Man as Voice, Woman as Body in Contemporary Narratives of Conflict
When contemporary feminist poet, Rupi Kaur, writes “our backs tell stories no books have the spine to carry”, what necessarily arises is the question pertaining to how literature fails to carry women’s ‘stories’ – their lived experiences (Kaur 2014). Women’s ‘backs’ – their bodies – brave this task instead. In contemporary narratives of conflict, the portrayal of the Middle East and post-9/11 conflict, is largely male-dominant. Whether deliberately or unintentionally, such narratives peripheralize female characters and silence their voices. This discussion looks at woman as body, not voice: how, in narratives being male-centric, the female body is constructed, contained, controlled to (em)body the nation’s psyche, post-9/11 terrorism, and the battleground upon which the personal and political collide.
Kaur’s poetic truth, together with a critical close reading of Feminist Theory and the Body (Price and Shildrick 1999) and Flesh Made Word (Michie 1987), construct a framework through which three novels of post-9/11 conflict are explored: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (2003), The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (2007), and The Attack by Yasmina Khadra (2007). In The Kite Runner, the first-person narrative records the journey from guilt to redemption for Afghan male protagonist, Amir. Yet, it is arguably his wife’s body – her ‘empty womb’; her infertility – upon which his unatoned sin is ‘punished’. The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s dialogue-type first-person narrative centralizes the voice of Pakistani male protagonist, Changez. While the story centres on his fraught relationship with America, it is his love interest, Erica, who embodies the state of the American nation pre- and post-9/11. In The Attack, female character, Sihem, literally ‘blows up’ her body. Even though the novel revolves around her unexpected suicide bombing, it is her Israeli husband, Amin, who dominates the first-person narrative. Each novel offers a significant reflection of the precarious relationship between various forms of male narration and portrayals of the female body – of man as voice and woman as body.
Theoretical Framework
Much of the academic literature and feminist writings on the female body pays particular attention to the representations of women’s bodies, and the societal pressures and cultural practices to which the body is subjected. In Feminist Theory and The Body, different feminist approaches to the female body, and topics related to the body, such as rape, disabilities, and plastic surgery, are studied. Price and Shildrick (2) explain why the female body is such a contested site for ideologies, cultural meanings and social control:
“…what is at issue for women specifically is that, supposedly, the female body is intrinsically unpredictable, leaky and disruptive. Not surprisingly, then, the ability to effect transcendence and exercise rationality has been gender marked as an attribute of men alone…such that women remain rooted within their bodies, held back by their supposedly natural biological processes.”
What this necessarily means is that the female body has been represented and understood in such a way that ‘woman’ has become synonymous with ‘body’ – a body that is ‘unpredictable’, ‘leaky’ and ‘disruptive’. The terms ‘remain rooted’ and ‘held back’ aptly describe the female bodily experience as imprisoning, while ‘transcendence’ is the experience of male ‘intellect’ and ‘rationality’. Such contrasting experiences is what underlies the literary dynamic of male narration and female characterization in contemporary narratives of conflict: the female bodily experience versus the male intellectual experience. Body is prison; voice is freedom.
Michie’s Flesh Made Word supports this notion. Michie’s work specifically focuses on the portrayal of women’s bodies in Victorian literature, and traces the customs that govern both its representation and textuality (Michie 4). To dissect the female textual body and examine the question of precarity concerning male narration and female embodiment, one must critically consider Michie’s pertinent questions and prevalent insights:
“…what does it mean to represent [women’s] bodies in language? How can one write across and between these traditions to begin to depict female physicality? Since women’s bodies are also simultaneously a primary metaphor for other things…and metaphorized into culturally recognized figures at the moment of their depiction…the issues of physical representation become especially complex.” (7)
Michie’s observations foreground ‘issues’ and ‘complexities’ of using language to write women’s bodies and female physicality. As Michie suggests, in some forms of literature such as contemporary narratives of conflict, words are reserved for male characters, while the female characters are only ‘heard’ through their bodies. In centralizing the male voice in forms of narrative, ‘language’ and ‘intellect’ are, again, gendered.
Two important themes—that essentially establish a framework through which the abovementioned novels are examined—emerge from the studies discussed: Firstly, as Price and Shildrick (2) reveal, what has historically been held by society is the belief that man is mind and woman is body. Mind and intellect are superior and separate to body and senses – in turn suggesting man as a thinking subject, and woman as driven by emotion. Secondly, in bringing this discussion of the female body to the domain of language, Miche highlights how women’s bodies are not their own; their bodies are for ‘other things’ – for metaphorizing, symbolizing and embodying. Applying these two themes to The Kite Runner, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and The Attack, and more specifically the characters and (em)bodiment of Soraya, Erica and Sihem, two profound questions necessarily emerge and prove most pertinent to this critical analysis: How is the notion of ‘man is mind’ – intellect and reason – and ‘woman is body’ – unpredictable and temperamental – reinforced? and How is the female textual body depicted by language – not as their own, but for ‘other things’?
The Kite Runner
The first-person narration of personal redemption in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner epitomizes the centralizing of the male protagonist and voice, at the expense of the primary female character. The novel’s narrative arc is structured around the protagonist, Amir, and his ‘morality tale’: a tale that revolves around Amir’s inability to intervene and stop the rape of his childhood friend, Hassan, as well as his return to Kabul years later in attempt to redeem himself. Importantly, Hosseini’s narrative reveals how storytelling—voicing—is intrinsic to Amir’s character development. In “The Use of Storytelling in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner”, Karam Nayebpour addresses the significance of first-person narration in the novel in enabling Amir to reconcile his past. Exploring Amir’s struggles and storytelling, Nayebpour (60) maintains that:
“..storytelling in The Kite Runner acts as a narrative tool, which serves at least two purposes. First, by recreating the narrator’s painful experience, storytelling enables him to find a way to atone for what he considers his past guilt…Second, storytelling reveals the dramatic impact of Amir’s unfavourable experience on his adult life and mentality.”
What can be deduced from such a claim is that it is Amir’s voice – his storytelling, his narrating – that, not only the entire story is dependent upon, but through which his character is made ‘complete’. Nayebpour’s insights, therefore, prove pivotal in the discussion of man as voice and woman as body. This is because, while Amir’s wife, Soraya, is similarly haunted by a tainted past, unlike Amir, she is not afforded the privilege of narration. The catharsis of storytelling is inaccessible to her. Rather, she is ‘imprisoned’ by her body: the very object of her past shame, and the site upon which Amir’s unatoned sin is punished.
Firstly, Amir’s and Soraya’s relationship epitomizes the idea critiqued by Price and Shildrick (2) that ‘man is mind’ and ‘woman is body’. Amir’s first-person narration can be described as a narrative of confession (Nayebpour 53). For example, he admits: “I watched Hassan get raped,” I said to no one” (Hosseini 86). Yet, Amir has, indeed, told this to ‘someone’: the readers, and himself. In this sense, Amir ‘effects transcendence’ and ‘exercises rationality’ by referring to his own experiences, reminiscing, as well as recording his pursuit of atonement. Soraya’s characterisation stands in contrast to this. Her body is depicted as ‘disruptive’: Soraya informs Amir about her past with an Afghan man, having stayed with him for one month out of wedlock (164). Such ‘unpredictable’ and ‘disruptive’ behaviour is incongruent with both Soraya’s and Amir’s cultural norms and religious codes. In fact, Soraya describes such behaviour as “rebellious” and “stupid” (164).
Secondly, Soraya ‘remains rooted’ within her body, owing to her infertility. Having escaped Afghanistan to Pakistan, then ultimately to the United States, Amir and his father strive for the western ideals of ‘happiness’: namely, college, marriage, middle-class privileges and a nuclear family. Yet, such ideals remain unfulfilled since Soraya and Amir cannot fall pregnant. Notably, Amir contemplates:
“…perhaps something, someone, somewhere, had decided to deny me fatherhood for the things I had done. Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so…I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya’s womb, like it was a living, breathing thing.” (173)
Amir’s contemplation complements Michie’s observation of the female textual body as the physical representation of ‘other things’: Soraya’s empty womb represents Amir’s ‘punishment’. Taken together, these analyses suggest that to read The Kite Runner through a feminist framework is to critique the periphery to which Soraya is assigned: while Amir’s voice is leading and Soraya’s voice is silenced in the storytelling, it is her body to which she is confined, for the purposes of representation and embodying.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
In the same vein, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid exemplifies the convoluted relationship between narration and embodiment. The novel achieves this through Changez’s first-person narrative that tells of his story and lived experiences as a Pakistani living in America pre- and post-9/11, as well as through Erica’s allegorical embodiment of the nation. The novel centres on Pakistani protagonist, Changez, who recounts his experience working on Wall Street, pursuit of the American Dream, and return to his homeland, Lahore. Hamid significantly employs a form of dialogue and first-person narrative to tell this story. The narrative, as a result, is framed around Changez’s thoughts, words, and reminiscing in such a narrow and singular way that no other voice is recorded or heard. Suffice it to say that Changez, as the male protagonist, completely dominates the narrative of the novel.
In “Possessed by Whiteness: Interracial Affiliations and Racial Melancholia in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, Delphine Munos argues that the purpose of such a narrative framing is for the Pakistani protagonist to silence the American addressee. Using studies on whiteness and psychoanalytic theory, Munos’s work exposes the ways in which the post-9/11 American society ignorantly overlooks and ‘silences’ “the painful histories of slavery, colonization or diaspora” (Munos 396), in attempts to prioritize “healing” and “progress” (396) from the trauma of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Changez’s first-person narration and monologue-like dialogue is in response to such an ignorant ‘overlooking’ and ‘silencing’; Munos argues that, by Changez “dominat[ing] the dialogue”, the “absent presence” and “disembody[iment]” of the American ‘you’ is thus highlighted, and Hamid is able “to indirectly ‘write back’ to his Western readership via the increasingly bitter, accusing tone of his protagonist” (400). In this sense, Changez is able to ‘effect transcendence’ by telling his story.
Erica, on the other hand, cannot effect such transcendence for it is Changez’s words that ‘contain’ her. As discussed, if Changez’s voice does, indeed, ‘disembody’ the American ‘you’ – the audience, the listener – then this, to some extent, mirrors Erica’s demise, since her character can be read as the allegorical embodiment of the nation. Changez’s words that he uses to describe both the nation and Erica mirror each other. Before the 9/11 attacks, Changez describes Erica as “stunningly regal” (19). He emphasizes her popularity, intellect, and beauty. Similarly, America boasted a military, economic, technological and global ‘royalty’, dominance and prosperity. Yet, in the wake of the attacks, Changez then describes Erica as “disappearing into a powerful nostalgia” (129). The grief and trauma that the terrorist attacks triggered, both conjured up memories of Erica’s late boyfriend and inflamed her preoccupation with the past. As a result, Erica struggles with mental illness, and is admitted into a clinic. Erica’s demise, notably, embodies the state of the American nation post-9/11; Changez observes how “America, too, was increasingly giving itself over to a dangerous nostalgia at the time” (130), and while “[he] had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time [he] was struck by its determination to look back” (131). It is thus indisputable how Erica’s textual body can be read as the physical representation of America pre- and post-9/11. In other words, it is Changez’s language that describes – and thus confines – Erica’s textual body to an allegory, in the same way that it silences the American addressee.
The Attack
Furthering the discussion within this framework, the association of freedom with voice and imprisonment with body is also central to analyzing Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack. The nucleus of the novel is Israeli male protagonist’s investigation into his wife’s suicide bombing. Essentially the story follows Amin Jaafari’s coming-to-terms with the loss of his wife, Sihem, as well as his attempts to make sense of such an unexpected and unpredictable act. Hence Amin’s first-person point-of-view as the dominating form of narration throughout the novel. This, however, poses the main point of contention of this discussion, and that Gardner addresses in “Female (Em)Bodied Justice: Terrorism, Self-Sacrifice, and the Joint Primacy of Gender and Nationality”. In her paper, Gardner redefines concepts of female ‘agency’, ‘liberation’ and ‘vulnerability’ in relation to female acts of self-destruction and terrorism in a post-9/11 world wherein media and literature ascribes strength and the ability to rescue to men, and vulnerability and victimization to women (Gardner 2). Prevalently, Gardner (2) argues that:
“…novelists – in their effort to understand the troubling nature of terroristic violence – are perpetuating perceptions of female victimization. The readiness of this reading is a result of the influence of white, western (liberal) feminism over academic notions of women and power, because of which we tend to perceive women only as agents when they resist, or pursue actions translatable to us as liberating in nature.”
The narration of The Attack exemplifies Gardner’s claim that “novelists…perpetuat[e] perceptions of female victimization” (2): despite Sihem’s suicide forming the crux of the story, she is pushed to the periphery of the novel, and her voice is silenced. Instead, her character becomes merely the object of Amin’s investigation, and readers consequently come to know Sihem through a male voice. Amin can thus be seen as Sihem’s spokesperson. Additionally, Sihem is painted as a victim to the extent to which Amin is convinced there is a plausible explanation for his wife’s unprecedented action. This is revealed when Amin goes to Bethlehem and confronts the supposed leader of the intifada who Amin believes to have indoctrinated Sihem; he asks: “What tales did you tell her? How did you make a monster, a terrorist, a suicidal fundamentalist out of a woman who couldn’t bear to hear a puppy whine?” (Khadra 156). The implications of his questions, therefore, strip Sihem of any agency in the decision to commit suicide. The confusion and unexpectedness concerning Sihem’s suicide, and the search for answers and explanations by Amin, reinforce the idea, once again, that the female body is ‘unpredictable’, ‘leaky’ and ‘disruptive’ and the ability to ‘exercise rationality’ is reserved for men (Price and Shildrick 2).
What’s more, this complements Gardner’s criticism of the stereotypical notion of female agency and liberation being synonymous with defiant acts of resistance and rebellion. This is because, as Gardner (2) explains, such acts are “translatable to us as liberating in nature” and dependent on how “we tend to perceive women” as agents (2). Rather, Gardner points out that certain female characters in terror fiction – such as Sihem – embrace vulnerability by subordinating themselves as a form of agency itself (2). According to Gardner (2), such acts are liberating insofar as they are willing, “deliberate” and “well-reasoned”. Interestingly, in Gardner’s article, she uses the words ‘act’ and ‘perform’ to describe vulnerability and sacrifice, and describes Sihem’s suicide bombing as “one of the novel’s opening scenes” (5) rather than ‘passage’. What can be deduced from such an observation is that, in The Attack, the ‘language of the female textual body’, as Michie (3) describes, is Action: in the ‘scene’ of her suicide, Sihem ‘performs’ her vulnerability through an ‘act’ of sacrifice. Even though Amin describes Sihem’s dead body as “horror in its most absolute ugliness” (Khadra 29), he cannot ignore the fact that, in death, she appears “calm, as though liberated by her suffering” (29). It is only once Sihem ‘escapes’ her body – through literally ‘blowing up’ her physical self – that she is ‘liberated’.
Conclusion
The discussion of Man as Voice and Woman as Body in contemporary narratives of conflict validates Kaur’s (2014) poetic postulation that women’s ‘backs’ and bodies bare the weight of ‘carrying’ their stories, when books and their narratives, fail to give them a voice. Reading The Kite Runner, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and The Attack within a feminist framework inspired by Price’s and Shildrick’s critique of mind and intellect as gender marked, as well as Michie’s insights into the literary representation of the female textual body, reveals a consensus that recognizes the male-centrism of contemporary narratives of conflict. The first-person narratives of the male protagonists in each novel confirm man as voice – of ‘rationality’, ‘mind’, and ‘freedom’ – and peripheralize female characters. The analysis of Soraya’s empty womb, Erica’s allegorical embodiment, and Sihem’s blown up body, validates the idea of woman as body – as ‘physical’, ‘unpredictable’ and ‘irrational’. Thus, to a large extent, such contemporary narratives of conflict reveal a fraught and precarious relationship between male narration and the representation of the female body – a relationship of containment and confinement.
Gardner, Renee Lee. “Female (Em)Bodied Justice: Terrorism, Self-Sacrifice, and the Joint Primacy of Gender and Nationality”. Conference Presentation. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/revisioning/2011/909/34/.
Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Mariner Books, 2007.
Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. Riverhead Books, 2003.
Kaur, Rupi. Milk and Honey. CreateSpace, 2014.
Khadra, Yasmina. The Attack. Thorpe, 2007.
Michie, Helena. The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies. Oxford University Press, 1990.
Munos, Delphine. "Possessed By Whiteness: Interracial Affiliations And Racial Melancholia In Mohsin Hamid’Sthe Reluctant Fundamentalist". Journal Of Postcolonial Writing, vol 48, no. 4, 2012, pp. 396-405. Informa UK Limited, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.633014.
Nayebpour, Karam. “The Uses of Storytelling in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.” Hacettepe Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, vol. 35, no. 1, 2018, pp. 52–60., https://doi.org/10.32600/huefd.434221.
Price, Janet, and Margrit Shildrick. Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. Routledge, 1999.