Saloua Ali Ben Zahra

DISABILITY AND SHAME IN SALMAN RUSHDIE'S NOVEL SHAME:
What it Means to Be a Disabled Postcolonial Woman

Salman Rushdie's Shame is to a considerable extent about how society defines disability. It is a narrative of how the life and character of its female protagonist, Sufiya Zinobia are circumscribed by her bodily and mental features. Rushdie introduces her in the following terms:

There was once a young woman, Sufiya Zinobia, also known as "Shame." She was of slight build … and her arms and legs were imperfectly co-ordinated when she walked. Despite this ambulatory awkwardness, however, she would not have struck a stranger as being particularly abnormal, having acquired in the first twenty-one years of life the usual complement of physical attributes, including a small severe face that made her seem unusually mature, disguising the fact that she had only managed to get hold of around seven years' worth of brains. She even had a husband … Appearances notwithstanding, however, this Sufiya Zinobia turned out to be, in reality, one of those … exterminating or avenging angels, or werewolves, or vampires, about whom we are happy to read in stories" (216).

Rushdie revises the definition of disability into a state of being one acquires in interaction with a dominant and violent culture's gendered de/valuation systems and politics of naming. Besides "Shame," Sufiya was also known as "a miracle-gone-wrong" (125). That is because she was born female instead of male in a culture that is based on the authority and continuity of the male family name and the male inheritance of property. At stake is also male inheritance of power within a system of relations that has been deeply and irreversibly altered by foreign presence and oppression. From their changing positions within the imperial enterprise, colonial men assign shifting roles to women and the disabled, for self-serving reasons to be noted further.

Marriage distribution captures society's altered conception and treatment of the disabled body. Sufiya is undesired and referred to as the "unmarriageable child" (156). Yet, she is later paired with a "brilliant" British-educated doctor, named Omar Khayyam. Her brown savior apparently found her desirable. At first sight, he developed (as he would put it) a "sexual obsession" with her (313). Sufiya was therefore desirable and undesirable, unmarriageable and marriageable. Omar was caught up in an ambivalent web of reactions vis-à-vis the disabled native woman. His responses to her were made up of a compound of attraction and repulsion, desire and fear. Such a structure of feelings is similar to Western comprehension of the "Orient." Internalized British norms divided native men from native women. Sufiya was further marked by Omar's internalized colonizing.

In fact, Sufiya's marriage would be a fiction. It was a political and social arrangement for the benefit of the more able-bodied persons entrusted with her care, primarily her legal father Hyder and her husband. Omar, guilty of "attempting a shameless piece of social climbing … by marrying the unmarriageable child, is enabled to stay close to Hyder for years, before, during and after his Presidency" (156). Both men were slaves to Western rivalries and politics of intervention that alienated, disoriented and displaced them. Sufiya's father, the man who decided her fate, was a native who combined the worst of the indigenous and Western systems of relations. He compounded cultural fundamentalism with servile Western allegiance. He found himself obliged to invent for his people doctrines and politics that would please the Americans (273). Also in order to protect his own peculiar interests in the seclusion of Sufiya, the father had to be creative with the Islamic marriage code, to the detriment of "the bride." "Raza Hyder forced Omar Khayyam to agree to the insertion in the Nikah [Arabic word for marriage] contract of a clause forbidding him, Omar, to remove his bride from her parents' home without their prior permission" (219).

The father who married off Sufiya has seen her as unmarriageable all along. He could not have helped her develop something he did not want to consider her capable of. It did not necessarily have marriage; however, the marriage fiction dramatizes and captures the process of denial, (of any ability or possibility for Sufiya). At the marriage prospect with the Western-educated medical doctor Omar, Sufiya's father objected: "but a damaged child: should we look for husbands at all?" (175). In reply, the girl's mother, Bilquis, notes that her daughter has "a woman's body" and that "brains are a positive disadvantage to a woman in marriage" (176). She goes on to point out Sufiya's improvements on the fronts of language and housework. She lists what Sufiya is able to do.

[Sufiya's] vocabulary is improving … she sits with Shahbanou and tells the dhobi what to wash. She can count the garments and handle money. She likes to go to the kitchen and help the khansama with his work. At the bazaar she can tell good vegetables from bad. You [Raza] yourself have praised her chutneys. She can tell when the servants have not polished the furniture properly (176).

Sufiya also liked babies and played with them:

The best thing that has happened recently is the babies, her sisters' babies. She, Sufiya, plays with them as often as she can. She likes watching them crawl, fall over, make funny noises, likes knowing more than them. She skips for them … She puts them in her head and brings them out when the sleep won't come. Good News [her sister's name] never plays with the babies. Why? No point asking" (273).

If society had provided acceptance and assistance, Sufiya could have managed to have a family life of her own. However, the society told Sufiya "babies aren't for you" (236). She was denied her reproductive rights because of society's disapproval of her category of physical and mental differences, particularly when they hosted by a female body. Babies are for the normal, able and presentable according to the culture's definition. Sufiya has a beautiful and healthy sister. She is called Good News. She embodies the appointed paradigm of presentability. The narrator comments: "what contrasts in these girls! Sufiya Zinobia embarrassingly small (no, we shall avoid, at all costs, comparing her to an Oriental miniature), and Good News rangy, elongated" (148).

Rushdie invents Good News also in order to dramatize the extreme and alienating violence in society's enforcement of its expectations. In fact, even when the Good News of the society do not like children, they are forced into motherhood. Moreover, Good News is an example of internalized cultural norms. She grows to hate Sufiya and channels all of her energy into conforming to society's expectations of her body, losing herself in the process. Good News was considered presentable, usable and politically useful. She was allowed to partake of the social opportunities available and parade her beauty in order to catch a rich and powerful husband (168) and eventually become a mother of strong sons and daughters. Good News would choose a "young police captain who was famous for being the most successful stud in the city," Talvar Ulhaq (178). Given the interests at stake, the family would allow Good News to take action in order to realize her marriage.

Sufiya had a grasp of the social mechanisms at work in her life. Despite her understanding, she found herself powerless because of the way social authorities and relations were structured. Women would not leave the house freely or safely without family permission and company. Sufiya's slight build and mental constitution, rendered her too shameful to present. Therefore, she was denied the possibility of stepping outside. Her family would not allow her to socialize because its members did not want her to become visible and jeopardize family interests. Society would not want her to reproduce either because she was considered too imperfect. The likes of her awaken a fundamental human fear of disability, shortcoming and death, particularly in an age governed by foreign imposed and imported norms of fitness. Seeing and showing her or any reminder of her would also reactivate society's sense of guilt at her oppression. Sufiya could not claim her family rights despite the fact that her kind of "disability" would not necessarily have made her incapable of fulfilling the role she yearned for. The family home was used as an equivalent of a prison and mental institution for her.

Rushdie's representations deploy strategies of challenge and refusal. In a first place, they question society's definition and identification of the individuals it intends to eliminate. The narrative portrays persons whose disabilities are incorrectly defined as congenital or psychic. Their lives are violently and unnecessarily institutionalized and sterilized by medical and social errors. The society which represents the disabled as such may itself be the primary cause of their conditions in the first place. That, is omitted from their medical histories. Society focuses on the disabilities in order to absolve itself from guilt. Its energy is channeled into devising restrictive narratives and treatments based on a projection of impossibilities and exclusions. Sufiya's disability was in fact a culturally acquired one, in part a punishment for her gender and also a consequence of physical violence. It was not an effect of brain fever as her guilty mother claimed. Rushdie reveals "maybe the fever was a lie, a figment of Bilquis Hyder's imagination, intended to cover up the damage done by repeated blows to the head: hate can turn a miracle-gone-wrong into a basket case" (125).

Sufiya's inability to become a mother is to be situated at a juncture of culturally acquired and accrued disabilities. Sufiya might have been a mother. Society did not see her fit for the role and disabled her from doing what she was able and liked to do. In many cases, impairment is not the "disability" that society wants and claims it to be. Speaking about housework, Sufiya could do many things. Her social side was developed enough for her to converse with the people she was allowed to reach, the house servants. In a different time, place and company, Sufiya might have been supported to start and run a chutney or laundry service business, or do some manual or literate work that she would like. The social problem in question runs deeper than marriage per se. Marriage is not all. However, in Sufiya's society, marriage was the only prospect for fertile-looking girls. A father's suitor voices his hope that "this Good News … is a fertile girl" (167). Good News explains to one of her working women: "you know what marriage is for a woman? … Marriage is power, … it is freedom. You stop being someone's daughter and become someone's mother instead" (169). The requirement of fitness for marriage and diplomacy as the only paradigm for acceptable womanhood enforces division across various social relations. Rushdie voices a critique of the marriage model: "why is it that fairy-tales always treat marriage as an ending? And always such a perfectly happy one?" (172). The narrowness of available options divides the healthy from the disabled within society. In a sense, Sufiya's predicament stands for the situation of women in Pakistani society in general. It allows us to see how limited the options would be for disabled women. Pakistani society limited people's thinking and particularly women's prospects to gender relations centered around honor and childbearing.

Denied the possibility of family life and meaningful work, Sufiya would resort to flouting the social codes. She would go out, like a man. Violence was the only venue left for her. She would destroy her already divided society. She would kill men, her oppressors. She would do the work for the benefit of native and foreign enemies. Chaos is profitable to native and foreign businessmen, they would take advantage to strike deals over the country's natural resources. Native men are also avenged against the upper classes by Sufiya's agency:

How does a dictator fall … Certain fatal connections are hinted at in print … The people are l ike dry wood,' Raza Hyder says. 'These sparks will start a fire.' Then the last night comes … How will it end, … with the mob surging into the palace … or in the other stranger way, the people parting like mythological waters, averting their eyes, allowing her [Sufiya] through, their champion, to do their dirty work … ? (289-290).

Sufiya's story is the story of all people across the Third World. The oppression of individuals based on bodily difference is socially explosive. Disability oppression is in a sense akin to popular oppression at large , an explosive overlapping. Sufiya's is also a story inspired by a news clipping. "In the East End of London, a Pakistani father murdered his only child, a daughter, because by making love to a white boy she had brought such dishonor upon her family that only her blood could wash away the stain" (123). Rushdie comments: "The story appalled me … But even more appalling was my realization that, … I, too, found myself understanding the killer. … We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to people living in the aftermath of the death of God … My Sufiya Zinobia grew out of the corpse of that murdered girl" (124). The England-based news story of the honor-killed Pakistani "haunts this book" (125).

Sufiya's story is a story of the people, a story of the global human body. It is also forcefully the story of the disabled body in oppressive unaccepting world cultures. Oppressive systems take a heavier toll on the disabled body. Denied growth, the disabled turn to the only code they experience and end up comprehending, mastering and manipulating: violence. At the heart of the disabled woman's internalized violence, emerges a possible connection between disability, social shame, stigma and violence in the society and the world. "Connecting shame and violence" (125) is a strategic refusal on Rushdie's part of the treatments that people and the disabled are subjected to through denial of agency.

Title: Shame
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher of the Edition Cited Here: Random House
Publication Date: 1984

Saloua Ali Ben Zahra is currently based in North Carolina where she Faculty-in-Residence at the Learning and Living Center at Appalachian State University and Director of the Arabic program and Assistant Professor of Arabic culture, language and literature in translation. She obtained her Masters' and Doctorate degrees from the University of Minnesota where she was a recipient of Fulbright scholarships twice. For her doctoral project she worked on representations of disabilities in Arab / Islamic post-colonial literatures, cultures and societies. She taught diverse courses in Minnesota, Arabic language and culture most recently, but before that French and Italian. She is originally from Tunisia where she was educated at the university of Tunis-Carthage and taught at various Tunisian universities.