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KurdistanObserver.com
Criticism and Civic Pursuit
By: Sabah
Salih
May 27, 2006
Recent events in Southern
Kurdistan has raised some serious questions about what authors can and cannot
write and what it means to read, interpret, and criticize in a society where
Islam, the tribe, and patriarchy, and until recently totalitarianism, continue
to have a big say in shaping public attitudes and perceptions. We all have to
agree that it would take a society of this kind at least a generation and some
monumental effort to make people realize that it is important for their
culture’s intellectual wellbeing for language to be left alone and for authors
not to be given a hard time because of what they say and write. The problem is
further compounded by the fact that the Kurds are surrounded by societies where
going after the word is the norm, and where regimes work behind the scene day in
and day out trying to undermine Kurdish national existence.
Still, at the political and
cultural levels certain steps can and should be taken to reassure users of
language in Southern Kurdistan that political and religious power is there not
for idealizing but for questioning, and that it is good for society to empower
its public discourse to challenge authorities (political as well as religious)
and hold them accountable for their words and deeds. Put it bluntly: There
simply has to be room for criticism at every level where power resides.
Otherwise, to be a writer, an artist, a secularist, a non-conformist, a believer
in liberating language from the confines of orthodoxy is to be the target of
attack by people bent on emptying language of its power to oppose, question, and
demystify.
For their part, those who
engage in criticism as a form of civic pursuit need to disclose, not so much to
their readers but to themselves, the type of vocabulary they operate within, for
such criticism by definition is always a projection of ideological likes and
dislikes, as is surely the case in my own situation as a person interested in
doing things with words. But perhaps a far more important issue for the reader
is to be able to see some rigor in such criticism. This is important not just
because words can be notoriously unreliable and inaccurate but also because this
kind of criticism, to paraphrase Terry Eagleton, must open itself to debate, it
must attempt to convince, and it must invite contradiction.
Yet much of what passes for
criticism these days in Southern Kurdistan, no doubt because of years of
dictatorship and the culture’s enormous appetite for lampooning and ridiculing,
seldom rises above name calling, name dropping, or cantankerous bombast. Wishing
for someone to catch some incurable disease not only is not criticism, it is
crudely banal, as is calling on a certain politician to pack and leave and seek
exile elsewhere. The first reminds me of the spectacle I used to encounter once
or twice a week in the 1970s on my way to school in a heavily working class
neighborhood of Erbil, in which two fierce looking mothers would heap every
imaginable abuse on one another over some stupid fight involving their children.
The second reminds me of what my mother used to say to my father during their
frequent fights over his drunkenness. “Just get out and leave us alone,” she
would scream at the top of her voice. Once I asked my mother where she wanted
my father to go. “To Hell,” she said. “Where is that?” I asked calmly. “You
idiot, don’t you understand, I’m just letting off steam. Of course, I don’t
want your father to leave us. This is as much his home as it is ours. Anyway,
you’re not supposed to take these fights seriously.” Such episodes can be quite
amusing from the sidelines, but when they are duplicated rhetorically as serious
criticism, you have to stop and wonder if anything can be accomplished by them.
No less banal is calling a
writer with whom you disagree ideologically an agent or a puppet of so and so.
The accusation carries no weight, not just because ideological disagreements
have to be accepted, but also because this kind of language is clearly a
leftover from the days of totalitarianism, also because those in the business of
writing ought to have the right to use their rhetorical skills in the service of
whatever cause they choose to embrace. As Bertold Brecht told us years ago,
writing, like most forms of knowledge, is a commodity.
Outgoing press secretary Scott McClellan used his to serve President Bush. To
call McClellan a puppet of Bush on the basis of that is not to reveal some truth
about the former White House press secretary but rather to view the man within a
particular vocabulary. Charges of puppetry, like the language of denigration
and name calling, come from the world of ideology. They can be effective, of
course--but not because they are capable of telling the truth--this they can
seldom do--but rather because they affect us emotionally. They move us into
thinking that what we have just heard is true.
Cheaper still is the term
infidel. It is as shallow as calling someone a pumpkin head, for the term has no
basis in fact. It is a term by which people describe those who do not share
their religious beliefs. Outside these beliefs, the term has no existence.
Although the word corrupt, unlike the word infidel, has a firm base in reality,
calling someone corrupt on the basis of hearsay or wildeaccusations would be as
lame as calling someone a dog. Furthermore, because this word has deep ties to
war and politics and even stronger ties to the way a culture works, its use
makes it necessary for all these factors to be taken into account. When viewed
from a particular cultural angle and defined as something like theft, cronyism
or nepotism, the term begins to make sense, and helps us realize why it scarcely
comes as a shock to us be told that Kurdistan today is awash with corruption.
This is not to excuse corruption or be silent about it; this is to deepen our
understanding of the problem and realize why it cannot be solved by political
action alone. The other thing about corruption is that it is intimately tied to
politics. In liberal democracies, an elected president or prime minister starts
out his tenure by appointing his friends and supporters as members of his
government. If this tells us anything, it is that this is the nature of
politics: even in liberal democracies there is an ugly side to politics.
Criticism must, therefore, try at once to demystify the way politics works and
explain why today the situation in Southern Kurdistan is even uglier rather than
just making some noise about it.
Yet another lifeless
expression much in vogue these days in Southern Kurdistan is “morally inept.”
What exactly does that mean? Can a human being really be morally inept? Who
decides? On the basis of what? Since morality is not the same the world over
and is constantly changing, the label can only draw attention to its user,
showing how close-minded her/she is. What about calling someone “the guardian of
our beloved language”? Do languages really need guardians? Aren’t they
supposed to fend for themselves as they negotiate their way through social and
cultural change? Language is strong enough to take care of itself; it needs no
policemen. Self-appointed champions of morality and language have little to
contribute to criticism as civic pursuit because their effort is largely
emotive: it can intoxicate but it cannot explain, dislocate, demystify, or
elevate the mind above passions.
Using the idea of culture
against an opponent is also destined to fail, for if culture in the 19th
century meant something like civility and extensive knowledge of the arts, or,
as Mathew Arnold famously put it, the opposite of anarchy, today the term means
so much more that it would be impossible to find a person who is not in one way
or another implicated by it. Culture today means everything from the way people
bury their dead, the way they get married, the way they decide what is beautiful
and artistic and worth listening to or watching, to the way they think about
language, literature, the role of men and women in society, among other things.
My mother, as a seventy-something Kurd who never got a chance to learn how to
read or write, may not be able to appreciate Mozart, but she can tell you quite
a bit why Sewa’s songs have always had such a profound impact on her. This
doesn’t mean that my mother’s interest in Kurdish folk music makes her somewhat
culturally inferior to a Mozart fan: it only shows that she feels culturally
connected to a different kind of music. Such matters are purely subjective. As
John Carey points out, on cultural matters there is no “global agreement”; to
claim that someone’s cultural taste is superior to someone else’s makes no
sense.
There is then this
imperialist ideology with roots in Arabia, better known as Islamism, that never
gets tired of trying to rob people of their ability to think for themselves.
Unable and unaccustomed to give a story a fair hearing, its disciples, when they
are not in the mood to intimidate, pick on the grammar of fellow Kurds writing
in Arabic, their effort clearly showing how out of touch their approach is with
the way linguistic matters are treated today. As it is widely understood now,
what we call grammar is just a set of arbitrary rules and regulations that owe
their existence to only two things: longevity and convenience. What is common
knowledge now is also the fact that what gives writing staying power is not
grammar (which is the editor’s job to take care of) but what it says (its
insights) and how beautiful it sounds (its stylistic flare and wit). Besides, as
a colonized people, I think it makes sense for Kurds writing in Arabic to take
their colonial revenge on this oppressor language by intentionally invading it
with Kurdish idioms and non-grammatical expressions. Having been deprived of
their native language by Arabic for so long, the time has come for the Kurds to
get even with their enemy linguistically.
Another point to keep in mind
about criticism as civic pursuit surely has to be this: Those who practice it,
including poets and thinkers we tend to revere because of years of cultural
indoctrination, are really not cut out, in W. H. Auden’s famous phrase from
another context, to play the role of a midwife to society. Such people, to
paraphrase a line from John Milton’s Paradise Regained, may be well
versed in books but shallow in themselves (iv, 327). They may have a way with
words, but they may not be in possession of ideas others don’t have, and,
contrary to Antonio Gramsci’s rosy assertion, such people are really in no
position to play any significant role in either maintaining the status quo or
undermining it.
As the young Karl Marx satisfactorily observed, yesterday it was the steam
engine that changed the world. Today, as the philosopher Slavoj Zizek glumly
observes, it is the liberal communist: Bill Gates, George Soros, and the CEOs of
Google, IBM, Intel, and eBay.
The point here is that criticism, poised between power and the citizenry, even
if it is politically directed, plays at best a marginal role in making a
difference in people’s daily lives. Like the mothers who provided my childhood
with much needed comic relief, it is easy for writers to get intoxicated by
their own words and begin thinking of themselves as noble statesmen appointed by
society to remind the masses what they are supposed to think. In my judgment,
what is worth keeping in mind here is that unbridled self-centeredness can
severely undermine criticism’s effectiveness. Criticism, which by the way is
just another name for what we loftily and sometimes pompously call dialectics,
can therefore find in the very thing it routinely rejects a valuable ally.
Here’s Brecht again: “I have never found anybody without a sense of humor who
could understand dialectics.” On that, it is good to know that Kurdish
folklore, no stranger to dialectics, is in full agreement.
Criticism, then, whether of
ideas, books, or people, must always be made aware of its limitations and biases
and be honest about them, and must never be allowed to degenerate into a
substitute for revenge, or what Denis Donoghue has called, “essays in rebuke.”
Dr. Sabah A. Salih is
Professor of English at Bloomsburg University, USA.
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