In a 1984 interview, Rushdie commented that “Midnight’s Children was a book that was deliberately constructed to be very open; Shame describes a very closed society… and so Shame is a closed system”.101 Himself a powerful generator of cultural shorthand, the closed system Rushdie describes goes beyond his structural attempt “to write a novel without a central character… [with] the characters of the novel standing in a circle facing inwards,” through to the physical and emotional spaces the characters inhabit, and to the abstract notions of religion and culture which are collapsed into them and which they, in turn, are trapped within.102 Aijaz Ahmad characterises this sense of enclosure as a “cage-like quality,” and roots it in the novel’s conception of the nation and the impermeability of its boundaries: “[t]he sense that Pakistan is a cage… [the] sense of being trapped,” he writes, “permeates the whole book right up to the final denouement where we find that even dictators cannot cross the ‘frontier’ and escape their cage”.103 He goes on to state that “any representation of women, whether in fiction or in life, has to do, surely, with gender relations, but also with more than gender relations; it is almost always indicative of a much larger structure of feelings and a much more complex social grid”.104 As I have demonstrated, this is particularly true of Shame – and, indeed, recalls the late eighteenth-century use of the position of women in society as an index of relative civilization – however Ahmad fails to trace the “larger structure” of the nation-cage
100 Rushdie, Shame, 216.
101 Kumkum Sangari, “Interview with Salman Rushdie”, The Book Review No. 8:5 (Mar./Apr. 1984), in Chauhan, Interviews, 63.
102 Rushdie and Sedge Thomson, “Interview at San Francisco State University”, recorded at SFSU, March 26, 1987, in Chauhan, Interviews, 83.
103 Ahmad, “Rushdie’s Shame”, 1465.
104 Ahmad, “Rushdie’s Shame”, 1469 (original emphasis).
inwards, rather than outwards, down to the metonymic heart of the “social grid”: the woman-cage.
Whether incarcerated in attics, mouldering bungalows and marble palaces by fathers and husbands, hermetically sealed inside the bodies and minds of other (imprisoned) women by the narrator, trapped inside their own maimed and cauterised psyches, or the determined occupiers of self-made world- or men-excluding
chrysalises, all women in the text are contained within prophylactic envelopes of one kind or another. The Eastern female space, the harem-veil-prison, is the cage that haunts the text – the cage that is the text. As Catherine Cundy points out, Rushdie’s fiction is often “a case of content dictating form,” and in Shame the theme of female containment is also a textual practice.105 The book consists of a set of overlapping, but not interlinking, enclosures, each with a woman inside it. It works like a
mismatched set of Russian dolls, all straining to fit inside the shape of one monstrous female imprisonment, the “Mother Country”.106
We have seen Ahmed remind Western feminists that “negatively charged speculations and statements about harem life form the pre-history of their
impressions. Although the specific detail and content of what was said has long ago faded, the negative charge has passed into the culture and become part of the cultural surround”.107 I would suggest that whilst this may be particularly true of the
negative charge of feminist orientalism, older tropes of the harem as a
transformative, metamorphic space, have also become negatively charged. The three sisters, Chunni, Munnee and Bunny, with whom this section started, live in a space
105 Catherine Cundy, Salman Rushdie, Contemporary World Writers, (Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press, 1996), 44.
106 The first section of the novel, where Nishapur is first depicted, is titled “Escapes from the Mother Country”.
107 Ahmed, “Ethnocentrism”, 526.
that is clearly the legacy of late eighteenth century texts like Rasselas and The Vindication of the Rights of Woman: not so much “the waiting room of history,” but history’s cabinet of curiosities.108 Nishapur is effectively a museum: it is a place of
“positively archaeological antiquity,” with “outsize chambers stuffed brim-full with the material legacy of generations of rapaciously acquisitive forebears”.109 As Brennan points out, “[t]he Shakil household betrays a history of collaboration, in which many of the English imperial habits are symbolised”.110 What he does not articulate in his analysis, however, is that whatever its past before the sisters’ self-imprisonment, Nishapur as we see it in the text is a place “beyond history,” an extra-temporal zone of history-defying pastness. Murmurs of colonial memory and imprints of a colonial past do exist there, but they are rendered simultaneous to “the impossible forms of painted Neolithic pottery in the Kotdiji style,” and “bronze implements of utterly fabulous age”.111 This sense of temporal polyphony and disjunction is emphasised by Rushdie’s use of the Hegiran calendar. “All this happened in the fourteenth century”, Rushdie-narrator tells us, neatly (if unconsciously) summarizing Scottish Enlightenment notions of comparative
civilizational temporality, “…[t]ime cannot be homogenized as easily as milk, and in those parts, until quite recently, the thirteen-hundreds were still in full swing”.112 Amidst this extra/poly-temporal “thing-infested jungle… [this] mother-country,” the three sister-mothers are merely one more “oblivion-sprinkled” relic of a previous age: exhibits in a museum they were born into and in which, in the final passage of the novel, they will die.113
108 Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe, 8.
109 Rushdie, Shame, 31; 33.
110 Brennan, Salman Rushdie, 87.
111 Rushdie, Shame, 31.
112 Rushdie, Shame, 13.
113 Rushdie, Shame, 31, 32.