http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfAGnxKfwOg
Friday, June 12, 2009
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Islam, sexuality, and the politics of belonging in the Netherlands
International Viewpoint
News and analysis from the Fourth International
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org
Theory
Against Tolerance
Islam, sexuality, and the politics of belonging in the Netherlands
Paul Mepschen
Sex seems to play a key role in the Dutch politics of belonging. Sex – especially homosexuality – is instrumentalized by the nationalist right who uses it to represent immigrants as ‘strangers’ who threaten tolerant, modern, Dutch society. Tolerance, power, and xenophobia come to be increasingly entwined in the Netherlands. A plea against ‘tolerance’ as the foundation for political and social struggle.
The Slovenian philosopher and sociologist Slavoj Zizek argues that tolerance constitutes a mystifying discourse veiling what is really at the heart of political and social struggle. There is good reason, Zizek argues, that someone like Martin Luther King didn’t make use of the concept. The struggle against racism is not a struggle for tolerance, but for social, economic, political, and cultural rights, and for changing unjust and undemocratic power relations. Zizek makes a parallel with feminism, asking if feminists struggle to be ‘tolerated’ by men. Of course not – from this perspective the concept of tolerance even becomes rather ridiculous.
Tolerance, in other words, does not work as an imperative for political struggle. As the American left political philosopher Wendy Brown argues, tolerance is a discourse of power which possesses a certain “magnanimity”and plays a key role in dynamics of in- and exclusion in liberal societies. Moreover, holding on to tolerance as the foundation for one’s engagement in struggle is what may keep the lgbt-movement from reinventing itself in an era in which globalization, the global spread of neoliberal capitalism, and the rise of Islamophobia, are radically changing what is demanded of our movements; how our struggles relate to other struggles; to the state; and to dominant liberal discourses. While the situation in the Netherlands provides perhaps the most cardinal example of the entanglement of lgbt-politics with racism and Islamophobia, the challenges we face in the Netherlands because of this strange co-optation of homosexuality by nationalists and Islam-bashers are mirrored in other parts of the world and cannot be understood without taking into account the ideologies embellishing the global onslaught against Islam.
The El-Moumni affair and beyond
In the Netherlands, lgbt-politics has largely come to be reduced to the question of a perceived lack of tolerance toward homosexuals among Muslims. The discourse that is put forward is one in which native Dutch citizens are construed as tolerant while society’s cultural ‘others’, especially Muslims, are represented as intolerant. Homophobia is construed to be alien to Dutch, modern, secular, society. The structural heteronormativity of society has almost completely disappeared from the movement’s discourse and from the struggle, while the question of Islam and tolerance has taken front-stage.
What could be wrong with tolerance? Would I perhaps prefer intolerance? Of course not, but if we would take a harder look at the concept and the way it was employed, we would be able to see that tolerance has a paradoxical meaning in present day society. It is accompanied, in fact, by virulent forms of intolerance and exclusion. To illustrate, we may have a look at the debate about Islam in the Netherlands starting in 2001. The Rotterdam imam El-Moumni, of Moroccon descent, in May 2001 made comments on national television arguing that homosexuality was an illness threatening reproduction and thus society in more general terms: classic patriarchal views. The comments caused enormous upheaval in Dutch society, in which people especially took offense because these views came from a cultural other, from ‘the outside’. The imam’s expressed views were taken to be comments on Dutch secular and modern society. In fact, only three years earlier, in 1998, during the Gay Games in Amsterdam, public homosexuality was fiercely debated in the Dutch public sphere. Several Dutch conservatives participated in that debate, arguing, among other things, that homosexuality was shameful and that they felt uncomfortable or offended by the public display of homosexuality during the games. Interestingly, Muslims played no role in this debate, and neither did the question of Islam in more general terms.
In 2001, on the other hand, the comments of El-Moumni were framed as ‘intolerant’, diametrically opposed to Dutch values, and construed as symbolic of the lack on cultural integration of Muslim communities in Dutch societies. The imam’s views, characteristic of conservative views on homosexuality in orthodox religious circles, were framed as representative of the whole of the Muslim community instead as the views of a specific, radical, current in Islam (El-Moumni belongs to a notoriously conservative mosque in Rotterdam). In public discourse, Islam became construed as completely and utterly antagonistic to modern, tolerant, Dutch ‘values’ and all the imams active in the Netherlands – including imams from the liberal Alavite community who have nothing whatsoever in common with orthodox figures like El-Moumni – were ‘invited’ for a lesson in tolerance by the liberal democratic minister of ‘large cities-affairs’. One of the prime participants in the attack on public homosexuality in 1998, the conservative columnist Van der List, who called homosexuality disgusting, in 2001 embraced the homosexual community that now needed protection against the horrible Muslim hordes who were a threat to liberal, tolerant, Dutchness.
A visibly uncomfortable prime-minister Kok spent the full ten minutes of his weekly interview on national television explaining to Muslims that they were to tolerate homosexuals, as this “was the Dutch way”. In a poll on the website of the largest Gay magazine, the mainstream, liberal populist Gay Krant, 91 percent of participants agreed with the statement that “Muslims should accept our tolerance or leave”. The widely read right-wing daily Telegraaf spoke of ideas coming from “the medieval deserts of Northern Africa” and gay members of the conservative liberal party VVD in Amsterdam published a pamphlet arguing that Muslims were threatening the liberal freedoms that were so characteristic to Dutch society.
Aesthetics of homosexuality
The message was clear: to be Dutch meant to adjust to certain ‘norms and values’ and to assimilate into the moral universe that constituted modern, tolerant Dutch society. Tolerance became one of the prime markers of ‘autochthony’. Helped by the events of 9/11, the single most successful right-wing populist in Dutch history, Pim Fortuyn, who as the reader may recall was brutally killed in 2002, instrumentalized this discourse of tolerant Dutchness to make his spectacular political staging possible. As a columnist, publicist, and public speaker, Fortuyn had tried for many years to get the Islamophobic, xenophobic, and nationalist view across that Muslims were retarded, that Dutch identity and modernity needed to be reappraised, and that the borders needed to be closed to immigrants, especially Muslims. For a long time, his views were seen as rather ludicrous and marginal, but during the 1990’s they slowly moved from the far right margins to the center of Dutch politics.
The right-wing populist party Livable Netherlands catapulted Fortuyn into the political arena in 2001. Fortuyn combined a personal, almost erotic, political aesthetic and charisma with neonationalist and Islamophobic political ideas and fulfilled a deep desire for belonging, meaning, direction, a closed and clear identity, and an ever more strictly defined definition of ‘the other’. Fortuyn wanted to embody the modern, free, tolerant, Dutch nation and did so by liberating the sexual norms and the aesthetics of part of the international and Dutch gay male community from the gay ghetto and bringing them into the Dutch public domain. As an essential part of this political discourse, Muslims were represented by Fortuyn as the exact opposites of the free, liberal, modern Dutch person. The former were represented as intolerant, primitive, and traditional, a triangle of alterity that made them quite incongruous with Dutch society. Obviously, the mass mediation of the homophobic comments of various orthodox Islamic figures in Dutch society like El-Moumni, and various affairs concerning visceral forms of homophobia in Muslim circles, helped Fortuyn greatly by reinforcing his point. Fortuyn’s recipe against what he dubbed ‘the agrarian backwardness’ of Islam: getting Dutch society back on the path of modernity and secularism through harsh integration policies and closed borders. Power and tolerance became completely entangled and emerged as a weapon in the hands of the populist and Islamophobic right.
Everyday homophobia
Would we turn our attention to the nationalist right in the Netherlands today, the politics of Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party or several populist right-wing media and Internet publications, we would see that tolerance is not quite characteristic of the politics of the far right. The tolerance towards homosexuality, merely discursive as opposed to practiced in everyday life, is accompanied by a growing intolerance toward Muslims and other immigrants, social outsiders, the poor. The culture of the Muslim minority is framed as an essential, natural, uniform, and a-historical whole while homophobia is construed to be alien to Dutch society. That narrative has rooted itself ever more deeply into Dutch society. As opposed to 1998, during the gay games – not very long ago – it is almost impossible today to imagine discussing lgbt-rights without bashing Islam and Muslims. The hegemonic narrative is that gay and lesbian emancipation is almost complete – as gays and lesbians are ‘tolerated’- and that the only problem left is the lack of integration of Muslims into Dutch society. However, the facts are quite different. Research shows that the official tolerance informing the self-image of the Dutch and ‘Dutch pride’ is not always congruous with the facts. Confronted with public homosexuality – like two men kissing – a large part of the population still responds with disgust and distaste. Sometimes this disgust leads to violence. While it is true that young Moroccan men are overrepresented among the perpetrators of homophobic violence in Amsterdam, research shows that this behavior cannot be reduced to the culture or religion of the young men involved. In fact, it is their social exclusion and marginality that is a more prominent candidate for blame.
Normalization
What causes the disgust mentioned above is heteronormativity, which is still a structural, essential aspect of Dutch society and moral order. In other words, heterosexuality remains the self-evident norm, a normativity which is reproduced through the family, in the educational system, popular culture, and media. The tolerated homosexual fits this heteronormativity very well: in almost every way he behaves according to heteronormative norms. As Steven Seidman says, the emphasis on tolerance has normalized homosexuality. The modern homosexual changed from a deviant, excluded other into the mirror-image of the ideal heterosexual. In a 2001 article on normalization, Seidman argues: "Normalization is made possible because it simultaneously reproduces a dominant order of gender, intimate, economic, and national practices”. He warns: "[L]egitimation through normalization leaves in place the polluted status of there marginal sexualities and all the norms that regulate our sexual intimate conduct apart from the norm of heterosexuality". He also points out: "Ultimately, normalization [renders] sexual difference a minor, superficial aspect of a self who in every other way reproduces an ideal of a national citizen".
As argued, many people in the Netherlands still look the other way, disgusted, shamed, when confronted with homosexuality in public. In such a heteronormative culture it needs not surprise that many homosexual men and women are depressed; that suicide rates among young gays and lesbians remain high; that transgenderism and other forms of gender nonconformity are ridiculed and transgenders are excluded; that violence keeps threatening the lgbt-community. The solution for such problems is not a politics based on tolerance, but on the struggle against heteronormativity.
In recent articles, the feminist philosopher Judith Butler rightly and harshly criticizes the confusion of sexual politics with the politics of empire and argues for a kind of sexual politics that resists Islamophobia, racism, and imperialism and that tries to find convergence points of antiracism and lgbt-struggles. Unfortunately, Butler doesn’t elaborate much. It is the task, it seems to me, of critical, antiracist, queer movements to think about and develop on forms of sexual politics beyond tolerance, against tolerance. The heteronormative society radical queers are fighting is the very society that excludes and discriminates against immigrants. Convergence points exist, for instance in the field of education where there is every reason to fight against both implicit heterosexuality as well as against the structural disadvantaging of girls and immigrant kids. Antiracists and lgbt-activists may also find each other in solidarity with lgbt’s from minority communities and in solidarity with homosexual refugees and their rights.
The reader may perhaps ask herself whether the author of the present article has gone mad. Isn’t the Netherlands in fact one of the ‘best’ countries to live in for lesbians or gay men, because they have in fact gained rights and a certain amount of acceptance and demanded their place in the public domain? Of course, this is true, and the gains of lgbt’s in the Netherlands must be defended and the public kiss-ins and similar actions organized by queers in response to homophobia must be supported and participated in. But we need a movement that is more than just responsive but that tries to constantly reinvent itself to fight the exclusion of deviant sexualities as effectively as possible, while doing everything to resist the instrumentalization of our struggles in the ‘war against terror’ and the ongoing onslaught against the Muslim community. I do not argue for intolerance, but for re-imagining political struggles in such a way that the structural causes of exclusion, discrimination, and violence assume center-stage again, for a queer movement that takes up the struggle against heterosexual normativity. Tolerance is ideology. We do not fight to become tolerated but to change the world. Tolerance is an ideological construct that disarms the lgbt-movement and positions us against as opposed to alongside ‘other’ oppressed minorities.
Paul Mepschen is an editor of the radical and socialist magazine and webzine Grenzeloos (www.grenzeloos.org) and a member of Socialist Alternative Politics, the Dutch section of the Fourth International. Paul works as a PhD-researcher on a project called ‘tangible belongings’, which deals with questions of citizenship, subjectivity, and aesthetics in local communities, at the Amsterdam School for Social science Research (ASSR), University of Amsterdam (UvA).
return to home page
News and analysis from the Fourth International
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org
Theory
Against Tolerance
Islam, sexuality, and the politics of belonging in the Netherlands
Paul Mepschen
Sex seems to play a key role in the Dutch politics of belonging. Sex – especially homosexuality – is instrumentalized by the nationalist right who uses it to represent immigrants as ‘strangers’ who threaten tolerant, modern, Dutch society. Tolerance, power, and xenophobia come to be increasingly entwined in the Netherlands. A plea against ‘tolerance’ as the foundation for political and social struggle.
The Slovenian philosopher and sociologist Slavoj Zizek argues that tolerance constitutes a mystifying discourse veiling what is really at the heart of political and social struggle. There is good reason, Zizek argues, that someone like Martin Luther King didn’t make use of the concept. The struggle against racism is not a struggle for tolerance, but for social, economic, political, and cultural rights, and for changing unjust and undemocratic power relations. Zizek makes a parallel with feminism, asking if feminists struggle to be ‘tolerated’ by men. Of course not – from this perspective the concept of tolerance even becomes rather ridiculous.
Tolerance, in other words, does not work as an imperative for political struggle. As the American left political philosopher Wendy Brown argues, tolerance is a discourse of power which possesses a certain “magnanimity”and plays a key role in dynamics of in- and exclusion in liberal societies. Moreover, holding on to tolerance as the foundation for one’s engagement in struggle is what may keep the lgbt-movement from reinventing itself in an era in which globalization, the global spread of neoliberal capitalism, and the rise of Islamophobia, are radically changing what is demanded of our movements; how our struggles relate to other struggles; to the state; and to dominant liberal discourses. While the situation in the Netherlands provides perhaps the most cardinal example of the entanglement of lgbt-politics with racism and Islamophobia, the challenges we face in the Netherlands because of this strange co-optation of homosexuality by nationalists and Islam-bashers are mirrored in other parts of the world and cannot be understood without taking into account the ideologies embellishing the global onslaught against Islam.
The El-Moumni affair and beyond
In the Netherlands, lgbt-politics has largely come to be reduced to the question of a perceived lack of tolerance toward homosexuals among Muslims. The discourse that is put forward is one in which native Dutch citizens are construed as tolerant while society’s cultural ‘others’, especially Muslims, are represented as intolerant. Homophobia is construed to be alien to Dutch, modern, secular, society. The structural heteronormativity of society has almost completely disappeared from the movement’s discourse and from the struggle, while the question of Islam and tolerance has taken front-stage.
What could be wrong with tolerance? Would I perhaps prefer intolerance? Of course not, but if we would take a harder look at the concept and the way it was employed, we would be able to see that tolerance has a paradoxical meaning in present day society. It is accompanied, in fact, by virulent forms of intolerance and exclusion. To illustrate, we may have a look at the debate about Islam in the Netherlands starting in 2001. The Rotterdam imam El-Moumni, of Moroccon descent, in May 2001 made comments on national television arguing that homosexuality was an illness threatening reproduction and thus society in more general terms: classic patriarchal views. The comments caused enormous upheaval in Dutch society, in which people especially took offense because these views came from a cultural other, from ‘the outside’. The imam’s expressed views were taken to be comments on Dutch secular and modern society. In fact, only three years earlier, in 1998, during the Gay Games in Amsterdam, public homosexuality was fiercely debated in the Dutch public sphere. Several Dutch conservatives participated in that debate, arguing, among other things, that homosexuality was shameful and that they felt uncomfortable or offended by the public display of homosexuality during the games. Interestingly, Muslims played no role in this debate, and neither did the question of Islam in more general terms.
In 2001, on the other hand, the comments of El-Moumni were framed as ‘intolerant’, diametrically opposed to Dutch values, and construed as symbolic of the lack on cultural integration of Muslim communities in Dutch societies. The imam’s views, characteristic of conservative views on homosexuality in orthodox religious circles, were framed as representative of the whole of the Muslim community instead as the views of a specific, radical, current in Islam (El-Moumni belongs to a notoriously conservative mosque in Rotterdam). In public discourse, Islam became construed as completely and utterly antagonistic to modern, tolerant, Dutch ‘values’ and all the imams active in the Netherlands – including imams from the liberal Alavite community who have nothing whatsoever in common with orthodox figures like El-Moumni – were ‘invited’ for a lesson in tolerance by the liberal democratic minister of ‘large cities-affairs’. One of the prime participants in the attack on public homosexuality in 1998, the conservative columnist Van der List, who called homosexuality disgusting, in 2001 embraced the homosexual community that now needed protection against the horrible Muslim hordes who were a threat to liberal, tolerant, Dutchness.
A visibly uncomfortable prime-minister Kok spent the full ten minutes of his weekly interview on national television explaining to Muslims that they were to tolerate homosexuals, as this “was the Dutch way”. In a poll on the website of the largest Gay magazine, the mainstream, liberal populist Gay Krant, 91 percent of participants agreed with the statement that “Muslims should accept our tolerance or leave”. The widely read right-wing daily Telegraaf spoke of ideas coming from “the medieval deserts of Northern Africa” and gay members of the conservative liberal party VVD in Amsterdam published a pamphlet arguing that Muslims were threatening the liberal freedoms that were so characteristic to Dutch society.
Aesthetics of homosexuality
The message was clear: to be Dutch meant to adjust to certain ‘norms and values’ and to assimilate into the moral universe that constituted modern, tolerant Dutch society. Tolerance became one of the prime markers of ‘autochthony’. Helped by the events of 9/11, the single most successful right-wing populist in Dutch history, Pim Fortuyn, who as the reader may recall was brutally killed in 2002, instrumentalized this discourse of tolerant Dutchness to make his spectacular political staging possible. As a columnist, publicist, and public speaker, Fortuyn had tried for many years to get the Islamophobic, xenophobic, and nationalist view across that Muslims were retarded, that Dutch identity and modernity needed to be reappraised, and that the borders needed to be closed to immigrants, especially Muslims. For a long time, his views were seen as rather ludicrous and marginal, but during the 1990’s they slowly moved from the far right margins to the center of Dutch politics.
The right-wing populist party Livable Netherlands catapulted Fortuyn into the political arena in 2001. Fortuyn combined a personal, almost erotic, political aesthetic and charisma with neonationalist and Islamophobic political ideas and fulfilled a deep desire for belonging, meaning, direction, a closed and clear identity, and an ever more strictly defined definition of ‘the other’. Fortuyn wanted to embody the modern, free, tolerant, Dutch nation and did so by liberating the sexual norms and the aesthetics of part of the international and Dutch gay male community from the gay ghetto and bringing them into the Dutch public domain. As an essential part of this political discourse, Muslims were represented by Fortuyn as the exact opposites of the free, liberal, modern Dutch person. The former were represented as intolerant, primitive, and traditional, a triangle of alterity that made them quite incongruous with Dutch society. Obviously, the mass mediation of the homophobic comments of various orthodox Islamic figures in Dutch society like El-Moumni, and various affairs concerning visceral forms of homophobia in Muslim circles, helped Fortuyn greatly by reinforcing his point. Fortuyn’s recipe against what he dubbed ‘the agrarian backwardness’ of Islam: getting Dutch society back on the path of modernity and secularism through harsh integration policies and closed borders. Power and tolerance became completely entangled and emerged as a weapon in the hands of the populist and Islamophobic right.
Everyday homophobia
Would we turn our attention to the nationalist right in the Netherlands today, the politics of Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party or several populist right-wing media and Internet publications, we would see that tolerance is not quite characteristic of the politics of the far right. The tolerance towards homosexuality, merely discursive as opposed to practiced in everyday life, is accompanied by a growing intolerance toward Muslims and other immigrants, social outsiders, the poor. The culture of the Muslim minority is framed as an essential, natural, uniform, and a-historical whole while homophobia is construed to be alien to Dutch society. That narrative has rooted itself ever more deeply into Dutch society. As opposed to 1998, during the gay games – not very long ago – it is almost impossible today to imagine discussing lgbt-rights without bashing Islam and Muslims. The hegemonic narrative is that gay and lesbian emancipation is almost complete – as gays and lesbians are ‘tolerated’- and that the only problem left is the lack of integration of Muslims into Dutch society. However, the facts are quite different. Research shows that the official tolerance informing the self-image of the Dutch and ‘Dutch pride’ is not always congruous with the facts. Confronted with public homosexuality – like two men kissing – a large part of the population still responds with disgust and distaste. Sometimes this disgust leads to violence. While it is true that young Moroccan men are overrepresented among the perpetrators of homophobic violence in Amsterdam, research shows that this behavior cannot be reduced to the culture or religion of the young men involved. In fact, it is their social exclusion and marginality that is a more prominent candidate for blame.
Normalization
What causes the disgust mentioned above is heteronormativity, which is still a structural, essential aspect of Dutch society and moral order. In other words, heterosexuality remains the self-evident norm, a normativity which is reproduced through the family, in the educational system, popular culture, and media. The tolerated homosexual fits this heteronormativity very well: in almost every way he behaves according to heteronormative norms. As Steven Seidman says, the emphasis on tolerance has normalized homosexuality. The modern homosexual changed from a deviant, excluded other into the mirror-image of the ideal heterosexual. In a 2001 article on normalization, Seidman argues: "Normalization is made possible because it simultaneously reproduces a dominant order of gender, intimate, economic, and national practices”. He warns: "[L]egitimation through normalization leaves in place the polluted status of there marginal sexualities and all the norms that regulate our sexual intimate conduct apart from the norm of heterosexuality". He also points out: "Ultimately, normalization [renders] sexual difference a minor, superficial aspect of a self who in every other way reproduces an ideal of a national citizen".
As argued, many people in the Netherlands still look the other way, disgusted, shamed, when confronted with homosexuality in public. In such a heteronormative culture it needs not surprise that many homosexual men and women are depressed; that suicide rates among young gays and lesbians remain high; that transgenderism and other forms of gender nonconformity are ridiculed and transgenders are excluded; that violence keeps threatening the lgbt-community. The solution for such problems is not a politics based on tolerance, but on the struggle against heteronormativity.
In recent articles, the feminist philosopher Judith Butler rightly and harshly criticizes the confusion of sexual politics with the politics of empire and argues for a kind of sexual politics that resists Islamophobia, racism, and imperialism and that tries to find convergence points of antiracism and lgbt-struggles. Unfortunately, Butler doesn’t elaborate much. It is the task, it seems to me, of critical, antiracist, queer movements to think about and develop on forms of sexual politics beyond tolerance, against tolerance. The heteronormative society radical queers are fighting is the very society that excludes and discriminates against immigrants. Convergence points exist, for instance in the field of education where there is every reason to fight against both implicit heterosexuality as well as against the structural disadvantaging of girls and immigrant kids. Antiracists and lgbt-activists may also find each other in solidarity with lgbt’s from minority communities and in solidarity with homosexual refugees and their rights.
The reader may perhaps ask herself whether the author of the present article has gone mad. Isn’t the Netherlands in fact one of the ‘best’ countries to live in for lesbians or gay men, because they have in fact gained rights and a certain amount of acceptance and demanded their place in the public domain? Of course, this is true, and the gains of lgbt’s in the Netherlands must be defended and the public kiss-ins and similar actions organized by queers in response to homophobia must be supported and participated in. But we need a movement that is more than just responsive but that tries to constantly reinvent itself to fight the exclusion of deviant sexualities as effectively as possible, while doing everything to resist the instrumentalization of our struggles in the ‘war against terror’ and the ongoing onslaught against the Muslim community. I do not argue for intolerance, but for re-imagining political struggles in such a way that the structural causes of exclusion, discrimination, and violence assume center-stage again, for a queer movement that takes up the struggle against heterosexual normativity. Tolerance is ideology. We do not fight to become tolerated but to change the world. Tolerance is an ideological construct that disarms the lgbt-movement and positions us against as opposed to alongside ‘other’ oppressed minorities.
Paul Mepschen is an editor of the radical and socialist magazine and webzine Grenzeloos (www.grenzeloos.org) and a member of Socialist Alternative Politics, the Dutch section of the Fourth International. Paul works as a PhD-researcher on a project called ‘tangible belongings’, which deals with questions of citizenship, subjectivity, and aesthetics in local communities, at the Amsterdam School for Social science Research (ASSR), University of Amsterdam (UvA).
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Friday, June 5, 2009
IN MEMORIUM ..SADANAND MENON ON KAMALA
Kamala (Das) Surayya — 1934-2009.
Sadanand Menon
Sadanand Menon
It was as if, along with dolls, pent-up fantasies had tumbled out of the Old Playhouse of a nubile lass. Kamala Das’s first collection of poems, Summer in Calcutta, published in 1965, kicked up some dust in the rather placid universe of what was then called ‘Indo-Anglian’ writing. Here was a young woman unleashing a set of languid images redolent with the sensual charge of a white hot summer in which the body wanted to burst out of its bud and blossom in the fullness of the self. English writing in India, long past its tepid middle-age, had just discovered its own sexuality.
It didn’t take the 30-year-old mother of three very long to establish a toehold in the airy portals of Indian writing in English, sparsely populated as it was then with women poets. Popular English periodicals like The Illustrated Weekly of India, Quest, Eve’s Weekly, Femina and Imprint were beginning to devote some space to these new literary trends. Along with Eunice D’Souza, Qurratullain Hyder and Chandralekha, Kamala Das represented the voice of a newly emerging feminine consciousness of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was not hesitant to bring into public matters otherwise considered personal. Of course, Ismat Chugtai had already opened the account on this front in the Urdu language.
However, to Kamala Das would go the credit of inaugurating a genre of ‘confessional’ writing which was to impact a large number of emerging women writers in English and regional languages who would find the courage to explore their deeper desires and, even more forcefully into the 1990s, their body.
Her subsequent collections of poetry in English like Descendants (1967), Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973), Alphabets of Lust (Novel, 1977) or Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1996) continued in much the same vein — the cry of a woman looking to cast aside the fetters and restrictions imposed by a male society. The quality of poetry was inconsistent; but the quality of intensity was sustained.
But it was not until her rather premature, narcissistically self-absorbed and gauche autobiography, My Story in 1976, that Kamala Das earned both a sort of national recognition and national notoriety. Told in a breathless, if padded tone, the narrative played with unrestrained sensuality and seemed more than eager to tell-it-all. While it provoked the conservative and titillated those seeking the salacious, what most people missed in the eager, gushing narrative was the fantasy and humour of it. The writer was simply having a blast and leading on her readers to a space where they might all have secretly wished to go. If, in her poem An Introduction she had written: I am every/Woman who seeks love; in the autobiography she becomes every woman who resolves a life of drudgery by escaping to an exotic garden of forbidden delights. It was ceaseless fantasy in a playhouse of infinite imagination.
The half-a-dozen or more times I met her and had longish conversations, she came through as a sober, self-contented, even conventional woman who was affection and warmth personified. There was no attempt to shock or provoke. But she had her eyes wide open and, during an extended chat with her once in her home in Kerala even as she fussed over her tiny grandchild, she minced no words in berating the literary and political establishment of the State which was chauvinistically male-dominated and sought to put her down.
In her other avatar as Madhavikutty, the front-ranking short-story writer and novelist in Malayalam, this was a criticism well directed. She certainly went through phases of isolation and alienation in the literary landscape of the State, even as she shone as a beacon of hope and aspiration for an emerging generation of women writers, for whom her iconoclasm and ‘coming-out-of-the-closet’ courage (even if it was make-believe) provided a roadmap for both honest and feminist writing.
Kamala (Das) Surayya was, however, no feminist herself. She made no pretence of speaking ‘on behalf’ of anyone or any cause. But her concerns, ranging from creative freedom and the need to dream and express sexual desire within a personal space to openly admit to being in a state of erotic insatiability was to open a valuable ‘womanist’ space within literature and politics.
It proposed an independent, autonomous sexual agency for women uncontrolled and unpatrolled by patriarchal yardsticks. However, the contemporary critic would say the fantasy was largely heterosexual and privileged a romantic space for man represented as the eternal lover, Krishna. For example, in Maggots (1967), a pining Radha laments the departure of Krishna even as a solicitous husband asks her if his kisses hurt. Her reply is quintessential Kamala Das:
What is/ it to the corpse if maggots nip?
Without Krishna, the woman is left to be a pining corpse.
Other excitements in her life included the bold move in 1999 to convert to Islam, making the political claim that, as a woman, she felt more protected in that religion. This, for once, was no fantasy. She stuck to her resolve and stayed true to her belief. It is nothing short of extraordinary that now she is provided a State funeral as a practising Muslim.
Kamala Surayya will be remembered for her writings in English and Malayalam. She will be remembered more for boldly adopting something like a maverick, enfant terrible, feminist posture, which became the window through which radical feminism could soon step in to articulate its sexual politics in India.
In her work, the playhouse metamorphoses into a mansion of real possibilities
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Sunday, May 31, 2009
SHE has become immortal
The one and the only one Kamala...
I read her my storywhen I was studying in upperprimary classes. I bought the book in 1976 for Rs 6/- Since then I have been reading her . I don'twish to assess her contributions right now, because all the significant people have done it in different channels and print media is also not far behind. It's a media over kill. But iam happy since a literary genius got such a large space .
Now I am thinking about two incidents which happened quite recently. The conversion in to Islam and leaving kerala to go to Pune .
To comprehend them a reading of one of her famous story "Neipayasam "is crucial .
Kindly read the translation of her story "Neipayasam"
Sweet milk
The Little Magazine
Family Vol III : issue 1
Kamala Das
A man, returning home at night from a simple cremation, having thanked everyone. We could simply call him Achhan. Because only three children in the city know his value. They call him Achha.
Sitting in the bus among strangers, he went over every second of that day.
Woke up in the morning to her voice. "Unniye, don’t go on sleeping covered up like that. It’s Monday." She was calling the eldest son. She then moved to the kitchen, her white sari crumpled. Brought me a big glass of coffee. Then? What happened then? Did she say anything that should not be forgotten? However much he tried, he could not remember. "Don’t go on sleeping covered up like that. It’s Monday." Only that line lingered. He chanted it to himself, as if it was a prayer. If he forgot it, the loss would be unbearable.
The children had been with him when he left for work in the morning. She brought them their tiffin in small aluminium boxes. A smear of turmeric on her right hand.
At work, he did not think of her at all. They had married, against the wishes of their parents, after a courtship of a year or two. But they never did regret it. Lack of money, the children’s spells of illness — they were often dejected. She became careless of her appearance. To an extent, he lost the ability to laugh.
Still, they loved each other. Their three children also loved them. They were boys. Unni, 10, Balan, 7, and Rajan, 5. Three boys whose faces were always smeared with dirt, who had neither outstanding beauty nor brilliance. But the mother and the father said to each other —
"Unni is always making things. He has a taste for engineering."
"We should make Balan a doctor. See his forehead: such a wide forehead denotes intelligence."
"Rajan is not afraid of the dark. He is smart. He should join the army."
They lived in a narrow street in the city, in a middle-class neighbourhood. A three-room flat on the first floor, with a veranda just wide enough for two people to stand in. Mother grows a panineer plant in a pot. It has not flowered yet.
In the kitchen, brass spatulas and ladles hang from the hooks on the wall. A wooden plank lies near the stove. Mother usually sits there, making chapatis when Father returns from work.
He got off when the bus stopped. He felt a twinge of pain in the knee. The beginning of arthritis? Who will look after the children if I am bedridden? Suddenly, his tears welled up. He rubbed his face with a dirty kerchief and quickened his step.
Have the children gone to sleep? Had they eaten anything, or had they just cried themselves to sleep? But they are too young to understand. Unni just stood there watching me when I put her in the taxi. Only the youngest one cried. But that was because he wanted to get into the taxi too. Certainly, they did not know the meaning of death.
Did I know? No. Did I ever imagine that she would suddenly fall down one evening and die, without saying farewell to anyone?
He had looked in through the kitchen window when he came back from work. She was not there.
He could hear the sound of children playing in the front yard. "First-class shot." It was Unni calling out.
He opened the front door with his key. It was then that he saw her. She was lying on the floor. Her lips were parted. She must have slipped, he thought. But at the hospital the doctor told him: "She died an hour and a half ago. It was heart failure."
He was swept by a welter of emotions. He was angry with her for no reason. How could she go, without any warning, burdening me with all the responsibilities!
Now who would bathe the children? Who would cook for them? Who would look after them when they fell ill?
"My wife died," he whispered to himself, "my wife died suddenly today of a heart attack. I need two days’ leave."
A great leave application. Leave, not because the wife is ill. Leave, because the wife is dead. The boss might call him to his room. He might express his sorrow. His sorrow! Who wants it? He didn’t know her. He didn’t know her hair that curled at the ends, her tired smile, her slow step. All these are his losses.
When he opened the door his youngest son came running up. "Mother isn’t back yet," he said.
How quickly he has forgotten! Did he really think that the body that was taken away in the taxi would come back alone?
He took him to the kitchen.
"Unni," he called.
"What is it, Achha?"
Unni came into the kitchen.
"Balan is sleeping."
"All right. Have you all eaten anything?"
"No."
He removed the plates covering the vessels kept on the sill. Chapatis, rice, potato curry, chips, curds — the food she had made. In a glass bowl, the neipayasam that she sometimes made for the children.
No, they should not eat this food. It is touched by death.
"These have gone cold. I’ll make some uppumavu," he said.
"Achha..." it was Unni.
"Um?"
"When will Mother come back? Isn’t she better?"
Let the truth wait for another day, he thought. There was no point in giving grief to the child tonight.
"Mother will come," he said.
He placed the washed bowls on the floor. Two bowls.
"Let Balan sleep," he said.
"Achha, neipayasam," Rajan exclaimed happily. He dipped a finger in it.
He sat down on the wooden plank where his wife usually sat.
"Unni, will you serve? Achhan does not feel too good. Headache."
Let them eat. They would never again be able to eat their mother’s cooking.
They started eating the payasam. He sat motionless, watching them.
"Don’t you want rice, Unni?"
"No, we want only payasam. It’s very tasty."
"Yes, Mother has made splendid neipayasam," Rajan said happily.
He got up and walked quickly towards the bathroom.
Translated from the Malayalam story ‘Neipayasam’ by Sindhu V. Nair with The Little Magazine..
Her real life and literay life are not running parallel, instead they are intertwined.Almost one and the same. Is there anything in this story that would explain her actions and behaviour.?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UbDPih_qLw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMCmADmDZmk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxAE6IVzlso
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePdeHLXuhMI
I read her my storywhen I was studying in upperprimary classes. I bought the book in 1976 for Rs 6/- Since then I have been reading her . I don'twish to assess her contributions right now, because all the significant people have done it in different channels and print media is also not far behind. It's a media over kill. But iam happy since a literary genius got such a large space .
Now I am thinking about two incidents which happened quite recently. The conversion in to Islam and leaving kerala to go to Pune .
To comprehend them a reading of one of her famous story "Neipayasam "is crucial .
Kindly read the translation of her story "Neipayasam"
Sweet milk
The Little Magazine
Family Vol III : issue 1
Kamala Das
A man, returning home at night from a simple cremation, having thanked everyone. We could simply call him Achhan. Because only three children in the city know his value. They call him Achha.
Sitting in the bus among strangers, he went over every second of that day.
Woke up in the morning to her voice. "Unniye, don’t go on sleeping covered up like that. It’s Monday." She was calling the eldest son. She then moved to the kitchen, her white sari crumpled. Brought me a big glass of coffee. Then? What happened then? Did she say anything that should not be forgotten? However much he tried, he could not remember. "Don’t go on sleeping covered up like that. It’s Monday." Only that line lingered. He chanted it to himself, as if it was a prayer. If he forgot it, the loss would be unbearable.
The children had been with him when he left for work in the morning. She brought them their tiffin in small aluminium boxes. A smear of turmeric on her right hand.
At work, he did not think of her at all. They had married, against the wishes of their parents, after a courtship of a year or two. But they never did regret it. Lack of money, the children’s spells of illness — they were often dejected. She became careless of her appearance. To an extent, he lost the ability to laugh.
Still, they loved each other. Their three children also loved them. They were boys. Unni, 10, Balan, 7, and Rajan, 5. Three boys whose faces were always smeared with dirt, who had neither outstanding beauty nor brilliance. But the mother and the father said to each other —
"Unni is always making things. He has a taste for engineering."
"We should make Balan a doctor. See his forehead: such a wide forehead denotes intelligence."
"Rajan is not afraid of the dark. He is smart. He should join the army."
They lived in a narrow street in the city, in a middle-class neighbourhood. A three-room flat on the first floor, with a veranda just wide enough for two people to stand in. Mother grows a panineer plant in a pot. It has not flowered yet.
In the kitchen, brass spatulas and ladles hang from the hooks on the wall. A wooden plank lies near the stove. Mother usually sits there, making chapatis when Father returns from work.
He got off when the bus stopped. He felt a twinge of pain in the knee. The beginning of arthritis? Who will look after the children if I am bedridden? Suddenly, his tears welled up. He rubbed his face with a dirty kerchief and quickened his step.
Have the children gone to sleep? Had they eaten anything, or had they just cried themselves to sleep? But they are too young to understand. Unni just stood there watching me when I put her in the taxi. Only the youngest one cried. But that was because he wanted to get into the taxi too. Certainly, they did not know the meaning of death.
Did I know? No. Did I ever imagine that she would suddenly fall down one evening and die, without saying farewell to anyone?
He had looked in through the kitchen window when he came back from work. She was not there.
He could hear the sound of children playing in the front yard. "First-class shot." It was Unni calling out.
He opened the front door with his key. It was then that he saw her. She was lying on the floor. Her lips were parted. She must have slipped, he thought. But at the hospital the doctor told him: "She died an hour and a half ago. It was heart failure."
He was swept by a welter of emotions. He was angry with her for no reason. How could she go, without any warning, burdening me with all the responsibilities!
Now who would bathe the children? Who would cook for them? Who would look after them when they fell ill?
"My wife died," he whispered to himself, "my wife died suddenly today of a heart attack. I need two days’ leave."
A great leave application. Leave, not because the wife is ill. Leave, because the wife is dead. The boss might call him to his room. He might express his sorrow. His sorrow! Who wants it? He didn’t know her. He didn’t know her hair that curled at the ends, her tired smile, her slow step. All these are his losses.
When he opened the door his youngest son came running up. "Mother isn’t back yet," he said.
How quickly he has forgotten! Did he really think that the body that was taken away in the taxi would come back alone?
He took him to the kitchen.
"Unni," he called.
"What is it, Achha?"
Unni came into the kitchen.
"Balan is sleeping."
"All right. Have you all eaten anything?"
"No."
He removed the plates covering the vessels kept on the sill. Chapatis, rice, potato curry, chips, curds — the food she had made. In a glass bowl, the neipayasam that she sometimes made for the children.
No, they should not eat this food. It is touched by death.
"These have gone cold. I’ll make some uppumavu," he said.
"Achha..." it was Unni.
"Um?"
"When will Mother come back? Isn’t she better?"
Let the truth wait for another day, he thought. There was no point in giving grief to the child tonight.
"Mother will come," he said.
He placed the washed bowls on the floor. Two bowls.
"Let Balan sleep," he said.
"Achha, neipayasam," Rajan exclaimed happily. He dipped a finger in it.
He sat down on the wooden plank where his wife usually sat.
"Unni, will you serve? Achhan does not feel too good. Headache."
Let them eat. They would never again be able to eat their mother’s cooking.
They started eating the payasam. He sat motionless, watching them.
"Don’t you want rice, Unni?"
"No, we want only payasam. It’s very tasty."
"Yes, Mother has made splendid neipayasam," Rajan said happily.
He got up and walked quickly towards the bathroom.
Translated from the Malayalam story ‘Neipayasam’ by Sindhu V. Nair with The Little Magazine..
Her real life and literay life are not running parallel, instead they are intertwined.Almost one and the same. Is there anything in this story that would explain her actions and behaviour.?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UbDPih_qLw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMCmADmDZmk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxAE6IVzlso
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePdeHLXuhMI
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