Saving Face: Charity and Conventional Narratives

In February, when Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy's Film, "Saving Face,"on acid burn victims won an Oscar, I was skeptical.  Accolade seemed to focus on how great it was for Pakistan to have this honor -- and whenever people get jingoistic, you know the core maybe hollow.  Frankly, there are two reasons why the film won the Oscar: excellent public relations work, and choice of topic that fits the western narrative of acceptable ways to talk about Muslim women - as victims of patriarchal religious violence without any emphasis on the larger socio-economic context in which this violence ensues and whether there are any viable solutions.

Now that I have seen the film, there is certainly a lot to critique.  From an objective standpoint, I am simply bewildered as to how mediocre filming and static story telling like this could win a prize.  An "A" for a sophomore year Film Studies Class.  Oscar, no.  But then that is perhaps the nature of the Oscars when it comes to films about third world women -- and specially when it comes to recounting in a manner that indirectly legitimizes war, terror, and intervention by western powers.  A film about drone victims would not gain traction.

The narrative also reinforces stereotypes about vigilante justice and charity as solution.  Women's disempowerment is not countered through documentation of sustained organizing, but reinforced as they are spoken for by lawyers, select ngo workers, and parliamentarians; rich doctors are presented as humorous, patronizing saviors, and even if the disparaging voice over is missing - there is no distinct, coherent message about women's empowerment or agency.  Rather, its opportunistic footage about a very important topic.

The focus on the doctor as saviour is perplexing and contradictory.  In the first few minutes of the film, we are shown a billboard with the face of a fair skinned, young woman advertising beauty services -- which makes you think the film questions the beauty myth.  Seconds later the doctor, in his cocky manner, talks of his work -- he "makes them bigger, makes them smaller."  What then is the political narrative?  From a feminist perspective, acid throwing is a particularly cruel form of punishment  because it destroys a woman's face in a culture where her worth is measured by beauty and youth  Yet, the  protagonist and purported hero of the documentary reinforces this myth in its most narcissistic and decadent form.  Dr. Jawad is a cosmetic surgeon who milks women's insecurity about their looks by subjecting the richest to the scalpel -- perking up breasts, tucking tummies, fixing features.  His canvass is the woman who believes she is defective because of society's emphasis on her perfection.  What better canvass than this --altruism combined with a Swadesh type homecoming -- and  women who actually need the surgery and are dependent on (and in fact lucky for receiving) his charity.  How perfectly rewarding to be filmed for it as well.  He is not God, but a prophet, he is.

I once met a Bangladeshi woman in a New York courtroom.  She wore a plastic mask on her face because her acid burnt skin lost moisture so rapidly.  Its of-course not just about losing your looks as the film often seems to signify. Acid causes deep physiological and debilitating changes that are permanent and painful on a continual basis.

The depictions are borderline derogatory.  Even if the women are speaking about their ordeal - one can not escape how discomfiting it must have been for them in some of the scenes.  The doctor asks Zakia (one of the victims) with forced compassion how it happened.  She is on the bed looking diminutive.  He towers over her.  She is the recipient of charity; he the benevolent giver with little emotional stake in the transaction evident before the surgery when he declares, "I'm having a party."  She is made to expose her face, and even if  the filmer thinks, throughout the film, this is an act of agency and defiance for someone who has masked it out of shame, it comes across as a meek act of a woman who wants the doctor to make it all go away doing as she is asked.

Even if she has signed a consent form, are doctors and filmmakers oblivious to lack of ethics and voyeurism implicit in the shot?  Is she not entitled to privacy for which the case is heightened in a cosmetic surgery like this?  We are privy to a private moment.  During the surgery, while she lies inanimate and unconscious, a discussion ensues about how her eyeball can not be retrieved as its been too long.  After the surgery the patient asks the doctor - what about my nose?  As he walks away he says,"I'll see you in a few months."  Lets see how the lips work out.  It appears as a most undignified moment for her.  And that in a nutshell is a metaphor for charity.  Leave the larger and systemic problems for later.  Poor should grovel and be thankful.  Rich should do charity and be thanked.   Also, in a few minutes, she has been reduced to eyes, nose, lips - oddly  reminiscent of what some feminists say is media's objectification of women through dismemberment of and undue focus on their individual body parts.

Later, an acid victim is shown during her ultrasound.  The doctor tells her she is pregnant.  As she processes the bitter-sweet news, we are again watching closely.  She realizes she can not be a candidate for surgery.  In a country where most women do not have access to birth control and avail unsafe abortion methods, is a woman who has just lost her chance at a free surgery to rejoice that she is pregnant? Lamenting the pregnancy would make her appear selfish.  Such emotional complexity is perhaps not what the film can begin to tackle with empathy.  Almost accusingly, the doctor asks, didn't you use birth control, don't you wonder if something like this could happen to your child, and quite aptly, albeit in a contrived fashion, she prays for a son.  With non empathetic, but pity inducing representation, I am surprised any acid survivors chose to be the subjects of this film.  It is perhaps testimony to a different type of desperation in their struggle - that they become subjects and are objectified - for the satisfaction of the doctor, the film-maker, the voyeur, the cheerleader from the fringes.

Showing the legislative and legal efforts is perhaps an effort by the film maker to place the victims as not merely victims but survivors who continue their struggle.  What then is perturbing is that the discourse around it is trivialized, simplified and superficial.  The lawyer hopes that the perpetrator is locked up in a "cage like an animal".  Ngo workers, despite an intervention by one woman against the death penalty, declare their desire for vigilante justice and dramatically ask for acid throwers to be sentenced to death, and given a taste of their own medicine.  What about people in our legal system working for reformatory and rehabilitative justice?  Surely, the legislative, legal, social, and political complexities we are dealing with are more than this - as are the diversity of opinion on punishments and solutions.  Are we to be satisfied with happy endings? Even Hollywood films have more gray than this. A double life sentence for the offender.  Vague reference to good legislative reform.  A prosthetic eye for Zakia.  As the offender spends his life behind bars, the victim walks through bazaars in a pointedly red dupatta.

Surely, if acid victims and grassroots women's groups against violence were organized and represented more accurately in the film, the discussion around it would be more nuanced, more empowering, and more focused on people and their struggles rather than filmmakers, the doctors, the prophets and the Oscar winners -- clichéd moments of reckoning and unpoetic justice.

"Nero's Guests" is a film about farmer suicides in India.  Even if rural journalist P. Sainath is valorized for his writing about the issue, at the end of the film you have a much deeper understanding of the economic, political, and global context of the suicides.  But in "Saving Face," the film and the filmmaker offers little history and analysis -- because this is the kind of mediocrity we are famous for.

PS:
See also:  http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film/the-real-miracle-workers-fighting-and-healing-pakistans-acid-attacks#

Activism Inventory

The time is ripe to do an inventory of my left organizing in Pakistan over five years, and ask questions.  Its been fraught with tension, but its death knell was today.  I went to a linen sale, and saw an activist.  I remembered him from meetings during the lawyer's movement.  And here we were examining export rejects.  It's time to rethink activism.  Have we been sequestered to our margins and rendered inert.  How did this happen so fast.

First and foremost, my work with the labor party (lpp):  The amazing thing about working with them was that I met communities - home based workers in Gadap, revolutionaries from Landhi, flood affectees from Sajawal, hard core union organizers who possess stamina for 8 hour meetings.  The bad thing was that I was from this side of the bridge, and as an elite, I too often and unwittingly succumbed to the limitations of inter class collaboration.  I was too often called to the pulpit, given respect I did not earn, asked to join the Congress.  But when I demanded I do hands on work such as filing lawsuit for our comrades who were killed in a road traffic accident caused due to state neglect of roads and lack of hospitals near highways, I was shut down. Where my personal skills could be useful, these were ignored.

But this is not an indictment, just a obituary of sorts.  I met the best lefties, the most dedicated people at the lpp - those who paint signs, stand in vigils, lead rallies without a complaint, hold union history in their memories.  I respect them for doing the physical work of protest and revolution - of marching, of handing flyers, of participating in janazas, of surviving on tea, of attending meetings and consultations even in times of hopelessness.

My brief work with the Pakistan Fisherfolk forum (pff) was in a similar vein.  Although the group is more ngo-ized, the pff can also, admirably, generate crowds of thousands of mahigir for their conventions.  If you miss working with them, you miss some of the key issue facing coastal communities - not the least of which is no provision of safe drinking water.  The leadership is affable and open to new people; their language is sharp, but the group fails when it come to integrating the community and allies in decision making.

Of-course my experience is limited to Karachi, and I can not generalize about leftie organizing in the rest of the country.

Further, the lawyers from the lawyers movement, in the aftermath of their rule of law revolution, have recoiled.  There is no mass drive in the lower judiciary to change the system so people have access to justice, just political intrigue in the higher echelons.  Here and there, people will surface with small plans in good faith.  But even the education of law does not allow the development of local doctrines or critical legal thought.

While groups such as pff and lpp are marred by their own internal deficiencies of democracy, lawyers by their lack of depth, elite groups are marred by their reach and politics.  Largely liberal, these groups take good stances on the rights of religious minorities and women.  But, they are disconnected from working class communities; they are more visible on the internet, louder in their their battles; but when it comes to taking a principled stance on Baluchistan, the war in FATA, or link oppression of women and religious minorities within the larger economic context -- of privatization,  neo-capitalism, and imperialism -- they are ambivalent, and tend to view extremist radicalization in isolation from economics.  They cheer capitalists and believe the solution lies in the free market ultimately.

I am writing this at a time when Karachi is engulfed in violence.  Just when we thought things were back to normal, and bodies laid to rest, there is news of shootings in Lyari, and an attack on a vehicle at Boat Basin.  In the backdrop, there is a larger, duller violence.  There is a strike every day -- paramedics for higher wages, people protesting lack of bijli, gas cuts, petrol price hikes, and mehngai.  In rural areas, the poverty is so deep that without whole-scale governmental intervention, creation of livelihoods, investments in agriculture, there is no stopping the train of devastation.  Instead, beguiling government officials and army walas sell farmland to foreign business, grant permission to the same to sell GMO seeds, and allow back breaking loans for mega projects.  In cities there is a vile corporate takeover-- monstrous constructions of elite towers and malls, fully air-conditioned with glistening floors, are in full flow.  Billboards outside my street are lit up by a generator guarded by a man in a van.  Both funny and vulgar, it seems.  In the meanwhile, a girl slips into coma after the light goes out at a government hospital and there is a lapse in her post surgical care.  The elite, some of whom partake in the liberal activism, appease themselves, it's about fueling the economy when they persist in hosting a top class fashion show  -- but their real crime is not in not cancelling the show, but willful blindness to how bleak reality is for the rest of the people.

And then you have the endless parade of well heeled, well financed, MBA social entrepreneurs who aim to provide reprieve in pockets; some have good systemic analysis while others are feel good careerists.

It's like we are adrift, and continual protest is only natural, ordinary and inevitable, and it's where we -- scattered activists -- are not at.  There is looming insecurity.  Whatever little band aid work, political groups, NGOs, ad hoc liberal groups, lawyers are doing, it's not nearly enough.  Given their inner lacking in organisation, structure, vision -- their inclination to fiefdom, their scramble for donor funding, limelight, domination -- these are not going to offer effective leadership in the times to come, with or without our critiques.

There are multiple gangs now operating in the city, not just one associated with each political party.  Most people travel hallways of fire on designated days, dodge bullets, grow wiser, understand guns and batha, and are more in tune than I could ever hope to be. What is daunting (and terrifying) is this -- whatever impact left leaning political groups -- lpp, pff, Campaign for Democracy, Women's Action Forum, the lawyers movement --  are making, they can't make interventions in the dirty and deadly mass murder politics of the city.  Targeted killings, crossfire deaths, vehicle burnings are embedded in the life blood of the city, and fisherfolk conventions, labor actions, impromptu worker's strikes, vigils for Taseer, excellent, uplifting, highfalutin speeches can not even begin to meaningfully tackle these mafias.  Meek calls for de-weopanization  aside, there isn't even a chalking of viable long termed solutions that pull in communities, let alone implementation.

Yes, you can build schools in Lyari, conduct employment generation projects, construct homes for people who had theirs flattened in the 2010 floods.  All problems are rooted in economics.  But again, without a massive creation of livelihoods and government commitment to social security, what can this do but serve as a tiny remedy for an impossible, pervasive problem.  It's hard not to cave to cynicism -- and coupled by knowledge that political action is weak and tainted, it seems dire.

We who supposedly give a rat's ass are increasingly being driven to the refugee centers of Facebook and Twitter where we click infinitely on articles and videos - be it the twisted literature of our times, the anthems of the Beghairat Brigade and Laal Band, stories of Syria, Egypt, Palestine, reports by Amy Goodman, Obamacare, and issues of Granta with cheeky covers - giant chat rooms with multiple portals but a bit more respectable as you can exercise political discretion in what you read.  A different discourse plays out on Geo, Sama, ARY,  Express News and other local TV news channels.  Without politics or even coherence and logic, the talk show hosts delve into the real life issues of real life people with a raw and voyeuristic edge.  The interview of a man who lost his 27 year old son in a shooting.  He says ruefully, "My son was an angel."  Talat Hussain, dramatically, in a long black coat, leads viewers through the illegally blockaded streets in diplomatic enclaves in Islamabad.  Here, a minimum wage guard was crushed to death when one such slab became dislodged and fell on him as he slumbered.  Important stuff, but the tone is so garish and blunt, you feel like switching it off.

Surely, there is a lot of information coming at us through the internet and television.  But how can we control it and use it to stay connected to communities, and radical real action, rather than becoming stranded and increasingly enraged, but dis-empowered.  How can global exchanges of information help rather than deter.  With all the knowledge that we have now, how can we go towards a more efficient form of organizing.  Are the little actions we are participating in on our own enough, or do we need a massive brain storming session.  My inventory could be a narrative of my own personal failing -- my inability to bulldoze and find a way for myself.  But is it also a larger failing.

Where do we even start -- with all our education.