‘You have done our shame’: interrogating shame and honour in diaspora in Jasvinder Sanghera’s Shame trilogy

ABSTRACT

Jasvinder Sanghera’s autobiographical trilogy explores how the concept of shame is instrumentalised in the practice of forced marriage in South Asian British diasporic contexts. As corollaries in the various performances and perceptions of South Asian marriage customs, shame and honour operate as technologies of power that police South Asian women’s sexualities and desires.

This essay maps how the affect of shame oscillates between the private and the public spheres of family and community spaces in Sanghera’s texts. The trilogy fulfils specific purposes: seeking respite from shame, gesturing towards modes of trauma work and healing from the violence and silence imposed through forced marriage, reconstituting negated selves at individual and community levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Forced marriage
• shame
• South Asian British women’s autobiography
• cultural relativism
• ‘honour’-based violence
• diaspora

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I will use ‘Jasvinder’ when referring to the author as the narrator-protagonist in her own story, and ‘Sanghera’ when referring to the author in her activist roles as writer and political commentator on the cultural mechanics of shame.

2. While forced marriage is defined by the UK Forced Marriage Unit as a criminal offence, arranged marriages are officially understood as voluntary practices, where ‘both parties have consented to the union but can still refuse to marry if they choose to.’ (see the UK Home Office’s Forced Marriage Unit Statistics, 2017). In addition to South Asian women, heterosexual South Asian British men are also subject to forced marriages and are threatened with familial violence (see Sanghera, 2009: 84–99, 260–62). Gay men and lesbian women of South Asian descent are frequent victims.

3. While caste, class, religion and diasporic movement patterns merit further in-depth intersectional examination in these texts, such endeavours would exceed the present scope of my current focus on shame.

4. Amrit Wilson also observes: ‘men who may have absorbed … aspects of jat masculinity – which serve to emphasize notions of izzat and justifications of violence against women – have also been influenced by constructs of British masculinity which have their own relationships with violence and misogyny’ (2006: 49). While meriting in-depth analysis, addressing men’s predicaments would exceed the scope of the present essay.

5. Besides South Asian women’s experiences, Sanghera addresses two high-profile media reports of two young Kurdish British women murdered by their families – Heshu Yones (†2002) and Banaz Mahmood (†2007) (Sanghera, 2009:132–34; Sanghera, 2011: 135–36).

6. Sanghera highlights that the British judiciary needs to understand that ‘cultural acceptance does not mean accepting the unacceptable’; see ‘Culture vs. Safeguarding, Jasvinder Kaur Sanghera, TEDxBergen.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKcfdtCnQBI. Accessed 09.08. 2018. I note here that Sanghera’s talks are multi-medial appendages to her autobiographical works and draw attention to how cultural relativism can silence victims of forced marriage.

7. Pallav Rastogi describes South Asian diasporic women’s autobiographical writing as being first made paradigmatic in South Asian American poet Meena Alexander’s Faultlines (1993) and Shock of Arrival (1996), where the vicissitudes of diasporic life are chronicled, while reconfiguring perceptions of selfhood against gendered interrogations of migratory experiences (2005: 520). Besides Sanghera’s trilogy, a number of Punjabi British autobiographies have been examined with regard to constructions of ethnic identities at the confluence of culture, diaspora and gender (see Kushal and Manickam, 2014; Chanda, 2014)

8. Aisha Gill considers the difficulties many South Asian diasporic women face in telling their stories, since they are often limited in their contact outside home spaces; interaction with mainstream society is often either forbidden or limited to absolutely necessary instances e.g. hospitals, schools, places of worship (2004: 468–77).

9. Recognising honour-based violence as actual crimes requires that family members be held accountable; the problem needs to be addressed on public platforms, with a view to legislative involvement and resolution. See the 2007 ACPO Roundtable Report on honour-based crimes in the UK (Gill, 2008: 252–61).

10. Jasvinder’s reliability as a narrator might be questioned with regard to the accuracy of her recall, since an autobiographical narrative can entail ‘its own elisions, its own figuration, its own forgetting’ (Ahmed, 1997: 162). The possibility of an unreliable memory does not necessarily prevent readers (especially forced marriage and domestic violence survivors) from engaging with the ‘truth value’ of these narratives, whereby ‘autobiographical truth resides in the intersubjective exchange between narrator and reader aimed at producing a shared understanding of a meaning of a life’ (Smith and Watson, 2010: 15–16).

11. In Shame Travels, Jasvinder’s final laying to rest of Robina’s memory is sublimated in her evaluation of shame discourses: ‘Lovely dutiful daughter that she was, she was too impressed by my parents’ stupid frozen values to realize that the shame she thought she would cause them was just a figment of their distorted imagination’ (Sanghera, 2011: 220).

12. Sanghera discovers hope during her interactions with these subcontinental male activists working towards more public awareness regarding the fatality of shame and honour discourses for women (see also 40–48, 51–58, 61–62, 67–68, 243–47).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Vogt-William

Christine Vogt-William is Director of the Gender and Diversity Office with the Africa Multiple Cluster (funded by the German Research Foundation) at the University of Bayreuth. She is the author of Bridges, Borders and Bodies: Transgressive Transculturality in Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Women’s Novels (2014) and is co-editor of Disturbing Bodies (2008), an essay collection on artistic and literary representations of ‘deviant’ bodies. She has published on South Asian and African diasporic and mixed race literatures, queer and critical race approaches in Tolkien’s works, literary representations of transracial adoption and transnational surrogacy in postcolonial women’s writing. She is currently working on her second book on cultural and narrative representations of biological twinship in Anglophone literatures.