In 1983 Salman Rushdie published Shame, about which the novel’s narrator, at times unmistakably the novelist himself, has this to say: ‘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.’
It turned out to be a mistaken prediction, of course, but it expresses a compelling and recurring desire in Rushdie’s writing, to write ‘the East’ out of him and find new origins, yet finding himself not quite able to do so. The sentence just cited above is followed by: ‘I do not always believe myself when I say this.’
Rushdie lived only briefly in Pakistan, and everything he had had to say about that country by 1983, in both Midnight’s Children and in Shame, expressed his repulsion. If the former novel describes India’s lost possibilities, its tolerant and plural ambitions squandered for expediency, the latter describes Pakistan as never having had such possibilities because it was constructed out of intolerance and narrow-mindedness. The failure of the state of Pakistan has a domestic allegory in the squabble between two powerful families, only thinly disguised to represent that of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Iskander Harrappa) and of Zia ul-Haq (Raza Hyder). But the force of Rushdie’s critique of Pakistan as an oppressive and authoritarian society is focused on the treatment of women.
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 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’. 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.
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 shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
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The above excerpts are taken from the book The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie by Abdulrazak Gurnah. Abdulrazak Gurnah won the 2021 Nobel prize in literature.
Kalampedia 