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$On male refractions$

On male refractions

Male inadequacy and virtual mirages of aggression: Guy Gunaratne on terrorism, incels and the performance of violent masculinity

A few months ago I found myself clicking through reams of news articles on Alek Minassian. He was the man who killed ten people by driving a van down a busy street in Toronto. Minassian pledged allegiance to a group calling themselves ‘incels’, a term that stands for ‘involuntarily celibate’. He had called for an ‘Incel Rebellion’ in a Facebook post in which he made reference to Elliot Rodger, the misogynistic killer who murdered six people in 2014 as an act of ‘retribution’ against women. According to an expert at the International Center for Counter-Terrorism at the Hague, Minassian’s post situated the van-attack ‘as extremist and terrorist in nature.’

The incel subculture was borne out of sites like 4chan and incel.me where communities are encouraged to practice cruelty. Much of it sounds surreal. Within these forums attractive young men are referred to as ‘Chads’ and unattainable women are often called ‘Stacys’. Incels themselves self-identify as ‘beta-males’ and declare an inability to convince women to have sex with them. For men such as Minassian, however, these shrill proclamations reflect a painful truth: an apparent sexual and social entitlement that fails to live up to reality. In the words of David Futrelle, a long time blogger on the subject, what makes the incel subculture so dangerous is that ‘it takes the bitterness and sadness we sometimes feel when faced with sexual and romantic frustrations and turns this misery into a mode of being.’

The spectacle of mass violence is often reported within ideological contexts: race, religion, political allegiance. Occasionally, and most often when the assailant is a white male, violence is positioned as a consequence of mental illness. Recently I have begun to wonder to what extent we also conceal a more mundane reality when we assign ideological narratives to these men: that of cowardice or an inability to confront male inadequacy. Minassian’s male ideal was one that could only be matched by mass violence. This in itself deserves our attention.

Since most atrocities, irrespective of ideological foundation, are perpetrated by men, could we not partly attribute mass violence to gender? If we do, we might also discover how pervasive these images of violent masculinity can be.

When we look at the face of Minassian what do we see? I can’t help but think of a series of images, faces of young men who have, over the course of the last few years, committed one atrocity after another. Blurry footage of high-schoolers stalking empty corridors carrying rifles, the haunted masks of young jihadi militants recording anti-Western pronouncements with their cell phones. I think about the proliferation of these images, the way they spread outward onto news cycles and social media streams. How must these images of male rampage feed into myths of entitlement, ready to aggravate and embolden other men into joining them? How do these images intermingle with representations of male desire and self-hatred?

John Berger once suggested that technological innovation ‘made it easy to separate the apparent from the existent. It turns appearances into refractions, like mirages. Refractions not of light but of appetite.’ I think about how these virtual mirages of male aggression first reached men like Minassian. His male ideals were hyper-masculine avatars, a refraction of masculinity that could only be seen to be complete when participating in violence. These representations within our societal mirrors are worth considering.

Pornography could be seen as one such social mirror. One in which, I’d suggest, members of incel communities would find something familiar. Rebecca Solnit notes that much of mainstream porn has more to do with what she calls “the homoerotics of masculine triumph, like a sport in which the excitement is that women are endlessly defeated”. The perversion of masculinity into a manifestation of hate is clear in the context of sexual violence. Solnit describes rape as “hate and fury taking the place of love between bodies. It’s the vision of the male body as a weapon and the female body (in heterosexual rape) as the enemy.”

If the defeat, or, more emphatically, the punishment of women drives part of a toxic narrative which feeds into the kind of male identity with which Minassian and his incel movement align themselves, could we then assume that the performance of violent masculinity forms part of the basis for other examples of mass violence?

I think about the supposed Islamist fanaticism of the Manchester bomber Salman Abedi, Omar Mateen the Florida nightclub shooter, or Mohamed Salmene Lahouaiej-Bouhlel who in 2016, drove his truck into a crowd in Nice. I think about the white supremacist attacks of Anders Behring Breivik who killed 77 in 2011 and Thomas Mair, who murdered female British MP Jo Cox in 2016, while shouting ‘This is for Britain.’ For the most part, violent extremists are male and socially isolated. They often adopt political grievance only shortly before planning their attacks.

Long before acting upon them, however, many have shown a history of domestic abuse and violent misogyny.

It’s easy to regard their attacks as moments of ecstatic gratification. Their bodies are weaponised and transformed, sometimes quite literally in order to carry out suicide bombings, or via extension through vehicles or firearms. Their ideal refractions are manifested in these cases, their self-images turned into illusions of power. It’s both a cry and a howl, pathetic and performative, that is then instantly validated by our own need for spectacle.

Pierre Mabille, a surrealist writer, once suggested that the construction of these distorted mirror-selves have a long history of psychological significance. As an example, he wrote about mirrors and how they were used in brothels during the Baroque period. Clients would be ushered into rooms with mirrored walls where they could act out their fantasies. Above all, Mabille suggests, was the fantasy of creating their own self-image. ‘In the spectacle which unfolds, the real personality of women matters less than the role she consents to fill. Acting or not, the client is a spectator for whom the mirror is necessary.’ For men like Minassian, Mateen or Breivik, mass murder is an exhibition, above all, satisfying a male desperation to be seen.

Guy Gunaratne lives between London, UK and Malmö, Sweden. His first novel In Our Mad and Furious City was longlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2018 and shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize and The Gordon Burn Prize 2018. He has worked as a journalist and documentary filmmaker covering human rights stories around the world.

November 2, 2018
the fact of experiencing something or being affected by it because of being in a particular situation or place

Livia Franchini is stuck between two countries and languages, ‘back and forth between two distinct, self-sufficient identities of home’.

I have a problem with control and after many years of more or less quietly coping with it, I have recently sought therapy to improve my condition. In the first session, wanting to amuse my new therapist, somewhat needing her to be ‘on my side’, rather than on the other side of the couch, I suppose (though this is cognitive-behavioural therapy, these are blue NHS plastic chairs), I joke: ‘I have a problem with needing things to be perfect. The catch is I work as a writer, and I write in a language that I can’t fully master.’ I reveal that English isn’t the language I spoke for the first twenty years of my life; like most, her reaction is one of incredulity. I blend in, having almost fully lost my Italian accent.

‘Well, you’re not alone,’ she tells me. ‘What else?’

I tell her that my need for control is usually triggered by interactions with others.

–

How did my irrational need for watertight control of any given situation become bound to a desire to query the world in a language that isn’t my own? I still don’t have an answer to the riddle, despite having been stuck as a pendulum between Italy and the United Kingdom for the last eleven years: back and forth between two distinct, self-sufficient identities of home.

I travel to Spain to teach a class of Spanish children about writing and translation. When I offer students the option between my first and my second language, they request I speak in Italian. They ask me to talk about my novel, of which they have read an extract. The original manuscript is in English, but I have translated a section of it into Italian myself, which was then translated into Spanish. The final product of this three-fold process is what the students have read. It makes my head spin to think about it. My Italian to Spanish translator has come along to the event and agrees to act as an interpreter, though I sense she is unsettled at the prospect of having to translate orally, imprecisely.

I begin in Italian, taking care to speak slowly to facilitate translation. But I stumble, slow down, interrupt myself when I realise that I lack the appropriate specialist vocabulary to describe the novel I, myself, have written. It’s a book in English, I only ever think about it in English. A girl raises her hand and asks, in Spanish: ‘What’s your book even about? I don’t get it.’ I answer, professionally: ‘You don’t have to get it, or even like it. That’s allowed.’ I smile. A boy speaks next, to me, directly, in good English, ‘How could you move to England at nineteen without considering the consequences?’ Suddenly, I am made visible. I have no answer to give him.

‘The thing is, she didn’t think about them,’ my Spanish translator laughs, jumping in to rescue me.

–

One important consequence of conceiving the private self as an idiom is that it can no more be equated with an interior than an external self. Your idiom is somehow both openly visible and strangely imperceptible. Walking, smiling, speaking, writing, joking, drawing, eating, weeping, listening – in all these modes of being and doing, you’re revealed as at once the most self-evident fact and the most impenetrable secret. Your private self is diffused in all the ways you express yourself, and so it isn’t reducible to any of them. It’s concealed, you could say, less behind than in the face you show the world. You are a secret that hides in plain sight. [1]

I tire myself out, I say to my therapist, because I cannot avoid engaging with any one line of questioning that is presented to me. It’s like playing Devil’s advocate, but there’s no fun in it. It can get really bad, and when it is bad I have the impression that six or so fleshy tendrils are stemming out of my brain, extending in different directions. When it is really bad it feels like six very developed private conversations are happening at the same time in different quarters of my brain. It has become second nature for me to operate in this way.

My therapist asks me to make annotations on a paper diagram, a working model known as the ‘hot cross bun’. I fill in each section and stare down at my own words, taking in the familiar vertigo of cognitive dissonance. Written down in English, my fears feel more manageable; at the same time, I’m not sure what I’m reading is about me at all, though I recognize the familiar handwriting. Did I really write this? How is this supposed to make me feel better?

The private self speaks its own tragic idiom: a language of one, with no referent. If the true self makes itself visible through the weave of experience, existing across two languages means that the tapestry is woven with thread of two different colours. You develop the habit of sticking two fingers into the fissures in the texture and wiggling them. Sometimes this habit leads to analytical overgrooming. Six separate arguments shooting off into six different directions: your sense of self is tethered to each equally and the strain to retain control over it all makes you feel like you might be about to explode.

The private self, stretched thin in such a way, on some days seems barely sufficient to cover up the worst of two cultures – two countries, bubbling under the upper level of your consciousness. How is it possible to keep a hold over it? On some days, the lid just comes loose.

For instance, there is your momentary annoyance when the Spanish children asked you to speak in Italian, because it would’ve been easier to speak of your work in English; the momentary assumption that everybody will understand you, wherever you travel. Did you really pick up on one of the worst traits of the British? How did you lose a grip on your own, Italian thought process? Your private self is other: you don’t have the intellectual capacity to keep track of it all. Some days you give away more about yourself than you had intended to: you’re untidy, indecently exposed. Sometimes others seem to know more about you than you do.

There is an Italian acquaintance who introduces himself afresh in Italian, after first introducing himself in English: ‘Sorry, I had to. You’re a completely different person when you speak in each of your languages.’ A university professor, to whom you confess you are struggling with research, tells you you’re no longer entitled ‘playing the language card.’ But this isn’t a game: your mother understands your English the worst out of all of your English-speaking friends. Your two selves, the Italian and the English, are equally, privately familiar to you, but never publicly so to anyone you to talk to.

Others can only engage with one self or the other at one time, but they see that half of you with more clarity than you do yourself, pick up on all the details. By which I mean, as I write this, I have no full control over what you learn about me by reading it, and that terrifies me.

–

I recently learned from a friend that there is a Spanish word for feeling shame and embarrassment on behalf of someone else; the closest equivalent I can think of in English is ‘cringe’, but this is a poor translation, conveying nothing of shame’s ability to flood the thresholds of selves. In poetry, the confessional is served up with this feeling so often that they might be considered composite, two parts of the same whole. [2]

Back in Spain, I’m about to give a reading at a place called Vergüenza Ajena, and despite the ominous moniker, something good happens to me there. The place is a small, welcoming bar – warm (it is winter). I am sleep-deprived, highly-strung, quite unhinged. Reading as a foreigner in a combination of English and Italian, in front of an audience whose language I don’t speak, I am unshackled from the expectation of being understood. I read confidently, very well. It is an intimate performance. Afterwards, a Venezuelan woman comes over to hug me. ‘I didn’t know what you were saying, but it made sense to me,’ she says, in Spanish, or this is what I understand, and it is enough for a private understanding between us, a small triumph of poetry weaving together the strands of languages and selves.

… writing might be defined as the use to which we put our homesickness. [3]

‘This is the working model we’ll be using. We’ll call it a “hot-cross bun”, because, well, it looks like one, doesn’t it? In this section, write about a situation that made you feel bad. Try to remember all of the details.’

There is no Easter equivalent of a hot-cross bun in Italy. We do, however, have Easter eggs.

[1] Josh Cohen, The Private Life (London: Granta, 2013)

[2] Daisy LaFarge, ‘Wildly Unmothered’

[3] Joyce Carol Oates, quoted in Eva Hoffman, ‘The Uses of the Past’, in Writing Worlds 1, The Norwich Exchanges, ed. Vesna Goldsworthy.

Livia Franchini is a writer and translator from Tuscany, Italy. Selected publications include The Quietus, 3:AM, The White Review, LESTE, Hotel, PEN Transmissions and the anthologies On Bodies (3 of Cups) and Wretched Strangers (Boiler House Press). She has translated Natalia Ginzburg, James Tiptree Jr. and Michael Donaghy among many others. Livia is one of the inaugural writers-in-residence of the Connecting Emerging Literary Artist project, funded by the European Union, which will see her work translated into 6 languages. She has performed from her work internationally, most notably at Faber Social, Standon Calling, Lowlands and Hay Festival. Livia is currently at work on her first novel, as part of a funded PhD in experimental women’s writing at Goldsmiths.

Photo credit: Robin Silas Christian

November 2, 2018
Editorial: hidden things

As the days are getting shorter, we investigate things that are tucked away in dark corners of the brain – or the national consciousness. Things that are known but not spoken of, relegated to the private sphere (or the more obscure corners of the internet). In this issue of PEN Transmissions, we explore all manner of hidden things with Elias Khoury, Livia Franchini, Guy Gunaratne, Ahmed Saadawi and Jonathan Wright.

Guy Gunaratne thinks about the connection between terrorism, incels and the performance of violent masculinity

Livia Franchini reflects on the impact being bilingual and going ‘back and forth between two distinct, self-sufficient identities of home’ has had on her private and public selves.

We were thrilled to speak to not one, but two great authors for this issue – and even better, to a translator, too!

The great Lebanese writer Elias Khoury is back with a new novel, My Name Is Adam, the story of a man who decides to investigate what happened in 1948 in Palestine in the city of Lydda where he was born. We spoke to him about the fascinating genesis of the book.

And finally, we spoke to Ahmed Saadawi and Jonathan Wright about Frankenstein in Baghdad: the novel’s success, its religious elements and truth in storytelling.

From private selves to male subcultures, from undead monsters to collective trauma, we hope you enjoy this issue of PEN Transmissions.

November 2, 2018
Silence as communication: a conversation with Elias Khoury

Elias Khoury is back with My Name Is Adam, the story of a man who decides to investigate what happened in 1948 in Palestine in the city of Lydda where he was born.

You’ve said that when you were working on My Name Is Adam, you collected stories that hadn’t really been public before. In response to your book, they’ve become history and are now out in the public sphere. What was the process of recording those stories and then making them public like?

I actually didn’t record the stories – I collected them. There’s a difference. I don’t record. The thing is that by mere accident I discovered something that was very little known. I suppose nobody knew it: that after the Nakba [the 1948 Palestinian exodus, ed] – where villages were destroyed, people were expelled – the Israeli army gathered people in one area of the cities, this area was encircled with wire, and the Israeli soldiers called it ‘the ghetto’. The Palestinians had never heard the word ‘ghetto’ before and thought it referred to an area where Arab people lived. This happened in many cities. Knowing that I started to investigate, to ask, to read. There were some writings about the exodus from Lydda which was the most well known exodus of the nakba. They had to walk into the wild, and it was July 1948, summer. Men, women, children, old people. Many died from thirst. But nothing was written about the people who were left behind, so I began to collect the stories of these people, how they lived, and then I decided to write this novel.

And this is the first of a trilogy?

Yes, the second novel is coming out in Arabic now, and I’m beginning to write the third one. It’s a long process. I collected stories from people who stayed in Lydda. I can’t go there of course, so I skyped. And then I met many people who escaped and went to Amman, to Jordan. But the major difficulty was how to recreate the life of the ghetto because very few people can tell you about it and most of them have died. So I had to recreate it myself, which opened a huge debate.

Why was it that the story of the ghetto wasn’t written down before?

Well, most of the stories of the nakba weren’t written down. When I published The Gate of the Sun it was the first real account of the story of the Palestinian exodus and the massacres of 1948. It was never written down, that’s what happens with trauma.

My Name Is Adam is structured around the relationship between silence and speaking. Silence is the major hero. People suffering from such a terrible trauma – for example the protagonist Adam – don’t want to remember. It needed time to come out, and now things are coming out.

It must have been an intense process of speaking to people.

It was very difficult. Victims don’t like to speak. When I went to them I went with huge knowledge, and because they knew about The Gate of the Sun, they knew me. That facilitated it. With Gate of the Sun it was much more difficult. I’m telling the story of an invented character, Adam. What I describe in the novel is about water, food, where they slept, their daily lives – that is true, but all the other things are of course fiction.

You’ve stressed in the past that your purpose is not to write history.

I write about the human experience. But in order to arrive there you have to put the background in. And unfortunately history is written by the victors, it was written by the Israelis. The details are mentioned in those stories, but they aren’t filled out.

So history is written by the victors and the rest is silence. Do you feel a responsibility to take on those stories?

It’s not a matter of responsibility, it’s a matter of love. I write because of love, not of responsibility. The major factor in life is loving others, and identifying with them. It’s an act of identification. The victors write history, but the victims write stories. And I think the stories will win. If there is a competition, the stories win.

Because they’re more powerful?

Yes, I think so. And they’re more profound. They give interior lives, real experience, while history is interested in power structures etc.

Isn’t it almost a contradiction to write about silence? As soon as you write you’re not silent anymore.

Consider the mother of my protagonist Adam: she never spoke, she spoke in fragmented words and stories, but she didn’t want and couldn’t speak. And afterwards you discover why: she didn’t tell him his whole story – that he was an orphan, etc. But how to portray the fragment of words that come from beneath the story? This was my challenge in writing it. How to create a dialogue with silence. There’s is this one sentence, when Adam meets a woman, that I like very much. When he describes her he says, You are beautiful like silence.

Because silence is a gift?

Silence is a way of communication. We don’t need language all the time. We misinterpret communication. I think about personal communication: looking, touching, that is communication. And then there’s the silence of disaster, real disaster. A city that was totally empty, looted, destroyed, young men of the ghetto obliged to get dead bodies left in the houses and burn them. In such a situation silence becomes totally different.

It becomes healing?

Yes. There is another part to the equation. Mamoun, the one who was like a father to Adam, is blind. Mamoun describes he sees with his blind man, as if this blind history needs a blind man to uncover it.

What, for you, is the balance between entertainment and values in a novel?

Entertainment is part of the work of novels. We have to tell a well structured story that people can read, and which you as a writer want to live in. The condition is simple: if I believe the characters, that they are real, then I can continue writing the novel. You have to identify something which you can identify with, which people can identify with, and it must be well structured.

Elias Khoury is the author of thirteen novels, four volumes of literary criticism and three plays. He was editor-in-chief of the cultural supplement of Beirut’s daily newspaper, An-Nahar, and is Global Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. My Name Is Adam (translated by Humphrey Davies) is out now.

November 2, 2018
The blind and the elephant: a conversation with Ahmed Saadawi and Jonathan Wright

We spoke to the author and translator of Frankenstein in Baghdad about the novel’s success, its religious elements and truth in storytelling.

Jonathan, do you feel the reception of Frankenstein in Baghdad is markedly different from what it was three years ago when the book was first published in Arabic, given that the situation in Iraq has changed?

Jonathan Wright: I think it is much the same. I’ve been surprised by the warm reception it’s received. I really don’t think any other book that has been translated from Arabic into English has received such attention.

So what is different about this one?

JW: It’s really hard to say. I suppose it’s the topicality and the fact of the invasion of Iraq and so on. The title helps. And having good publishers. They’ve been very aggressive. It would be nice if books succeeded just based on their merits but that’s not the case.

Do you feel that there is a difference between how Arabic books are perceived in the West versus how other regions are perceived?

JW: I’m not sure there is! I think we’re doing rather well. When you look at the number of titles translated from Arabic – if you compare it to, say, Chinese literature, I think we’re doing rather well. I’m certainly not complaining. Obviously there are preconceptions about what Arabs might be writing about. Often people are surprised that they write about the same things as everyone else – you know, falling in love and everything else.

Do you feel that Arabic books are used more for their anthropological insights over their literary quality in the West?

JW: I’m sure this is true, yes. But I don’t find that particularly offensive or problematic. Except that it does raise the question of representation and to what extent these particular novels are representative of the whole, because a novel is under no obligation to think about being representative, that’s not its business.

What’s the purpose of the novel then, for you?

JW: Well it’s not for me to say and it’s a mix of things. But personally I have a reputation in the Arabic-English world for being a bit of a populist. I quite like the idea of finding books that have a fast pace and are gripping, that have a story that grabs your attention. There aren’t many, and they’re quite hard to find, but if they’re there I’ll do them.

It’s great to add translated title to the mix of what ordinary people are reading so that they don’t notice that they’re translated. I try as far as I can to make myself invisible and not to remind the reader too much that this is a translated world.

Ahmed, what is the purpose of the novel for you?

Ahmed Saadawi: I believe that the reason for writing a novel is connected with the ancient tradition of storytelling. When the first person told stories it was firstly for amusement and to satisfy the curiosity of other people and their desire for information and knowledge. There’s also a metaphysical reason. Because the world that we see is insufficient. These are all elements in the essence of novel-writing today.

Would you say that storytelling and the novel have the same purpose as religion? After all, religion also has metaphysical elements, plus entertainment value etc.

AS: That’s an interesting question. Yes, all these things have some connection: dance, art, prostitution, literature, everything. They all had religious objectives. And then art no longer was required to serve a religious purpose. It was based more on human experience of life. Religious texts tried to tell us that there’s a depth to life and that there’s another world beyond. Similarly, art tells us that there’s depth to life, but in the same world, not in another world.

What is the role of religion then in Frankenstein in Baghdad?

AS: The religious element is strong and fundamental in the novel. The process of making the What’s-Its-Name is taken from Muslim and Christian traditions, because the spirit is animated by the soul. And in the story there’s a reference to a saviour. It’s a saviour in a political context. But in the Arab world in general the political objective is not distinct from the religious objective. In difficult times people do revert to religion. In Iraqi Shiite culture the concept of a saviour is extremely important: the Mahdi. In the 1990s after the Kuwait war the Americans did serious damage to the country and life became very difficult. A lot of people said, This is the time that presages the coming of the Mahdi. Even in 2005 when sectarian violence was intense, there were at least three people who claimed that they were the Mahdi. All these elements are included in the identity of the What’s-Its-Name.

If religion is important, and you said storytelling is important, what is the role of truth versus storytelling in your novel?

AS: Religious belief, political belief, dogma: all of them tell a story and say, This is the truth. People will fight another to assert the truth of their story. Novels tell us that in fact there isn’t one story. Everybody has a piece of a true story. It is like the story of the blind people and the elephant.

Six blind people all touch a part of the elephant, and they never know the whole elephant?

AS: That’s how it is. Nobody has the whole truth.

Jonathan, what’s the one book you’ve translated other than Frankenstein in Baghdad that you think deserves the most attention and praise?

JW: Last year I did an Egyptian book which I really liked and hope will be a big success. It’s a memoir of a middle-aged Egyptian gay man, In The Spider’s Room. It’s really quite a moving story. He spent seven months in jail. They have a round up of gay man and he’s arrested. The authors did interviews with many of the men who were picked up. But it’s not based on any particular person, it’s fiction.

Ahmed Saadawi is an Iraqi novelist, poet, screenwriter and documentary filmmaker. In 2010 he was selected for Beirut39, as one of the thirty-nine best Arab authors under the age of forty, and in 2014 he became the first Iraqi to win the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction. This prize was awarded to Frankenstein in Baghdad, which also won Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire in 2017, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. He lives in Baghdad.

Jonathan Wright is a British journalist and literary translator. He studied Arabic at Oxford University. He is the translator of Hassan Blasim’s The Iraqi Christ, which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014. He has served as Reuters’ Cairo bureau chief, and he has lived and worked throughout the region, including in Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Tunisia and the Gulf. His translation of In The Spider’s Room by Muhammad Abdelnabi is out now.

November 2, 2018