Hanif Kureishi - Collected Essays

In his short fiction ‘In The Penal Colony’, Kafka describes an ingenious machine for torturing to death a man condemned for disobedience. The device is equipped with ink-jets which inscribe the name of the crime on the victim’s body, even as he bleeds to death. ‘“This condemned man, for instance,” — the officer indicated the man — “will have written on his body: Honour thy superiors.”’

The whole process of writing as killing takes twelve hours. This calligraphy of colonialism might be called ‘being killed by description’, as the body is ripped to shreds by those who hold the pen. There is no question here of the victim having his own pen; he doesn’t speak. His version of events, his story, will not be considered. Even his own body carries the inscription of the other.

Collective or shared stories, linked by implicit agreement about how the future should be, or about the sort of people who are preferred — heroes, leaders and the morally good on one side, devils, villains, the ignored and the bad on the other — can also be called ideologies, traditions, beliefs, ways of life or forms of power. After they’ve been told for a while, stories can turn into politics, into our institutions, and it is important that they seem to be just the way things are, and the way they have to go on being. It is always illuminating to think of those groups and individuals who are denied the privilege of speaking and of being listened to, whether they be immigrants, asylum seekers, women, the mad, children, the elderly, or workers in the Third World.

It is where the words end, or can’t go, that abuse takes place, whether it’s racial harassment, bullying, neglect, or sexual violence. Silence, then, like darkness, carries something important about who the authorities want others to be, something important about the nature of authority itself, and the way it wants to dehumanise others in the silence.

Of course different systems use different methods to ensure silence. From the cutting off of tongues to the burning of books, or the use of sexual morality as well as covert prohibition — like ignoring people, for instance — all are different ways of ensuring a dictatorship of voices, or of maintaining the single voice. If one person tells another who they really are, while denying them the right to self-description, certain kinds of self-doubt or inner disintegration will follow. People can be formed and also deranged by the stories others tell about them. When Jean Genet was told he was a thief, it was an idea it took him most of his life to escape.

The necessity of a certain interpretation of reality and the imperative that this idea be maintained, couldn’t be clearer than in families. Children are soon made aware of the force of a particular description, and of its authority. While most parents are aware that children develop when they are listened to, they don’t always want to hear them.

On their side, of course, children are fascinated by language, especially when they discover that there are words which make the adults crazy or frightened, which make the adults want to slap them, or shut them up. Children can become compelled by any discourse which provokes terror in adults. Therefore children learn about the language community by discovering what cannot or should not be said. They learn about prohibition and limits, about punishment, about hiding and secrets, and about privacy. When they discover what cannot be said, they have to learn to lie or conceal their words, often from themselves. If they are lucky they become creative and use metaphor. If they are unlucky they go mad.

Depression, for instance, might be called a kind of slowness. It could be seen as a subversive refusal to move at the speed of the others, as the rejection of a banal, alienating consumerist world in favour of an authentic inner puzzlement. But, more commonly, without such an idealisation, it is a slowness which usually takes place in silence, beyond or outside language and symbolisation. The depressed, therefore, do not believe in language as the carrier of meaning. The dead cannot make friends. The depressed person, self-silenced you might say, feels far removed from the source of her words, which may well multiply on their own, and can seem to circulate wildly and without meaning, like birds trapped in an empty room.

The deliberately silent are at least making a point — to themselves — when they suppress or break up their own stories. The involuntarily silent, on the other hand, might feel as though they’ve had their words fruitlessly stolen from them. But this enforced silence on behalf of the powerful is not for nothing. The mythologising of those not heard is the opportunity for difficult and busy work. The silent other has to be called, for instance, a stranger, foreigner, immigrant or asylum seeker. She might be an exile, an interloper, the one who does not fit or belong, the one who is not at home, the one whose words do not count.

This range of denotions at least makes it clear that we can never stop wondering about our own alien, awkward or foreign parts, the elements which cannot speak except through the use of others. Racism might at least teach us that we are always strange — or other, or unwelcome — to ourselves, particularly when it comes to our need. We might even be aware that there is an odd but intriguing silent reversal here. The sort of capitalism we have has always depended on colonialism, and has always required both labour in the Third World and labour from the Third World — the immigrant, in other words. And yet our own need has only ever been represented in terms of their need, as their dependence on us. This is frequently manifested as an image of desperate people climbing over barbed-wire fences, eager to come over here and strip us of all we have.

The subject chosen to be strange has an important place. He or she has to be kept constantly in mind; worked over and worked on. It is a passion, this attitude to the threatening foreigner, the outsider, the one who doesn’t know our language. Someone has to be kept in their place in order that the other can exist in a particular relation to them, so that hatred can flourish. I call this a passion rather than an opinion because these fictions have to be constantly reiterated. They cannot be stated once and for all, since the victim seems always about to escape his description. Unless he’s constantly buried and re-buried beneath a deluge of words, and, of course, the actions which words entail, he might turn into someone like us.

If a plausible version of the twentieth century can be told in terms of silence and its uses, there is reason for optimism too. That period was also about people insisting on their own words and histories, speaking for themselves. The 1970s, as I recall, were about the formally colonised, gays, women, the mad, children, putting their side of the story, telling it in their own words and being heard. As a result, in some places, there were significant social advances. It has been said that when Pinochet was arrested in Britain, things changed in Chile. The dictator wasn’t sacrosanct; people began to speak, his mystique was penetrated at last.

Clearly, though, this description is simplified; there is an absence here. I have implied that on one side the words are there, ready and waiting to go, while on the other they are unwelcome or prohibited, that the only problem with the words is that the authorities don’t want to hear them.

However, at the centre of this is something else: the person who doesn’t want to hear their own words. This is the person who owns them, who has made them inside his own body, but who both does, and does not, have access to them, who is prisoner, prison and the law. Real dictators in the world are a picture, too, of dictators within individuals, of certain kinds of minds.