Book Review: Shame by Salman Rushdie

Title-Shame

Author-Salman Rushdie

Publisher-Vintage

Format-Paperback

Length-288 pages

Rating-4.5/5 

Salman Rushdie is known for infusing multiplicity of meaning and layers of interpretation in his works. To provide a detailed review of those meanings would not only be a tough endeavor but also a bit impossible due to the paucity of space we have on Instagram feed. So in this review I would like to focus particularly on the issue of disability and we will try the analyse the novel through the prespective of disabled characters.

The character which interested me the most in the novel was indeed the intellectually disabled character of Sufiya Zenobia. Sufiya is double marginalized- first for being a woman in the patriarchal Pakistani society and secondly the shame of being intellectually disabled. But unlike other marginalized people who do not make any effort on their part to come to the center, Sufiya shows her resistance through violence and transforms herself into a beast. At the age of twelve for the first time all those suppressed shame and anger comes out while she was sleepwalking into Pinkie Aurangzeb’s yard and killed two hundred and eighteen turkeys by tearing of their heads and reaching down into their bodies to draw their guts up through their necks with “ tiny weaponless hands” (150).

Parallely, Sufiya‟s mind slows down and she remains a child forever. It is in her mind where she can enjoy, the “favourite things she keeps in there locked up. When people are present she never dares to take things out and play with them in case they get taken away or broken by mistake.” (224). Inside her head she not only conjures fictional images of happy times with her father hugging and smiling at her or of playing with her mother on a skipping rope. She fills her head with happy images, so that “there won’t be room for the other things, things she hates” (225).

Conflicting notions of husband, children, duties of a wife that she has imbibed from others who come in contact with her (ayah, mother for example) confuse and torment her. As she tries to conjure up vague equations of social relationships within her head, her need for expressing her sexual desires take her into another dimension. The tug of war between responsibility and practical reality haunts her.

What is surprising is Rushdie‟s use of a disabled female body, its suppressed sexuality giving birth to a beast, so malicious that it indulges in the rape and decapitation of four adolescents. Involuntarily, Rushdie knits a tale from powerlessness to all consuming power, an animal like power that knows no fear.

It was overall an interesting read.I give this novel 4.5 stars and recommend it to all those readers who wants to read something different.

Happy Reading