ON BEING ASHAMED; OR, SHIT, RACE, AND DEATH

When I was growing up in my racially mixed small Ohio town, the black girls had a phrase they used to great effect whenever a person did or said something foolish or embarrassing: “Ooh, shame!” The word “shame” was drawn out, sometimes to three syllables, so that it hung in the air like lingering smoke or a bad smell that would envelop the embarrassed person for hours if not days to come.

Sometimes I lie awake at night and think of things I’m ashamed of. They make a curious collection:

1. In 1987, I threw used toilet paper out the window in a guesthouse in Ladakh, India (formerly Tibet); I later saw the family picking it out of their vegetable patch.
2. Around 1989, I referred to a fellow graduate student, in the company of a famous feminist professor and several other grad students, as “the greasy Canadian.” I had no reason for maligning him, nor any notions about Canadians, except that the one other graduate student from the Far North had recently ended our friendship and I was bitter.
3. In 1990, when my friend Karina was dying of cancer, and I was visiting her in the apartment where she stayed near the hospital in Philadelphia, I asked her at two in the morning to stop talking so loudly on the phone, so that I could sleep. Of course, we didn’t yet know she was dying, but we knew the cancer was advanced.
4. When she died, I began pestering her brother for the tapestry that had hung on her bedroom wall and that I had admired for a couple of years. I was sure Karina would want me to have it. I also asked for the shirt back that I had given her in her last months to cheer her up. I thought it would suit me very nicely. Indeed it would look better on my curvy body than it had on her emaciated one.
5. When the famous African-American senator came to speak at my small college in 1998, I had a burning urge to yell out an epithet. Also, when I was just becoming close friends with A, an African-American woman, and she was wearing torn jeans, I had a sudden urge to say, “Hey, your knees are black, too!” And, looking at a photo of her relatives: “Gosh, your whole family is black!”
6. When I was about thirteen (1976), my father thought I’d said the N-word. I was playing basketball with two black girls from school and when I lost the ball, I said, “Fuck!” It was the first time I’d ever uttered that epithet. They took that as an excuse to knock me around, maintaining I’d said “Fuck you.” Upset, I came home and told the story to my father, afraid to name the epithet I’d used. His face grew dark as thunder. “You must never, never say that! How could you even think of saying it?” I had never dreamed of saying the N-word; I’m not sure I had ever heard it. Only later did I come to dream of it, out of sheer perversity. So this is not, in fact, an incident I need to be ashamed of—quite the contrary, Monica Jones and Tracey Washington should be ashamed of beating up on the poor skinny white girl who was only angry at herself for not being their match in basketball.

Attempting an objective consideration of this list, I notice all the items involve breaches of etiquette, some more egregious than others. In most but not all of them, I did what my friend A’s ex-husband refers to as “showing your ass”—like a baboon, I displayed my rank need and desire, my unfortunate self-centeredness.

I also observe that almost all the behaviors more or less explicitly involved the body, mine or another’s, and, specifically, bodily humiliation. Do I remember such shameful moments rather than others because our puritanical society is so afraid of bodily functions and their exposure, and therefore makes reference to them by way of its worst insults? Or is it because I have committed few violations I would consider primarily spiritual? I have never, for instance, cheated on a test, or plagiarized; I have never deliberately stolen one person’s love from another; I have never tried to destroy a person’s career. I have spoken honestly about people I love, and even about their bodies, to other people, but I have never failed to underline my love and its dominance. I have sometimes given away others’ secrets, but never with malicious intent.

There is something unforgettable about insults to or by the body. Racism and genocide are both insults to the body, to the nature of the particular body being demonized. Indeed, I recently heard a scholar argue cogently that genocide is sex crime, or misogynist hate crime, writ large; at the root of every genocide is the fear of a group’s reproduction, and at the root of such fears is primitive hatred of the mother, more specifically, of her womb. The first and last entries in my list concern prejudice and racism. Thinking it through, I am not truly ashamed of number five, just as I have no cause to be ashamed of number six, except that it was the first moment the idea of racist utterance entered my head, inserted there by an over-vigilant parent. I recently read that during the health care debates, protestors outside Congress shouted the N-word at Senator John Lewis, and I am sickened. “I trust you,” said my friend years ago, when I stumbled through an embarrassed apology over possibly clumsy utterances I’d made about race. And I trust myself. I know that one’s unconscious has a cultural repository and that urges of the sort I had when Lewis visited my college have their own perverse honesty; they are confessional rather than antagonistic.

I wasn’t going to shout the N-word when John Lewis visited my campus, by the way, I was going to shout “Gorilla.” A minute later, I thought about the fact that one pale Midwestern girl in the college choir struck me as having the face of a pig (there is a certain chinless, turned-up-nose kind of white person who often strikes me this way). I could just as well have had the urge to yell “Piggy” at her, but she wasn’t the focus of the event. Also, on some level the event itself struck me as hypocritical. My college has a habit of preening itself on its “commitment to diversity,” and on the fact that its founders were abolitionists. So what? Our past gives us reason, thank God, not to be ashamed, but to be positively proud, and to keep saying so 150 years after the fact, seems to me vanity and foolishness. Something in me itched to expose the way in which whites and blacks still find one another strange despite ­assertions of nonracism, to expose my own contempt for the ceremony, to ­expose myself as an unregenerate racist despite all my institution’s protestations.

On the other hand, the invitation to Lewis was in good faith (his niece also happened to be a student at the school). So there was no reason to épater the college officials. Yet the need to do something improper in public sometimes feels uncontrollable. Public ceremonies embarrass me, and whenever, for instance, our college is called upon as a collective body to sing the school hymn—“Hail to alma mater, hail to K—all glorious . . . our cornfields, our prairies, our home”—I am overcome by giggles (“our cornfields”?! “all glorious”?!). I was also new to the college that autumn, newly friends with A, and had inhabited all-white environments for years past. Here I could say more about having actually grown up in a town that was forty percent black, with a college that was the first to admit blacks (and women, too), but I will hold back on that. I want to think about the genuinely egregious item in my list, the one I find rankly unforgivable, that goes far beyond an overwhelming itch to verbally expose my and my society’s racial unconscious: throwing my own filth into the garden of our Tibetan hosts in Ladakh. This was, I think, a truly racist act.

The Westerner throwing her own shit to the natives. How will I ever atone for that one? I’d had altitude sickness for days and was scarcely off the toilet for five minutes at a time; the toilet had no proper flusher, and I was out of water to pour down after the paper. At this point, my shit was mere brown water, and I suppose I thought if I threw the paper out the window, the wind would blow it away. It never occurred to me to collect the paper in a bag, possibly because I was with my boyfriend and didn’t want him to be aware of it (such are the inhibitions of young love). It was later, when I saw family members bending between rows of vegetables to pick up the bits of paper, that I was ashamed, and in years since, every time I remember what I did, I feel sick at heart. I dream of eliminating this sickness through some sort of compensatory act, but I don’t know what that would be.

The “greasy Canadian” is a no-brainer. I have grown up, I don’t malign people stupidly and unnecessarily any longer in order to prove something about myself; and if one person reminds me of another I don’t like, or who has hurt me, I keep quiet. I don’t know why I even mention the incident in my list, except that the remark was so stupid it deserves to be mocked, and that clearly the moment has stayed in my mind for a reason. I’d been invited, with a select group of other graduate students, to the house of a famous scholar who had previously excluded me from her gatherings. I wanted to declare my in-ness by pointing to the out-ness of this person who was not present, and I needed to unleash some aggression against the other Canadian who had been my best friend and now chose to avoid me. He’d also won a prize I’d been denied, which rubbed salt in the wound. Possibly the whole event, such as it was, says more about elite graduate programs and their atmosphere than about me. It speaks to the anxiety and favoritism, the fears of exclusion, that such atmospheres foster.

My behavior around Karina’s illness and death shames me still, but I’m thinking more about it and finding reasons to forgive myself. These events have in common with the previous one the fact that I was in graduate school at the time, and I really haven’t a single joyful memory from graduate school. Good moments there were—including good moments with Karina, a Czech librarian who’d defected via Paris and was the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, drinking vodka into the evening and talking about our love lives—but I don’t remember feeling buoyant and optimistic; I remember a lot of loneliness and angst. I was in a kind of second adolescence after the release and excitement of college, trying to learn to negotiate an intensely pre-professional atmosphere for which I was utterly unprepared. I had always been intellectually precocious but emotionally immature, and while the ivory tower pushed me to prove that I was more than just precocious, that I had a solid mind and a devotion to work, it allowed me to remain suspended in my emotional growth. We were to complete our dissertations within four years, five at most, and then we were meant to go on to other ivory towers and have ­llustrious careers. How all this was to be accomplished was not made clear, and I felt I was paddling along day to day in very deep waters. My boyfriend at the time was a young man caught in an abusive relationship with his mother, and I suffered the fallout from his suffering and insecurity; banned from family gatherings or excursions, forbidden to call his mother’s home when he was visiting her (which was often), regaled with stories of her genius and his close bond with her, and periodically vilified for making demands on him, I was in a constant state of anger combined with self-blame.

Not good at all. And then to have my complicated, vociferous, prematurely wrinkled, perpetually frustrated Czech housemate get horribly ill and die on me at the age of thirty-three! I’m still ashamed of myself, but I also see what a child I was, how my growth had been stymied; how I’d been confused by mixed messages: I was brilliant but I was lacking in self-presentation; I was a sprinter but needed to be a long-distance runner; I had to overcome my resistance to theory; I was pretty and charming but froze up at key moments; and I needed to tackle Frances Burney the night Karina stayed loudly on the phone until two in the morning—and after all, I had taken the time to ride three trains from Princeton to Philly to be with her, as I did in subsequent weeks and months.

Oh, the grad school profs! One mocked my rejection of postmodernism, another seized and kissed me under the Gothic arches, another did her best to support me but had the sudden death of her husband to deal with, another assigned literally two thousand pages of reading a week, yet another tied up a male graduate student in his house and read him Romantic poetry while stroking his hair from midnight to five in the morning—what in the world was going on with these profs?!

I still think Karina’s brother should have given me the tapestry. It hung over her bed and we used to talk underneath it. As it is, I haven’t a single piece of her, nothing whatsoever as a memento of our three years of friendship and camaraderie.

Is this turning into an exercise in self-absolution? I seem to have let myself off the hook for any incidents that took place during graduate school and any incidents involving what, for lack of a better shorthand, I’ll call the American race problem. The one I’m still having the most trouble with is the toilet paper in Ladakh.

But let me think a little more about shit. When I was growing up, my mother used excremental epithets whenever she was angry, which was often; she sometimes applied them to me, which was not much fun. She admitted to having a kind of shit neurosis, and tentatively attributed it to the fact that as a small child she had fallen into the cesspool (this was in Lithuania) and would have drowned had not the German shepherd grabbed her by the collar just in time. This should have made her love German shepherds, but oddly, she was afraid of them, perhaps because of their association with police and particularly with Nazis. And perhaps, who knows, she associates shit with the Nazi regime.

The other day, here in Berlin where I’m living just now and where the rules about cleaning up after dogs are haphazard, Bella stopped to poop outside a school, in the area where pupils had their bicycles parked. A woman came by with her little son and the two made disgusted noises. I was preoccupied and became suddenly self-conscious; I had a plastic bag in my pocket, but it didn’t occur to me until after we’d left behind a couple of soft piles that I ought to have used it. I think the woman’s anger made me defiant. Or perhaps because she looked Turkish and not bona-fide German (this is the German race problem, now that the Jews are no longer), I wasn’t sufficiently fearful to respond. On the other hand, a few days later when a Turkish man less than half my age yelled at me in mock anger at Bella’s stopping near his picnic table to pee, I became abjectly apologetic. I was intimidated where I should have just yelled back, “It’s only water, pal!” I probably still felt guilty from the previous incident. Once again, my ethnocentrism had cropped up in the dirtiest possible form.

We have a tendency, in America, to focus on black versus white. This allows us to forget all the shades of prejudice in between—and lets us off the hook, in some ways. We assume it’s natural for opposites to be chary of one another, we “work on” our racism, we congratulate ourselves on how far we’ve come while deploring our recidivism, and all the while we forget that there is a larger human problem to do with the need to feel superior, to make others carry our dirt. I believe this problem will always be with us humans, and the way to think about it is neither to say it’s natural nor merely to create taboos around forms of speech. We can’t all undergo psychoanalysis, either, so I think the answer may be as simple and as impossible-feeling as “try to know as many people as you possibly can so that no one is an Untouchable.” The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah makes more or less this point in his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, when he suggests we attempt to converse with as many kinds of people in as many parts of the world as we can, whether or not we agree with them. He means the kinds of conversations that begin on the private level, with something two people or two groups have in common, and perhaps can proceed from there.

Not being a philosopher, I feel self-conscious trying to solve the world’s greatest problem—that of the objectification of one group by another—in a personal essay. But we are all persons, qualified to take a stab at them, aren’t we? Certainly the world’s problems begin in persons, in their needs and desires, attractions and repulsions, their failure to control these, or, more importantly, to recognize them for what they are. (The traditional monotheistic mind-body split assumes that control is the issue; Freud taught us that repression only leads to violent outbursts; now we have to learn to acknowledge the full range of eros and aggression and find a balance between control and indulgence. I am not saying anything new.) What does it mean that the Turkish woman’s annoyance didn’t lead me to clean up my dog’s pile of shit? Why did I react with something akin to fear when the young Turkish man expressed mock-anger at me? Was it the same reaction I had when my father thought I’d called the black girls “niggers”—a conviction that even if I wasn’t guilty in this particular instance, if my father thought I was, then surely I was guilty in principle, capable of saying what I hadn’t said? Therefore, when the Turkish guy accused me of contempt, I felt guilty because of the previous incident. But was it really prejudice that made me ignore the woman, or was it resistance to authority—she was a mother taking her son to school; she was thus a parental figure telling me what to do, and I wanted to do what I wanted to do? Only afterwards did it occur to me that I was leaving the shit right where children could step in it. In the moment, I felt defiant; but was it easier for me to defy a Turkish woman than a bona fide Aryan German? Or would I have been all the more defiant toward the latter because of historical resentment? Was I really just shitting on those who once shat on me, who said “Jews and dogs may not walk on this street”?

Leave it to the brilliant and frightening J. M. Coetzee—frightening because he shows us everything we don’t want to know about ourselves and lets us alone with it, without answers or sanitizers—to tie everything fundamental together: racism (Hendrik, of course, is black, a servant), the garden of Eden (the feces as snakes; the fig tree that signals, in the Bible, a return to happy domesticity, the private paradise of the private home), incestuous desire, human waste. In the Heart of the Country mixes all these up; “looped in each other’s coils,” Coetzee suggests, are the good and the bad within us, the loving and the violent, the clean and the dirty, the red and the black, father and daughter. Untouchables and other underlings exist to enable the rest of us to deny this coiling. We do so at our peril.