Love and Shame

Funny you should mention the "unremitting grayness" of England, Max. I was struck, on the contrary, by how exotic Aslam makes the English landscape seem. A small example:

The house is on a street that runs along the base of the hill. This street is linked by a side-street to a shelf-like road higher up the hill and, in late summer, when the abundant fruit of the wild cherry trees gets trodden on, the footpaths up there are stained with red and dark-blue smears.

The violence too, in a way, adds to the otherworldliness of the setting.

I've been thinking about Maps in connection with other books I've read about the Indian diaspora, including classics like Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas (set in Trinidad) and more recent examples like M. G. Vassanji's The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (set in East Africa). Biswas is one of my favorite books, and there are a few parallels, I think, with Maps. One of them is the contrast between an easy-going writer-father (Raghu in Biswas, Shamas in Maps) and an angry, cynical son (Anand and Ujala, respectively). Naipaul explains the relationship like this:

Though no one recognized his strength, Anand was among the strong. His satirical sense kept him aloof. At first this was only a pose, in imitation of his father. But satire led to contempt, and contempt, quick, deep, inclusive, became part of his nature. It led to inadequacies, to self-awareness, and to lasting loneliness.

But in Maps, it seems to me, the focus is much less on the family and more on the community at large than it is in Biswas. I think love has a role in this, as a force that sends family members out into the world to find it, and at the same time circulates strangers into the family. Love in Maps, though in a more somber way, works almost as it does in a Shakespeare comedy, motivating all sorts of strange and unlikely behaviors. Lovers in Maps act as if under a spell, without regard, as with the disappeared couple, or with the affair between Shamas and Suraya, of logic or their own well-being.

The opposing force to love, in Maps, is shame or embarrassment. It's embarrassment, I would argue, not religious belief, which produces the suffering and violence in the book. Believers like Kaukab are not simply offended by, for example, seeing their offspring with non-Muslim partners; they are profoundly shamed and embarrassed. Embarrassment inspires much of the everyday anger in the world, and it's a fact I never thought much about until I read (speaking of unlikely things), Christopher Ricks's Keats and Embarrassment. This is certainly one of the oddest books of literary criticism you'll come across, and was written three decades before Ricks's surpassingly odd book on Dylan. Ricks writes:

Indignation stands interestingly to embarrassment; the one hot flush drives the other, as fire fire, so that a common way of staving off the embarrassment one would otherwise feel is by inciting oneself to indignation.

Like love, shame in Maps produces strange behaviors. I think of the scene in which Kaukab, embarrassed almost to the point of derangement when her son brings his white girlfriend home for dinner, uses a pair of old shoes as serving dishes. Ricks proposes that "one of the things for which we value art is that it helps us deal with embarrassment, not by abolishing or ignoring it, but by recognizing, refining, and putting it to good human purposes," and that artists like Keats instruct us in being "morally intelligent" about embarrassment and its consequences.

I don't suppose many the readers would think of Ricks (or Shakespeare, or perhaps even Naipaul) when reading Maps, and I suppose it rankles a writer to see such weird connections being made. But readers, like writers, bring to a book whatever they have. Which is, if the writer is very lucky, everything they know and everything they are...

[Amardeep reminds me that I omitted a link to OGIC's wonderful post on Maps when she announced the nomination. Read it here.]

Comments

[ogic]

Hi Sam,
I conflated my response to your post and Max's under the latest to appear, above.

[Sam]

Thanks, OGIC ...

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