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Write a term paper of 2000 words taking the following quotation as your theme in relation to Salman Rushdie's two texts, Shame and The Jaguar's Smile. "Humiliate people for long enough and a wilderness bursts out of them" Salman Rushdie, Shame.

Shalimar the Clown, of the eponymous novel, fools on the high wire for the multitudes. The name, once replete with innocent laughter takes on a sinister colouring when Shalimar, cuckolded by his beautiful wife, becomes the embodiment of emasculated pride. His clowning career is another manner of emphasising his humiliation. Before Shalimar becomes involved in Guerialla warfare, before he murders his wife and her lover, Shalimar's clowning changes: as dramatically physical a comedian as ever, but there was a new ferocity about him that could easily frighten people as well as making them laugh (STC 231). So, as Booker notes the very idea of a stable unified self is revealed by Rushdie to be a fiction. This motif of repression, and its consequence: an eruption of untamed emotions and behaviour, is traced throughout both Shame and The Jaguar's Smile. Rushdie describes two very different cultures and two very different sets of people untethering a nature that has been modelled by the repression that they suffer. One describes a cast of characters amplified by all the resources of Rushdie's magical realism, the other, an entire and a real people, known only as a generic population, united by a struggle.

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Shame is a title without artifice. Its simplicity describes perfectly Rushdie's subject - the shame of a nation that has struggled into existence, for whilst he does not call his land Pakistan, he leaves an unmistakable breadcrumb trail for his readers.

Shame and humiliation are quite different things in Shame. When Omar first leaves the capacious mansion of his youth, he receives the ultimate insult: a necklace of old shoes is thrown at his invulnerable throat. In a Muslim land, where uncleanliness is something forbidden, the string of dirty shoes is a humiliation not to be borne. But for the twelve-year old Omar, shame is a forbidden emotion. And his mothers' prohibition is a more stringent one than his God's:

Sharam, that's the word. For which this paltry 'shame' is a wholly inadequate translation It was not only shame that his mothers forbade Omar Khayyam to feel, but also embarrassment, discomfiture, decency, modesty, shyness, the sense of having an ordained place in the world, and other dialects of emotion for which English has no counterparts What's left when sharam is subtracted? That's obvious: shamelessness. (S 39).

The necklace does not land on him, but on the religious fanatic Ibadalla, the unclean shoes sully the divinity of his gatta; the zealot's bruise. It is significant that the symbol of shame can land upon the shoulders of a holy postman, spurned in love, but misses entirely its intended victim. Omar cannot receive this manifestation, this label of a shame that he simply does not feel.

When Omar leaves Q. he is garlanded, as is traditional, with flowers, which gave off an aroma which quite obliterated the memory stink of the necklace of shoes (S 54). Though he has been taught shamelessness by his mothers, the concept is necessarily twinned with shame: the garland of shoes missed his neck but caught his imagination. Though incapable of feeling humiliation Omar is not quite shameless; certainly he is not insensible to the feeling. After ruining Farah by raping her whilst she was under his hypnotist's spell, Omar achieves a kind of mutilated epiphany: it has made me understand my mothers at last. This must be what they locked themselves up to avoid Vomiting out the thin yellow fluid of his shame (S 53).

So Omar's childhood, screened by mansion walls, reveals itself a product his mothers' shameful sin. Omar's dictated shamelessness allows him to exhibit his 'true' nature: to get drunk, to visit whores: to live in defiance of his countrymen's moral code. This defiance of civilised conduct and accepted mores is Omar's own wilderness, though a banal and, Rushdie implies, commonplace one.

The novel's heroine exhibits a different type of wilderness. Of Sufiya it is said the baby blushed at birth (S 90). As a newborn baby Sufiya's humiliation is two-fold; the shame of being a daughter and the shame of her father's impotent probing, his desperate search for male genitalia on the body of his new child. So, as a baby, it is Sufiya's body that is a source of shame to her; this shame is augmented by the 'slowness' with which her brain-fever scars her. Our narrator suspects that Sufiya's brain fever makes her preternaturally receptive to all sorts of things that float around in the ether enabled her to absorb, like a sponge, a host of unfelt feelings (S 122). Referred to as her mother's shame, Sufiya absorbs the shame of her womanhood and her idiocy.

Extraordinarily receptive, Sufiya is surfeited with the shame of her milleu. For, the shame, the humiliation incurred by the shameless characters, such as Omar, is not dissipated, rather, it is deflected. Rushdie's narrator instructs us to imagine shame as a vending-machine drink:

Out flows the bubbling emotion and you drink your fill but how many human beings refuse to follow these simple instructions! what happens to all that unfelt shame? What of the unquaffed cups of pop? Think again of the vending machine. The button is pushed; but then in comes the shameless hand and jerks away the cup! The button-pusher does not drink what was ordered; and the fluid of shame spills, spreading in a frothy lake across the floor (S 122).

Sufiya is stained by her sex before she is capable of understanding its implications. In this fiction the otherness of womanhood is not a marginalised shame, instead it is foregrounded throughout. Bilquis's naked shame pre-dates her daughter's birth. Her clothes blown away by the explosion that killed her father, Bilquis is exposed to her husband on their first meeting. The shame engendered by the nature of such an encounter seeps through the years of their marriage to leave its stain upon their first daughter, for Bilquis does not drink her cup of shame, instead she boasts to Good News: he saw me lying there with all my goods on display in the window, you know, and I suppose the bold fellow just liked what there was to see (S 65).

This filial inheritance is hinted at by Raza's violence, which foreshadows that of his daughter. When Raza emerges like a celebrity from his train ride, assuming that the assembled crowd are waiting for his arrival, he is swept over by the fans who wait not for him but for an actress who shared his train. Raza, previously held aloft as the only husband who did not beat his wife, degenerates into type: in the illogical manner of the humiliated, he began taking it out on his wife (S 92). So once more, Sufiya must absorb the humiliation that her father chooses to redistribute as blows.

Sufiya, in her retarded mental state, can feel the humiliation of a mass, but she cannot assimilate it. The weight of vicarious shame unleashes a literal beast within her. By the end of the novel the beautiful Sufiya, who married the beastly Omar, descends literally to the beastliness that her husband betrays but metaphorically. Sufiya's catalogue of crimes are the actions of a creature not of civilisation, but of wilderness. When she attacks her brother-in-law it is with her teeth, like an animal. When she launches herself at her philandering husband she is covered with mud and blood: truly a creature from the wilderness, or a creature whose wilderness has broken free. In the words of Deszcz, Sufiya's coarse animality is actually her freedom.

The notion of Sufiya being a person whom the wilderness breaks out of is suggested by Rushdie himself. Many have remarked upon the beauty and the beast pairings of Sufiya and Omar, and of the duality of Sufiya: for she is both beauty and beast: a beautiful who woman, who, like the Sirens, will lure men to their deaths. Booker compares her to Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Dr Jekyll was, of course the paradigm of benevolent good; it was his hamartia to have the inclination and means to turn himself into Hyde: degenerate beast. Rushdie plays with this intertextuality, as Booker notes, the phonetic parallel between the names Shakill and Hyder is, quite obvious. Rushdie inverts the both tales, for it is as Sufiya Shakill that his heroine becomes monstrous; precisely when her name and married state ought to ensure the same type of civilised fulfilment that it does to other characters in other stories.

This exposure of an inner wilderness is typical: The kinds of human-beast transformations undergone by Sufiya Zenobia Hyder represent a favourite Rushdie motif. Rushdie is writing about a country that binds itself with multi-fold repression and such repression, such accumulated humiliation must find some form of release. Inevitably, it is a violent one.

Rushdie links Pakistan's Muslim sense of shame, Sharam, with Nicaragua's political shame, its struggle to retain (or even achieve) autonomy. He begins by telling us that the country's history had been a continuous rite of blood (J 9). The nation is scarred by its history: emotionally, and literally for Rushdie is careful to note the bullet-pocked buildings and the punctured signs. He lets the symbol stand unelucidated, though the resonance is potent: in this nation the road signs, the very declarations of self-ownership, have been violated by the violence of the struggle.

Rushdie's choice of title too, is immediately disarming: a nonsensical phrase, one which communicates only the intention of a deliberate deceit, for Jaguars cannot smile: the only creatures capable of smiling are apes, and their relatives, humans. The book's epigram, taken from one of Nicaragua's seemingly ubiquitous poets, serves to underscore this sense of mystification that begins his text:

There was a young girl of Nic'ragua

Who smiled as she rode on a jaguar.

They returned from the ride

With the young girl inside

And the smile on the face of the jaguar.

The inexorably upbeat rhyme scheme, like the jaguar's smile, works to further our sense of unease, making comical the girl's death. The repetitive rhythm somehow suggesting an inevitability and a triviality that enfold the fictitious girl. So before we even embark upon the body of the text, the reader is, in a way, humiliated: we are mocked by the light-hearted treatment of death, by the inscrutable phrase: 'the jaguar's smile'. Rushdie calls it infuriating like a jingle that refused to be forgotten (J 129). This de-familiarisation, this distance between the subject matter and its presentation forms a fitting echo of the book's content; the struggle of Nicaragua that seems to defy Western logic - so that only the trans-continental Rushdie is able to deliver the tale. Even he cannot understand: is the girl the revolution and the jaguar geopolitics, or is the girl Nicaragua and the jaguar was the revolution? Eh? What about that? (J 129).

The pride and the shame of the Nicaraguans is given a more generous representation, portrayed as legitimate. Rushdie notes the cowed existence of an entire nation:

There was often a little, defensive something that would creep into the discourse of the Nicaraguan leaders. 'No country is put under the microscope the way we are,' Foreign Minister d'Escoto would tell me. That sense being watched, all the time, for the tiniest slip, made them jumpy. (J 16).

This sense of being watched, the need to conduct oneself accordingly, perhaps filters into their art: in Nicaragua, we learn, writers are given diluted Ezra Pound and told to emulate him. Yet Rushdie insists, I did not ever think I had seen a people, even in India and Pakistan where poets were revered, who valued poetry as much as the Nicaraguans (J 27). It is pertinent to cite Rushdie's comment in Imaginary Homelands: the imagination works best when it is most free. Here Rushdie was reflecting upon the intellectual and creative freedom of a writer removed from his subject, but the comment has resonance here: the poet's voice is stifled by a national struggle, by the nationalisation of literature that the leaders are so proud of. Despite the nationally advised programme of literature, censorship is not a part of Nicaraguan's state-run publishers. Poetry seems to be a fundamentally important art form to Nicaragua. Perhaps the prevalence of poetry is because, uncensored, and seemingly written by all, it is an egalitarian form of art that allows the Nicaraguans a voice that is proud, and not steeped in shame.

Rushdie's message, if it can be called such, is a preventative one. The people of Nicaragua are not the humiliated and vengeful characters of Shame; instead they are oppressed, poor and ardent. Their patriotism and enthusiasm has not yet been crushed, but Rushdie implies that no nation can continually endure such breaches of its pride. Dayal's comment upon the theme of Shame is a useful explanation of Rushdie's purposes in writing about Nicaragua: that something ugly will arise unless that eruption is somehow prevented by bringing it to the light of consciousness. He records countless episodes that demonstrate this precipice, he describes Ortega's appeal to The International Court, Nicaragua protecting itself from the US as David against Goliath The mouse roared (J 130). This description of a mouse encapsulates perfectly the Nicaraguan sense of shame, enforced by the actions of other nations. Rushdie remains optimistic: It was entirely possible that Nicaragua's will to survive might prove stronger than the American weapons (J 135).

Humiliation is a powerful emotive force; it is not creative but destructive. Rushdie's works explore this concept and agree that shamed is a dangerous state in which to enslave people: a wilderness will surely break through the eggshell-thin layer of civilisation that teaches us to blush.

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