Author of the Month: Anis Shivani

You write, “There will be no rude wolf-whistles, no overt harassment, as in uncouth India,” and you follow it up with Ram commenting there are no incidences of “reported rape” in Dubai. The distinction “reported” coupled with the culture of secrecy described earlier in the story creates a very chilling effect. How would you compare violence against women in India and Dubai?

Again, note that this laudatory — and illusory — remark about rape in Dubai comes from Ram, even as he is being escorted in a dark Mercedes by an agent of the intelligence services toward their secret headquarters. It’s not the agent who makes this remark but Ram. So he remains in a state of illusion, and why not, he’s had a blessed thirty-five years of relative privilege, compared to where he came from in India. In essence, he’s allowed himself to be morally “co-opted.” His allegiances are all wrong, and he half-knows it. It’s hard for him not to feel superior to those left behind in the race, it’s hard for him not to feel emotionally attached to Dubai’s glossy exterior, since he believes he’s had some infinitesimal role to play in the glorious transformation. He’s aware of the fakeness of Dubai, but he honestly can’t visualize anything better in its place. In many ways, Ram is representative of the attitude of migrants anywhere in the world at that early stage of integration into bourgeois norms, and such attitudes are very common among, for instance, recent Hispanic or Asian migrants to the U.S., once they start putting some distance between those just off the boat and their own middle-class security.

Ram, at the end of the story, is commenting on how women are left apparently unmolested, regardless of their provocative clothing, and that too in a Middle Eastern country. That may be true on the surface, but what women does this formulation leave out? I don’t know enough about violence against women in Dubai versus India, but I would guess that in Dubai, as in India, there are layers of differences, protections versus vulnerabilities, for different classes of women. In India it would likely be more overt, as the recent cases of gang rape illustrate, but I would note the underlying constant, pervasive, low-level violence against women which would be true in both these sexually repressed societies. Dubai may boast surface Western freedoms, it may think of itself as a party town — as perhaps Delhi and Bombay also are to some extent — but what about subterranean patriarchal attitudes which easily veer into violence? In Dubai, how does the Filipina maid fare against the female British executive? Similarly, in India, what about the poor servant versus the high-powered businesswoman? And in the vast middle is the amorphous perpetual low-intensity abuse, which requires an altering of the mindset skyscrapers and highways can hardly begin to achieve. It requires a transition to true democracy.

At the same time, real progress for women, which has come about by the simple fact of economic development, as problematic and unequal as that may be, cannot be denied in any of these societies, so I think it’s important to keep that in mind and not have a predominantly negative or static view. The transformation underway is fundamental and irreversible. Making things visible is half the fight. In The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, my new collection, there’ s a story called “Dowry,” which is about a young female Muslim physician in an Indian provincial setting, fighting the invisibility of victims of domestic abuse at her own progressive hospital. Here again, confused loyalties due to professionalization and specialization come into play, and make it difficult to roll over ingrained cultural beliefs.

Since you write both fiction and poetry, have you found that some themes or subjects are better suited to stories and some to poems?

No, I wouldn’t say that at all. The same subjects find expression in both fiction and poetry, only in different ways of course. In both My Tranquil War and Other Poems and The Fifth Lash and Other Stories there are repeated excursions into surveillance, discipline, empire, self-censorship, torture, justification for war, the material conditions of artists, and the uses and abuses of literary endeavour. I have a story called “Tehran” in Anatolia and Other Stories, the book whose opening story is “Dubai,” but I also have a poem called “Observations of an American Woman Upon Donning the Chador in Tehran” in My Tranquil War. I have a dystopian story about mass deportation called “Repatriation” in Anatolia, but the theme of mass exclusion occurs in many different ways in My Tranquil War as well. In fact there’s a story called “Manzanar” in Anatolia, while there’s also a poem called “Remembering Manzanar” in My Tranquil War.

Often I take a first, glancing blow at ideas that have been percolating in my head for a while with poetry, before launching into full-scale attack in a story or novel, and then I’ll return to poetic treatment having dealt with it in prose. I find it extremely helpful to switch back and forth between the two modes in dealing with the same subjects, a way to unblock the alternative mode. This is not to say that poetry and fiction work along parallel tracks for me most of the time, but there is a lot of overlap, very helpful from the point of view of the eventual full realization of ideas.

In your ‘What is World Literature?’ essay, you quote Goethe discovering the similarities between Chinese and German people through literature. Later you remark that “the concern [with world literature], as with globalization in general, is uniformity, a monolithic dominance that crushes diversity of local expression.” This suggests that, though acknowledging similarities across the human experience is imperative, becoming entirely the same is highly undesirable. Do you think a balance can be achieved between the two?

Yes, this is an important point to make. I think both trends are simultaneously in progress, and of course I think that becoming the same everywhere is highly undesirable. It means the extinction of the human, in fact, if such a project of uniformity materializes, but unfortunately, with the global transmission of debased consumerist values via social media, satellite television, and other means, this is already happening very rapidly. One can see how the use of language is suffering all over the world, how the same dumbed-down English — I encountered it emerging in real-time in California as the Valley Girl dialect — is becoming the global lingua franca among young people.

I’m a committed one-worldist, globalist, whatever you want to call it, and I think given emerging technology, this world convergence is bound to happen during the course of the twenty-first century — barring some apocalypse. But at the same time, one notices a disturbing flattening of cultural differences. That would be too high a price to pay for universal communication and exchange of ideas. What ideas would be exchanged anyway if everywhere was the same bland cool neoliberal “paradise” — á la Dubai or Singapore or Shanghai? What is being propagated at a rapid pace is the glamorous physical infrastructure of Western development, including buildings, roads, communications technologies, power plants, etc. But what is not being disseminated — in part because the West itself has been rapidly losing its own faith — is the enlightenment value system that led to this blossoming of science and technology in the first place. The West becomes less democratic and universalist by the day, while the East adopts some of the exterior manifestations of progress; both are emerging as soulless societies, without absolute commitment to human freedom. The West feels that it can dispense with the substance of the enlightenment as long as the pretense can be maintained that prosperity and freedom continue on as before, and to some extent this pretense can indeed be kept going a long time. The East is uncomfortable making the transition to full-fledged democracy and equality, hoping that the semblance of spreading prosperity will keep such demands at bay for a long time yet. In both cases, power is narrowing and shifting upward at an almost unprecedented scale in the modern era, while at the rhetorical level power has ceased to call itself by its proper name, especially among the intelligentsia.

Where does world literature, and what I think is its antithetical idea, multiculturalism, fit into this?  Goethe’s hope for world literature — I recently came across an astounding new book called Against World Literature, by Emily Apter, which essentially makes a mockery of the notion because literature is allegedly untranslatable! — was that it would bring out the commonality among different nations, bridging differences and encouraging mutual respect. It was very much in tune with enlightenment philosophy. Real differences wouldn’t be papered over in this bold concept. Multiculturalism, on the other hand — or the literary brand of multiculturalism, as it has become enshrined in New York and London publishing — has little truck with this notion, it is rather a reiteration of ethnic bias or prejudice, setting up races and nations as distinct and apart, though some superficial transactions might indeed take place in the interest of economic lubrication. I’m not saying this is how multiculturalism has to be, but corporate publishing and the arts infrastructure has reduced it to this. Instead of increased global understanding, what we have — like the shimmering glass towers of Dubai — is a glossy parody of literature, dreamed up in the marketing-addled brains of corporate executives, translated into reality by many willing writers happy to traffic on their ethnic essentiality. So today we have the familiar multigenerational family secrets saga written according to a specific formula by many interchangeable Indian writers based in the U.S. or the U.K. There’s often a pair of brothers or sisters, one of them a proper bourgeois, the other a Naxalite or Tamil Tiger affiliate, and eventually, like in a Hindi movie, reconciliation and redemption are achieved. What bullshit! This is the kind of writing that deters thought, is meant to be a consumer product that lends easy status, makes the reader feel like a participant in some global discussion about literature. It’s fake, not the real thing, however, and as with other worthwhile ideas appropriated by the corporate elite, it creates similarity and banality everywhere. The corporate marketplace describes itself as democratic, but it is utterly authoritarian, and writers and artists play along with the game, knowing the bounds of acceptable discourse.

Sauleha Kamal is Assistant Fiction Editor for the magazine.