to the

Chapter Four

94

impossibility of evading the assignation of responsibility that this suffering signifies:

And to come back to the “roots” idea, I should say that I haven’t managed to shake myself free of it completely. Sometimes I do see myself as a tree . . . . My story's palimpsest-country has, I repeat, no name of its own. The exiled Czech writer Kundera once wrote: “A name means continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name.” But I am dealing with a past that refuses to be suppressed, that is daily doing battle with the present; so it is perhaps unduly harsh of me to deny my fairyland a title. (88, emphasis added) He is, Levinas would suggest, held hostage by the vulnerability of

the other10 whom subjectivity cannot excuse without shame. The narrator/author is held accountable as if despite himself, despite his knowing otherwise; but, responsibility is not knowledge, and the discrepancy between the two orders, ethical and epistemological, is what produces shame. The manifestation of shame only bears witness to the originality of ethics, its originary claim on subjectivity that precedes knowledge, and to the responsibility for the other one is unable to evade without fault. It is here represented by the claim of “roots” and of history that “refuses to be suppressed,” or rather by all those who constitute it and whose painful sacrifices demand that I acknowledge it as mine. The narrator/author has indeed, as Levinas writes regarding subjectivity conceived as being hostage, “not done anything” and yet has “always been under accusation—persecuted” (Collected Philosophical Papers 114). This also implies that shame is a sentiment whose basic structure of being exposed to others testifies to our originary relatedness and compassion. Shame reveals our inability to escape our own predicament and is provoked by the proximity or presence of an other whose gaze places us in question and demands that we justify ourselves.

The name the narrator/author ascribes to the “fairyland” where his “modern fairy-tale” (Shame 70) takes place is, in the end, Pakistan or rather his cracked “looking-glass Pakistan” (88), revealing to the country, willing to take a look at its own image, the shameless nature of its modern history. Shame does not only belie the narrator’s ambivalent relation to his own cultural history; it is also the absence of shame in the recent history of Pakistan that the novel expiates for.

Ashamed of Who I Am

95

This expiation is allegorically represented through the dialectic of shame, embodied in the character of Sufiya Zinobia, and shamelessness, which finds its most acute expression in Omar Khayyam, who is eventually consumed in the symbolic flames of shame in order to enable what could be seen as a promise of a political renewal. Rushdie is thus writing a book intended to blush for his country’s inability to do so. Indeed, the political hysteria that haunts the order and the structure of the narrative closely mirrors the events that haunt the order and the structure of power in the recent history of modern Pakistan. Pakistan's trying past, the political crisis dividing it, the liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971, the pursuit of fundamentalism and militancy and the callous cynicism of political rivals vying for power are all conspicuously present and, like Rushdie’s voice, too imposing to be incidental. General Zia’s military accession to power in 1977, veiled under the deliberately cracked veneer of fiction, is unequivocally represented in the novel by General Raza Hyder’s military coup d’état and his deposition and eventual incarceration; also, the execution of Iskander Harappa, a political rival whose allegiances and the fictional destiny he is consigned to, have strong resonances with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s tragic death in 1979 and the political duplicity of the events preceding it. Rushdie’s Shame emerges as a self-conscious challenge to the dominant political and historical rhetoric and its flattening of national affect by suppressing the historical stresses that would question the integrity of the national consciousness in order to consolidate collective cultural identity. What is history and what fiction, in terms of Shame, becomes a question eminently worth raising, as the boundary keeping the two apart is under constant elision. Rushdie is opening history itself to the shadows of its unwritten records that can destabilise its present by making it blush.

Like all postmodern authors, Rushdie complicates the regimes of storytelling and narrative conventions. His warning, already at the outset, that “ends must not be permitted to precede beginnings and middles,” that “effects [must not] precede their causes,” that one should not mess with the order of things, with the narrative timeline and the chronology of events, because that is “where madness lies!” (22), is instantly followed by a paragraph that shatters our illusion of linearity. The events that were to unfold later—in fact, the last,

Chapter Four

96

agonizing scene of the novel, where the principal character Sufiya Zinobia is consumed in flames—are introduced, countering the effect of time in what appears as a reckless disregard of his own admonitions. Indeed, the narrator/author is constantly preempting the story, trying our patience and revealing the fractured timeline or rather our inability to master it. The narrative goes against the grain of its own progression and becomes disorderly, taking place precisely “where the madness lies,” reflecting the fragmented experience of the present that constitutes the diasporic subjectivity by tearing it apart. The future becomes obstinately invasive, borne by the past and constantly haunting the present: “But I have been out of doors for quite long enough now,” says the narrator/author, realizing his inability to master the text he is writing, “and must get my narrative out of the sun before it is afflicted by mirages or heat-stroke. — Afterwards, at the other end of his [Omar Khayyam’s] life (it seems that the future cannot be restrained, and insists on seeping back into the past), when he got his name into all the papers over the scandal of the headless murders . . .” (24). Having further already told us about the fate of Iskander Harappa in advance and his secretly staged hanging by General Raza Hyder, and the eighteen shawls of detailed bloodshed and corruption his wife Rani Harappa had woven about Iskander—resonating strongly with just as uncompromising political critique of Bhutto’s hypocrisy—the narrator/author once again reminds us that it is “[t]ime to turn back the clock . . .” (196). Our expectations of how the story should unfold are constantly frustrated, as he then continues to relate the story of Iskander before his death two chapters later: “Back goes the clock once again. It was election day and there were many fires. Raza Hyder pouring ashes from the window of a moving car. Isky Harappa unaware of the death-cells of the future” (231).

However, the structural contradictions in the fabric of the narrative that create cognitive ruptures in the reading experience and reveal our powerless attempts to master the text, to be done with it, do not only represent Rushdie’s aesthetic assault on literary conventions but also mirror the affective contradictions in a diasporic identity unable to master the narrative of its own history. The impossibility of ordered narrative reflects the affective experience of fragmentation that conditions the experience of time itself insofar as

Ashamed of Who I Am

97

the narrator/author cannot stabilize the present due to the excess or surplus of the past that remains unassimilable. It is as if the continuity of history that constitutes the integrity of experience has been violently rent and can no longer be homogenized to unify the subject. In other words, the structural hybridity of the text reflects the hybridity of split subjectivity owing itself to the past it no longer retains as its own. This is “where the madness lies!” Indeed, this is the madness that Western reason, with its positivistic confidence in empirically knowable truths, structures itself against. The temporal effect that here produces shame implies also the impossibility of reason to master it and be rid of it in a remissive closure that would consolidate the subject by integrating experience. However, diasporic identity is ripped open by the excessive tug of time that runs backward while progressing forward; this produces the very disquiet of being, in Levinasian terms, that is no longer able to close in upon itself and posit itself as a subject. This is identity articulated as the beating of the Other-within-the-Same. Shame thus articulates the very structure of ethical relation that deposes the subject from its sovereignty and opens it to the demand that can never be satisfied: the demand of ethics and responsibility.

Shame of a Nation

Under the guise of fiction and irony, Rushdie’s novel, published only a few years after Bhutto’s trial and his subsequent execution, becomes a politically charged exposé where the duplicity and the inequities of power relations that have shaped the recent history of Pakistan are revealed in the “looking glass” of magic realism. Perhaps “the truth” suppressed by the regime of power requires the charms of “magic” rather than the pragmatics of reason to coax it back up. The truth of Iskander Harappa’s political ambitions, whose “greatness overpowered Time itself,” who ushered in “a new century” “ahead of Time” (Rushdie 1992, 186), and, by way of metaphoric displacement, of Bhutto’s prominence in the political arena of Pakistan, is indeed revealed in a narrative torsion of magic realism. Rani Harappa’s “epitaph of wool,” residing in “eighteen shawls of memory” entitled “The Shamelessness of Iskander the Great” (191), intricately weaves “in silver-threaded whispers” (192) the motifs of debauchery,

Chapter Four

98

corruption, political conspiracy, suppression and torture of dissidents, the inauguration of nuclear deterrence programs, malfeasance in office, election fraud and the allegorical representation of the “Death of Democracy,” depicting Iskander/Bhutto

squeezing Democracy’s gullet, while her eyes bulged, her face turned blue, her tongue protruded . . . her hands became hooks trying to grab the wind, and Iskander with his eyes shut squeezed and squeezed, while the Generals . . . Americans and Russians in baggy suits and even the great Zedong himself, they all watched . . . Iskander the assassin of possibility, immortalised on a cloth, on which she, the artist [Rani Harappa], had depicted his victim as a young girl, small, physically frail, internally damaged: she had taken for her model her memory of an idiot, and consequently innocent, child, Sufiya Zinobia Hyder (now Shakil), gasping and empurpled in Iskander’s unyielding fist. (194) “Fortunately, however,” says the narrator/author, “I am only

telling a sort of modern fairy-tale, so that’s all right; nobody need get upset, or take anything I say too seriously. No drastic action need be taken, either. What a relief!” (70). Rushdie’s shame for a history of corruption and for a humanity beaten and hijacked by political self-interest, that has bled the country dry not only of the possibility to retain political integrity but of its capacity to blush, is articulated in the novel as a violent, expiatory hostility represented by the inexplicable crimes that “shame’s avatar” (219), Sufiya Zinobia Hyder, carries out in her sleep. In her somnambulism, Sufiya becomes

a tide rising towards flood, [as] she feels something coming, roaring, feels it take her, the thing, the flood . . . the Beast bursting forth to wreak its havoc on the world, and after that she knows nothing, will remember nothing, because it, the thing, is free. (219) Male bodies are found with their heads “wrenched off their necks

by some colossal force: literally torn from their shoulders” (216) and never recovered. The irrepressible shame no one feels in this “fictional country” that “is not Pakistan, or not quite” and that exists, like the author himself in it, “at a slight angle to reality,” (29) is condensed in Sufiya and it bursts, “[s]welling slowly, feeding on inadequacy, guilt, shame, bloating towards the surface” (218), during the night; then, the

Ashamed of Who I Am

99

repressive mechanisms, still at work, metaphorically and metonymically cushioning the affect to abolish the need to cope with it, are relaxed in what then becomes an expiatory release of shame that purifies the country through immolation. The fact that the victims of shame remain faceless again implies that the capacity to blush is lost altogether as well as the face that for Levinas signifies the very possibility of ethical relation.11

The novel’s concern with shame is thus powered by the explicit lack of shame. As suggested before, the unfelt shame of the political power that constitutes the torn fabric of the narrative comes to be embodied in Sufiya who haunts the imagination of the local population as the remnant of shame they are no longer capable of experiencing. And what distinguishes her from the outset is her excessive propensity to blush. Her father, General Raza Hyder, expecting a triumphant reincarnation of his stillborn son and heir is crushed by the unanticipated birth of “the wrong miracle”:

The heroine of our story, the wrong miracle, Sufiya Zinobia, was as small a baby as anyone had ever seen. . . . Raza Hyder raging roaring. . . . the future President was trying to affect biology by a superhuman act of will . . . . [but there was] no possibility of error. . . . Matter of sex is beyond dispute. . . . But what father would allow his son, twice-conceived, to be executed thus, without a fight? Raza tore away swaddling cloth; having penetrated to the baby within, he jabbed at its nether zones: “There! I ask you, sir, what is that? . . . Is it not, doctor, an absolute and unquestionable bump?”

And at this point . . . when her parents had to admit the immutability of her gender, to submit, as faith demands, to God; at this very instant the extremely new and soporific being in Raza’s arms began—it’s true!—to blush.

O rubescent Sufiya Zinobia! . . . the baby blushed at birth. Then, even then, she was too easily ashamed. (89–90)

Blushing at birth because of the sunk prospects of her father’s

prejudice, she eventually internalizes the prejudice in the expression of shame that is here ontological, pertaining to being and the fatality of being what she cannot help, and becomes the incarnation of her father’s absent shame. However, considering the close analogies and the historiographic collusion of fiction and reality that the novel testifies to, Sufiya also blushes for the inequities and the bigotry of the

Chapter Four

100

political power structure that her father comes to embody “at a slight angle to reality.” The Beast that consumes Sufiya is the literal embodiment of shame. The metaphor, in other words, is literalized as in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Magic realism, which allows for literalization of metaphors, is here also a narrative technique used by the narrator/author to externalise his own shame in relation to the cultural identity irremissibly his and yet no longer one he can assume. Sufiya, at her most destructive, thus also becomes a liberating relay for a diasporic subject caught in an impasse or a double bind of irreconcilable demands. However, Sufiya is not a martyr but a beast of a martyr’s burden. She is not consumed by shame in self-immolation to expiate for the shamelessness of others because shame here seeks retribution; it is shame that does not want to blush any more but “wreak its havoc” upon the world that denies it. If shame is a revolutionary sentiment, as Marx suggests, “a kind of anger turned inward,”12 then Sufiya is the pathological embodiment of its spirit both internally and externally. In other words, Sufiya represents an affective curse of shame that persecutes the nation because it has none and the real, physical purging of its power structure to enable political rebirth. Indeed, Omar Khayyam, who is the dialectic counterpart of Sufiya, insofar as he was raised not to “feel the forbidden emotion of shame” (38), and, who, “having been barred from feeling shame . . . at an early age, continued to be affected by that remarkable ban throughout his later years” (39), is himself finally defaced by Shame:

She saw him and shuddered; then she rose up on her hind legs with her forepaws outstretched and he had just enough time to say, “Well, wife, so here you are at last,” before his eyes forced him to look.

He struggled against their hypnotic power, their gravitational pull, but it was no use, his eyes lifted, until he was staring into the fiery yellow heart of her . . . and as he stood before her, unable to move, her hands, his wife’s hands, reached out to him and closed.

His body was falling away from her, a headless drunk, and after that the Beast faded in her once again, she stood there blinking stupidly, unsteady on her feet, as if she didn’t know that all stories had to end together, that the fire was just gathering its strength . . . and that the power of the Beast of shame cannot be held for long within any one frame of flesh and blood, because it grows, it feeds and swells, until the vessel bursts. (286)

Ashamed of Who I Am

101

In the extended metaphor of a Hegelian dialectic, Shame and Shamelessness are thus inexorably brought together and both consumed in the fires of historical progress, vanishing on the horizon of time in the final scene of the novel. It is as if under the veneer of postmodern skepticism towards historical and epistemological foundations, the novel still harbours the possibility of political and social rebirth represented by the Shelleyan image of the Phantom arising from the “graves” of injustice,13 bidding farewell and announcing the promise of a new but ambiguous dawn, the narrator/author cannot clearly distinguish:

And then the explosion comes, a shock-wave that demolishes the house, and after it the fireball of her [Sufiya’s] burning, rolling outwards to the horizon like the sea, and last of all the cloud, which rises and spreads and hangs over the nothingness of the scene, until I can no longer see what is no longer there; the silent cloud, in the shape of a giant, grey and headless man, a figure of dreams, a phantom with one arm lifted in a gesture of farewell. (286) This dialectic, after all, as the narrator/author suggests, is the

controlling structure of the novel: “Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn,” he says, and the “meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence” (115–16). However, the Phantom is “headless” and the future uncertain, intestate and hopeless to divine.

Shame is written as the symbolic neurosis of a nation both redressing its political and social ills and testifying to its own inability to do so. To the extent that shame is represented as enabling political agency and a critical reassessment of the recent history of Pakistan, it establishes the potency and even the responsibility of fiction to deconstruct the realities of power by making them visible, open to critique and rescindability. It is far from incidental that “democracy,” in Rani Harappa’s allegorical representation of its demise, is modelled “on an idiot, and consequently innocent, child, Sufiya Zinobia” (194). The shawl symbolises a nation in its death throes as soon as shame is sacrificed on the altars of power. In her innocence and her frailty, Sufiya is the mirror of our (in)humanity in Levinas’s terms. Her very vulnerability is what overpowers the ethical subject precisely because it

Chapter Four

102

is the exposure and mortality of others that in Levinas give rise to ethical obligation.14 Seen in these terms, the novel unravels our inhumanity. However, Sufiya also reproduces the violence of the political regime she herself has suffered, re-establishing thus the frenzied circularity of Hegelian thought and, perhaps, the hopelessness of political awakening.

In the end, the affective experience of shame in the novel seems to unravel as a violence of history the subject is powerless to redress. Both structurally and thematically, Shame articulates the heteronomy of the subject, the fact that we are never for-ourselves. Shamelessness begins there.

Notes

1. In Existence and Existents, this absolute attachment of being, experienced as a weight one cannot support, is designated as the impersonality of the “there is [il y a].” The partcular chapter focusing on “the horror of the il y a” was written while Levinas was held in captivity as a prisoner of war in a camp near Hannover (1940–1945). Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents (45). 2. “On first analysis,” says Levinas, “shame appears to be reserved for phenomena of a moral order: one feels ashamed for having acted badly, for having deviated from the norm. It is the representation we form of ourselves as diminished beings with which we are pained to identify.” For Levinas, however, shame is not associated with morality, which is what distinguishes it from guilt, but with an exposure of being. “Yet shame’s whole intensity,” he continues, “everything it contains that stings us, consists precisely in our inability not to identify with this being who is already foreign to us and whose motives for acting we can no longer comprehend” (On Escape 63, emphasis added). In other words, analysis of shame in purely moral terms is insufficient for Levinas, as shame manifests a deeper ontological predicament of split subjectivity that is yet caught in an impasse of enduring what it cannot. One is assigned to the impossibility of assignation. This will become notably significant for our reading of Rushdie’s novel Shame in relation to the same impasse experienced by diasporic subjectivity. 3. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous ( 127). Cf. also Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind (172). 4. Cf. Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (2008). 5. Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (2011). For further reference on the phenomenological significance of shame for de Beauvoir, Sartre, and

Ashamed of Who I Am

103

Levinas, see Lisa Guenther’s excellent discussion in “Shame and the Temporality of Social Life,” in Continental Philosophy Review 44.1 (2011): 23–39. 6. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (2002). 7. After the Partition in 1947, Muslim refugees sought shelter in a newly established Islamic Republic of Pakistan, giving rise to a large culturally displaced mohajir community. Historically, the term mohajir is related to a Muslim exodus from Mecca to Medina in 622, while its second derivative meaning is associated with emigrants who leave their country of origin due to non-Muslim power shift. This is an exalted form of migration, or hijrat, closely associated with the unwavering faith of the mohajirs. However, the mohajir and their descendants, like all migrant identities, carry the traumas of cultural displacement and suffer the loss of historical memory. Rushdie’s intrusive postmodern narratorial techniques in the novel being both a part of and apart from the novel’s intrigue mirror the postdiasporic concerns with permanently shattered and fragile identities whose past is a haunting presence impossible to get rid of, generating the experience of shame and disaffection that split the subject. 8. “Throughout human history,” says Rushdie, “the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings. Like many millions of people, I am a bastard child of history. Perhaps we all are, black and brown and white, leaking into one another, as a character of mine once said, like flavours when you cook” (Imaginary Homelands 394). 9. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (1–29). 10. “Responsibility for another” writes Levinas, “is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it, has not awaited freedom, in which a commitment to another would have been made. I have not done anything and I have always been under accusation—persecuted. The ipseity [or the self] . . . is a hostage” (Otherwise than Being 114). 11. Cf. Zlatan Filipovic, “Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas: ‘After You, Sir!’” (2011: 58–73). “The face of another is, above all, an ‘exposure, without defence’ . . . and because of its extreme exposure, even inviting violence, it becomes the watershed of the ethical exigency. One always hates and strikes another’s face, one aims at the face that yet, in its very vulnerability and exposure to outrage, signifies authority: ‘The face is what forbids us to kill,’ says Levinas. It is ‘that whose meaning consists in saying: “thou shall not kill”’ (Levinas, Ethics and Infinity 86). The face is thus an authority without force” (Filipovic 67). 12. Cf. Marx’s letters to Arnold Ruge in Marx Engels Collected Works (1975). “Shame is a kind of anger which is turned inward. And if a whole nation really experienced a sense of shame, it would be like a lion, crouching ready to spring.”

Chapter Four

104

13. Cf. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “England in 1819” (Poems and Prose 177–78). 14. Cf. Filipovic, “Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas” (66); Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity (89).

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 2002.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. Constance Borde Sheila

and Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1985. Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New

York: Grove Press, 2008. Filipovic, Zlatan. “Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas: ‘After You,

Sir!’” In Moderna Språk 105.1 (2011): 58–73. Levinas, Emmanuel. Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans. Alphonso

Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. —. Entre Nous. Trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New

York: Columbia University Press, 2000. —. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans. Richard A.

Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985. —. Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh:

Duquesne University Press, 2001. —. Of God Who Comes to Mind. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1998. —. On Escape: De L’evasion. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 2003. —. Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.

Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. —. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.

Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Marx, Karl. Marx Engels Collected Works. Vol I. New York:

International Publishers, 1975. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991.

New York: Penguin Books, 1992. —. Shame. London: Vintage Books, 1995.

Ashamed of Who I Am

105

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Poems and Prose. Ed. Timothy Webb. Enlarged. London: Everyman Paperbacks, 1995.