EL PAPEL DE LOS FACTORES COGNITIVOS EN LA FIBROMIALGIA

The Scheherazadian transformative power of narrative suffuses Shame, but in this novel it has lost its generative abilities: rather than giving rise to life and

expression, here it is at best a means of codifying and preserving stories, and at worst

a means of gaining lethal control over the auditor. Bariamma, the matriarch of Raza Hyder’s family, ritually recounts “the family tales” every evening, as her brood sits around her.

These were lurid affairs, featuring divorces, bankruptcies, droughts, cheating friends, child mortality, diseases of the breast, men cut down in their prime, failed hopes, lost beauty, women who grew obscenely fat, smuggling deals, opium-taking poets, pining virgins, curses, typhoid, bandits, homosexuality, sterility, frigidity, rape, the high price of food, gamblers, drunks, murders, suicides and God. Bariamma’s mildly droning recital of the catalogue of family horrors had the effect of somehow diffusing them, making them safe, embalming them in the mummifying fluid of her own incontrovertible respectability. The telling of the tales proved the family’s ability to survive them, to retain, in spite of everything, its grip on its honour and its

unswerving moral code.³

At first glance, this ritual of performative story-telling seems to constitute a rare moment of female empowerment in the text: here we have a strong woman forging the identity of herself and her family, in a similar synechdochic pattern to those observed above, with Saleem and Scheherazade. This oral history is a female province, and it appears to contain the power not only to transmute horror into security, but to offer hope for the future. In the possibility of survival that it holds out, then, it is consonant with Scheherazade’s narrative – and yet, where

Scheherazade’s story-telling ultimately promises the end of horror, Bariamma’s recital merely offers its preservation. One of the many avatars of deathly femininity that stalk the text, the matriarch’s “embalming… mummifying” (note the pun – we

3 Rushdie, Shame, 76.

will encounter it again later) narrativisation of violent crime, sexual transgression, and misogynist tragedy ensures that the family’s view of itself is a catalogue of horrors rigidly preserved in the amber of an “unswerving moral code” reminiscent of the “iron morality that was mostly Muslim” that traps the three Shakil sisters in the fortress of Nishapur. These stories, we are told, “were the glue that held the clan together, binding the generations in webs of whispered secrets”.⁴ Rather than salvation, transformation, or utterance, Bariamma’s tales offer secrets, stasis, and damnation.

When Raza’s new wife Bilquis is “forced” to tell the story of the horrors that befell her during the violence of Partition, it becomes part of the matriarch’s

recitation.

Her story altered, at first, in the retellings, but finally it settled down, and after that nobody, neither teller nor listener, would tolerate any deviation from the hallowed, sacred text. This was when Bilquis knew that she had become a member of the family; in the sanctification of her tale lay initiation, kinship, blood. “The recounting of histories,” Raza told his wife, “is for us a rite of blood.”⁵

With the heavy emphasis of the religiosity of this family narrative as a hallowed, sacred, sanctified, static text, Rushdie folds this “rite of blood” into a critique of a despotically rigid Islam that, as I shall demonstrate, courses through both this novel and its successor. Muhammad, especially in Shame and in The Satanic Verses, but also in moments throughout Rushdie’s oeuvre, is configured as a kind of anti-Scheherazade: his recitation working to lock down believers in a steely, despotic mono-narrative that precludes multiplicity or freedom. From the queenly

4 Rushdie, Shame, 13, 76.

5 Rushdie, Shame, 76-77.

determinism of her youth in her father’s secular Delhi cinema – an “Empire” he lost, along with his life, “because of a single error, which arose out of his fatal personality flaw, namely [religious] tolerance” – Bilquis has been bound, in a Qur’anic master-narrative, into an inescapable family enclosure which will, in the end, cause her death.

On the following page, seemingly discrete from the description of Bariamma’s narratives, is one of Shame’s few direct references to the Arabian Nights. Describing the Pakistani government’s policy of announcing victory whatever the result of battles with India in the early years of the war over Kashmir, the narrator tells us “the national leaders, rising brilliantly to the challenge, perfected no fewer than one thousand and one ways of salvaging honour from defeat”.⁶ This is more than an invocation of the Arabian Nights as a means of gesturing towards a multiplicity of stories, however: behind the rhetorical flourish, this is a

representation of the power of narrative as propaganda – as a means of control wielded this time by the despotic sultan rather than by Scheherazade. Just as

Bariamma binds her extended family together in “webs of whispered secrets,” so the nation’s leaders cast a net of lies over the populace to hold them in place. Much later in the novel, Rani Harappa embroiders a series of eighteen shawls – an activity also directly linked to the Arabian Nights through the repeated motif of “miniscule arabesques [depicting] a thousand and one stories” – documenting her husband the dictator Iskander’s infamy.⁷ In “the hissing shawl… silver-threaded whispers

susurrated across the cloth: Iskander and his spies, the head spider at the heart of that web of listeners and whisperers, she had sewn the silvery threads of the web, they

6 Rushdie, Shame, 78.

7 Rushdie, Shame, 111.

radiated out from his face”.⁸ Although Rani’s embroidery constitutes an articulation of female resistance to despotism, it is uttered – or rather stitched – after the death of her husband: a record of his wrongdoing sent to their daughter Arjumand, his

political successor. It is another non-generative act of narrative embalming.