"Forget Maps": Documenting Global Apartheid and Creating Novel Cartographies in Ishtiyaq Shukri's...

“Forget Maps”: Documenting Global Apartheid and Creating NovelCartographies in Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret

M. Neelika Jayawardane

Research in African Literatures, Volume 45, Number 1, Spring 2014,pp. 1-23 (Article)

Published by Indiana University PressDOI: 10.1353/ral.2014.0011

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• RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Spring 2014). © 2014 •

“Forget Maps”: Documenting Global Apartheid and Creating Novel Cartographies in Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret

M. NEELIKA JAYAWARDANEState University of New York, [email protected]

ABSTRACT

In The Silent Minaret, South African–born writer Ishtiyaq Shukri links apart-heid-era obsessions with classifying and immobilizing people with the anxieties of the post-9/11 world, where nations in the geopolitical West simi-larly attempt to categorize and restrict threatening “dark bodies.” Through connections between the trajectory and scholarly journey of Shukri’s pro-tagonist, Issa, I examine the relationship between educating the public to be on the alert for signals that mark certain people as “threatening others,” the subsequent responses of suspicion, fear, and terror, and the consequences to the bearers of such marks as they are subjected to constant surveillance. Shukri’s “disappeared” narrator, who educates and politicizes his friends in absentia, raises questions that are especially pertinent in light of recent rev-elations about the National Security Agency’s ability to routinely reach into individuals’ private information. Issa’s disappearance gives him a location of agency; paradoxically, it also highlights the authority and power of the state.

“Forget about maps. They don’t show things as they are . . . maps don’t show dreams either. Only nightmares.”

—IshtIyaq shukrI, The SilenT MinareT 61

SIGNIFYING SOUTH AFRICA’S COLONIAL AND APARTHEID PAST IN THE GLOBAL PRESENT

In the aftermath of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11/2001, Muslims, Arabs, and the cultural and religious practices of Islam—from the esoteric to the everyday—captured the imaginations of pundits in

2 • RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES • VOLUME 45 NUMBER 1

the popular media, policy makers, and the global intelligentsia. In the geopo-litical West, discussions about the “inherent violence” or barbarity of Islam were inevitably accompanied by blitzes of visual narratives that helped manufacture enduring linkages between those labeled Arab or Muslim with an aura of terror-izing otherness. The general public, too, was encouraged to help authorities by monitoring their surroundings for these new, terrorizing others and to stay alert for signs of suspicious activity. Ordinary persons living in European hamlets and America’s mega metropolises alike, thus, became enmeshed in the obsession with monitoring Muslims (and those who appeared to be Muslim). Subsequently, repetitive visual narratives on popular news shows and incendiary political speeches emphasizing Muslims’ criminality and embodiment of terror helped create a one-dimensional individual and a monolithic picture of Islam, concealing the inherent multiplicities within the Arab world and its diaspora and the diverse (and sometimes contentious) ways of interpreting what it means to be Arab and/or Muslim.

While popular media portraits of “Muslim terrorists” created a very visible other, these stories also had the converse effect of “disappearing” Muslims—removing their narrative presence from the prevalent discourse and denying them the possibility of individual or collective agency. Concurrently, the acrobatics per-formed by the Bush administration created a category of invisible non-humans—

“enemy combatants” who were targeted for sequestration in gulags—unreachable by the protections of the Geneva Convention or human rights definitions granted by existing laws.1 The focus on vilifying Muslims and generating an atmosphere of absolute national unity also meant that few in the geopolitical West voiced their concerns about invading Afghanistan or Iraq and those who did were heavily criticized and denounced as unpatriotic.

In what follows, I investigate the possibility of agency for both those who are targeted as the audience of popular narratives emphasizing the criminality of racialized others and those objectified by this education, exploring and locat-ing routes that circumvent the publicized polemics of nation, nationalism, and newspeak. More specifically, I consider the spaces of possibility depicted in The Silent Minaret, where South African–born writer Ishtiyaq Shukri links colonial and apartheid-era obsessions with classifying, containing, and immobilizing people in the Cape with the anxieties of the post-9/11 world, in which “Western” nations similarly attempt to categorize, limit, and restrict threatening dark bodies.

Both apartheid South Africa and the U.S., post 9/11, engaged actively in edu-cating the public to be on the alert for material signals that mark certain people as

“threatening others.” Through links to Shukri’s protagonist’s intellectual and polit-ical trajectory, which are recorded in his own scholarly writing and in his friends’ reflections about him, I examine the relationship between the divisive strategies used by the two global empires, the significance of the public’s responses of sus-picion and fear, and the consequences that bearers of specified markers of terror endured as they were subjected to constant surveillance. My inquiry into Shukri is also concerned with whether literature is able to intervene productively in contemporary discourses about surveillance, security, and the “terrorizing other.” What are the conditions and limits under which literary, artistic, and cultural expressions that question the state’s role in the War on Terror must operate? How might we creatively open up spaces in which to reflect on or question official and

M. NEELIKA JAYAWARDANE • 3

popular media narratives about the terrorizing other and do such reflections have enduring effects on the consuming public?

By examining the psychological, intellectual, and political journey of the novel’s main character, Issa Shamsuddin, from apartheid South Africa to Britain at the commencement of the Global War on Terror, I explore whether literature, learn-ing, and friendships can prompt us to reeducate ourselves through investigating subsumed versions of history, thus playing an important part in transforming our political alignments. Ultimately, I question—through investigating the trajectories of Issa’s friends—whether one’s personal experiences can counter the barrage of political and media narratives that have transfigured people who were once largely exoticized dark others into threatening others. Using his protagonist’s scholarship, Shukri seeks to include an awareness of the mire into which the globally mobile un-citizen is thrown—unmoored and disempowered as s/he is by modern immigration laws and accompanying surveillance technologies, both of which were strengthened post-9/11. Shukri’s “disappeared” narrator, who edu-cates and politicizes his friends in absentia, raises questions that are especially pertinent in light of recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s ability to routinely reach into individuals’ private information. As readers, we realize that, although Issa’s disappearance allows him to act outside of the state’s surveillance machinery, thus permitting him a location of agency, it paradoxically reveals the authority and power of the state.

Shukri’s fictional protagonist, Issa Shamsuddin, details the particularities of both Dutch and British colonial history and specifies the positions that South Africa occupied as it transitioned from a simple watering station for the Dutch East India Company (the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, hereafter the VOC) to a colony of strategic importance for both the Dutch and the British.2 The web of linkages that connect distant historical periods, imperial ventures, and geographi-cal locations, “where people are dispossessed and dominated within a discourse that rationalizes oppression on the basis of keeping the dominant safe, rather than examining the conditions of poverty and despair that empire creates,” are interests that are woven into the essential fabric of the novel (Frenkel 14). However, the multiple strands of Shukri’s narrative do not solely focus on South African dilemmas about race and national identity. Instead, he historicizes the dynamics of intercultural relations in South Africa in order to illustrate how the methodologies employed by previous European imperial ventures remain globally relevant and pertinent to the present, including the role that empire plays in racializing differ-ence and bureaucratizing its demarcations. Shukri, then, uses South Africa and its history to comment on twenty-first-century imperial ventures and the effects that these new wars will leave on both those who inhabit the lands on which they are waged and those in whose name they take place.

Ronit Frenkel, in “Reconsidering South African Indian Fiction Postapartheid,” points out that South African literary works not only serve as “critical interven-tions into discourses of race and identity formations that redefine contemporary understandings of postcolonial South Africa” (2), but that because both “colony and metropole” exist together in the nation, “this intellectual integration allows for a unique perspective on postcolonial cultures within transnational multicultures” (3). South Africa, as a “nation overdetermined by racial taxonomies,” becomes a location in which there might be opportunities to test the false logic of racial


classification, replacing such Enlightenment-era reasoning “with a cosmopolitan understanding of identity and interconnection” (Ibid. 14). For Issa, the “segregated logics” and “paradigm[s] of difference” essential to creating the “politics of authen-ticity that often polices the borders of identity politics” (Ibid. 14) are replaced—through one’s understanding of how empire constructs those differences and exclusions—by intellectually and emotionally embodying one’s discoveries about the symbiotic relationships that support civilizations.

Issa Shamsuddin is deeply invested in constructing an identity outside of any nation state, including South Africa, and/or conventional grouping, espe-cially those that force one to identify oneself within the confines of one’s “origins.” Shukri not only “emphasise[s] the inventedness of ‘African’ identity” (Pucherova 930) through a call for a deep identification with the foreign other, but through Issa’s (and Kagiso’s) musings, he underscores the “instability of national identities based on notions of indigeneity in a world with a history of mass migration, exo-dus, and colonisation” (Ibid. 930). A young Issa tells Kagiso, who has been looking for Asmara in Ethiopia, that the city is, in fact, in “Eritrea” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 61). Issa then instructs Kagiso to “Forget maps” because “They don’t show things as they are” (Ibid. 61). When Kagiso is confused by the absence of an Eritrea on the map, Issa tells him, “That’s because it’s still a dream. Maps don’t show dreams either. Only nightmares” (Ibid. 61). Later on, Kagiso, as an adult, remembers that lesson: on the graffiti on the toilet walls of a restaurant in the heart of “London-stan,” he notices a chain of remembrances: “Bangladesh used to be East Pakistan . . . Pakistan used to be India . . . Israel used to be Palestine/Lebanon used to be Syria/Eritrea used to be Ethiopia” (Ibid. 38). The chain rolls on, reminding us that,

“America used to be England/England used to be France” (Ibid. 38). A parallel chain, beginning with the heading “insha’allah,” hopes that “One day Basque will have been Spain” and “Palestine will have been Israel” (Ibid. 38). These chains of longing, inscribed by many hands, mirror Issa’s line of inquiry: they are the desires of everyman, revealed, shared, and collaboratively built on in the privacy and anonymity afforded by a toilet.

But although he is more interested in viewing identity as a multitude of posi-tions—as neither one nor the other and certainly not as something determined by a nation—it is this new nation of South Africa, reformed under recent democracy, that gives him a “pass” of a different kind than the dompases of the apartheid era.3 His new passport permits his body a degree of mobility, allowing him to travel to Great Britain for further education. But a passport, much like a dompas, is also a document that confines one through its very nature: it is not only a mandatory and essential component of the rituals of mobility in the modern geopolitical world, but also tracks one’s every move across national borders. For those demar-cated as the world’s others, it limits mobility: if one’s passport identifies one as a dangerously mobile other from an undesirable third world–nation, it is simply one’s confinement, limiting motion across educational, economic, social, and, sometimes, intellectual and political lines. Issa’s own desire is to stand outside the divisive rhetoric of nationalism and identity politics; but South Africa, the country that gave him his passport and nationality, now brands his body and determines how he is identified and has historically lain in opposition to his very existence as an uncategorizable other. Paradoxically, however, without this document, he cannot escape the nation that stamps him with a claim of belonging nor further


his own desire to learn and contribute toward a different, more expansive vision of cosmopolitanism.

Perhaps because the nation state insists on its hold on one’s identity and movements, it is statelessness that Issa—and his friends—see as a route of possi-bility, without having to parrot songs of nation and belonging, “flushing proudly, without any sense of irony or reflection” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 248). Issa’s disap-pearance can, thus, be a form of resistance—a way of preventing the state from recording his movements by dissolving his physical presence from the public record. At the very end of the novel, Katinka, caught up in a “flag-waving crowd” in London, remembers a moment she felt utterly at peace in South Africa: not when

“the old flag came down on the old country,” but when there was no flag on the pole at all, proclaiming the parameters of belonging. Although the moment when the old flag came down was “a sublime, ‘at last’ moment,” when “[t]hree hundred and forty-two years . . . wrong years, dark years, evil years . . . finally draw to a close,” she relished the contemplative emptiness before the new flag was inevitably rolled up (Ibid. 249–50). This was a “stateless moment: no flag to wave, no anthem to echo, no eternal enemy against which to perpetually defend, no God-chosen nation for which to die in gory glory” (Ibid. 251). When the new flag was finally raised, she realizes that “the endless, limitless, possibilities of the stateless moment” were over “with one patriotic puff” (Ibid. 250–51): the anarchic moment of transition, rather than being an unmoored period of fear and instability, is theorized as an ideal—if fleeting—one, setting subjects free of bondage and misplaced loyalty to king and nation, when they could stand on their own principles.

DEFINING THE NATIONAL SELF, DESCRIBING THE TERRORIZING OTHER

Shukri’s nonfiction, recording his life in London at the beginning of the War on Terror, seems to be inextricably tied to his fictional character’s scholarship and experiences. Like Issa, Shukri, too, is deeply committed to political engagement, undergirded by a self-directed education in history—with attention to unearth-ing histories that are suppressed by master-narratives convenient to conquest. In an online essay, Shukri contends that South Africans have a duty to act, rather than “watch with uncomfortable indifference,” when they see systems of oppres-sion built on the principle of categorizing people; noting that they are “uniquely placed to comment and campaign against a system which is every ounce as evil as the one we have overcome” (“Apartheid Is Not Dead”). He, as a South African Muslim in London—like his fictional protagonist—understands the powerful implications of Britain’s imperial history and how much it depended on taxonomy, on manufacturing biological difference based on social assumptions about race, and subsequently maintaining people in restrictive categories. In amused tones, he remarks on how he is “frequently not perceived to be [South African] and have sometimes had [his] identity vehemently contested” (Ibid.). His physical markers and speech patterns only served to “complicate, frustrate, and confuse most local perceptions of what it means to be a South African” (Ibid.). Because he does not

“fit into the British-designed box, finely carved over centuries of imperial observa-tion and description, and forever intended to contain the native from the former colony,” the inheritors of ideological hangovers created by imperial taxonomical


boxes assume that it is their “claim of who [he is] rather than their assumption of who [he] should be, which warrants contestation” (Ibid.).

In the early years after 9/11, Shukri’s awareness of how taxonomical boxes have been used for demarcating and policing others becomes even more relevant, as he watches Britain slide back comfortably into identifying phenotypical mark-ers as synonymous with suspicion and threat. Shukri documents how he was

“followed and stopped for further questioning” at the “main concourse of Water-loo Station” (“(The Tightening of) Screws”) after he attended the Hutton Inquiry into the death of the British weapons expert Dr. David Kelly, where then-Prime Minister Tony Blair appeared to testify on August 28, 2003. He expresses surprise that, given the “public nature of the event,” he was followed and singled out for questioning for attending (Ibid.). The polite policemen who followed Shukri attempt to assuage his fears; they inform him that he was not singled out, that

“several people had been followed from the proceedings and were being stopped for questioning” and that his “manner in the queue during the night as well as during the proceedings suggested that, in the current climate, [he] should be fol-lowed and stopped for further questioning” (Ibid.). He remembers that he was quiet while standing in line and, when there was enough light, “read the papers [he] had brought along” (Ibid.).

He speculates whether authorities were alerted to his “manner” by the kefiye he was wearing and what might have been the “perceived common denominator” among those who were also supposedly followed and questioned that night. He knows full well that Britain isn’t Israel, where arriving “in Tel Aviv Airport with a kefiye can lead to interrogation,” that there are no pass laws or dompases here, as there were in South Africa, and that this is not Zimbabwe, where “just talk-ing to the media can lead to arrest” (Ibid.). But he also knows that, “under new anti-terrorist legislation,” the officer questioning him, a man who only identifies himself as officer 411LX, “now has the power to arrest and detain without charge, as used to be the case in apartheid South Africa” (Ibid.).

Shukri’s personal experiences in London, published on Chimurenga Online, are illustrative of the manner in which dominant groups become far less generous in their regard of others, who, in peaceful and prosperous times, may have been seen as simply exotic and different. Under politically charged circumstances, eco-nomic depreciation, or times in which a populace feels otherwise threatened, state power reacts by creating linkages between threat and otherness, as did the U.S. and Britain. Processes that draw attention to this otherness are initiated, which not only highlight the difference of and threat posed by the other, but also serve to amalgamate somewhat disparate groups of people in a given society, encouraging them to imagine themselves as the national “self.”

DISAPPEARANCES, ERASURES, AND GLOBAL EMPIRES: RESONANCES BETWEEN THE VOC’S INDIAN OCEAN WARS AND THE WAR ON TERROR

The Silent Minaret ricochets between interlinked moments in history and several geographic locations, examining the manner in which two countries—Great Britain and the Netherlands and their shared colonial footprint on South Africa


and the Indian Ocean—are linked to this present moment of globalized war. The structure of the novel depends on multiple narrators and several genres of writing: included are Issa Shamsuddin’s story (conveyed in the present tense), sections of his writing, selected quotes from scholarly and historical texts he read, and remi-niscences of his friends and family. The use of mixed genres and multiple voices helps create an atmosphere where past blends with present and colonial practices of an old empire slide neatly together with the practices of a new imperial venture.

The story centers on a disappearance—that of the young PhD student, Issa Shamsuddin, who had been writing his dissertation in London. The central ques-tion, as articulated on the book jacket, is whether it is “a matter of choice—the next step in a journey of self-imposed exile” and a final act of defiance—or if it has been orchestrated by more “sinister forces.” Shukri never specifies what these “sinister forces” might be, but we, as readers, are left with evidence linking Issa’s physical, political, and historical body to a long trajectory of unequal relations between the empire and the colonized.

It is Issa’s modest collection of friends and family—elderly Frances, who lived in a flat above him; Katinka, his lifelong friend and fellow South African trans-plant to London; Kagiso, his adoptive brother who flies to London from Johannes-burg to collect the meager remnants of his life; and Issa’s mother, Vasinthe—who reconstruct his life history and his last days as a “visible” person as they attempt to trace his whereabouts. The stories that Frances, Katinka, Kagiso, and Vasinthe recount introduce us to Issa’s life as a young boy in Johannesburg, the volatility of South Africa during the time he was a student at the University of the Western Cape, and to his subsequent move to London where he was a doctoral student. In the absence of material clues that might explain his disappearance, they resort to reading his incomplete dissertation and book collection, combining that learn-ing with their personal memories about his life in order to piece together how he diverged so significantly from each of them in thinking, habit, and political choice.

We learn that Issa isolated himself in his cell-like rooming house located in the heart of the European metropolis. His isolation is regulated only by visits to the markets outside to exchange a banana for the sports page from a newspaper vendor, sharing fleeting moments of company with the equally isolated Frances, the elderly woman who lives upstairs. Issa spends the majority of his time writing in the Baghdad Café, smoking a shisha behind a mashrabeya screen—a partition that allows him to observe others in the bar, but not be seen (67). As Issa writes, maps out his doctoral research, and spends time delving into the violent encoun-ters indelibly inked on the political landscape of South Africa, we, as readers, also follow the routes of imperial conquest and the discrepancies between oral memory and what is recorded, discarded, or erased in official written history.

We learn, through Issa’s dissertation, abandoned in the café on the day he was last seen, about the centuries-long repercussions of empirical conquest, sub-jugation, and transportation for labor and the sequestration of people in prison islands and colonies to suppress dissident forces. Issa realizes that “natives” and “others,” as they come closer to understanding how the structures of power are constructed and repeatedly strengthened, are often forcibly “disappeared” because of the threat they pose.4 In addition, dangerous knowledge of how sys-tems of domination deploy their power may also result in self-elimination—acts


of disappearance into the madness and oblivion that seem to be the only refuge in the face of the hopelessness resulting from it.

It is in the Baghdad Café, his regular haunt, that Issa surveys the televised images of a devastated city under “shock and awe”—footage of a night-time sky-line lit up by what looks like spectacular fireworks—as well as maimed children and prisoners who are soon to disappear into a global archipelago of prisons sur-rounded by fences with plaques that declare “Honor bound to defend freedom” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 72). The so-called “War on Terror” had just begun, splashed out theatrically on television screens across the world. This televised “advertise-ment” of the obliteration of Baghdad gave American viewers reassurance that their nation had found the culprits for the 9/11 terrorist attacks and that, in obliterating it, their nation had not cowed. But the spectacular nature of this televised event also allows those in the centers of twenty-first-century civilization to be voyeurs of the nullification of cities and citizens who, as Issa reminds his friends, gave them a system of numbers, an alphabet, and provided the basis of much of the foun-dational literature, art, and religion practiced in the West. Issa knows that these are simply the first steps to annihilating and erasing Baghdad’s existence and the records of the people who built it. The rain of fire unleashed by operation shock and awe not only obliterated a physical landscape, but the intellectual and techno-logical history on which its own advances are based, including the translations of Arab scholars kept safe in the libraries of Baghdad (Ibid. 198). Such erasures allow the invader to fashion the enemy into the repository of nothing but barbarity and, eventually, paint him/her as something one can justify destroying.

The prisoners that Issa subsequently sees on the larger-than-life television screen—those “heavily shackled men in orange overalls” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 71), disembarking for a then-unknown location—are to arrive at what is to become a notorious system of prison colonies outside the legal and physical borders of U.S. territory. Meanwhile, the increasingly isolated and estranged communities of Muslims and immigrants from third world–countries in London can do noth-ing but huddle together to await what comes. They gather at the café to watch the images of glorified destruction: Baghdad under bombardment by the coali-tion of the willing. It seems, however, in these scenes, that Issa is alone with his knowledge of how empires work. In a way, he can predict what will happen: for him, the actions of VOC—the oldest known amalgamation of a corporation and a nation, bound by their common desire to expand their power and control trade in the Indian Ocean—are hardly different from those of this new corporate-driven empire in the twenty-first century. At the time of Issa’s disappearance, it appears as though one can hardly distinguish the “17th century . . . from the 21st” (70). If the first banished exiles from Southeast Asia, “[m]en of high social standing, all of them . . . prominent Muslim leaders” (74), arrived at the prison colony of the Cape in 1667, the early days of 2002 saw the first Muslim prisoners of the current war—cast in the signature color of the Dutch royal family, the House of Orange—arrive at Guantánamo. As Issa concludes, “[t]he history of the early European explora-tion and settlement at the Cape of Good Hope remains universally and eternally pertinent. The procedures of dispossession and domination implemented here in the fifteenth century would be repeated around the globe for the rest of the millennium, and then again at the start of the new millennium” (65). That is when he “slip[s] through the door into a dawn that is beginning to illuminate the


devastation wrought by a violent night,” brushing past a waiter whose “home town” was ruined (75), abandoning his dissertation in the café.

Issa Shamsuddin points out, in his historical analysis of South Africa’s place in the imperial ventures of the VOC and Britain, that detention, deportation, and violence aimed at controlling and regulating the bodies of others were essential to imperial systems of control. Here, too, in our post-9/11 world, the “racialized body . . . represents specific enemies, threats, dangers” and, thus, becomes an abstract site on which to “exert multiple forms of modern state power” and display author-ity (Rana 157). Issa’s ruminations in the café, reflecting on the significance of Islam to South Africa’s overall culture as well as its contributions to resisting oppression from colonial times to the apartheid era to the present, help the reader comprehend the fallacies behind the injustice of current myths of violence and irrationality built around the religion. He also creates direct linkages between the “procedures of dispossession and domination implemented here [at the Cape of Good Hope] in the fifteenth century” and those being carried out in the twenty-first; these pro-cedures, as he points out, were simply part of the processes of conquest that were

“repeated around the globe for the rest of the millennium” and initiated once again “at the start of this new millennium” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 65). In Issa’s assessment, the enormity of the ensuing disruption to human life on a global scale, precipitated by the actions of the VOC as it pursued its corporate interests, is superimposed by those of the U.S. and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan today.5

The breadth of the VOC’s power was directly linked to the government charter it was granted by the Netherlands—allowing the company to colonize the territories in which it traded, through the use of force if necessary—paralleling U.S. government–sanctioned warfare to further its corporate interests.6 When Issa looks up to the television screen to witness the first “blurry pictures . . . of heavily shackled men in orange overalls behind high-security fences, their arms chained behind their backs to their feet” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 71), he immediately notes the unmistakable correlation between them and their “renditions” to Sheikh Yusuf’s and countless others’ forced transport to the Cape Colony for resisting the VOC’s “colonial activities” in their homelands (72). The nonchalance with which the U.S. began to “disappear” the bodies of dissenters and bystanders in the “War on Terror” parallels the manner in which the VOC, 334 years prior, made individu-als from dissenting nations vanish as part of its quest for the control of and access to valued commodities. Through juxtaposing the two histories, Shukri leads his readers to draw the similarities: if bodies were moved, removed, and erased in the path of the spice trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, bodies are also disappeared as collateral damage in the struggle to control the production and distribution of today’s worth-its-weight-in-gold commodity, petroleum. Despite these resonances, there remains one crucial difference.7 While the VOC had no use for those political bodies it transported to its prison colony in the Cape, effectively silencing their influence in their homelands (though they were clearly not able to quell them in their relocated spaces), our modern military and corporate acts of invasion also include a rhetorical warfare, using the weaponry provided by the mediascape of the twenty-first century.


ISSA’S DISSERTATION: EMOTIONAL TRANSFORMATIONS VIA INTELLECTUAL REFORMATION

Though readers rely on Issa’s friends’ narratives to piece together remnants of his sequestered existence in London, information about his life—and perhaps even clues about his disappearance—is provided through his scholarly work. Issa’s dissertation, abandoned in the shisha café, not only educates his friends about the subsumed portions of South African history, it also supplements and adds an intellectual weight to their emotional connections to each other. We arrive at this reeducation, as does he, “through the work of Erich Auerbach, whose ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’ is used to provide the epigraph to the doctoral thesis” (Viljoen). Issa’s writing provides a guide to his friends and through reading his dissertation, they are prompted to reflect on their relationships (or lack thereof) with those they were told are the other, the enemy; the source and repository of savagery and ter-ror. We come to realize that, while our emotional connections and social networks are significant to challenging the myths and rhetoric surrounding the other, our commitment to an intellectual reeducation, through investigations into subsumed versions of history and the manner in which hegemonic systems of power attempt to erase them, is equally important.

Issa documents the significance of Islam to the South African liberation struggle as well as the fact that, much like any other religion, it has no inherent relationship to terror and conquest. It is equally clear that he is not on a mission to convert his friends to a particular religious path. In fact, though he knows his history, he is not familiar with religious practice; with Frances, he is almost comi-cally inept when explaining how to use the prayer beads (tasbeeh) he gives her. Frances, who does not know how to use the tasbeeh, remarks that Issa “didn’t really know [how to use them] either, but said it was simple, that you just rolled the beads through your hands during prayer rather than pause at every individual one” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 18). When she protests that she cannot take such an

“exquisite” gift—let alone one given by Issa’s friend—he replies that it was simply “[t]radition” to bring prayer beads for loved ones when one went on pilgrimage, that his friend knew he would never use them, and that he preferred to remember his friend by keeping the second gift his friend gave him: the “lewd T-shirt he’d picked up from Amsterdam on his way back” (Ibid. 12–13).

In his dissertation, Issa follows the “history of the early European explora-tion and settlement at the Cape of Good Hope” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 65) and, in particular, “the initial phase of European/African contact” during the “first fifty years leading up to the establishment of a permanent Dutch settlement there”—a period reflective of the “hybrid dynamic, the complex transcultural exchange and fusion” within the location (Ibid. 66). Issa chronicles how the “heterogonous bartering” system, “though fragile and uneven, nevertheless formed an integral feature of the early settlement and ensured its development” (Ibid. 66). But, as Issa notes, this loose arrangement of trade between European visitors and indigenous inhabitants, creating a moment of heterogeneity and transcultural exchange, was short-lived. The historical record of such exchange and dialogue was “ruthlessly revised, edited, and suppressed” (Ibid. 66) and any evidence of “global cross pollination and intermingling” (Ibid. 67) was erased systematically from memory.


When three ships belonging to the VOC dropped anchor in present day Table Bay on April 6, 1652 and Captain Jan van Riebeeck disembarked, charged with setting up a refreshment station, that heterogonous barter and exchange ended. Still, writes Issa, Dutch interest in the Cape remained specific “and the role of their settlement there, narrowly defined”: the Cape was simply a strategic spot “between the Netherlands and its empire in southeast Asia” to stock passing ships with fresh water and produce (Shukri, Silent Minaret 72). This first European settlement at the Cape stamped itself on the “most fertile seasonal grazing pas-tures of cattle rich Khoikhoi who had retreated with their herds into the interior for the winter” (Ibid. 69) and already disturbed the existing ways of being and land-sharing agreements among the local inhabitants. Because it was meant to be a self-sufficient station, the VOC—a “global corporation that was, in effect, ‘a state outside a state’ ”—began bringing slaves from Mozambique and Madagascar, shipping more involuntary laborers “from Dutch colonial territory in their eastern empire: India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Ceylon” (Ibid. 73). The majority of these slave laborers from the East Indies, who came to be known as the “Cape Malay,” were Muslim or converted to Islam after arrival.8

Issa records the manner in which the Cape transitioned into a prison island that served as a marooning ground for those who resisted Dutch colonial rule in Southeast Asia. Facing the “threat of increasingly militant opposition to its lucrative enterprise . . . . Company directors identified [the Cape as a location] far removed, suitable for the incarceration of political prisoners and exiles from the Eastern Batavian Empire” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 73–74). The first banished exiles arrived in 1667, fifteen years after van Riebeeck landed: these were “[m]en of high social standing, all of them were prominent Muslim leaders” (Ibid. 74).

Issa also includes anecdotal insights that give his readers clues into the role that notable Muslim leaders and Islam in general played in struggles against European colonial excursions in Southeast Asia. He begins by noting the arrival of Abadin Tadia Tjoessoep (also known as Sheikh Yusuf), a member of the royal family of Macassar and the maternal nephew of King Bisei of Goa, to the Cape in 1694.9 Yusuf was born in Macassar on the island of Sulawesi in 1626. By the time he, as a young man, had completed his study in “Arabia,” he was unable to return to his home because the Dutch had invaded and taken control of the area (Schell 327). Much as we now note the passage of young men into “jihad,” following similar violent incursions into their homelands, Yusuf subsequently fought against the Dutch East India Company’s encroachments alongside Sultan Ajung of Banten on the island of Java; but following key defeats, he was persuaded to surrender on the condition that the Dutch would pardon him. However, the Dutch did not satisfy their end of the agreement, first banishing Yusuf to Batavia, then to the castle in Colombo, Ceylon, and finally, fearing the scope of his influence, exiled him to the Cape of Good Hope ten years after his initial surrender.10 When Yusuf arrived at the Cape Colony in 1694, aboard a ship named the Voetboeg, he was “accompanied by 49 supporters, including two wives, two slave girls, twelve children, twelve imams, and a number of sympathetic friends” (Loos 48).

The life trajectory of Sheikh Yussuf—the man who, in his youth, was edu-cated under the tutelage of several pious scholars in Arabia and was eventually regarded as a saint because of his noble resistance of Dutch invasions and his many subsequent imprisonments—follows the transnational cultural, religious,


and commercial networks between South Asian city-states, the power of this charismatic leader, and the fear he inspired in the empire. Issa notes that, although Sheikh Yusuf was to live only five more years before he died in captivity, during this brief period he “established the first Muslim community in South Africa, attracted runaway slaves who converted to Islam, and represented a symbol of resistance to European colonialism” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 74). In addition, although Sheikh Yusuf arrived “shackled in chains” and was almost seventy years old, “it is impossible to overstate the impact his detention at the Cape would have on the culture and political ethos of the colony and that of the country that it would eventually develop” (Ibid. 72).

Issa uses Sheikh Yusuf’s forced transportation to the Cape and the role he played in South Africa’s history to map the linkages between Islam and the anticolonial struggle, which eventually formed the historical foundations for the fight against apartheid. His agitation against the Dutch, even in this diminished capacity, was so influential, notes Issa, that “the history of Islam in South Africa is . . . synonymous with the struggle against oppression,” be it associated with colonialism or apartheid (Shukri, Silent Minaret 74). Issa remembers that as South Africans prepared to vote in the first democratic elections in 1994, “under the leadership of another insurgent septuagenarian,” people were simultaneously commemorating the tricentenary of the establishment of Islam in the country; he records that “the high point of the celebration was a mass encampment around Sheik Yusuf’s tomb” (Ibid. 75). In a manner of speaking, Sheik Yusuf was not only one of the first Muslim emissaries from the Indian Ocean world, but also Mohan-das Gandhi and Nelson Mandela’s political predecessor—a brother from another mother—to South Africa by just over two hundred years.

Shukri includes these anecdotes linking Muslims, Islam, and South Africa’s journey toward political liberation in the first portions of his novel, showing how Issa “continually uses early colonial domination of the Cape and the resistances to this rule, particularly by Muslims like Sheikh Yusuf, as a paradigm to make sense of the post-9/11 War on Terror . . . counter hegemonic propaganda, or what he calls ‘whitewashing’ ” (Viljoen). The role that Islam and Muslims played in lib-eration struggles will undoubtedly surprise many readers in Europe and the U.S., especially after being dosed heavily by popular media representations of Muslims as terrorists and Islam as oppressive.

Gabeba Baderoon, in her article analyzing media representations of Islam in South Africa after 9/11, explains “the country has a small but well-integrated Muslim community . . . while Muslims constitute a small minority in South Africa—under two percent of the population—at one point, slaves, some of whom were Muslim, constituted the majority of the population of the Cape Colony” (3). Baderoon’s arguments support Shukri’s about the role that Islam and Muslims played in the anti-apartheid struggle. She contends that, because “South African perspectives of race have been profoundly shaped by slavery, . . . Islam can be found at the center of the colonial and apartheid racial order” (3). However, she argues that Muslims in South Africa were often not regarded as politically relevant by either colonial or apartheid powers, despite the initial association of Islam with Sheik Yusuf’s message of resistance and that, as Shukri points out, his presence in South Africa was “adopted as a symbol . . . of Islamic resistance to colonialism and apartheid” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 75). Instead, according to Baderoon, the “Cape


Malay” were “constructed as colorful, submissive, and law-abiding,” as well as “skilled” and “industrious”; the images of Islam, “evident in nineteenth-century landscape paintings of the Cape,” portrayed the religion as a “picturesque tradi-tion” characterized by “colorful clothing and rituals” (3). According to Baderoon, Muslims in South Africa were never caricatured as wholesale terrorists, even after 9/11. Baderoon’s conclusions further mirror Issa’s own arguments about how Islam and Muslims have been portrayed as a terrorizing other, as part of political and military strategies that have long histories in imperial ventures dating back to the seventeenth century.

“REMEMORATION”: REDEMPTION, RENEWAL, AND REDEFINITION OF NATIONAL HISTORY AND PERSONAL IDENTITY

Although Frenkel and Rastogi (in “International Geographics”) categorize Shukri’s novel as part of “South African Indian literature” and Issa as “Indian,” these are the very markers of identity, built on the twin myths of nation and origin, that both the fictional character and author seem to resist. It is true, as Rastogi states in “Citizen Other,” that for South Africa’s “Indian” population, “their foreignness is repeatedly used as a weapon against them,” although “Indians may have vigor-ously asserted their belonging in South Africa . . . by claiming solidarity with black Africans” (108).11 Indeed, in times of divisiveness, “Indians in South Africa remain suspended in a state of migrancy with all the connotations of flux and instability that the term suggests” and are “often made to feel homeless in the postapartheid present” (Ibid. 108). However, although Issa’s mother, Vasinthe, wears saris and salwar khameeses and hums “her favourite bhajan from childhood” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 45), her and Issa’s “Indian” identities in South Africa are largely reduced to costume, food, Issa’s penchant for “lentils and rice” (19), and their inherited names. Despite the view that “Indians,” much like the accusation hurled at pre-World War II Jews in Europe, have not “found an affinity and solidarity with both country and continent” (Hlongwane 42), Shukri’s protagonist never resorts to identity politics; instead, he, his mother, and their tightly connected family and friends stand in critique of such divisiveness.

Previous arguments by Shukri scholars (see Frenkel; Pucherova; Rastogi; Steiner) illustrate that the novel attempts to revisit official versions of history, to uncover subsumed memory, and to initiate conversations about “redemption, renewal, and redefinition” of identity (Pucherova 930). Issa Shamsuddin’s drive to highlight “the foldedness and blendings” between seemingly “incommensurate” civilizations stands in contrast to twentieth- and twenty-first-century desires to confine populations according to nationality and racialized identity (Frenkel 14): it is the antidote to the divisive rhetoric that became commonplace during the War on Terror. Issa’s desire to highlight “global crosspollination and intermingling” is borne of his self-directed education on South Africa’s subsumed histories. Rather than producing a cosmopolitanism based on pointing out “simple similarities” between cultures and peoples, Issa fashions, instead, “networks of interconnect-edness, to create transnational solidarities and a quest for global justice, as an alternative response to violence and mourning” (Ibid. 14).


These individual acts of friendship and hospitality define the processes of self-transformation in Shukri’s novel, wherein deep involvements with the other, over time, permit individuals to go against state-mandated visions of social relations via intimate friendships (see Pucherova; Rastogi, “International Geographics”; Steiner). Pallavi Rastogi, in “International Geographics: Looking Out in Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret,” points out that friendships serve to erase state-mandated racial divides within South Africa: “[i]n showing the con-nections between Afrikaner, African, and Indian Muslim, the novel triangulates itself racially, revealing the web of allegiances that binds South Africans of every race together” (19). In addition, Dobrota Pucherova, in her article on the role of friendship and “re-imagining the other” in South African novels, notes that Shukri chronicles the manner in which “ethical possibilities of ‘rememoration’ ” remain tenable within “instances of friendship and hospitality towards strang-ers, of adoption and surrogacy, as well as of platonic or erotic desire towards the foreign other” (931).12 She argues that acts of “rememoration” help counterbalance

“[r]acism, xenophobia, and imperialism” and ultimately redefine South African identity (941). Within Shukri’s novel, such “unexpected instances of friendship and desire” become alternatives to the intentionally polarized discourses of the state and mediascape, intervening within the powerful inscriptions of identity encour-aged by prescriptive and reductive descriptions of the other (Ibid. 941). Against such prescriptive discourses about the other, Shukri sets “the personal—the lived experience of their characters which in its complexity questions simple categorisa-tions of identity in terms of culture and religion”—building “personal relation-ships across cultural boundaries” (Steiner 54). For both those who are objectified as the other by the publicized polemics of nation, nationalism, and newspeak as well as those for whom power structures claim to speak, private relationships open up routes of understanding into the “stranger”/“other,” circumventing divisive political rhetoric that removes agency from all parties.

Pucherova is careful to note that the desire for the other or “the foreigner” in Shukri’s novel “resonates more closely with the ethics of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who theorised desire not as negation and assimilation of the other to self, but as a mode of opening oneself to the strangeness of the other” (932).13 In Shukri, the draw of the other does not have to be limited by a simple desire for the “epistemological possession of the other” (Ibid. 932). Instead, “this desire implies the opposite, risky movement of giving up one’s identity and enter-ing the strange territory of the other . . . in this light, [national] identity . . . not only tolerates or accepts alterity, but defines itself through (rather than in opposi-tion to) diverse foreign others” (Ibid. 932). The barriers that are all important to colonization and conquest—including the “hedge planted by seventeenth-century Dutch settlers at the Cape of Good Hope to mark off European land claims and separate them from local shepherds, . . . the borders and fences of apartheid South Africa, the West Bank barrier, and the immigration controls of twenty-first-century Britain that bar entry to Afghanis and Iraqis whose countries have been invaded with British military participation”—are transcended only in “private moments of crossing over to the unknown other through love, hospitality, and friendship” (Ibid. 939). Pucherova emphasizes that, for Shukri’s Issa Shamsuddin, “attain-ing freedom depends upon the ability to grant freedom to others” and learning


about the other happens not by “occupying foreign territories, but accepting the foreigner in [one’s] own country” (939).

Attempts at “rememoration”—the reconstruction of history as something “that is interested in memory not as remembrance but as the overall structure of the past within the present,” according to Pierre Nora (qtd. in Pucherova, 931)—in Shukri remain most successful on an individual basis: in intimate moments between friends, where cultural practices that seem to make the other “strange” are made familiar over a cup of tea, official versions of history are challenged over the course of many conversations, and, eventually, both parties’ interest in one another’s otherness eventually means that they embark on a lifelong education about what it means to embody their friend’s position. Here, the desire to learn about the other is most often initiated through the twin vehicles of curiosity and compassion, giving rise to committed education and interaction. At other times, the journey toward the other has its origins in one’s own self-loathing or in light of the emptiness or ugliness found in one’s own culture’s defining set of values. This is a process committed to learning defined by responsibility and recognition: it does not demand that the other take on the burden of having to translate dif-ference alone, so that the persons from the dominant culture can remain within their comfort zone.

In Issa’s family, the first instance where two individuals take a great leap of faith toward understanding the other is when Issa’s and Kagiso’s mothers—“Ma Vasinthe” and “Ma Gloria”—create a cohesive household. Theirs is an allegiance that does not demarcate difference according to the mandatory racial classification system in apartheid-era South Africa; instead, it seems they agreed to distribute the duties and responsibilities for running their shared household in direct disre-gard of the country’s legal and social rules, relying, rather, on each other’s—and their children’s—needs to guide them. Vasinthe, a South African of Indian descent, is a doctor and meets Gloria when she, travelling all the way from Taung, arrives on her doorstep (carrying her own newborn son, Kagiso, in a bundle on her back) looking for work as a maid. This fortuitous meeting takes place the day Vasinthe is to give birth to Issa—the same day on which her husband left her. Given the circumstances, they see each other’s common need and humanity. The women do not discuss taking on the roles of “madam” and “maid,” prescribed for those in their respective class and race categories in South Africa. Instead, their allegiance to each other and the paramount business of raising their sons as equals in a rac-ist country are fashioned in such a way that the nation and its divisive constructs remain alien in their home—so much so that Issa Shamsuddin and Kagiso Mayoyo are dumbfounded when people look at them strangely when they insist, naturally, that they are brothers. It is no wonder, then, that the man who was, thus, raised by two women—both of whom, at a fundamental level, opposed the maintenance of the separations that the apartheid state enforced—comes to insist on reaching for a common humanity and on finding ways to unify ideologies, even at the dawn of a new empire’s wars of expansion.

Much of Shukri’s novel, thus, chronicles the lives of Issa’s friends, subsequent to his disappearance. Though the entirety of the novel takes place in Issa’s absence, it is clear that each of his friends and family members are deeply transformed through their interactions with him; their own intellectual and psychological


frameworks, as well as the trajectories of their lives, are changed in drastic ways as they examine Issa’s life. They remember that Issa developed a high level of consciousness about the other and that his own complex otherness—an awareness that leads him to question attempted erasures in history and “disappearances” of bodies deemed superfluous, troublesome, or problematic to powerful empires and the glorious, “whitewashed” histories they attempt to construct—arrived early in his life. However, they also remember that they met Issa’s adamant insistence on historical accuracy and politically astute choices with annoyance. For instance, his adoptive brother, Kagiso, recollects that, as a boy, Issa insisted on saying “paneer” instead of “cheese” when their mother, Vasinthe, took a photo: it is a small and almost comical act of rebellion against the hegemony of the English language, leaving the family with a photograph of a pucker-faced Issa on record. Vasinthe’s response is indicative of how the world meets attempts at rebellion against conven-tion, even when the new vision offered by the revolutionary may be in one’s favor:

“Why do you always have to spoil things, Issa?” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 42). What Issa discovers, as his awareness of hegemonic systems increases, is that attempting to reverse or engage with instances of erasure—whether it is of a people’s history on a large-scale basis or on a personal level—will almost always be met with boredom and indifference at best, or militant aggression at worst.

Kagiso also recounts a childhood visit to his grandmother in Taung, which, along with his grandmother’s story about the manner in which history is manip-ulated to favor the construction of an empire, was what Kagiso identified as

“arguably” determining “Issa’s fate” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 23). Taung, though “a small village hardly ever featured on the map,” located approximately halfway between the excavated diamond fields of Kimberley and Mafikeng, was histori-cally significant to both the formation of South Africa and the British empire. From Taung, the Barolong, Kagiso’s people, were recruited by British colonel Robert Baden-Powell—the founder of the Boy Scouts—to help him stay resilient for “217 brave days” against a 6,000–strong siege by Afrikaners “under the leader-ship of Generals Snyman and Croje at the start of the South African War in 1899” (Ibid. 23). Kagiso reminds us that Baden-Powell recorded history with significant omissions, going to “great lengths” to erase, from his reports to king and country, that he had relied heavily on the Barolong—the so-called Black Watch—and that they “were forced to survive on less rations during the siege than their British counterparts” (Ibid. 24).

These instances of erasures, where “inconvenient” portions of the empire’s glorious history are conveniently omitted from the written record, are countered by Kagiso’s grandmother, who represents history on the stage of the “mud floor of her dark shack that smelt of fire wood” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 24). While the general promised them land “in abundance,” she remembers that they received

“not one inch” (Ibid. 24). Of the £30 000 that they heard “the good people of Britain . . . raised . . . for the reconstruction of our town, . . . not one penny” reached the Barolong (Ibid. 24–25). Gone also from Baden-Powell’s report is the fact that more than 1,000 Barolong died of starvation (Ibid. 25). While the empire may record the great general’s achievements, “among our people, he’s a lying thief,” concludes Kagiso’s grandmother (Ibid. 25). For Shukri’s readers and for Kagiso, her surviv-ing memory of the role that her people played in winning this crucial battle for Britain stands defiantly revisionist, as significant as the cracks of daylight that


“sparkled through holes in the corrugated iron” of her humble home, “like stars in the canopy of night” (Ibid. 23–24).

Although both Kagiso and Issa are recipients of this “rememoration” of history, it is Issa who takes the step of challenging the hegemony of officialdom. Following the visit to Kagiso’s grandmother in Taung, Kagiso is mortified when Issa challenges their teacher’s version of South African history. Kagiso shakes his

“head in dismay when [Issa] called Baden-Powell a ‘lying thief’ ” in their history class, earning nothing but the ire of their teacher and “snide comments” in every other class from “Maths to Phys Ed” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 25–26). When Issa carefully compiles a “bibliography of recent revisionist research into the South African War” with the help of a “research student at the university,” with whom his mother puts him in touch, his history teacher, Mr. Thompson, dismisses his efforts, confirming that “[h]istory cannot be re-written,” it simply “is” and that if Issa wants to pass his exams, he had better remember to write the official ver-sion (Ibid. 26). Mr. Thompson’s stern warning gives readers an insight into Issa’s encounters with official attempts at erasure: he realizes that those who attempt to revise history will not be given the “Pass/Go” cards that only the empire can hand out and will be prevented from progressing through life. At school, Issa learns that calculated erasures by empires continue, no matter what part he might play in “correcting” them by reinserting different, revisionist accounts or how much access he has to language and education.

For Kagiso, it is only on his flight back from clearing out Issa’s London flat that transformation happens: he remembers their student days and how he became absorbed in being one of the “bright young things of upper campus” at the pres-tigious University of Cape Town (Shukri, Silent Minaret 225), in “contradistinction to Issa’s commitment as a student to struggle” (Viljoen). Kagiso reevaluates “the history of struggle from which he had removed himself” only after Issa’s disap-pearance and reading Issa’s dissertation. As a result of absorbing the intellectual and political journey on which Issa embarked, “Kagiso recommits himself to his work in making political documentaries” (Viljoen).

Later in his life, Issa’s commitment to finding a common humanity despite differences is tested when he and Kagiso travel to be a part of the celebrations in Cape Town on the day that Nelson Mandela was officially released from prison. On their way, they meet Katinka, a young Afrikaner farm girl hitchhiking on the side of the road, who is searching for a life outside of the belief system of her nation and her family—a system that revels in a racial hierarchy that places her people on the top of the heap. Katinka’s imagined future for her country, one where the benefits of power are more equal and have less to do with racial demarcations, stands in stark contrast to her family’s desires. When her family learns that she is departing to Cape Town, her father tells her that she will no longer be welcome in his home if she “runs after a communist terrorist kaffir” and her brother tells her that he would “shoot [her] himself” if he ever sees her again (Shukri, Silent Minaret 119). Issa, seeing Katinka on the side of the road, does not want to pick her up initially; perhaps, at this point in his life, an Afrikaans girl tests the limits of his ability to befriend the other. It is Kagiso who convinces Issa to stop by literally pulling the emergency brake of the car (Ibid. 118). But after the group reaches Cape Town, when a friend slyly questions Issa about who the “lanie nooi” might be and whether he is “leading the way to reconciliation by example,” Issa is quick to say,


“She’s a comrade from the Free State, So don’t you give her grief” (Ibid. 123–24). He is prompted to reevaluate his behavior, and review his own lessons, partly because the dignity of someone, whom he had until then regarded as a distant other, is threatened.

Many years later, Katinka’s love for Karim, a Palestinian man she meets in London, challenges her to truly commit herself to an engagement with the other—a knowledge that is beyond the epistemological desire to “map and trap” the other through sexual conquest. Instead, her journey includes her commitment to learn-ing Arabic, which permits her to visualize and embody Karim’s ways of wording, thinking, and being. Because Karim has had to return to his rural Palestinian town, Qalqilia (presumably because the British authorities have rejected his appeal for asylum), by the end of the novel, Katinka joins him behind the Israeli-built wall that separates the town’s inhabitants from the world. Her descriptions of the isola-tion and difficulties of living daily behind such monstrous barriers are recorded in her letter to Kagiso, where she assures him that, despite “the frustration that, every day, the world chooses to buy the propaganda, the misinformation, the lies, the crude racism, the blatant stereotypes,” she has found peace: “after all the years of searching in unlikely places, there is the contentment of being at home, in the most unlikely place. Yes. Loved—and at home” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 273).

Facing the actual indignities of day-to-day existence in divided Palestine constantly reminds her of Issa’s words—words that mark the final sentence of the novel, a text sent by Katinka to the disappeared Issa’s mobile number “Da histry of erly urpean setlmnt @da cape is unvrsly and eternly pertnt” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 274). She sends her congratulations to her old friend, Kagiso, who has completed the documentary he set out to make and been honored as the “Best Documen-tary Film Maker 2004,” and challenges him to bring his cameras to Qalqilia. Her invitation is a reminder of their ongoing duty to others who are similarly trapped behind walls, as were South Africans, an act of “rememoration” built on their shared experience of apartheid. She tells Kagiso, “Go find an eight-metre high wall. Walk up to it. Stand next to it. Imagine it stretching on and on, for 710 kilo-metres—longer than the length of our first journey through the Karoo” (Ibid. 272). The resonances between South Africa’s apartheid walls and the physical barriers separating Palestinians from their basic human rights are easy to identify and, as Katinka asserts, they create miseries that are “far more horrendous than anything you’ve seen in the homelands” of South Africa (Ibid. 273).

Frances, Issa’s elderly Irish-born neighbor, and her spiritual journey as a Christian is also transformed by her friendship with this quiet, introspective foreigner. It is important to establish that Issa is completely disinterested in con-verting Frances to Islam; he is far more interested in encouraging her to see how the two religions walked together throughout their individual histories. The pages of the novel open with her musings about how she could hear him scurrying as he went about his daily routine in the apartment below hers and her memory of Issa giving her prayer beads used by Muslims—a tasbeeh (Shukri, Silent Minaret 12). Although she remains a devout Catholic, she embarks on a self-guided study of the Koran and medieval Islamic literature, finding, along the way, that the two religions and cultures had forged a solid, common foundation. She discovers that what we commonly regard as the pillars upholding a nation or religion—demar-cating lines of purity, exceptional status, and exclusivity—are most often infused


in their very core by other cultures and traditions. Through this self-directed study, Frances discovers that the writer regarded as the grandfather of British literature, Chaucer, sourced stories from the Arab tradition, that the passionately lewd Wife of Bath was an Arab woman, that there are references to Jesus and Mary in the Koran, and that the Virgin Mary’s father’s name was Imran—a tidbit of infor-mation she shares with her priest, Father Jerome, only to be met with a “frown,” projecting his resistance to such ideas (Ibid. 17).

These instances scattered throughout the novel highlight the “blendings and interconnectedness between what has been placed as incommensurate in post-9/11 discourse” and “critique the idea that the conflict is one of incommen-surate civilizations” (Frenkel 14). The moments of rememoration between Issa and his friends also “undermine the meaning of ‘national culture’ by showing its sites of memory—such as works of literature considered ‘holy’ or ‘canonical’—as an essentially hybrid, dynamic, and invented system of signs” (Pucherova 940). Through these discoveries, Frances is not only “alerted to the arbitrary ways in which national culture is defined, maintained, and defended,” but also how our desire to construct an exceptional status for our own “ ‘national culture’ is used to justify violence” (Ibid. 941). Significantly, Frances discovers that “wh[en] one religion remembers things another doesn’t” (Shukri, Silent Minaret 16); here, she emphasizes a continued, symbiotic relationship between Islam and Christianity, rememorializing religions as historical and spiritual companions who remember for each other, thereby providing support for each other’s empty spaces. Such rememberings and forgettings also ensure that each tradition, though believing itself to be separate, is fundamentally intertwined with the other—so much so that the attempt to erase each other’s “shadow” inevitably injures the self.

A DISAPPEARANCE RESULTING IN “TRANSMUTATION AND PROLIFERATION”

Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret forces us to consider difficult questions: in the face of well-orchestrated obliterations—material, cultural, and historical memory—what are the locations of resistance, if any? In a war that relies on constructing the dark other as the embodiment of terror, through the use of end-lessly recycled images and news narratives that “publicize” particular bodies as dangerous, what recourse do we have, especially when the ordinary citizen has been incorporated into the machinery of the surveillance state, and where are we all engaged in venerating terror at the altar of images? Issa’s life is an investigation of the possibility of agency, for both those who are targeted as the main audience and those objectified by this education, permitting us to locate routes that mean-der outside the publicized polemics of nation, nationalism, and newspeak. When we learn about how sites of memory and resistance within “slaveways” survived in South Africa, we also understand how we, as a populace living within new locations of erasure, might resist empire.

Issa’s inquiry into how bodies were forcibly transported for labor or removed and erased during the seventeenth century informs us about the trajectory taken by the geopolitical West in the aftermath of 9/11/2001. Indeed, like many writers who critique hegemonic cultures, Shukri illustrates the manner in which political and cultural difference is manufactured in the creation of empire. While Shukri’s


writing illustrates the ease with which dissent and otherness can be erased, as well as the devastating psychological effects on those who experience attempts to catego-rize and monitor their bodies, his novel also serves to highlight and reappear the bodies that were disappeared under a massive tangle of laws during the so-called War on Terror, challenging the fictions manufactured by the dazzle of political sermons and news-speak after 9/11. Ultimately, the ability of popular discourse to disappear multiplicitous ways of being an other is countered by “novel” accounts like Shukri’s. His writing engages in an act of reappearing the complexity of the bodies and psyches empires attempt to disappear—reappropriating images of the “terrorizing Muslim” body and writing those flattened personas back into the multidimensional complexities of being Muslim and an other in the present world.

Issa and his companion narrators’ observations, which chronicle how the other was manufactured in South Africa, also advance our understanding of the manner in which the materiality of otherness was constructed during the apart-heid era and how body-mapping and body “publicity” have become similarly cru-cial to incorporating the general public into the discourse of terror in the post-9/11 world. Analogous to the manufacture of “terrorizing” Muslims, the construction of terror in apartheid-era South Africa was closely linked with the dissemination and consumption of publicized images and narratives of the dark other: the dif-ficulties that South Africa encountered in describing and enclosing those who have, historically, been geographically, financially, and socially mobile are also the same limitations that the modern world encounters in attempts to confine those seen as dangerously peripatetic bodies.14 Through Issa’s narrative and intellectual journey, we, as readers, along with Issa’s friends, discover that the U.S. and Brit-ain have embarked on a trajectory on which apartheid-era South Africa already attempted to traverse: projecting terror onto the bodies of the “dark other,” relying on phenotypes as the basis of labeling, categorizing, monitoring, and excluding the other and using certain bodily markers of “darkness” as references for the level of terror and danger posed.

Although Issa irritated and confused his friends and family during his lifetime, after his disappearance, significant transformations in their lives take place as they reflect on their time with him. His “unexplained disappearance compels his friends . . . to reconsider anew their memories of him, their stories of him, their shared pasts, and their own place in the world” (Viljoen). In fact, Issa’s disappearance not only reconfigures memories and reshapes the lives of his family and friends, but also results in his “transmutation and proliferation,” providing a “resistant alterity” to the dominant discourse of the state (Ibid.). In providing a conduit for others’ transformations, Issa’s impact on the people around him reflects the life trajectory of his namesake, Jesus of Nazareth. Readers may real-ize that “Issa” is the Arabic and Urdu version of the name “Jesus” (Jayawardane,

“Disappearing Bodies” 49). Like Jesus, whose collection of friends and followers came together to reflect on the significance of his lectures and his insistence on living an ethical life—one informed by the bounds of love rather than the legali-ties by which religious edicts hobble followers—Issa’s friends, too, reflect on the impact of his life after he is gone. The miracle of his life transforms each person who came close to him; they are transfigured by internalizing the principles of love—a love that insisted on finding commonalities outside of religion, convention, custom, and state—on which he built his life.


NOTES1. For more on how the category of “enemy combatant” was created, see Matheson

ch. 3.2. The VOC, the “first modern corporation,” was founded in the Netherlands in

1602, with the express purpose of furthering the trading interests of Dutch merchants and trading companies, creating a unified front against British imperial interests and the monopoly of the Portuguese in the spice trade.

3. Passbooks, derisively referred to as dompases (dumb passes), were intended to regulate movement of black Africans in urban areas, who had to carry their dompases at all times if they wished to travel outside designated “homelands” as proof that they were authorized to live or move in “white” South Africa.

4. Shukri’s novel makes explicit references to how empires, as they engage in expansion, transport and incarcerate those demarcated as threatening others. McClintock discusses the direct links between the “disappeared” but highly visible bodies of those who are incarcerated and the increased visibility of the state’s author-ity and argues that the U.S.’s power became more visible as the images of obliterated cities and “enemy combatants” in Guantánamo Bay replaced the void in power created by the Twin Towers (154).

5. This history and the links between the VOC’s activities and those of the War on Terror are explored in more detail in Frenkel and Jayawardane, “Ambiguous Bodies,” “Disappearing Bodies,” “Learning the Cartography of Terror.”

6. For a detailed history of the VOC and its involvement in transporting slaves from its East Asian colonies to the Cape Colony, see Schoeman.

7. For detailed analysis and historical context on how the Bush administration reinterpreted constitutional law so that torture could be read as “enhanced interroga-tion” to circumvent the Geneva Convention, see Hersh; Matheson ch. 3; Sands; Wittes.

8. For a more detailed description of the history of South Africa, the ventures of the VOC, and the history of how the Cape Colony and Robben Island came to be a dumping ground for political prisoners, dissidents, and other undesirables, see Thompson.

9. Rastogi follows the manner in which Shukri “foregrounds the impact of Asians/Indians in the making of South Africa, but also traces the linkages between Goa, Indonesia, and South Africa though the pathways of the Indian Ocean” (24). However, any implication that Sheik Yusuf, whose maternal uncle was King Bisei of Goa, had “Indian” links is erroneous. The Goa referred to here, over which King Bisei ruled, is located on the Island of Sulawesi in modern Indonesia, not the Goa on the West coast of India.

10. See Schell.11. The “Indians” of South Africa have their earliest roots in the slave trade, engi-

neered by the VOC, that brought exiles and laborers from throughout the Indian Ocean world to the Cape. Later, Indian indentured laborers were brought to the colony of Natal (present day Kwa-Zulu Natal) by the British. Free “passenger Indians” also came as traders (or as workers for existing traders) to Durban, the Cape, and travelled into the interior—to Transvaal and the Free State—to set up businesses until laws were passed to prevent them from owning property. See Duphelia-Mesthire, From Cane Fields to Freedom, “The Passenger Indian as Worker.”

12. Here, Pucherova relies on the definition of “rememoration” by Nora in Realms of Memory: “a history that is interested in memory not as remembrance but as the overall structure of the past within the present” (931).

13. See Pucherova 932.14. For more on the similarities between the ways in which the geopolitical West

has attempted to limit the mobility of the “dark other” in the twenty-first century and


South Africa’s attempts to categorize and limit mobility, see Jayawardne, “Ambiguous Bodies,” “Learning the Cartography of Terror.”

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