From Polarizing to Shared Shame: Multicultural Daughters, Pakistani Mothers, and Norwegian Child Welfare Services in What Will People Say

ABSTRACT

This article is a close analysis of the feature film What Will People Say (2017) by the Norwegian-Pakistani director Iram Haq through the lens of shame as a filmic emotion experienced both by the Pakistani mother in the film and by the Norwegian majority viewers. The film’s reception reveals a polarized discourse that pitches the Norwegian majority against minority women and builds up the myth that shame in contemporary Norway exists primarily as an import phenomenon in diasporic communities such as that of the Pakistanis. My analysis shows how paying careful attention to the Pakistani mother’s role in the story and the Pakistani family’s interactions with the Norwegian Child Welfare Services becomes a productive avenue to challenge the polarized discourse and build up a sense of mutuality and community in multicultural Norway. In essence, the article shows how Norwegian majority viewers can share the shame of Pakistani minority women when they are willing to approach the mother’s shame as more than simply a twin sister of honour and embrace their own embarrassment at the way the Norwegian Child Welfare Services treat the film’s main character, a Norwegian-Pakistani teenage girl whose family sends her to Pakistan against her own will.

KEYWORDS:

• Embarrassment
• filmic emotions
• Iram Haq
• involuntary stays abroad

Hva vil folk si (What Will People Say, 2017) is a critically appraised¹ Norwegian feature film by the Norwegian-Pakistani director, actress and screenwriter Iram Haq. Born to immigrant parents in 1976, Haq grew up in a multicultural neighbourhood in Oslo. In her acting and filmography, she actively draws on her multicultural upbringing, taking up controversial topics like negative social control and women’s oppression in the Pakistani communities in Norway. In the short film Skylappjenta (Little Miss Eyeflap, 2009), which is Haq’s debut as a director, Haq plays herself a Norwegian-Pakistani version of Little Red Riding Hood. Little Miss Eyeflapp is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the toils a Norwegian-Pakistani woman needs to go through to escape forced marriage, and it is a canonic text in the Norwegian school curriculum. Also the protagonist in Haq’s first feature film, Jeg er din (I Am Yours, 2013), is a Norwegian-Pakistani woman, this time a single mother with a troubled relationship with her Pakistani family and who struggles to find love. In What Will People Say, Haq tells the story of Nisha (Maria Mozhdah), a sixteen-year-old Norwegian-Pakistani girl from Oslo, who after being caught kissing with her ethnic Norwegian boyfriend in her room at night, is kidnapped by her father and sent to his relatives in Pakistan. The Norwegian Film Institute (NFI) and the website filmrommet.no, which is the largest film-on-demand service for schools, libraries, and public institutions in Norway, actively promote the use of What Will People Say for educational purposes, for example, in connection with the teaching of topics such as democratic citizenship, gender roles, cultural conflicts or health and life skills (Wangsmo, n.d.). This speaks of the important place What Will People Say occupies in the literary republic in Norway.

In this article, I investigate how What Will People Say builds a sense of community and mutuality in the multicultural society Norway has become. What insights into the lives of multicultural teenage girls like Nisha does Haq’s film offer to majority Norwegians? In the film’s reception, several Norwegian film reviewers deploy a polarizing language that reinforces the boundaries between “them” (minority Pakistani) and “us” (majority Norwegians) (see, Berge, 2017, Aalen 2017). For example, in Kinomagasinet, What Will People Say is described as “a film that should be on the syllabus for those of us who want to learn more and understand what kind of culture such migrant girls grow up with. A culture full of fear and expectations about … sorry the expression … what ‘people’ will say. One’s own people. Unfortunately, I don’t think Norwegians care about this too much” (Berge, 2017, emphasis in the original).² Formulations like this pitch the Pakistani communities in Norway, especially Norwegian-Pakistani daughters, against the Norwegian majority, who are both uninformed and indifferent to the power of shame defining the lives of multicultural girls like Nisha.

They also build up the myth that shame in Norway is aligned with the premodern and exists as primarily an import phenomenon in traditional diasporic communities (Wyller, 2001b, pp. 10–15; Stafseng, 2001, pp. 32–33). Several Norwegian scholars have successfully debunked this myth from various perspectives (Skårderud, 2001; Wyller, 2001a). Interested in the gendered articulations of shame, Norwegian anthropologist Marit Melhuus discusses how in Norway, where women have own incomes and are themselves responsible for their own sexuality, women’s shame has been decoupled from the honour of their children and men, and it is a private rather than a public matter (Wyller, 2001a, pp. 149–151). That is not to say that Norwegian women have lost and have no shame, rather the triggers of shame have changed from unwanted pregnancies and single motherhood (Melhuus, 2001, p. 151) to lacking control, talking or drinking too much, and training or cleaning too little (see, Godø, 2008).

If shame and shaming continue to shape the lives of majority Norwegians, Norwegian majority women included, how can the shame of minority women become a platform for mutual understanding rather than polarization and stigmatization, as witnessed in the reception of Haqs film? This question is particularly relevant if we keep in mind that What Will People Say is promoted as an important pedagogical resource in the multicultural classroom in Norway. In this article, I approach it by discussing two aspects in the film: the mother’s role in the story and the interactions with the Norwegian Child Welfare Services. I provide close readings of chosen scenes from the film that are relevant to these two aspects and discuss how to move from a polarizing discourse to a shared sense of shame. My readings are informed by an understanding of shame as a slippery, muted, and filmic emotion, which I account for in the next section of this article, where I primarily engage with the scholarship of the American psychologist Silvan Tomkins and of the American film cognitivist Carl Plantinga.

Shame, Looking, and Cinema

In shame, I feel myself to be bad after doing something that I or others feel is bad. As the British-Australian queer and affect scholar Sara Ahmed puts it, the badness of my actions is thus transferred to me (Ahmed, 2014, p. 105). Moreover, the focus of shame is the individual, but the guardians of shame are the community. As the individual lowers her head, casts her eyes down or even freezes in shame (a bodily transformation), she evaluates herself through the threat of exclusion and lack of recognition by her community. In addition, American psychologist Silvan Tomkins (Tomkins, 1963 [1995]) defines shame as a loss of face and conceives of it on a continuum of guilt, shyness, and humiliation. The latter are the so-called sisters of shame, as the title of the Silvan Tomkins reader suggestively formulates it (Sedgwick & Frank, 1995). The transferable, exclusionary, and diffuse character of shame makes shame a particularly slippery and muted emotion.

Shame also rooms contradictory affects. Although Tomkins defines shame as one of the primary negative affects, excruciating and mortifying, he also links it to positive affects such as love, interest, excitement, and enjoyment, for one can experience shame only if the subject is sufficiently concerned and/or invested (Tomkins, 1963 [1995], pp. 138–139, 147–150). When shame is shared, says Tomkins, it becomes a “prime instrument for strengthening the sense of mutuality and community” (Tomkins, 1963 [1995], p. 156). In Tomkins’ words, “When one is ashamed of the other, that other is not only forced into shame but he is also reminded that the other is sufficiently concerned positively as well as negatively to feel ashamed of or for the other” (Tomkins, 1963 [1995], p. 157).

Last, but not least, Tomkins speaks of shame in ways that are strikingly filmic. The centrality of face and the complexity of looks are defining for shame: “The awareness of the face is more salient in shame than in other affects” and “the shame response itself heightens the visibility of the face” (Tomkins, 1963 [1995], p. 142). Tomkins also points out the ambivalence of looks involved in shame: “In shame, I wish to continue to look and to be looked at, but I also do not wish to do so” (Tomkins, 1963 [1995], p. 137). He discusses the taboo on looking and on mutual looking: “Since the face is the site of affect, mutual looking becomes tabooed insofar as it might violate whatever cultural constraints there may be on the expression and communication of affect” (Tomkins, 1963 [1995], p. 144). The focus on the face and the various ways of looking and looking away are also defining for film as a medium, which suggests that shame and film intersect in interesting ways.

One film theorist who has explored the many intersections between film and emotions in general is cognitive film theorist Carl Plantinga. Writing together with Ed Tan, Plantinga (Plantinga & Tan, 2006) treats filmic emotions as potentialities in the film rather than guaranteed outcomes in every spectator. Elsewhere, he differentiates between four types of filmic emotions that take as their object 1) the unfolding of the narrative (direct emotions), 2) the characters (sympathetic emotions), 3) the craft of filmmaking (artefact emotions) and 4) the spectators’ own prior responses or the responses of other spectators (meta-emotions) (Plantinga, 2009a, pp. 89–90, 2009b, p. 69). Interested in what it takes for spectators to experience shame and guilt in response to film and using examples from Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock, 1951), Plantinga concludes that shame and guilt can only be experienced as meta-emotions (Plantinga, 2009b, p. 164). This means that spectators can experience shame for having wished a character dead, but not in response to the unfolding of the narrative or the craft of filmmaking, unless they feel very responsible for the film as the film’s director, screenwriter, or a close relative of them (Plantinga, 2009b, p. 161). When the spectators share a strong ethnic, national, or other affiliation with a fictional character who commits an act worthy of condemnation, shame can indeed be experienced as a sympathetic emotion, yet Plantinga argues this is highly unlikely because spectators realize the film is “fictional and tells a story that is not meant to bear a relationship to actual historical events” (Plantinga, 2009b, p. 162). Interestingly, when Plantinga starts to demonstrate how shame functions as a meta-emotion, he finds himself adjusting his initial thesis and concludes that films like Hitchcock’s do not elicit shame or guilt directly, but “a synesthetic experience that approximates some of the elements of paradigmatic shame and guilt” (Plantinga, 2009b, p. 166, my emphasis).

Suggestively, Plantinga’s commendable efforts to use shame as a category to analyse film signals shame’s slippery and muted nature. Shame is not easy to locate and perhaps it appears in less expected places in film than what Plantinga’s discussion may suggest. This is especially true if we enlarge our understanding of shame in the way Tomkins does and use examples from a film like What Will People Say, which is in fact based on the director’s own experiences with being sent to Pakistan as a teenager against her own will. In what follows, I look for shame and its sisters in predictable and less predictable places in What Will People Say. I start my discussion with an investigation of Najma’s shame. Najma (Ekavali Khanna) is Nisha’s mother and she is depicted as the most shameful character in the film, constantly concerned with the family’s reputation in the Pakistani community. I also look for shame and its sisters at a higher level in the film, both in connection to the unfolding of the narrative and in response to the craft of filmmaking as an orchestration of cinematography, sound and editing. In this way, I put to test Plantinga’s theory and ask whether shame can also work as direct or artefact emotion. Along the way, I use Plantinga’s categories of filmic emotions as signposts to guide my analysis rather than absolute entities, with the goal of expanding our understanding of shame as filmic emotion.

The Mother’s Shame

Several film reviewers describe the father-daughter relationship in What Will People Say as intensely gripping and deeply moving because it rooms nuances and emotional complexity that obstruct interpretations of the father Mirza (Adil Hussain) as simply an oppressor and abuser (Lismoen, 2017; Nilssen, 2017, Søbstad 2017). Early in the film, Mirza shows how proud he is of his daughter’s achievements in school, and he pampers her with money gifts so that she can save up for her driver’s licence. When he finds her in bed with her ethnic Norwegian boyfriend and suspects intercourse, Mirza has an outbreak of rage and physical violence, which results in Nisha being placed in a crisis shelter for a few days. This incites a long series of attempts from Mirza’s side to restore the family’s and Nisha’s reputation in the Pakistani community, all of which involve serious abuse of his daughter. He kidnaps and abandons her in Pakistan. When the Pakistani police forcefully stage compromising pictures of Nisha naked with her cousin and blackmail the family for money, Mirza is so angered and desperate that he pushes Nisha to jump off some cliffs in Pakistan, which she does not. Once back in Oslo, he enrols his daughter in a new high school and keeps a strict eye on her, driving her back and forth from school every day and controlling all her moves. While these actions speak for themselves, the film also makes evident the father’s ambivalence and ultimate love for his daughter. Mirza is hesitant to marry Nisha off to a Pakistani-Canadian young man when he understands she will not be given the opportunity to study and make a career. He also makes no attempts to stop his daughter from running away and instead watches her with tears in his eyes as she runs into the wintry night in the last scene in the film.

On the other hand, Nisha’s mother is depicted as a disciplining force that would do everything to restore the family’s honour. She is the primary recipient of shame in the film, a most shameful character who, unlike Nisha’s father, shows no affection towards her daughter. Najma’s shame is closely tied to honour, a twin pair which signals a patriarchal understanding of shame as closely connected to women and female sexuality. Accordingly, a woman is seen to have no shame and lose her honour if she destroys her sexual reputation (Melhuus, 2001, pp. 144–9). Shame is here understood in terms of sexual purity and chastity and is seen as a positive attribute of women with generational implications. Consequently, a daughter’s shamelessness, read unacceptable sexual behaviour, is seen as a moral drawback that mirrors the mother’s own shamelessness, which in turn undermines the honour of the men in the family, particularly the father, who is seen to have lost control of his women (Melhuus, 2001, p. 148).

Seven or so minutes into the film, a sequence of two scenes provides intriguing perspectives on the mother’s shame. I want to dwell on this sequence and discuss Najma’s shame in a multicultural rather than exclusively Pakistani context. In the first scene, we see Mirza celebrating his birthday at home with family and friends. The atmosphere is cheerful, the guests crowd around the coffee table in the living room and enjoy cakes. The women and children wear traditional clothes, while the men wear dresses, shirts, and jeans. When the Indian pop hit “Sadde Dil Te Chhuriyan Chaliyan” by the Punjab singer and songwriter Daler Mehndi (1999) starts playing, Mirza stands up from the sofa holding a jalebi (sweet snack) in his hand and invites Najma to dance in front of everyone. She comes across as very shy, but starts dancing carefully with her husband, at first in close contact with him when he pulls her closely towards him, then regularly moving her palms up and down as if trying to keep him at a distance (see, Figure 1). She covers her mouth as she smiles, looks down, shakes her head, and makes general comments in Urdu, first to the guests: “Mirza eats this every Sunday. He left his country, but not his customs. And he must dance to his favorite song.”³ Then she whispers directly to Mirza: “Not with me, Mirza” and “In front of all these people?”. Mirza encourages the guests to stand up and start dancing, but the only one who responds to his invitation is his daughter Nisha, who has just arrived home. He grabs her hands and the two of them start dancing in a more energetic and vigorous fashion while the rest of the guests clap their hands while sitting or standing. Najma tries to wave her son Asif (Rohit Saraf) onto the dance floor, but he is busy with his smartphone, snapping pictures, videos and finally a selfie of the family. Once released from her father’s grab, Nisha, still on the dance floor, starts texting with her friends. First, we see an unfocused close-up of Nisha’s phone screen, then the message exchange is shown as unfiltered text directly on the screen. The arrival of every new message is accompanied by a loud notification sound which interferes with the Indian pop song in the background. The editing rhythm in the scene now accelerates to underline how Nisha quickly shifts her attention back and forth between her phone and the party. Najma looks concernedly at her daughter, who is constantly texting. “Najma is so shy. I am exhausted. I am too old for this”, says the father laughing as he finally takes his seat back in the sofa.

Figure 1. Mirza in What Will People Say (Haq, 2017) makes Najma dance in front of the party guests, while their son Asif is snapping pictures of them. Screenshot reproduced with the permission of Mer film.

In the next scene, we see a close-up of Mirza’s hands counting a pile of money. A following establishing shot reveals that the family is gathered in the kitchen. Najma and Nisha are cleaning up after the party, while Mirza and Asif are sitting at the kitchen table, doing the register of the family kiosk. Cleaning in the background, Najma brings up how inappropriate and vulgar it was of Mirza to make them dance in front of everyone. Her shyness at the party is thus reframed as humiliation. Asif agrees, “Dancing is wrong. People don’t like it”, while Nisha means it’s idiotic to think that there is anything vulgar about a family dancing together. Then Nisha grabs a bottle of Coke and sits down at the table with her father and brother, ignoring her mother’s pleas to come and help. “I am tired”, she says as she texts her friends. “So am I”, answers the mother. Mirza doesn’t get involved in the conversation. Instead, he states he will send money to his sister and mother in Pakistan, so that they can also enjoy themselves on his birthday. Najma protests: “You only care about them. My family is also in Pakistan. You could think about them also.” When Nisha refuses once again to help her mother do the cleaning, Najma leaves the kitchen in frustration: “Ok, let’s drop it. Why should I do everything?”.

This sequence of two scenes is interesting because it is the only instance in the film which sheds light on the mother’s difficult situation. Throughout the rest of the film, the mother is portrayed as exclusively preoccupied with the family’s honour and in contrast to the more sophisticated and perhaps naïve father, who after all is fond and proud of his daughter. The loud twin of shame, honour, makes Najma come across as ruthless and heartless. In the dancing scene, however, the other sisters of shame, shyness and humiliation, afford more sympathetic interpretations of the shameful mother. For what is at stake in a dance for a woman like Najma?

Saying no to Mirza in front of the guests is not a choice. Not only is she totally dependent on her husband’s income. The scene in the kitchen shows clear tensions in the family about the distribution of money and how much economic support Mirza gives to his own family compared to Najma’s. Najma’s own contribution to the household is in the domestic sphere, not measured in cash. She cooks, cleans, and throws parties for Mirza, and housework makes her tired. Unlike Mirza’s sister, who is shown to be very successful in making Nisha partake in domestic activities during her stay in Pakistan, Najma fails to get her daughter’s help in the household and her innumerous pleas are drowned by the loud noise of messages constantly ticking in on Nisha’s phone.

Engaging in joyful public dancing is not an option for Najma either. Her son, who later echoes her worries in the kitchen scene (“Dancing is wrong. People don’t like it.”), insists on documenting the entire birthday party. Under the sharp flashlight of his smartphone, Najma risks total exposure not only in front of the party guests from the Pakistani diaspora in Oslo, but also in front of acquaintances and family back in Pakistan, who follow closely on social media. The risk of total exposure is thus doubled up by the risk of total exclusion. The ways in which Najma’s children use their smartphones are suggestive of this doubling: to post everything on social media (Asif) and to keep their mother completely out of their lives (Nisha). Another aspect to keep in mind is language. In contract to her husband, who seems to know some Norwegian, Najma does not speak the language at all. This means her social bonds are exclusively Pakistani, which is why losing face in front of the Pakistani community is a very high price to pay for an already vulnerable woman.

Because the film chooses Najma as a convenient antagonist to the more sophisticated and loving father, it is impossible for viewers to share her shame and show concern for her otherwise difficult situation. Indeed, she remains a monstruous mother of sorts, whose shame the viewer can easily dismiss as outdated and out of place in a Norwegian context, where women’s shame has been transported to the private domain and individual psychology (Melhuus, 2001; Skårderud, 2001). Although, or perhaps, precisely because modern gadgets like smartphones are used as cinematic cues of Najma’s shame, Najma seems very much caught in antiquated tradition. Her shame is thus decisive for the polarizing discourse which many of the film reviewers ended up reproducing when talking about this film. The shamelessness of the Pakistani police, who force Nisha and her cousin to pose naked in front of their camera, is another important element reinforcing such readings. The portrayal of the Norwegian Child Welfare Services, on the other hand, brings the Norwegian majority viewers into a moment of self-awareness which carries the promise of mutuality and community. I will now turn to the second aspect in my analysis, the interactions with the Norwegian Child Welfare Services.

The Embarrassment of Institutional Failure

In the last few years, several stories of involuntary stays abroad have sent shock waves through Norway, as they document how multicultural youth from Norway have been subjected to violence and even torture by relatives and educators in the parents’ country of origin (Kalajdzic et al., 2020; Løberg, 2020; Strand et al., 2018). Concerned with the developments, the Norwegian Government appointed in 2019 an expert group to investigate how such involuntary stays could have been avoided and how the Norwegian support services handle the young victims. The report of the expert group came out in 2020 (Bredal et al., 2020). It paints a complex picture of reasons and trajectories for involuntary stays abroad and shows how schools, police and Child Welfare Services tend to focus on the message “don’t go”, which many victims consider unhelpful and even irrelevant (Bredal et al., 2020, p. 9). Late involvement, institutional fragmentation, insecurity, and hopelessness (authorities see these cases as a “deadlock” and feel they lack adequate measures to intervene) result in a poor follow-up of multicultural youth both before and during their stay abroad as well as upon their return to Norway (Bredal et al., 2020, pp. 9–10). This report supports overall national criticism of how Norwegian support services meet multicultural youth and their parents, in addition to the fact that the Norwegian Child Welfare Services struggle with their reputation abroad following several cases accepted for hearing by the European Court of Human Rights (Norwegian National Human Rights Institution, 2021) and spread through mass and social media (Haugevik & Basberg Neumann, 2020).

In What Will People Say, the Norwegian Child Welfare Services get involved both before and after Nisha’s involuntary stay in Pakistan. I argue that the cinematic treatment of the encounters with the Norwegian Child Welfare Services in Haq’s film codes shame and its sisters as filmic emotions in the spectators. According to Plantinga, in fictional films, shame can only function as a meta-emotion that takes as its object a spectator’s prior responses or the responses of other spectators (Plantinga, 2009b, p. 164). If What Will People Say is indeed fictional, the fact that it is based on the director’s own experiences and taps into heated contemporary debates about the role of institutions like the Norwegian Child Welfare Services, makes the story in the film bear a strong relationship to reality. This opens for the possibility that shame can be found elsewhere in the film than on a meta-level, which is what Plantinga assumes. How do majority spectators in What Will People Say experience the encounters between multicultural youth and the Norwegian Child Welfare Service in the film?

Following Mirza’s physical attack om Nisha and her ethnic Norwegian boyfriend, Nisha is placed in a crisis shelter for a few days. While in the crisis shelter, Mirza and Nisha meet with a social worker from the Norwegian Child Welfare Services to “solve the conflict”, but the conversation ends with the father storming out of the room when Nisha denies having had intercourse with her boyfriend and explains she has in fact broken up with him. It is Najma who finally manages to lur Nisha out of the crisis centre with the promise of reconciliation. Once back at home, Nisha is kidnapped and sent to Pakistan. The second encounter with the Norwegian Child Welfare Services is after Nisha returns from Pakistan and starts in a new high school. The Child Welfare Services call in for a new meeting after receiving a concern note from Nisha’s school. I want to dwell on this second meeting, which comes an hour and twenty-six minutes into the film.

The first shot in the scene is an establishing shot of Nisha, her parents and her brother sitting at a round table with two social workers, one of whom Mirza and Nisha met before Nisha was sent to Pakistan (see, Figure 2). The camera is placed on a tripod in front of the table, showing from left to right in normal perspective the two social workers in profile, Nisha and Mirza facing the camera, and Najma and Asif also in profile, sitting across from the social workers.

Figure 2. Nisha and her family in What Will People Say (Haq, 2017) are called for a meeting with two social workers (to the left) from the Norwegian Child Welfare Services. Screenshot reproduced with the permission of Mer film.

After Asif explains he is there to translate, the mother takes up the word in Urdu and reassures the social workers that they want the best for their daughter. For the rest of the meeting, the social workers direct all questions at Nisha. They are interested in hearing about how Nisha feels and try to procure explanations about her stay in Pakistan. Neither Mirza nor Najma get to speak up again. The family is in fact asked to leave the room before the social workers can confront Nisha with a Facebook-message she sent to a friend while in Pakistan in which she wrote about being kidnapped, locked up, and beaten. Once Nisha’s family leaves the room, one of the social workers moves to the other the side of the table, so that Nisha sits in the middle. For the rest of the meeting, we witness the social workers’ many failed attempts at making an anxious Nisha admit that her stay in Pakistan was involuntary. Instead, Nisha talks about cultural immersion and getting used to everyday life in Pakistan. She also explains the message was sent in anger and that her memory fails her. Met by Nisha’s unwillingness to talk, the social workers finally give up but reassure her that they care about her and have no intensions of harming her family. “Can I leave now?” asks Nisha nervously and eager to leave the meeting as soon as possible. On the way to the car, as Nisha and her family pass by another Pakistani family, Najma reminds her daughter of the great shame which she has inflected on them, mentioning the taboo on looking and social exclusion: “You have put us in a situation when we can longer look people in their eyes” and “We are no longer invited to weddings”. As they get into the car, Najma passes a most ruthless condemnation of her daughter: “I wish you were born dead,” which reinforces the viewer’s contempt for the terrible, shameful mother.

During the meeting, the disconnect between the Norwegian Child Welfare Services and the Pakistani family, Nisha included, is striking. Guilt, fear, and anxiety are affects engendered by the Pakistani characters when meeting the two social workers from the Child Welfare Services. The meeting itself comes across as awkward and directly unhelpful, with the social workers once again failing to foster a real conversation with the Pakistani family. This institutional failure preceded by the mother’s threats to keep her mouth shut and followed by Nisha’s justified relief at leaving the meeting and her mother’s cruel dismissal of her (“I wish you were born dead”) codes embarrassment as a direct emotion in the film.

While Tomkins (Tomkins, 1963 [1995]) speaks primarily of guilt, shyness, and humiliation as the sisters of shame, embarrassment is commonly associated with shame, with the former being described as less intense, more transient, and more a matter of social evaluation than of self-evaluation, which means embarrassment has a milder impact on self-esteem than shame (Crozier, 2014). Embarrassment as a milder sister of shame does effective political work in the scenes where Nisha and her parents meet with the Norwegian social workers. Aware of the bad reputation of the Norwegian Child Welfare Services, majority spectators are encouraged to feel embarrassed at the way in which the narrative unfolds at this point in the film. A few other elements in the scene from the Child Welfare Services support such a reading. The communication block is for example, underscored by the lack of a neutral interpreter in the room as well as by the halts and silences in the conversation. The institutional character of the meeting room (empty white walls and dark beige curtains) as well as the way in which the characters are positioned around the table (Nisha and her father are “caught up” between the social workers on the one hand and Najma and Asif on the other) underline the emotional disconnect and mistrust between authorities and the Pakistani family. The choice of clothing is also suggestive of the chill in the room, with Nisha and her family keeping their outer clothes on during the entire meeting, while the social workers wear casual blouses and unbuttoned cardigans.

But perhaps most powerful when coding embarrassment as direct emotion are the ways in which the characters watch each other and look away. They move their eyes constantly to catch reactions (social workers keep all eyes on the entire Pakistani family, Nisha looks back and forth at her parents), conceal truth (Nisha looks down and away when finding excuses for the Facebook-message) and send a warning (Mirza and Najma keep a strict eye on their daughter before they are asked to leave the room). The rapid eye movements are well visible both because the medium close-up is the preferred shot in the scene, but also because these quick eye movements stand in stark contrast to the otherwise stationary position of the characters at the table. There is a taboo on looking and reciprocal looking, as suggested by the chosen editing in the scene. In place of the shot-reverse-shot, which is the most common editing technique for dialog scenes, we are presented with a series of frontal and lateral medium close-ups of Nisha as she is being interrogated by the social workers. As Nisha gets more and more anxious, the editing rhythm slows down and the camera insists on holding a long frontal shot of Nisha. We see her struggling to give “correct answers” and keep eye contact with the social workers, who speak mostly off-screen. If the mother’s shame was cinematically coded to trigger contempt, the embarrassment engendered by this institutional failure builds bridges between majority spectators and minority characters. As characters rapidly move their eyes to watch each other and look away, spectators also struggle to keep on watching how Nisha is being interrogated in a hopeless attempt “to help”. This means the taboo on looking and mutual looking is now shared by characters and spectators. This taboo is clearly challenged in the last shot of the film, which rounds up a most powerful scene in the film, an emotional peak for characters as well as spectators.

Shared Shame and Reciprocal Looking

After the family arranges to marry Nisha to a Canadian-Pakistani young man, Nisha decides to run away at night. It is snowing outside. Nisha puts on a jumper and a pair of light shoes, sneaks out through the bedroom window, and climbs down three floors holding tight to the balconies of the building. As she starts running down the alley, she turns back for a moment and looks up only to see her father watching her from the window of their apartment. Through shot-reverse-shot from various perspectives, we see the exchange of glances between father and daughter, both with teary eyes, accompanied by instrumental music to reinforce the sadness and emotional tension in the scene. Once Nisha turns around and continues to run, the camera cuts back to a frontal medium shot of the father, wearing only a tank top and his glasses. The background music is no longer playing, but we hear background noises from outside, vague traffic sounds and snowflakes falling to the ground. The father looks slightly to his left, then he moves his eyes slowly to look straight into the handheld camera. For a few seconds, Mirza holds eye contact with the camera and by extension with the spectator, then the screen turns black and the closing credits start rolling.

As the father silently turns his eyes into the camera, spectators are brought into a sudden moment of self-consciousness, a startle which works as a cinematographic shaming of sorts. Located in the craft of narrative filmmaking rather than in a fictional character like the mother, this shame is an artefact emotion with transformative potential. Suddenly, the focus shifts away from “their” shame and honour to “us” the spectators. As spectators watch themselves through Mirza’s eyes, they also ask what it takes to meet the needs of ethnic minority youth like Nisha who is failed miserably not only by her parents, but also by her Norwegian boyfriend and the Norwegian support services, school included. Who stands ready to take in Nisha as she runs into the wintry night poorly clad and with tears in her eyes? What Will People Say asks this pregnant question to all spectators, irrespective of their ethnic affiliation and makes them acknowledge a shared problem. It is in this way that shame in this film can become shared, an instrument to strengthen the sense of mutuality and community in the multicultural society rather than further polarize along ethnic lines.

As my analysis has demonstrated, this emotional journey to shared shame requires an openness to characters like Nisha’s mother, whose shame is not simply a mirror of its loud twin, Pakistani honour, but also a commentary on the multicultural context which shapes both Nisha and Najma. It also implies an ability to stay attuned to the quieter and more transient sisters of shame, like embarrassment in the scenes from the Norwegian Child Welfare Services or startle in the film’s epilog, and which are coded in the cinematic text through aural and visual cues such as loud or subtle sound effects, music, silences, editing, and choreography. Given the traction of Haq’s films in the Norwegian education system, the exercise of lending the mother and the cinematic text a careful eye and ear, can counteract the polarizing discourse present in the multicultural society in Norway, as signalled by the film’s reception.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. What Will People Say has won several important national and international film awards and nominations, including four Norwegian Amanda Awards in 2017 for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actor, the Audience Award for New Auteurs at 2017 AFI FEST in Los Angeles, and the Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature at the Indie & Foreign Film Festival in 2018.

2. The translation from Berge is mine. Original quote in Norwegian: «Hva vil folk si er en pensumfilm for de av oss som ønsker å lære mer og forstå hva slags kultur slike innvandrerpiker vokser opp i. En kultur fylt av frykt, forventninger til … unnskyld uttrykket … hva «folk» vil si. Ens egne folk. Nordmenn tror jeg ikke bryr seg så mye, dessverre” (Berge, 2017, emphasis in the original).

3. This and all the following English translations of the Norwegian subtitles in the film are mine.