Essay from The Literary Review
Between Silence and Screams
TABISH KHAIR
|
I dislike the word 'exile' and the word 'hybrid,' both so easily appropriated by people with fat wallets and glib tongues. People from my class and classes more privileged than mine. And yet, like many writers and artists, I speak from an in-between space. The space between the material and the symbolic, the space between people, the space between cultures, the space between the past and the future. The greatest danger in speaking from in-between spaces is that one either lapses into silence or starts screaming. For whatever you say is liable to be overheard or misunderstood. |
I was stung by the challenge to write about my own “Mullah Muslim religion.” Not that I considered Hinduism any less my cultural heritage than Islam, but still. I wrote an article on Islam in India. It too was published by the Times of India. The article was simple to my mind: highlighting the Islamic tradition of ijtihad (scriptural re-interpretation), I asked why Indian Muslims---or rather Islamic scholars in India---did not reform aspects of religious practice in keeping with the spirit of Islam and changing times? I mentioned things I would like to see reformed---for example, it might be a good idea, I argued, to consider replacing the annual ritual of sacrificing animals during Eid (to commemorate Abraham's 'sacrifice,' the Biblical one about which Søren Kierkegaard wrote an entire book) with charity in the shape of cash. Nothing happened for a week. Then (I have been told) the article was taken up for discussion on radio and all hell broke loose in my town. Only in and around my town though. The local mullahs started preaching against me, I received anonymous phone calls by people who threatened me with death and worse, my defence of Rushdie was suddenly recalled in the vivid colours of apostasy, a mob surrounded my father's clinic demanding that I should be turned over to it to be “disciplined.”
My father, a religious man and a doctor, did not want to call the police because he was afraid the matter would turn into a Hindu-Muslim riot if (Hindu) policemen were involved in it. He went out to speak to the leaders of the mob: he was alone, except for one of my uncles, the Urdu writer Kalam Haidri. The mob was on the verge of turning violent, but there was still some respect for my father. My father, who knows his Quran and Hadiths inside out and can speak the language of the crowd, argued with the leaders of the mob for three or four hours. At the end, he convinced them that I had not done anything “un-Islamic.” They went away, some of them still muttering.
A few years later I moved to Denmark (a purely personal decision and not due to any kind of 'exile' whatsoever) and my first novel was published in India. A (Danish) journalist, who heard of it, requested an interview with me. During the interview, I told him about the mob because my novel featured similar situations. But I also narrated the incident to highlight the local character of the threats (the result of small town conservatism and intrigues rather than global Islamism), its transitory nature (after a few months I could enter Muslim areas of the town without feeling threatened), and, above all, the complexities brought forth by the fact of the mob's discussion with my father. I insisted on the final point because, to my mind, it illustrated the possibility of dialogue in the space between people and cultures, if that dialogue was informed by knowledge and respect. Imagine my surprise when the article appeared bearing the heading, 'Indisk forfatter-talent betalte dyrt for at støtte Salman Rushdie' (Budding Indian writer pays dearly for supporting Rushdie).
My natural reaction to this heading was to decide not to speak about the matter to any Western journalist in the future. If the complexities of the in-between spaces that I occupied and wished to narrate were to be reduced to the usual stereotypes, why, then, I might as well stay silent.
A few months later I visited the Karen Blixen Museum outside Copenhagen. Most of us are familiar with Karen Blixen, if not through her writing then through Meryl Streep's portrayal of her in Out of Africa. The museum largely fulfils the expectations raised by Out of Africa: you encounter a cultured European lady and a talented writer in exotic Black Africa.
I was immediately struck by two group photographs featuring Karen Blixen. The first one had been taken in front of her farm in 'Kenya': it featured her Black servants, with Karen Blixen leaning at a distance from them. The caption listed the name of only one servant: “faithful servant, Farah.” The other photograph featured Karen Blixen a few decades later, in her old age. It had been taken in Denmark. It featured her standing right in the midst of her (Danish) “staff.” It mentioned each of the attendants by name. Full name.
Looking at the two photographs and the fact that almost a century of discourse on the matter had not made the curators of the museum realise at least the stereotypical nature of their captions, made me feel dejected and angry. I became conscious of the vast space that existed between me and the other Danish visitors to the museum. I felt tired of the necessity of explaining to a world that simply refuses to hear and see. I despaired at the possibility of dialogue, real dialogue. The poem 'Karen Blixen: Two Photographs' was born in that moment of despair and anger.
But it was completed later. It was completed only when I realised one further fact about the two photographs: that the Karen Blixen of the second photo was an old infirm woman, who might have needed to lean on someone's arm. No doubt the stereotypes that I discerned in the photos and the captions existed. But something else existed, too. A shared space created by the inevitable passage of time, the universal infirmity that comes with advancing years. The in-between space of old age. In that realisation, I believe, I overcame the compulsion to be silent or to scream. It is there that I found something between a scream and silence: the voice of my poem.
Karen Blixen: Two Photographs
I hated you at first rumour,
Writer of tales, baroness,
White owner of black farms,
Hunter posing over a shot lioness.
Dark are the windows behind their backs.
They are framed by the farm of your dreams,
Eight African servants, all black,
Arranged in two orderly rows, stiff,
Flowing dresses, turbans, caps,
And you in your long necklace, apart, leaning.
No names, the secret police of sight,
Those dark-glassed inspectors, Vision and View,
Have ensured that. No names that might
Be proof—except one, Farah, 'faithful servant.'
The second's 45 years after, another place
More specific than 'Kenya,' another people—
Your own. There are hedges in this one,
Trees, sunlight, pond, ripples.
You stand in their midst, supported
By 'staff' with full names, housekeeper
Caroline Carlsen and her son, Nils,
Clara, Christel, a poodle that
Like your lost horses, had a name.
You see, looking from a certain angle,
Say, a little to the left and below,
One is struck by how you stood apart then
And how you stand in their midst now.
How can I bridge that gulf of a foot or so
Your Danes were ignorant of and your Africans knew?
One stares into the eye of the camera, taut
With perhaps the tension of losing a soul.
Is it pride or resentment? What
About the one watching you from a corner
Of his eye? Has he walked
Through too many safaris of sudden alarms?
Believe me, it is still not easy to walk
Out of that frame of wooden darkness
Into this vista of grass—and talk.
Believe me, it is easy to hate you
And forget, in the first, the smile,
Impossible to understand, on your face;
And that the difference in the second
Also had something to do with age.
