Politics of the Face

The American invasion of Afghanistan is a classic rape and rescue fantasy, according to my friend Vicki Sung at New York University. After American masculinity came under attack on 9/11, its feminisation of Afghanistan was represented in the media by the symbolic lifting of the Afghan woman’s veil. Sharbat Gula was found and photographed by National Geographic’s Steve McCurry for the second time in her life in 2002.

“The subtext underlying images of women covered head-to-toe, or begging on the streets, or scarred from a botched attempt at self-immolation, is American cultural and moral superiority framed within its ideology of freedom,” Dinah Zeiger says in Afghanistan Blues. In 2001, Sharmeen’s Beneath the Veil helped construct that frame, according to Zeiger who studies the politics of images. In Lifting the Veil (2007), Sharmeen’s primary interest was to look at and photograph the veiled woman’s face.

Politics of the face:

But the face has its own politics. At its core is a paradox. The face reveals, but it also conceals. Like the mirror mask Lady Gaga wears in the music video Pokerface, it is simultaneously reflecting and hiding reality. As a mirror, the face means recognition. As a mask, the face means honour. Lifting the Veil was about the former face. The Oscar-winning Saving Face is about the latter.

Some brutal reactions to the lifting of Afghanistan’s veil also targeted the face. There were acid attacks on girls going to school. Without a face, the girls cannot interface with the West. Without an interface, there is no intercourse. That is why acid attacks in Pakistan are usually carried out by turned-down suitors.

After it won an Academy Award last week, Saving Face has faced similar attacks.

Empire’s discourse on gender:

“What is the value of a feminist value reified by white men (Oscar judiciary) to a brown woman (Sharmeen and the acid attack victims represented)?” left-leaning journalist Hashim bin Rashid asks in Pakistan Today (March 1, 2012).

Postcolonial feminists see oppression in the Western image of an abstract essentially-oppressed singular third-world woman.

But isn’t there some latent oppression of the same kind in implying that professional decisions of the members of the Academy are essentially a function of their ethnicity and gender?

Writing in The Express Tribune (March 1, 2012), Nadir Hassan collapses the entire process of Academy Awards to American hegemonic goals. But Oscar winning documentaries in the decade since 9/11 include Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) that criticised American torture practices focusing on the murder of an Afghan taxi driver by American soldiers while he was in illegal detention, Murder on a Sunday Morning (2002) that exposes institutional racism in America, Bowling for Columbine (2003) in which director Michael Moore discovers a “culture of fear” created by the American media and the government, and Inside Job (2011), a scathing criticism of the US financial system.

Also, isn’t there significant oppression in collapsing Sharmeen’s own artistic growth or political opinions to a static function of her social class (‘the elite’), especially in borrowed Marxist terms with no regard to their European historical context that may not be applicable to Pakistan? Whose discourse is that?

Framing ourselves:

Defining women as archetypical victims freezes them into “objects-who-defend-themselves” and men into “subjects-who-perpetrate-violence”, according to postcolonial trasnationalist feminist Chandra Talpade Mohanty.

Isn’t there significant violence of the same kind in feminising ourselves as singular colonised objects-who-defend-themselves against a monolithic colonising West – the subject-who-perpetrates-violence?

Claiming he knows “How to win an Oscar”, Nadir Hassan implies donor agencies in Pakistan and the Academy are working together to propagate the “pernicious influence of the West in Pakistan”.

But Pakistani acid attacks are not a reaction to the American invasion of Afghanistan. Saving Face can be seen as talking about oppressed women waiting to be rescued, but also as a story of men and women from different backgrounds working together to achieve common goals. The recent legislation against acid attacks was pushed by women parliamentarians with diverse political affiliations.

But if this issue must be seen as a battle between Pakistani culture and the West, many in Pakistan will side with the West. In 2008, People’s Party senator Israrullah Zehri defended honour killings in Balochistan as “a centuries-old tradition”. Most Pakistanis did not accept that justification. We think it is time for the tradition to end.

There is no abstract, singular, transcendental Pakistani culture we all subscribe to. Culture is a construct. If we could peel off European colonisation, we would encounter Arab colonisation. Every encounter with ‘the Other’ fundamentally changes how we interface with the world. There is no essential Muslim woman beneath the veil that we must protect. Beneath the veil there is only another veil.

The writer is a media and culture critic and works at The Friday Times. He tweets @paagalinsaan and gets email at [email protected]