Unhinging the beast-with-balls

MAN: A filthy paste of servitude, tyranny, fetishism, fear, vanity and ignorance. The greatest offence one can commit against an ass is to call it a man.

WOMAN: The most brutal of enslaved beasts. The greatest victim shuffling on earth. And, after man, the most responsible for her problems. I’d be curious to know what goes through her mind when I kiss her.

Renzo Novatore (1890-1922)

Should thank Radical Hypocrite for drawing my attention to this disturbing thinker. This post will be a tribute – in the form of mad arrays of trackbacks – to this powerful Bengali Blogger.

This post is a reaction to The Padlocked Vagina — Rape as Torture in the Congo posted in WomensSpace Jan 24, 2007; I finished the post after viewing Dario Argento’s The Stendhal Syndrome (1996)

Not being able to write, or, lost a bit of purpose…

I started detesting my raving and ranting (or whining and pining, as you wish) and dripping bleakness in your eyes, reader. But there are friends still, who do rave and write unabashed and I feel assured. A friend of words is raving against the world and I have decided to do it about my self, ’cause I am a world of sorts.

Had ‘bad faith’ because I forgot that even by engaging in muck you still can enjoy a relish of curving your speech to unexpected shapes and it might trigger some pleasurable hormones. These days, I am encountering no other sustainable impressions of satisfaction than reading what some of you write. I am blogging. I am a haunted caped superhero condemned to live another life by night. I am at war with my daytime self…

I will be in a gender-bashing mood again. I will pulp my gender not because I wish to be politically correct, or I wish to change the body I am born with, but because I have bore the clumsy weight of it’s cultural connotations enough in my mind. Normative masculinity prevents me from coming to terms with my body. When I started enjoying its possibilities at that impressionable age (or, when I started knowing that you are beautiful because you are different from me) I never knew that my body is capable of rape.

But when I was gendered – by newspapers and culturally produced images and sounds – I knew men can do it, organically. How it meant prowess and virulence and to be a man meant harboring that unofficial desire to do it (or the shared unofficial secret that girls love to have nightmares about it). Because I am naturally armed and you have pockets of vulnerability. Knowledge polarized us. I can’t recall when I started understanding rape; but I am sure that there had been a pristine period of sexuality before that knowledge which one can never reclaim. You don’t need to commit the act to be condemned from that short-lived Eden. Macbeth was doomed when he knew that he is able to commit a heinous murder to prove his manhood, and to prove it only.

Why am I – again – writing about sexual violence? Because I need to implicate and extricate myself from social violences happening beyond me. Writing about Nandigram and Rizwanur Rehman assures that one can never be a participant, one can only opine endlessly in television. So I am perceiving the social in terms of the sexual and the psychic; I am treating the metaphoric as the real because the it is more experienced by us adults in our everydays. One cannot escape it.

Because rape is the ur-form of all crimes of power. It was never about lust or pleasure; it is always about ultimate control through ultimate humiliation. During genocides and pogroms, always there had been at least one friend telling me: either we are the killers or we are victims; there cannot be a position between. There are no reasons to ponder upon and to arrive late at conclusions. You reason out, you procrastinate, you weigh pros and cons…and blood will seep up your fingertips. So you need to bleed if you don’t want to discover yourself stained by others’ blood.

How do I explain the immense and overwhelming experience of remorse whenever I heard about atrocities committed by people with whom I share certain commonalities of identities? It was a deja vu. Then when did it first happen? This remorse following knowledge of violence? Folk tales, mythologies and comic strips had been full of gore, the boy-child is never afflicted with guilt when he enjoys them; no qualms identifying with the killer at that age. The idea of rape was the first instance of a gruesome crime we boys encounter where we have no choice but to identify with the perpetrator’s body; because it is always so basic. To immediately detach identification, one needs to detach from one’s own body. It’s castrating. But one had to do it, one needed to learn to do it.

Taking sides always had been a decisive act. To do so, condemned in a sanctuary of metropolitan middle-classness bred in one of European colonialists’ earliest laboratory (Kolkata, in other words), you need to feel raped. You need to imagine it.

It is not easy for someone gendered masculine. But it is not difficult for someone who has dabbled in poetry and politics. One needs to spread the radiation of conscience to the edges of the body. Nothing in you stenches with power anymore and you experience the supple vulnerability of your conscientious skin. The body unlearns what it has accumulated throughout the teens and early youth. But still, all those powerful Bengali writings of the ’60s and the ’70s against establishment – in a rhetoric which I also dabbled with sometimes – is so masculinist and overwhelmingly a rhetoric of rape, feminising the other and endowing the writerly self with rapacious virility!

Because gender turns into a mirror of class and ethnic, linguistic, religious, communitarian identities; all. And a ruthless mirror, bound to speculate you back. Middle-class we are, neither killer nor victims; but an unstable equilibrium which we try to bolster with Kultur, progress, opinions and consummables. It is nothing but the desired impossibility of rising up and nightmares of sliding down. It keeps us safe; but no more when the imagery is of forcefully taking her. Sliding down and dreaming up: the rhythm of fucking where ‘up’ so disconcertingly is ‘away’…

But armed with awareness, imagination, sensitivity and arts only these Orwellian Ariels can commit that feat: declass, declassify. It is a battle against spectres, against identities sewn in my skin: Middle-class, Bengali, male, upper-caste, Hindu, heterosexual, teacher, intellectual executive, civil, sushil samajpati… So many skins to shed to disrobe before you woman. And the anxiety that you will still discern with a smile in the dark that the king is still clothed with things he can neither feel and therefore peel off…

I am still obsessed with that Danish boy who never grew up to be a man and contemplated self-termination using the impossible participle: being.

… That is the question.

…so there will be follow-up posts.