“You must never lose your sense of shame. If one is past all shame, what is one fit for? One lives like a bird in moult, shedding virtues like plumes all pointing down to hell” — Wolfram von Eschenbach (German poet.)
I’VE been wrestling with this idea — the essentiality of shame for retaining humanity — for some time now. But I am reminded of it every time I read in the news about how one judge or the other has, again, successfully continued Imaan Mazari and Hadi Chattha’s perverse incarceration.
The novel Shame presents another take on the idea. While acknowledging its necessity, it argues shame is never truly lost. It is suppressed, it is unacknowledged, it is transferred to others, but it invariably re-emerges, nay erupts, mutated into manifestations of violence and tyranny throughout society.
Surviving in Pakistan (but, more specifically, thriving in Pakistan) demands the suppression of shame. Being more fortunate, we suppress the shame of a cruel and rapacious system built to profit the powerful by exploiting the powerless. As Muslims, we suppress our shame at how we steadily criminalise the very existence of our minorities and force them to leap through ever-higher hoops to earn their right to live. As citizens, we suppress the shame of a state that has long abandoned any pretence to being representative and casually disappears dissidents. As lawyers, we suppress the shame of a legal system indifferent to justice and riddled with cowardice and venality. We suppress the shame, not only from fear of the consequences of speaking or acting, but so we can live with ourselves.
