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Friday, September 01, 2006

the nature of invisibility

is that we don't see what it is we're not seeing.

Like the man I spoke to recently, who would consider himself a literate, well-educated, cosmopolitan, progressive world citizen. He told me that reading fiction is an essential part of his life. I asked him who his favourite authors were. He reeled off about 15 names, from around the world, smiled widely, said: You can see I have a global appetite.

No,
I said gently. You have half a global appetite.

He looked irritated, as people do when you puncture their self-congratulation in a way they can't grasp.

In your whole list,
I said, there's only two women. Don't you find it strange to read just half the human race?

8 Comments:

Anonymous claire said...

what did he say to that?

9/02/2006 6:26 PM  
Blogger shailja said...

He looked flustered, made a lame comeback about political correctness, and lurched away.

9/06/2006 6:08 PM  
Anonymous claire said...

you know, for a long time i considered carrying a card around with the answers to the three or four questions everyone asks of me on it, so when someone starts up with "what are you ..." i can just hand them the card and walk away.

now that i'm older, i want to make a card that explains why political correctness is *good* so that i can hand it over to the person who uses the term in an argument as a four-letter word ... and walk away.

9/07/2006 3:32 PM  
Blogger shailja said...

I used to ask people to define "political correctness" when they used it. It's one of those terms everyone likes to toss around without actually knowing what they mean by it.

But I know you have a definition, right, Claire? Or even a 1000-word exposition on the use and misuse of PC therof on one of your many disgustingly prolific blogs?

9/07/2006 6:42 PM  
Anonymous claire said...

i like frank chin's redefinition of pc as "pidgin contest", a competition in a lingua franca to see who can be, simultaneously, the most civil, and the most original.

but you're right. it's high time i blogged about it :P

9/08/2006 8:06 PM  
Anonymous Priyanka said...

I like the thought: "the nature of invisibility is that we don't see what it is that we're not seeing."

Shailja, I agree that the self-congratulatory type can be painful to interact with. But to some degree, don't most people (regardless of their politics) suffer from that disease?

That said, why would you pick writers based on their sex? I read a lot of women authors, and perhaps not that many men. But it isn't deliberate. I'm a writer, and I'd rather people read me for my work than any aspect of my identity.

9/13/2006 3:29 PM  
Blogger shailja said...

Why would I pick writers based on their sex? I wouldn't. But if most of the writers I had read, over say, a year, were of one gender, one race, or one nationality, and I hadn't even noticed, I would be grateful if someone pointed that out to me. Especially if I was laboring under the delusion that my taste in writers was boldly international and wide-ranging.

9/16/2006 8:17 AM  
Anonymous tahlasimsim said...

The nature of invisibility
is that we don't see what it is we're not seeing.

I like that, too.

Ever come across the experiment of the kittens that were only exposed to horizontal stimuli and another set of kittens exposed only to vertical stimuli? It could help to solve the problem of men not being able to see and honour women beyond the boundaries of natural filial love and affection. I wasn't exposed to these writers but your bringing it to my awareness does make it difficult to comment until I have read at least half a dozen of them just to begin to restore the balance, before I reflect on what I was before I learned more about them.

I would tend to give women who hate men simply because they are men a wide berth because as a man I am ashamed of that stereotype of being applied to me personally.

I also believe that men have written about women in a particular way that you, Shailja, might describe as imperialist (eg the Geisha book which I read and then forgot most of by the time I got to the end of it.) But I think I would need to start thinking about men who have written about strong female characters, too.

I used 'strong' deliberately only to create a comparative sense in time, in history. Women from our part of the world have only recently 'seen what it is that they are not seeing'. Until that moment, they were in an inferior position and only the stronger ones managed to escape the risk of having little else to offer as a model to their female children.

1/26/2007 9:25 AM  

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