I went to a reading by Khaled Hosseini last night, at the bay area Book Group Expo. Khaled read from a section of his new book A Thousand Splendid Suns, which someone described as being the history of Afghanistan viewed through the eyes of two women.
The reading was fascinating/frightening: it detailed the search of a pregnant woman and her surrogate mother for a hospital that would take them in while she gave birth. Women had been banned from all the hospitals in Afghanistan, bar one, and that one lacked water, electricity, and basic medical supplies. When the woman’s baby turned out to be in the breech position, the doctor apologized for the lack of anasthetic, and then continued to do a cesarian section anyway.
Khaled Hosseini is a physician who has worked internationally; consequently, the medical details had a frightening heft. He described the way in which the pregnant woman’s mouth stretched back and frothed with pain.
As he passed into this description, the audience, which was full, began to shift. The demographic was mostly women, but with more men than last year (I’d make a guess at 25-30%). Everyone was uncomfortable. As Hosseini described the doctor’s whispered apologies, I heard people exclaiming to each other “There isn’t going to be any anasthetic…!” Everyone appeared to find the idea shocking, unthinkable. Hosseini himself said that when he had gone into Afganistan as a physician, hoping to lend aid, he’d been shocked to hear from doctors that the sheer number of injuries that had been incurred by the war when the warlords entered Afghanistan meant that physicians were constantly running out of basic supplies. A doctor told him that it had, during the war, become expected to perform cesarian sections, and even amputations, without anasthetic. “As a doctor from the west,” said Hosseni, “the idea was wild…”
The reading opened to audience questions. A woman asked Hosseini if he was afraid that readers would misuse A Thousand Splendid Suns to reinforce prejudices against Afghanistan as primitive, barbaric, misogynist.
Hosseini said he was not. “If the truth is ugly, you show ugly truth,” he said. But he also described the way in which he viewed Afghan society as a kaleidoscope, and how he had been careful to describe some Afghan men as feminists.
Another woman inquired about the burkah.
Hosseini said that he felt the burkah was almost more important to people in the west than it was to women in Afghanistan. He mentioned that it was a great burden for professional women in urban areas who had it imposed on them, but he also mentioned that there were parts of Afghanistan where women had worn it for centuries, and were not unsettled to continue wearing it after the warlords were driven out.
The Iranian writer who was moderating the panel (I’ll update on her name when I find it), Susanne Pari, said that the burkah is on the bottom of women’s list of priorities. In Iran, they have to deal with more basic rights, such as fighting for the right for women to have custody of their children. Hosseini added that he felt the rights women were fighting for in Afghanistan were even more basic — such as the right to health care that will lower the astronomical rate of maternal death in childbirth.
“The burkah is a powerful visual symbol,” argued Hosseini. Bccause it is so symbollic, he argued that it receives disproportionate attention in the west.
Both writers described ways in which women make use of covering in their own ways. In Hosseini’s book, he says one character whose fortunes have fallen is relieved by the anonymity granted by the burkah, so that she doesn’t have to deal with the scornful recognition of old friends. The Iranian writer spoke more generally of Iranian women who find the coverings they wear to be useful because it makes them feel safe; she argued that in a society where a man’s sexual repsonse to a woman is always the woman’s fault, it is a relief for women to have anything which they feel allows them to prevent that sexual response. She added that her grandmother had never gone out without a chador, and that without it, she’d have felt naked.
I was surprised at how much attention was given to the subject of the burkah, especially in a conversation about how it is disproportionately discussed and used as a stand-in for more dire issues that affect women. However, after the reading, I overheard a young woman describing to her husband how she felt Hosseini was wrong that women liked the burkah; she’d seen a documentary where women talked about how they didn’t like it. He countered that Hosseini had never said women loved the burkah, just that banning it wasn’t their first political priority.
After overhearing this conversation, I remembered how deeply ingrained our western attachment is to this potent symbol of hiding women away. We want desperately to soothe this outward symptom. Perhaps it takes a doctor like Hosseini to remind us that the social disease of sexism is far larger and more insidious.
I was frustrated by a claim made by the Iranian writer during her introduction of Hosseini. She took a moment to explain their similarities. Both are expatriates (they did touch on Salman Rushdie’s claim that expatriate’s writing of home is a broken mirror distorted by time and nostalgia; Hosseini agrees). She also said that both of them are interested in storytelling rather than sending a political message.
Even before the restof the panel, this claim set my teeth on edge. An American, and Afgan expatriate’s, novel of recent Afghan events, told through the eyes of women — this is unpolitical? And then as the conversation moved on, and we discussed foreign policy, the nature of war, the availability of medicla help in Afghanistan, the treatment of owmen, activism, and so on — it was extremely clear that the book was a political one, manifestly dealing with issues that are political in nature.
Several times, the Iranian writer repeated that she felt one of the most important virtues of writing is its ability to humanize distant tragedies. What could be a more political project? By her own words, she admits that she is seeking to complicate American narratives of powerless narratives. She is trying to change essentially political narratives — for what one presumes are political goals. That storytelling is her tool does not mean that the means and ends are not political, as well as artistic.
It astonishes and vexes me that a writer can make the claim that her writing is not political, even while entering a conversation about foreign policy, activism, and women’s rights. Her strange assertion ground home to me the lengths to which educated, brilliant writers are invested in the western construction of politics and art as dichotomous. The concept that true art is apolitical has been historically leveraged against the writing of underprivileged groups, as a way of demeaning the writing of women, people of color, queer people, and the poor. The buy-in to this construction is so complete that writers who are clearly political can be seen to distance themselves from politics in order to increase their ability to claim a connection to art.
Politics and art are not dichotomous. Giving ground to this idea allows people to demean writing by calling it political. The response to this should not be to deny that one’s writing is political, but to ask frankly, “Why is that a problem?”
Although my writer-brain wants to focus on those internecine politica, I think the most important moment of the panel occured toward the middle, when the Iranian writer turned to Hosseini and asked him, “What can people do? Besides send money to UNICEF…”
“Don’t underestimate the importance of money!” he countered.
Money, he said, is important. Money allows the programs that we have sent into other countries to function. He searched for a specific example, and came up with one that is astonishing in its simplicity and efficacy.
In refugee camps in Darfur, he said, one of the most dangerous activities for a woman is to collect firewood. They need firewood in order to cook, but when they go out for it, they risk rape, kidnap, assault, and murder. He mentioned that he had met women who had been raped in this fashion when he went to African refugee camps.
A German man has invented a low-energy cooker that will greatly reduce the amount of firewood that women need. However, each one costs $70. So, every $70 that’s used to buy cookers means that a woman does not have to risk rape, kidnap, assault, and murder, in order to feed herself and her children.
I sometimes see writing that denigrates people who give money to political causes, implying that they are insufficiently dedicated, that their help is lesser and a salve to privileged consciences. Hosseini’s comment, however, allowed me to reframe the issue for myself. Giving money to international charities *is* giving labor to international charities, only indirectly. It’s working within the American economic system to benefit people in other economic systems. It transforms one’s labor in the ad company, or grocery store, or computer industry, into the labor of political activism.
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MODERATOR’S NOTE: I respect Ampersand’s decision to allow Robert, BrandonBerg, and Daran to post on this blog. However, I have found that your comments derail the conversatio in ways that I am not interested in for my own threads. Consequently, I request that you avoid my threads in the future.
i appreciate your turning my head around concerning political art – for a long time i was allergic to it, regardless of the presence of plenty of politics in all of the “great” art of the past [the paintings of picasso or kahlo being only two outstanding examples of thousands] – i really see how the perception of art and politics being separate is a white male privileged viewpoint and am suitably chastened.
i think a reason some of us in the creative fields have this mixed set of feelings is twofold. one one hand, we are continually being called upon to consciously blur the line between commercial and non-commercial art, which is really a facet of the same struggle of perception. i mean, if money isn’t political then what is? secondly, i find an awful lot of american “public art”, which is generally required to be “socially responsible” and as unthreatening/inoffensive as possible, to be bland. publicly funded sculpture, architecture, poetry on the buses, and high school writing competitions come to mind right away. i imagine part of this, though, is less about mixing art with politics as it is mixing art with CERTAIN PEOPLE’S IDEA of politics. people on the margins of society will inescapably express art that to some will seem transgressive; and so unfortunately a lot of art that is accepted as “socially responsible” and representative of diverse segments of the community are actually the most watered down, filtered by city councils that aren’t really all that diverse.
clearly, the statement “the personal is political” and its correlary, “all art is political”, means something different when your personal life is what to watch on cable and whether to eat thai or italian tonight, versus a personal life that involves such experiences as being harassed by the police because of your appearance. so, thanks for reminding me of that.
This put me in mind of this quote from Khaled Mattawa’s introduction to Without An Alphabet, Without A Face: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef:
I believe this and this is what I tend to think artists who produce political art—politcal in the largest sense of the word, not as narrow partisanship—mean when they say they are not looking to “send a political message.” It is, the idea expressed in the quote from Mattawa’s introduction, at the heart of the difference between art and propaganda. Not that propaganda is unimportant and not that there is anything inherently wrong with writing propaganda in the form of a novel, poem, dance, play, etc.; in fact it can be quite important work. But it is not art in the sense that Mattawa is talking about, and I am guessing this is what the Iranian writer at the reading meant as well.
I find it difficult to believe that a doctor would do a cesarean section for n breech position in conditions where anesthesia is unavailable. This is a controversial indication even in the developed world, and essentially a variation of normal, not an emergency. Something else must have been going on.
Hi Richard,
Thanks for taking the time to stop by. I always appreciate your posts and arguments.
I’m not really seeing this one, though. It seems to rely on a static concept of beauty, and my first instinct is to problematize that. What is beauty?
What, for that matter, is art? I am fairly uninterested in this question, actually, as I tend to think it leads to a lot of wankery. However, I think the attempts to define it have been interesting.
I tend to look at the definition of art as something coming out of the western tradition of categorization, where there are lots of distinct, non-overlapping boxes. Given that, it’s not surprising that art gets defined in ways that pull on other distinct, non-overlapping boxes. Art is Beauty. Art is Not Politics.
But of course, one’s sense of aesthetic itself is political. To reproduce it unquestioned is political; to choose to alter it is political. These are basic decisions that follow their own politics, certainly as much or more as it is a political decision to wear lipstick, forego high heels, or choose not to argue when your coworker says something racist.
Certainly, in this case, the stated intent (from Susanne Pari) was to put a human face on tragedy. This is in essence a political desire for recognition. It’s consciousness raising.
Hi Mandolin–
I just lost a whole big response to your questions, which are really good and need more time than I have now to retype what my response was. I will come back to them, I hope, within the next day or so.
I’ve encountered this too, and it is a particular line of thought that has always bothered me, in that it seems to be making political activism about the purity of the activist, rather than whether or not effective aid is provided to the recipient. It makes charity entirely about the donor, in other words.
From having worked with a few different charities over the years, sometimes, they want labor, sometimes they want money. Both are useful most of the time, and there’s nothing wrong with helping out with what is needed.
—Myca
In my area, a lot of the charities prefer money–a click to my local food bank, for example, shows that while they will accept food (of coruse) they’d actually rather have a check. Too many well-meaning folks dumping kidney beans on the door, I assume.
It’s also a lot more efficient. I’m a lawyer. I’m self employed, and for my profession I don’t make all that much, but after all my deductions I certainly make a lot more than is needed to hire a food bank staffer. It makes more sense for me to work and donate earned income for the time i worked, than for me to work those same hours at the food bank.
Okay, Mandolin, it’s been a few days, but I am going to try to reconstruct the response to some of your questions that I lost. Let’s start here:
1. To write a story with the explicit intent of, as you put it, “put[ting] a human face on tragedy” is absolutely a political act; the story will be, by definition, implicated in the politics of whatver tragedy it is trying to humanize and the politics of the place where the story is published/told. This fact, however, does not mean that the story was written with the intent of “sending a political message,” if you understand “political message” to mean supporting a partisan agenda in relation to whatever tragedy it is that we are talking about.
2. This is why I distinguished in my comment between art and propaganda, not because I think that art is somehow a special category of product that is, in its essence, different from anything else—more pure, apolitical, whatever—but because its purpose is different, which is also to distinguish between and among different kinds/levels of craft (including hierarchical rankings of talent and ability) and the purposes to which they might be put. This is not a particularly western notion. Poets going back hundreds and even thousands of years, for example, have always distinguished between writing that qualifies as “art” and writing which does not—though you would be correct to point out that this distinction is not the same as the one which says art is something that belongs in a museum or the academy or the rarefied atmosphere of certain kinds of literary readings or that genres like science fiction are not “real” literature because they are, well, “genre” literature. I just don’t think that this latter distinction is what Mattawa is talking about in the passage I quoted in my original comment.
3. You suggest that Youssef’s political stance towards/in his art, as Mattawa characterizes it, seems to rely on “on a static concept of beauty.” I don’t agree. What Mattawa says is that Youssef has a commitment to beauty and that, for him [Youssef], justice and compassion are aesthetic choices. Justice and compassion, in other words, are part of what makes beauty for Youssef, not that beauty exists as some kind of Platonic ideal that justice and compassion must be shoehorned into. For Youssef, Mattawa argues (and I agree having read some but not all of Youssef’s work), the writing of poetry is a political act in precisely the way you describe all art as being political because it “generates feelings of empathy and solidarity.”
As a poet who writes politically engaged work, the questions you have raised are deeply important to me. I believe, not naively, that art, and in my specific case, writing, can be a real force for change in the world, but I have learned through a long process of trial and error that every time I have tried to write a poem that sends a political message—rather than a poem that allows the politics (and, yes, my understanding of the politics) of the situation I am writing about to become visible and available for my readers to explore—the end result has been not only a failed poem, but a message that is far less powerful than it might have been.
I guess what I am saying is that whenever a writer states that her or his primary concern has been with storytelling rather than sending a political message, I hear that person saying that he or she has focused on the craft of storytelling, rather than the craft of propaganda, and that is why he or she produced a novel rather than a political tract.
I feel like this response has been all over the place, but at least it puts forth some of the ideas contained in the comment I lost.
Richard,
You are always eloquent. If that’s all over the place for you, I hope someday to emulate your messes.
Your position is clearer. It’s interesting to me, though, that the time when I feel I encounter the most desire to define politics as “partisan” and relating specifically to, say, one party versus another in a governmental election, is when I’m discussing art. I’m sure you’ve thought about this a lot and that this definition is something that you have come to from serious contemplation. However, I’ve frequently encountered in my discussions about this topic with people that they will claim that art cannot be political, until I point out something that is political, and then, rather than redefining art to embrace the political — they will redefine the political to exclude that art.
If politics is to be defined solely or primarily as partisanship, then is feminism itself political? Is an essay that attempts to tease out and describe the facets of rape culture, without offering any kind of solution, political? Is social science that describes rape culture political?
If the answer to these questions is genuinely no, then I will re-examine my stance here. But I do, genuinely, feel that the answer is yes.
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For the record, I’m highly suspicious of Big Poetic Abstractions, like beauty, truth, and justice, so I find it difficult to have the discusison on that plane. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder — and what is beautiful is contextually defined, the latter process being itself political.
A friend of mine has counselled me on my personal blog, where I cross-posted this, not to sling around the words “all fiction is political” because he fears it will lead to a conceptual flattening where all work is equally political. Some work has a conscious, intellectual engagement with the political; other work has less of this.
I think, though, that we talk in stories — or, in the case of poems, in stories and contemplations — because narrative is one of the primary ways humans understand the world. One writes a novel instead of a political tract because a novel offers its own ways of understanding, both as a writer and as a reader. Many political points are best conveyed as stories, which I would surmise is why so many of these conversations become heavily dominated by the anecdotal. Likewise, the act of representation is always itself political, because politics are unavoidable when one is creating a world. The extent to which these two things are true will depend on the political point, or the work, but I think they are always true at base in any piece. Everything else is a matter of degree.
There, now I’ve been all over the place, too. :) And a silly side note, I think art and propaganda can be pretty closely linked themselves: unless I’m much mistaken, some of Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s plays are explicitly intended as propaganda to persuade Kenyans of the good of marxism.
Ach! You make this too interesting to put off and so I will put off, for a moment, the work I have to do—which, oddly enough, is very relevant to this discussion: I am guest-editing a special Iranian-literature issue of an online journal. You might be interested in how what I called the controlling question framed the call for submissions. Anyway, back to the topic at hand:
I think the answer to these questions is unequivocally yes. But here’s one way of teasing out further the point I was trying to make, I think. I tend to distinguish between politics with I call a capital P and politics with what I call a small p. Capital P politics has to do with the fact that all human relationships are political because all of them involve negotiations of power. So, a position, say, which calls for more women in elected office is, for me (and I am drawing here a rough sketch), a capital P political position because it involves power negotiations between men and women on a rather large scale without necessarily getting into the question of the particular policy positions held by the women who get elected. On the other hand, a position which argues that, yes, there should be more women in office, but that the only women who should be elected are women whose policies are on the left, is small p politics, because it involves a kind of partisanship that—no matter how much I might want it to be the way my world runs—is actually separate from the question of whether more women should be in elected to office.
Each of these positions is, arguably, feminist—or at least grows out of a feminist consciousness about the world—but I would suggest that a work of art intended explicitly to propagandize for and promulgate the latter stance at the expense of exploring all the complex questions that it raises (and it this sacrifice of complexity that is for me one distinguishing charactristic of propaganda) will ultimately fail as art. This does not mean it will not serve an important social/cultural/political function; it’s just hard for me to imagine it succeeding as a work of art, by which I mean something that is supposed to represent/reflect back at us/choose-your-verb the complexities, the full complexities, of human existence.
(And you are right: some art engages politcs explicitly; other art engages it implicity; but I would disagree with your friend. I think it’s a mistake to back off from an all-[insert artform]-is-political stance because to back off is implicitly to let people who don’t produce explicitly engaged work off the hook, as if they are not responsible and accountable for the social/cultural/politcal implications of what they write. It’s more important, I think, to refine and define what you mean by political so that your position speaks to the spectrum of ways in which art is political. By the way, have you ever read the essays of June Jordan or of Sam Hamill? I learned more about the relationship between poetry (and therefore art) and politics from reading them than from almost anywhere else.)
And what you say about the nature of narrative is, of course, true, and I have had my share of the conversations you describe about art not being political with people who avoid the whole issue by hiding behind what is, truly, an impoverished notion of politics. I do think it is important—and I am not saying you do this—not to let those people frame the context in which we talk about what it means for art to be political.