:: Saturday, September 07, 2002 ::

Rushdie's Fury:

Salman Rushdie's Fury (2001) is a not so subtle critique of contemporary American society from one of this generation's most celbrated authors. The book portrays the barely suppressed, murderous rage of a South Asian, Cambridge professor and eccentric dollmaker named Malik Solanaka, who moves to New York city to escape his familial obligations.

Despite my deep respect for Rushdie's writings I found this book disappointing in several respects. I must confess a general dislike for novels in which the protagonist is an English professor or a professor any sort. It has become cliche to depict the complex and sordid lives of humanities professors; there are simply many more interesting stories to tell. Of course, it is unfair to criticize Rushdie for a book he did not write rather than the one he did. Nevertheless, this book lacks passion in its prose. The critiques of American society seem warmed-over. Take for example,

He had learned, also when giving his own name to omit the "Professor." Learning annoyed people, and formaility was a form of pulling rank. This was the country of the diminutive. Even the stores and eating places got friendly fast. Right around the corner he could find Andy's, Bennie's, Josie's, Gabriela's, Vinnie's, Freddie & Pepper's.

The critique is well taken, but there is no wit or charm in the writing. This is hardly the kind of cutting jab one would expect from a character who circulates in Oxbridge circles. It is more like the stale rants that so many Brits deliver to the plague of American tourists who visit London each year. There are also shades of American Psycho that haunt this book, especially the concept of the inverted Frankenstein (i.e., human exterior, monstrous soul). To the extent that this book mimics the earlier masterpiece, I think the book fails to tread new ground.

However, I do not want to dismiss this book. There is a compelling idea at the heart of the story, the idea of fury that stems from rootlessness; the frustration and scathing contempt that develops from residing but not belonging to any particular society; the unbearable burden of being and not being, if you will. It is an insecurity which I see in myself and so many of my friends who belong to diasporic communities (or it could just be that most of my friends are hot-blooded, malcontents). We try to become more American (British, Ugandan, Australian, Scottish, Texan, etc...) than the native sons and daughters or else we retreat into an imagined community that resides only in our imagination. Some of us become chameleons in the world around us, but our camouflage only disguises our self from our selves.

Rushdie's protagonist projects fury onto others and displaces his own outbursts through blackouts in order to hide his rage from himself. For example, in one scene, the professor imagines his Urdu speaking cabbie screaming,

"Islam will cleanse this street of godless motherfucker bad drivers..."

This inexplicable duality of "road-rage" and "jihad" on the streets of Manhatten are truly comic -- at least in the pre-911 context of the book -- and revealing. Rushdie writes,

... What had comprehensively gotten his goat? Solanka silently answered his own question. When one is too young to have accumulated the bruises of one's own experience, one can choose to put on, like a hair shirt, the sufferings of one's world.

The professor realizes that his hidden rage is the mirror of the rage felt by his African-American friend who also does not quite belong in the upper-class circles in which he circulates. The South Asian professor ruminates about his friend:

"Jack Reinhart" was a usefully non-black specific name, carrying none of the ghetto connotations of a Tupac, Vondie, Anfernee, or Rah'schied (these were the days of innovative naming and creative orthography in the African-American community). In the Palaces, people were not named in this way. Men were not called Biggie or Hammer or Saquille or Snoop or Dre, nor were women named Pepa or LeftEye or D:Neece. No Kunta Kintes or Shaznays in America's golden halls....

There is something in the mirror that binds and separates the hyphenated lives of the African-- and the South-Asian-- in their experiences. Or perhaps it is the case that minorities of color struggle with the Lacanian mirror stage. Unable to control our reflection, our behavior escape from us. For some of us the mirror reflects our features in three hues -- black, brown, and white. Maybe this is what makes it difficult to feel at ease in a society where the majority see themselves as a blank canvass: white and neutral, grounded and normal.

I wondered if we could explore this theme of rage, contempt, mockery, and fury that is grounded in groundlessness.

:: Vikash Yadav 5:26 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Re: Anniversaries and the Dangers of Appropriation

I feel some discomfort talking about the commemoration of the September 11 attacks; yet what makes me more uncomfortable are the various uses to which this tragedy has been put to by parties on various sides of the conflict. I will confine myself to just discussing the uses and pronouncements made by several such protagonists in order to highlight some of what I see as the problems in examining and coping with such an event.

The Obscene Mathematics of Guilt and Suffering:

Vikash, quite rightly points out to the difficulty in using the deaths of individuals to reach some comparative ranking of suffering. This can be broadened, in the weeks after September 11 the New Statesman magazine, devoted an issue to discussing the fallout of the September attacks and pointed out in one article that two times as many children die every day from diarrhoea (caused by lack of clean water) somewhere in the world. The point behind this is twofold – it is not part of the rather obscene mathematics of guilt and suffering that is so frequently used after the genocides of WII – “What are 3,000 compared to the millions in Auschwitz, the Gulag, Rwanda etc.” It is not possible to calculate suffering in such a way, for we do not live in a Benthamite world where a pleasure/pain calculus can render such judgements meaningful. However, I do not subscribe to the alternative view which seeks to subsume all such suffering in one equivalent chain – in my mind all suffering is not equal, to claim this is also deeply obscene, at the very least there differences of kind if not differences of degrees. Yet to assert that it is not possible to distinguish between different kinds of suffering all too often ends up merely supporting the status quo, and in today’s world this means supporting/endorsing the structural violence and terror that is visited upon those who have no voice or capacity for resistance.

“Never forget the other Terror” said Mark Twain, speaking of the terror that swept France in the 1790’s (it should be noted here that the term terrorism was first used to describe State Terrorism after the French Revolution that was visited by the State upon its citizens, hence the oft-quoted saying “The Revolution is eating its own Children”), Twain pointed out that there had been two “Reign of Terrors”. The first was the immediate and urgent one which brought “the horror of swift death” while the other resulted in “lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak”. The former “inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million.” As Twain presciently remarked the one brief terror “we have all been…diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over” whereas the other we had never learnt to see “in its vastness or pity as it deserves”. Terrorism is indeed an evil and must be countered, but it has a certain dynamic with poverty – the world’s biggest killer.

It was very disillusioning to see in the reaction to the attacks an element of Schadenfreude amongst many outside the US, for example within the European Left; the minute that the underlying feeling becomes one of “Yes the WTC collapse was a tragedy but we should not fully show our solidarity with the victims as this would mean supporting US imperialism” then any real ethical stance is replaced with the shallow and repulsive mathematics of moralising guilt. The essential point here is that the lives of any and every human being is important and valuable in itself and the death of any is a loss in itself regardless of race, gender, religion or personal conviction. But the sword cuts two ways, just as the quiet satisfaction of many who regarded themselves as progressives or secularists at the WTC and the ensuing shock in the USA fills me with disgust, so too should Americans be wary of the ideological and distorted lens through which they view the event. The American gaze is one, which has profoundly racist and supremacist connotations – I think the sentiment of “Why did this happen to us? Things like this don’t happen here!” is a profoundly immoral and insensitive one – as it ignores and is blind to the fact that for millions of people around the world such a horror/tragedy occur with alarming frequency everyday and is part of their regular lived experience. It is immoral as it recreates the vantage point of the innocent Gaze, which it struck by an unspeakable Evil from the outside and then by its self-conferral of innocence redirects a righteous anger to the Outside which interrupted the idyllic Elysian Fields. I think here it is necessary to apply Hegel’s dictum that Evil not only reside in the “Outside World” but also in the innocent gaze itself which perceives Evil all around itself. A more ethical and laudable response to the attack on the WTC would have been not the recurring “Things like this should not happen here” but “things like this should not happen ANYWHERE”, this would have been a truly radical stand and I think would go much further in preventing a recurrence of such an event. Much of what I say is admirably summed up by the words of a Palestinian journalist who when asked if he could say one thing to American in the aftermath of September 11, replied “America we feel your pain. Isn’t it time you felt ours?”.

As long as those in the US or the West are only concerned to prevent the occurrence of effects of terrorism within their own borders, while denying any responsibility for what occurs outside and only being preoccupied with the welfare of their own citizens all the time blissfully willing to trample/neglect those of non-citizens, the whole enterprise of eliminating terrorism will be a self-defeating one. This will mean tackling some troubling and explosive issues such as the locus of conflicts ranging from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to suppressed irredentist movements and flashpoints such as Kashmir. Given the changing way Space is being re-organised it is no longer possible as the old European Imperial powers did of relegating disturbing issues to the periphery and margins as in today’s world such conflicts and tensions are carried over across borders and spill into core from the remote margins. The only answer and way to stop the obscene mathematics and ranking of suffering, death and guilt is to actively protect the lives of all peoples and to base any emancipatory or progressive project/policy on an extension of its benefits to all instead of restricting the right to life, freedom from persecution just to one or a select group of nationalities, ethnic/religious groups – to do otherwise is meaningless.

The Modernity of Fundamentalism:

There is a certain moral blackmail at work in the reactions that are expected to the WTC collapse. If one condemns it unconditionally, one is criticised for endorsing the ideological position of American innocence under attack from Fundamentalist evil; and if one draws attention to the deeper sociological, political and economic causes behind Arab extremism, one can be rightly rebuked for blaming the victim and imply that the US simply got it comeuppance. The only possible solution here is to reject this blackmail and to endorse both positions simultaneously, as only espousing one would be one-sided and false and would be playing into the Fundamentalist approaches of the respective ideologues and demagogues of both sides. The two sides are not necessarily opposed to each other – they really belong to the same field, as Tariq Ali points out in his “Clash of the Fundamentalisms”. What Ali along with several other perceptive critics have done is inverted the cliché analytic term popularised by Huntington on the future shape and nature of conflict (Edward Said talks of "Clashes within Civilisations”). As pointed out earlier the contributions of Islam to world and European culture, science, and history is crucial and priceless; moreover in terms of the tolerance shown to religious communities and ethnic minorities the historic record of Islam has been much better than that of Christianity; I say this not to excuse or ameliorate the impact of Islamic Fundamentalism but to stress that what we are encountering here is not a feature inscribed into Islam as such but something which is the outcome of a very modern process. As Stephen Chan observes trying to explain the events of September 11 purely by studying or referring to Islam is like trying to understand the many colonial and other wars aged by the European powers by studying Christianity or by Muslims trying to understand Western interventions in the region by reading the Bible – such approaches will not yield any sense. As Ziauddin Sardar states Islam cannot explain the actions of the suicide hijackers any more than Christianity can explain the gas chambers or Catholicism the bombing at Omagh.

The Muslims Fundamentalist’s target is not just global capitalism or American imperialism but also the corrupt “traditionalist” regimes of the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia. I have already outlined in a post below the more salient and basic features of this issue, where the primacy of economic interests prevents the emergence of democracy. With respect to this it should also be remembered that until the 1970’s Afghanistan was one of the most tolerant Muslim societies and Kabul was known for its secular and vibrant cultural life (even until last year the BBC carried reports of the well known mass celebration of marriages of the Sikh community in Kabul, an annual and colourful event that used to attract many visitors). The rise of the Taliban is therefore not to be seen as some sort of regression to a “primordial” state but the outcome of international power politics following the Soviet invasion and the counter-actions of the US and the interests of regional players such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia – the emergence of the Taliban in other words is very much part of the struggle for influence and resources by modern states and not some Messianic social resurgence, it is to sum up part of a very modern process of expansion and control.

The Spring catalogue for Verso in 2002 showed George Bush as a Muslim cleric with a beard – emphasising the fact that the global capitalist liberalism which opposes Muslim Fundamentalism is itself a mode of fundamentalism so that in the current “war on terror” what we are dealing with is a “Clash of fundamentalisms”; however it is possible to go beyond this and assert that the Muslim fundamentalists themselves are not real fundamentalists – they are already modernists par excellence – in that they are partly a product of global capitalism. Arguments that Islam needs a Protestant reformation which would open it up to modernity are therefore misplaced (Tariq Ali’s argument that Islam needs a true Enlightenment is more accurate but still ignores the fact that Islam already had an aborted “enlightenment” of its own in the early mediaeval period during the last year of the Abbasid Caliphate and the Iberian period of culture, the destruction of the latter lead to a shattering loss of this epicentre of culture, philosophy and science, for the rest of the Islamic world so much so that many scholars use the term “Andalusian syndrome” as a self-referential pessimistic nostalgia for lost opportunities amongst many Muslim communities, the point is not to debate the accuracy of such arguments but to acknowledge that the relevant register of Enlightenment and Renaissance values were not unknown in the Islamic world). The Wahhabi movement with its tenet of Itijihad (the right to interpret Islam on the basis of changing conditions) already fulfilled some of the roles of a Protestant revolution. Itijihad can be seen to be a dual notion: neither a spontaneous immersion in an old tradition nor the need to adapt to new conditions and compromise but the urge to reinvent eternity in itself in the new emerging historical conditions. The Wahhabis were very dogmatic and purist in their opposition to any accommodation to Western modernity but they simultaneously advocated the abandoning of old superstitious customs – a parallel to the Protestant return to origins against the corrupting inertia of tradition and established clergy. Positing Jihad against McWorld, is therefore really an inaccurate view, as instead of two vying alternative world-views or ways of life what we have is two sides of the same coin – not Jihad versus McWorld but McJihad. Of course what the Muslim Fundamentalists want is deeply contradictory and this is the only way in which the label of Islamo-Facism used by Francis Fukuyama and others may be relevant for just as Fascism wants Capitalism and modernity without any of its disrupting effects: the excesses of individualism, social disintegration, class antagonism, rapidly changing interpersonal relation (“where everything solid melts into thin air”) so too does Muslim Fundamentalism want to accept modernity and capitalism without really accepting capitalism (again the paradox of wanting a revolution without actually having a revolution) and any of the accompanying challenging socio-economic trends (in this is very much like its Christian Fundamentalist and Hindu Fundamentalist brethren, each of which struggle with what they regard as modernity and capitalisms’ unwanted “side-effects” in their respective societies).

Fundamentalism by its very nature and logic is a basically modern phenomenon and should be distinguished from primordialist and revivalist movements. We should avoid mystifying it by relegating it as part of pre-modern mentalities or pre-capitalist social structures as it encapsulates and reflects current capitalist struggles and conflicts under its guise. By its nature it too tends to re-produce itself in its enemy and so we should exert ourselves to avoid seizing the moral high ground or being totally convinced of the rightness of our cause, as down this path lies the ethnocentric and self-deceiving path to fundamentalism. As Umberto Eco writes: “ We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so we too would become Taliban.”

The War on Terror

This is the trap, which is reproduced by the tactics and the philosophy behind the so-called war on terror. Those who start by denouncing religion as a force of oppression find that in fighting it they are compelled to forsake freedom itself, thus forgoing precisely what they wanted to defend. Liberal, Conservative and even leftist supporters of the war on terror are so eager to fight antidemocratic fundamentalism that they will end up discarding freedom and democracy themselves. Such is the passion and overriding importance given to fighting terrorism that the argument that we have to limit our own freedom here and now is used in order to win the war. The terrorists are ready to wreck this supposedly democratic and free world out of hatred, and in a similar vein those claiming to wage a war on terror are ready to undermine the very basis of such a democratic world out of hatred for the Muslim Other. Writers such as Joseph Alter love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalise torture – the ultimate degradation of human dignity – to defend it. Much has already been said on the contradictions and distortions within this notion of a war on terror, I will only add a few of the more striking and disturbing aspects that I find.

There is a particular type of dehumanising of the recipient populations that goes on, not only as terrorists but also as the patronising objects of humanitarian, who can ignore Madeleine Albright’s quote the “we are opposed to the Taliban because of their treatment of women and children and their lack of respect for human dignity” coming from the same individual who felt that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was an “acceptable price” to pay for keeping sanctions in place against Iraq, such a response can only be mind-boggling. The designating of those opposed to the US as “unlawful combatants” allows the US to assume an unprecedented hegemonic role – we can no longer imagine an independent agency such as the Red Cross organising say an exchange of prisoners between the two groups as the US perceives itself not as one of the warring sides but a global mediating agent of peace and order both using military action to eliminate and crush any opposition and at the same time providing humanitarian aid to the impoverished local populations (a new variant of the old Hearts and Minds approach which accompanied the savagery of the field conflict in the Vietnam War). American planes flying over Afghanistan dropped both food and bombs, combining the role of war maker and provider; this is expanded even further as sometime military action against the Taliban was presented as a way of guaranteeing the passage of humanitarian aid. We thus have no clear distinction between war and humanitarian intervention: the two are closely connected and the same intervention could be said to function on both levels as Tony Blair argued the toppling of the Taliban regime was seen as a way of liberating the Afghan population from their rule and bombing as a way of ensuring the safe delivery of food and medical supplies. War now becomes peace.

Similarly John Ashcroft’s ominous statement that the terrorist “used our Freedom against us” again implies that to win such a war our freedom must be limited. The claim that the US arrogates to itself the right to seek out and destroy not only the terrorist but those who give them material, moral, ideological etc, support means that the task becomes one that will never really be accomplished (hence the admission by some such as Dick Cheney that such a war will not end in our lifetime) and to use Charles Beard’s phrase we really will have to wage perpetual war in order to win perpetual peace. There is bad infinity at work here, in that such a task or goal is not designed to have an end in sight and nor indeed is one possible. In this way the outburst of patriotism and flag waving that erupted after September 11 is slightly invidious, as it evokes an acceptance of this mandate of war by the US: of course the problem is that in some senses the US is not in a real state of war (like say WWII) as for many people daily life goes on and much of the business of war is the exclusive preserve of specialised state agencies while only certain reminders of the war intrude into daily life. This again blurs the distinction between a state of war and a state of peace and indicates that a time may occur when the two may not be clearly distinguishable.

:: Conrad Barwa 7:54 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Appropriating the Anniversary:

(AP Photo/Pool, Kathy Willens)

The one year anniversary of the terrorist attacks in NY, DC, and PA is almost upon us. Many Americans have already appropriated this tragedy as an attack on the US and the "American way of Life." In fact, one of the most famous pictures from the tragedy is an iron cross with an American flag in the background -- a double appropriation of hallowed ground. While spirituality and patriotism is often laudable, it is troubling to see the struggle to interpret this event through a narrow religious/nationalist lens. I think it is important to remember and remind the majority of Americans that several of the victims were not American citizens and that other victims were from the religious and ethnic minority communities victimized by hooligans after the tragedy. The South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) has links to a "census" of the WTC tragedy.

According to an April 2002 New York City Dept. of Health analysis of WTC deaths by birthplace (looking at 90 percent of the 2,825 of the victims)... India: 34; Pakistan: 7; Guyana and Trinidad & Tobago: 29 (several of South Asian origin); Bangladesh numbers were not broken out. With 34 victims, India was the third largest country (US: 2,106 & UK: 53).

Several community organizations have put the death toll of South Asians - US citizens and non-citizens - at more than 200.

I have not seen any studies on the religious affiliation of the victims.

My aim is not to wage a battle on comparative suffering. Or even to "re-claim" the victims on the basis of nationality or heritage. I just want to make a plea for all Americans to be critical about the ways in which this tragedy is appropriated and the actions that are/will be taken in the names of its victims.

:: Vikash Yadav 11:18 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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American Imperialism:

Conrad, I appreciate the ways your post differentiates US and European forms of colonialism. You are correct that I am mainly using the narrative about the transformation "from republic to empire" as a way to garner sympathy from American readers. I agree that it is difficult to discover and recover a time when Americans were not imperialistic in their ambition and deeds. In fact I was thinking about the faces carved on Mt. Rushmore, as the living testament to US imperialism. As Simon Schama and other historians have pointed out the famous sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, selected the faces to be carved on the basis of those presidents who established, preserved, and expanded the territory of the US. George Washington was chosen as founder of the state, Thomas Jefferson was chosen not for authoring the Declaration of Independence but for arranging the Louisiana Purchase that doubled the country's landmass, Lincoln for preserving the Union, and Theodore Roosevelt was engraved mainly for his efforts to secure and establish the Panama Canal.

I would disagree with some of the phrasing in which you appear to give great agency to the US to engineer volatility and economic crisis. I would argue that the economic crises probably result more from neglect and incompetence than US will or desire. The US is not quite competent or intelligent enough to willfully engineer volatility. I am also less willing to criticize the US for attracting skilled and cheap labor. This strategy is open to all countries and it is their own fault if they do not take advantage of the global labor supply. I do not believe in the "brain drain" hypothesis mainly because I see networks forming between talented individuals. I do not deny that these relations may be exploitative, but I do not see flows of talent in zero sum terms. Finally, I am hesitant to consider the IMF or WB as unilateral, this ignores a wealth of research on the dynamic nature of international financial institutions and the ways in which these institutions have responded to criticisms from developing and emerging market countries.

Nevertheless, I do see how the US through its foreign policy makes it appear even more imperialistic and coordinated that it is. And I find the analysis of the Iraqi "threat" to be quite insightful and useful.

:: Vikash Yadav 8:51 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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