The Modalities of ‘Coming Out’
T.P. Sabitha I propose to look at the dynamics of the production of two kinds of subjects, the autobiographical and the fictional, and attempt to see how a gay identity informs and transforms the two in sometimes similar and sometimes differing ways. Let me look at Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (subsequently to be referred to as SM in the course of this essay) and Christopher and His Kind (to be referred to as CK). What makes the “subject” a specifically Modernist one in these texts written in 1964 (SM) and 1964 (CK)? And what makes it specifically gay? The last question will of necessity imply a look at the notion of the subject –my proposed objective – in that both the texts are narratives informed by the gay identity of the subject, fictional or autobiographical. And lastly, what are the implications of looking for a gay narrative or gay subject in these texts? These are the questions I wish to explore in the course of this essay. It is, I confess, is only a pointer in the direction of possible answers. So, how is the subject a “Modernist” one in these narratives? The novel, A Single Man, is not a first-person narrative, but it uses certain first-person narrative techniques like the Woolfian stream of consciousness and a certain Bergsonian idea of subjective time or durèe both of which are characteristic of what has come to be labeled “Modernist”. There is a certain interiority to the Modernist subject which comes from a self-awareness of this subject capable of objectivising itself and indeed reading itself. The fictional subject in A Single Man, George, is both the subject of this narrative and also the object. In the beginning as well as at the end of the novel, there is a pseudo-clinical objectivisation of the subject: Fear tweaks the vagus nerve…But meanwhile the cortex, that grim disciplinarian, has takes its place at the central controls and has been testing them, one after another; the legs stretch, the lower back is arched… And now, over the entire inter-communication system is issued the first general order of the day: UP…It stares and stares. Its lips part…It knows its name. It is called George” (SM 7-8). The novel here curiously resembles an autobiographical narrative in that there is an explicit rupture between the subject “George” and the George that this subject objectivises in the third person narrative of this novel. The opening lines of the novel establish the subject as the subject in two principal ways: first through a self-recognition (“I am”) and through the recognition of itself as George in the eyes of others, in a dialectical cognitive process. Its existence is confirmed by its self-awareness and its recognition by others. The public affirmation that this self desperately needs in order to establish its identity is a persisting idea in the text. Look at these lines for example: “George slips his parking-card into the slot (thereby offering a piece of circumstantial evidence that he is George); the barrier rises in spastic mechanical jerks, and he drives in” (SM 34) and “[a] veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, ‘Good morning!’ And the three secretaries – each of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style – recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply ‘Good morning!’ to him” (SM 35). However, the recognition by others is also a misrecognition. They fail to read in George his not-so-concealed secret: his queerness. All the characters in the novel – including those who know about his liking of men – either fail to read altogether or misread this essential constitutive of the subject called George. In a conversation with his married student, Dreyer, George learns that his wife has taken up a teaching job and teasingly asks him, “ ‘So you’re fixing your own breakfast?’ ” and Dreyer replies, “ ‘Oh, I can manage. Till she gets a job nearer in. Or I get her pregnant.’ ” The narrative continues, “[h]e visibly enjoys this man-to-man stuff with George. (Does he know about me, George wonders; do any of them?)” (SM 40-1). There is misrecognition even by friends who “know” he is gay: After a few drinks with Charlotte, a close friend, when George gets up to leave, we are told, “As they embrace, she kisses him full on the mouth. And suddenly sticks her tongue right in…It’s one of those drunken longshots which just might, at least theoretically, once in ten thousand tries, throw a relationship right out of its orbit and send it whizzing off another” (SM 122). Even the possibility of a true understanding – I am referring to the Kenny episode at the end – is shown to be impossible. This misrecognition is what makes George feel truly alienated. Indeed, the whole novel is marked by an acute feeling of alienation. And the only other self who will have understood this queer subject, Jim, is dead. Jim is an absent presence in the novel. Time, space and the alienated fictional subject – all bear markers of his absence. The absence of Jim is a signifier of a larger absence of understanding, sharing and desire – an absence of the returning gaze of the queer subject. And since subjectivity is presented in the novel as constituted as much by others as by the self, the queer subject remains partly unconstituted. However, the unreturned gaze of desire has been compensated through a fictional device in the text – that of making the subject the third person “he”, thus creating a rupture in the self (the self as observing and desiring subject and object that is observed and desired.) This fictional device of a fissure in the self creates a space for the acknowledgement of his homoerotic desire. This is further enacted
Beyond Violence
Srimati Basu “How am I going to manage without you?” my maternal grandmother Pata wailed at the viewing of her husband’s recently deceased body. As a precocious and carefully inscrutable 12-year-old, I remember feeling embarrassed on her behalf, and thus mine, that she expressed public grief for logistical support rather than the passionate loss I had seen at other mournings. Even at 12, I did know he was a hard man to mourn–physically (and likely sexually) violent, emotionally abusive, serial philanderer, financial deadbeat. But it felt both like a failure of love, which I must have believed undergirded their lives, and a lesson in the raw realities of marriage. In retrospect, it was probably one of her most outspoken acts of resistance. It does not seem too much of a stretch to imagine that the everyday experiences of my grandmother, who raised me for the first four years of my life and was a substantial presence over the next 15, animate my ideas of feminism and social justice. As Uma Narrayan says evocatively in the essay “Contesting Cultures,”My eventual feminist contestations of my culture have something to do with … my early sense of ‘the politics of home.’ As far back as memory serves, I resented my grandmother’s non-resistance, her lack of anger, her low moaning to gods, her turn to religion, her performance of abjection. “Ahalya, Draupadi, Kunti, Tara, Mandodari,” she would chant first thing every morning. This auspicious litany of the “Five Women” was meant to bring good fortune, but these are all archetypal wronged wives in Hindu epics, rather difficult to recuperate as models of feminist agency. In what I now know to be common among battered women, she had a damaged optical nerve and was severely agoraphobic, which meant she could never come out and enjoy herself with us without a dramatic breakdown. I am wary of simple causality, and refrain from attributing my two decades of research on women’s property, law and marriage in India, and on violence within and outside marriage, to my grandmother. I do know that my work is driven by anger at our family silences around this violence. They echo the experiences of other friends whose families work to save face rather than confront abusers in their midst, relying on the quiet toughness of survivors. I have tried hard to understand that silence and compliance can be as crucial among coping strategies as any other, including finding solace in patriarchal religions. Even living well–if in oblivion–can be the best survival tool, as it seems it was for my mother and aunts. In the end, though, I can’t help cheering for fierceness, action, voluble speech. But last year, in clearing out an old drawer at home, I ran across a 1949 letter from my aunt to her father–my violent grandfather. “Bapi, how are you? I miss you,” it begins in the passionate voice of a four-year old. It suggests that she and her sister had left home for awhile with their mother, informing him that they are well and that her mother is taking good care of them. She complains about her sister’s temper and tells him about her new earrings. Her misspelled signature is a poignant reminder that she has just learned to write. A copy hangs above my desk as I work to finish my book on family law and violence, a reminder that love complicates shame and action beyond reason, much though we would like to exorcise violence in the name of feminism. Srimati Basu is Associate Professor, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Kentucky, Lexington. This article was a part of a week-long Bitch Media/ Ms. Magazine blog carnival in honor of Feminist Coming Out Day. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
On The Poverty of Student Life
Mustapha Khayati [First published in 1966 at the University of Strasbourg by students of the university and members of the Internationale Situationniste. A few students elected to the student union printed 10,000 copies with university funds. The copies were distributed at the official ceremony marking the beginning of the academic year. The student union was promptly closed by court order. HUG reproduces a section from the pamphlet.] We might very well say, and no one will disgaree with us, that the student is the most universally despised creature in France, apart from the priest and the policeman. Naturally he is usually attacked from the wrong point of view, with specious reasons derived from the ruling ideology. He may be worth the contempt of a true revolutionary, yet a revolutionary critique of the student situation is currently taboo on the official Left. The licensed and impotent opponents of capitalism repress the obvious–that what is wrong with the students is also what is wrong with them. They convert their unconscious contempt into a blind enthusiasm. The radical intelligentsia (from Les Temps Modernes to L’Express) prostrates itself before the so-called “rise of the student” and the declining bureaucracies of the Left (from the “Communist” party to the Stalinist National Union of Students) bids noisily for his moral and material support. There are reasons for this sudden enthusiasm, but they are all provided by the present form of capitalism, in its overdeveloped state. We shall use this pamphlet for denunciation. We shall expose these reasons one by one, on the principle that the end of alienation is only reached by the straight and narrow path of alienation itself. Up to now, studies of student life have ignored the essential issue. The surveys and analyses have all been psychological or sociological or economic: in other words, academic exercises, content with the false categories of one specialization or another. None of them can achieve what is most needed–a view of modern society as a whole. Fourier denounced their error long ago as the attempt to apply scientific laws to the basic assumptions of the science (“porter régulièrement sur les questions primordiales”). Everything is said about our society except what it is, and the nature of its two basic principles–the commodity and the spectacle. The fetishism of facts masks the essential category, and the details consign the totality to oblivion. Modern capitalism and its spectacle allot everyone a specific role in a general passivity. The student is no exception to the rule. He has a provisional part to play, a rehearsal for his final role as an element in market society as conservative as the rest. Being a student is a form of initiation. An initiation which echoes the rites of more primitive societies with bizarre precision. It goes on outside of history, cut off from social reality. The student leads a double life, poised between his present status and his future role. The two are absolutely separate, and the journey from one to the other is a mechanical event “in the future.” Meanwhile, he basks in a schizophrenic consciousness, withdrawing into his initiation group to hide from that future. Protected from history, the present is a mystic trance. At least in consciousness, the student can exist apart from the official truths of “economic life.” But for very simple reasons: looked at economically, student life is a hard one. In our society of abundance,” he is still a pauper. 80% of students come from income groups well above the working class, yet 90% have less money than the meanest laborer Student poverty is an anachronism, a throw-back from an earlier age of capitalism; it does not share in the new poverties of the spectacular societies; it has yet to attain the new poverty of the new proletariat. Nowadays the teenager shuffles off the moral prejudices and authority of the family to become part of the market even before he is adolescent: at fifteen he has all the delights of being directly exploited. In contrast the student covets his protracted infancy as an irresponsible and docile paradise. Adolescence and its crises may bring occasional brushes with his family, but in essence he is not troublesome: he agrees to be treated as a baby by the institutions which provide his education. (If ever they stop screwing his arse off, it’s only to come round and kick him in the balls.) “There is no student problem.” Student passivity is only the most obvious symptom of a general state of affairs, for each sector of social life has been subdued by a similar imperialism. Our social thinkers have a bad conscience about the student problem, but only because the real problem is the poverty and servitude of all. But we have different reasons to despise the student and all his works. What is unforgivable is not so much his actual misery but his complaisance in the face of the misery of others. For him there is only one real alienation: his own. He is a full-time and happy consumer of that commodity, hoping to arouse at least our pity, since he cannot claim our interest. By the logic of modern capitalism, most students can only become mere petits cadres (with the same function in neo-capitalism as the skilled worker had in the nineteenth-century economy). The student really knows how miserable will be that golden future which is supposed to make up for the shameful poverty of the present. In the face of that knowledge, he prefers to dote on the present and invent an imaginary prestige for himself. After all, there will be no magical compensation for present drabness: tomorrow will be like yesterday, lighting these fools the way to dusty death. Not unnaturally he takes refuge in an unreal present. The student is a stoic slave: the more chains authority heaps upon him, the freer he is in phantasy. He shares with his new family, the University, a belief in a curious kind of autonomy. Real independence, apparently,
Dread Not Rasta
Richard C. Salter The dusty street into St. Thomas, a medium-sized coastal village in the eastern Caribbean island of Dominica, ran east to west along a garbage-strewn stream spiked with disposable diapers and trash. Matewé was taking me to visit Duke, a fellow well-known by youth in the area for his wisdom and the small “church” (his term) that he ran. After traversing a few alleys, and gaining entrance to Duke’s grandmother’s yard with an identifying whistle, we passed through the wooden shack into the backyard where the church sat. The church was about six feet wide by eight feet long and was built onto another building that served as its back wall. The church was an appropriate symbol for subaltern resistance, for the building that served as the church’s back wall was actually the village police station. Duke welcomed us, and with three other dreadlocked church members we entered the building for what could be called a five-hour “reasoning” session. After we entered the church and turned on a boombox inside, Duke cut and sorted the seeds from some ganja and then heated the ganja on a hot plate to remove impurities such as fertilizers, pesticides and “things used on plantations” that may have gotten into it. He then packed it into the “chalice” and lit it. The chalice was a water pipe made with a large bamboo stem, a hollow water-filled coconut as a base, and a hollowed out stone bowl. It resembled the water pipes favored in many Rastafari yards, and it was similarly passed member to member throughout the reasoning session. Duke did not use the term “reasoning” to describe the church activities, instead referring to the passing of the chalice as “prayer.” His young daughter (perhaps 5 years old) was with us and was surprised to see me, a white man, in the church. She asked, as the chalice was passed to me, “You praying now?” For some of the time at church we sat quietly, but at other times we reasoned and discussed the world. Duke said he was trying to get away from “churchy stuff” at his church: “We come when we want. We talk about what we want.” Typical of many Rastas, Duke was critical of Roman Catholics and distinguished the rules at his church from those of the Catholic Church, where formality made it impossible to eat or for kids to walk around during the service. Many of the topics we covered could be found at any Rastafari reasoning: what is a proper diet? If you avoid eating blood, is it okay to eat siwik (river crab), since it does not appear to have blood in it? What about crayfish? Salt? We talked about the merits of “bush medicine,” the benefits of zèb chèpantyé (Carpenter Weed) as a blood cleaner. We talked about the roots of reggae and jazz. We talked about the “wickedness” people do and our responsibility to improve the world for children in this generation. Duke was particularly interested in talking about the merits of ganja. That was not surprising, and indeed the merits of ganja as inspiration, herbal remedy, or tea, or the economic benefits to be had through hemp production would also be a topic at any Rastafari reasoning. But Duke was particularly emphatic that ganja should not be smoked with any sort of tobacco, including the local Indian Tobacco (lobelia inflata). According to Duke, ganja is “lamb’s bread,” and “smoking is eating.” He reasoned that “Jesus broke bread” (i.e., he smoked marijuana) and that “real food” means “to be contented with God.” He considered smoking ganja to be eating real food because it satisfies, it brings “peace,” it “brings one to God.” Physically, Duke and his church members resembled any other Rastas on the island. They wore dreadlocks and used much of the same argot as other Rastas. They also smoked ganja in the same way, using similar accoutrements, and they reasoned about the same topics in a common format. But although Duke would fit into what I have broadly defined as the Rastafari movement, he and his other three church members were adamant that they were not Rastas. Duke was a Dread. Dreads do not always constitute a self-identified group as they did at Duke’s church, but there are certainly many who call themselves Dreads in order to differentiate their beliefs from orthodox Rastafari. In addition, there remain some general social and organizational differences between the two groups. For example, unlike many orthodox Rastas, Dreads are with rare exceptions from the lower classes. The Dread movement is far less hierarchically organized than most Rastafari groups, and with a few exceptions, like Duke’s small church, Dread practices are individualized, and often ad hoc and idiosyncratic. The Dreads remain a movement of small groups, without systematic communication among themselves, and thus they also tend to be associated strongly with particular villages or locales. There are also areas of worldview, ethos, rituals and food practices that differentiate Dreads from orthodox Rastas. The clearest divergence between Dreads and more orthodox Rastas is in their attitudes towards a deity. Orthodox Rastas tend to maintain a belief in Haile Selassie, former Emperor of Ethiopia, as God. Dreads, on the other hand, tend not to proclaim the divinity of Selassie. Duke, for example, ridiculed Selassie and Rastas who claimed any belief in him. Even Dreads who acknowledged Selassie as a great leader, or as a great African statesman, suggested that it is dangerous to worship a human being. Francis was representative of many Dreads when he said that he would not call himself a “Rastafarian” or anything else: “I would just call myself a living man.” To him the term Rastafari was a “perversion” because the term “Ras” means king, and it is a perversion to call a man king when in reality we are all just men. To him, Selassie “was man just like me.” It would have made no sense to accept Selassie as God: “How could