Abstract
This article argues that Tahmima Anam’s novel The Good Muslim highlights the troubled relationship between empathy and silence in order to demonstrate the ethical dangers arising from the failure to accept “partial empathy”, wherein understanding and sharing coexists with incomprehension and disjunction. In doing so, the novel critiques both extremes of the theoretical debate about empathy: the dismissal of empathy, drawing on the Levinasian–Derridean discourse of alterity, for ineluctably subsuming the other’s otherness, and the celebration of empathy as a conciliatory bridge across polarizing differences. Moreover, Anam underlines the ambivalences of silence — which can embody both powerlessness and agency, and which can both participate in and withhold expression — to complicate the current emphasis on silencing in critical theory with concerns about the violation of others’ silences. Examining the silences of trauma and rape in the aftermath of the 1971 Bangladesh War, the novel shows how false empathy silences the other by deeming their experience as already understood while intrusive empathic gestures jeopardize the other’s chosen silences. Further, Maya and Sohail’s negotiation of their irreconcilable differences over religion illustrates how their inability to accept gaps in empathy prompts them to adopt conflict-eschewing silences that lead to the complete breakdown of empathy.
Tahmima Anam’s 2011 novel The Good Muslim explores the troubled relationship between a pair of siblings, Maya and Sohail, who choose the divergent paths of secularism and religious fundamentalism respectively, as they learn to cope with the aftermath of the Bangladesh War of Independence. 1 Following the siblings’ relationship over a period of fourteen years after the 1971 War, the novel examines the crises of empathy that emerge between them, first due to the alienating experiences of post-war trauma and later because of their irreconcilable differences about religion. In particular, the text emphasizes the role of silences in animating the siblings’ thwarted attempts to empathize with each other; in doing so, the novel demonstrates the challenges that silence poses for empathy, even as it points toward the possibility of silence serving as a medium for empathy.
This article contends that The Good Muslim highlights the fraught relationship between empathy and silence in order to demonstrate the ethical dangers arising from the failure to accept “partial empathy”. Simply put, I use the term “partial empathy” to refer to the partial nature of empathic understanding and sharing, which always coexists with incomprehension and disjunction. I argue that the failure to accept partial empathy often leads the empathizer to either embrace oppressive forms of empathy that erase the other’s otherness or to eschew empathy altogether by labelling the other as completely inscrutable. I locate my analysis around silences inhabiting the self–other relationship because the inherent opacity of silence often necessitates complex engagements with the realm of partial empathy. Although silences can also uphold empathic connections, the other’s silence often engenders and/or makes more visible empathic gaps; conversely, silences also mask gaps in empathy. Anam’s novel shows how the refusal to accept the partial empathy occasioned by silences manifests itself in attempts to: infringe on the other’s silence in order to understand them better; read the other’s silence as always already understood within the framework of meta-narratives; mark the other as unworthy of engagement and suspend dialogue with them altogether. In critiquing these modes of engagement with others’ silences as ethical failures, the novel asks us to account for the singularity of each silence, as it gestures toward the ethical possibilities of partial empathy.
This article’s reading of The Good Muslim contributes not only to the theorization of the complex relationship between silence and empathy, which has not received as much scholarly attention as it merits, but also to key conversations about empathy and silence respectively. 2 The contemporary debate about empathy often gets polarized between two positions: the dismissal of empathy as a manifestation of the universalizing, homogenizing discourse underpinning imperial–colonial and patriarchal thought, and the celebration of empathy for its capacity to enable imagination of others’ experiences. Showing the harmful consequences of both the outright repudiation and uncritical embrace of empathy, this article posits the acceptance of partial empathy as a form of ethical engagement that recognizes both the meeting points and the gaps that occupy the space between the self and the other. Moreover, in examining empathic engagements across silences between the self and the other, this article emphasizes the ambivalences of silence — which can embody both powerlessness and agency, and which can indicate both separation and connection. In doing so, it unsettles the current trend in critical theory to read silences primarily as instances of silencing, showing that both the imposition and the breaching of silence can participate in oppressive operations of power.
Furthermore, in examining the layered interactions between silence and empathy in The Good Muslim, this article highlights a hitherto neglected aspect of the novel. Scholars have commented on the novel’s attention to the silences haunting Bangladesh after the war; for instance, Farzana Akhter (2018) has argued that the novel exposes the silencing of women, particularly of birangonas or survivors of war rape, in service of male-dominated narratives of nation-building. Additionally, Anam’s work is regularly cited as a significant contribution to the “new genre of [Anglophone] cultural production” about the 1971 War that “seeks to illuminate internal and external tensions surrounding the representation of war, gender, memory and justice for a global audience” (Chowdhury, 2016: 43) — although A Golden Age, the first book in the trilogy that features The Good Muslim as its second installment, appears more frequently in this thread of critical scholarship on Anam. 3 Further, critics such as Claire Chambers (2015) and Amrah Abdul Majid and Dinnur Qayyimah Ahmad Jalaluddin (2018) have meditated on the ideological chasm between Maya and Sohail that ultimately raises questions about the possibility of empathy between them. However, none of the commentaries on the novel have examined its engagement with the entanglement of silence and empathy, which, as the reading in this article shows, crucially informs the text’s ethical and political implications.
Before delving into my analysis of the novel, let me discuss briefly the relevant political and cultural conversations about post-war Bangladesh that Anam’s novel joins through its examination of empathy and silence. As Majid and Jalaluddin (2018) suggest, Maya and Sohail’s empathic crisis over ideological differences about religion allegorizes the tension between the Bengali and Islamic aspects of national identity in Bangladesh that has troubled the country since independence. 4 Historians have observed that the political and cultural dominance of West Pakistan before the war had led to a strong assertion of Bengali identity (as a linguistic–ethnic, and largely secular, formation) in Bangladesh, which ultimately proved instrumental in propelling the war. This emphasis on Bengali identity remained quite robust until Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s assassination in 1975, after which there was a resurgence of the country’s Islamic identity (drawing on the discourse of the 1947 partition that advocated for religion-based national identities) under General Ziaur Rahman and General Ershad. Several scholars have argued that the “binary opposition between secular identity and Muslim identity” (Riaz, 2016: 6) has been superficially imposed on Bangladesh, neglecting the complex cultural negotiations that constitute its “Bengali-informed Muslim community” (Uddin, 2006: 112). However, as Hossain contends, competing narratives of national identity have continued to fuel the “ongoing political polarization” in Bangladesh (2015: 366). This division is something that both the dominant political parties, the centre-left Awami League and the right-wing Bangladesh National Party (BNP), have exploited by emphasizing respectively the Bengali and Islamic elements of Bangladeshi identity.
Among the multiple disputes between the Awami League and the BNP, the memory of the 1971 War and the various silences surrounding it have emerged as enduring points of contention. Perhaps the most divisive issue has been the Bangladesh government’s prolonged failure to bring war criminals to justice, as evidenced by the controversy over the International Crimes Tribunal that emerged in 2008 and eventually resulted in the bloodshed during the 2013 Shahbagh protests. The Awami League contended that the trials were necessary to hold accountable war criminals who had conspired with the Pakistani army during the 1971 War but had found positions of power in Bangladeshi society under the auspices of the BNP. On the other hand, the BNP called the trials a witch-hunt aimed at undermining the Islamic leadership of the country. 5 The Good Muslim points to the long history of the simmering, although relatively silent, public discontent about war criminals that lies behind this political crisis, as it highlights efforts made by activists such as Jahanara Imam to organize gono-adalats or “people’s tribunals” for the trial of war criminals during the late 1980s and the 1990s.
Moreover, as Anam’s representation of Imam’s tribunals underlines, the 40-year-long silence over the trial of war criminals went hand in hand with the silence around the figure of the birangona (or “war heroine”) — a term coined by Sheikh Mujib to denote the rape survivors of the 1971 War. Some commentators have remarked that the Bangladesh government’s effort to publicly acknowledge rape survivors was exemplary for its times. However, as studies by feminist scholars such as Nayanika Mookherjee (2015), Bina D’Costa (2011), and Yasmin Saikia (2011) have shown, the attempt to valorize birangonas failed to rid them of the social stigma around rape. Moreover, the discourse of the birangona ended up silencing them on several counts: its euphemism elided the violent experience of rape; it insisted on the abortion of rape-induced pregnancies, shaming the pregnant women as carriers of the “enemy’s seed”; and it homogenized survivors’ experience through a predetermined narrative that did not sufficiently heed their individual stories. Further, as Mookherjee (2015: 7) notes, the government and the press fell silent about the birangonas between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s, although artistic representations kept the figure of the birangona alive in public memory. The 1990s witnessed some oral history projects that provided platforms for the birangonas to speak; Nilima Ibrahim’s (1994) influential I Am the Birangona Speaking remains noteworthy for being the first book to document birangonas’ first-person accounts of their experiences. Additionally, Jahanara Imam solicited birangonas’ testimonies for the “people’s tribunals” she organized in the 1990s. As D’Costa and Hossain show, however, these tribunals not only faced considerable opposition from the BNP-led government of the day but also inadvertently created new problems for the birangonas, who were ostracized when their photographs were published in newspapers (2010: 347). This incident attests to the multilayered challenges involved in redressing the silencing of the birangonas.
Anam’s novel is deeply attuned to the political contexts outlined above, and Anam (2013) has spoken of the “burden of representation” and anxieties about historical accuracy while writing A Golden Age and The Good Muslim, which were among the first novels in English to represent the 1971 War. Chambers suggests, however, that “Anam reveals certain blind spots” in her representation, pointing, as an example, to the novel’s largely sympathetic portrayal of Sheikh Mujib (2015: 143). It would therefore be useful to complement the novel’s “blind spots” by situating the text alongside other representations of the war. In addition to the long tradition of Bengali writing about 1971 by distinguished authors such as Humayun Ahmed, Selina Hossein, and Syed Shamsul Haque, Anam joins a new generation of Bangladeshi writers, writing in or translated into English, who have illustrated varied experiences of the war and its enduring aftermath. For instance, Shaheen Akhter’s (2018/2011) The Search tells the story of a birangona to emphasize that her subjectivity encompasses more than her experience of rape, while Ruby Zaman’s (2011) The Invisible Lines underlines the internal divisions within Bangladeshi society as it focuses on a protagonist born to a “Bihari” father and a Sylheti mother. 6 Additionally, Neamat Imam’s (2015) The Black Coat critiques Sheikh Mujib’s leadership after the war, while Zaman and Farrukhi’s (2007) edited collection Fault Lines puts Bangladeshi and Pakistani stories of the war in conversation with each other. Of course, these texts present their own “blind spots” and silences, as does The Good Muslim; nevertheless, as this article shows, Anam’s novel attends carefully to the implications of its silences.
The body of this article is divided into four sections, the first two of which lay out the theoretical conversations around empathy and silence respectively. The third section examines the silences of post-war trauma and rape in the novel, showing how Maya’s inability to accept empathic gaps in her relationship with Sohail prompts her to forcibly break his silence, while the siblings’ false empathy in relation to Piya’s experience of rape ends up silencing her for several years. The final section focuses on the siblings’ ideological differences over religion to argue that the refusal to accept partial empathy can prompt the embrace of a conflict-eschewing silence that leads to the complete breakdown of empathy.
The ethics of partial empathy
Empathy has often been shunned in contemporary critical theory because of the prevailing emphasis on difference, which draws its impetus from the Levinasian–Derridean conception of alterity. Radically redefining otherness by dissociating it from correlation, symmetry, and reciprocity, Levinas (1969/1961) critiques the “totalizing” impulse of Western philosophy to reduce the other to the same by assimilating them within frameworks of similarity. Levinas famously names the other’s irreducible otherness as the face of the other, describing it as “the way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me […] at each moment, destroy[ing] and overflow[ing] the plastic image it leaves me” (1969/1961: 50–51). Further, Levinas identifies the relationship with the face of the other as the site of ethical responsibility toward the other. Derrida complicates Levinas’s idea by focusing on the ineluctable spectre of the Third (or the other “Others”) in the relationship with the other, which compels the self to situate the other in a matrix of interconnected relations, jeopardizing the other’s singularity (1999/1997: 29–34). Conceptualizing ethics as the welcoming of the other, Derrida argues in Of Hospitality that the ideal of unconditional hospitality, which requires welcoming “the absolute, unknown, anonymous other […] without asking of them […] even their names”, always exists in tension with the constraints of conditional hospitality, which insist on rendering the other comprehensible within social structures of power (2000/1997: 25–28). For Levinas, this domain of conditional responsibility inevitably roots itself in “comparison […] contemporaneousness […] order […] the intelligibility of a system” (1981/1974: 157). In this way, ethics is, as Derrida puts it, “joined to everything that exceeds and betrays it (ontology, precisely, synchrony, totality, the State, the political)” (1999/1997: 34). In other words, in the Levinasian–Derridean line of thought, although the act of understanding the other may be necessary for political order, it always entails compromising the other’s irreducible otherness.
Drawing on this discourse, critics of empathy contend that the desire for empathy symptomizes the totalizing propensity to assimilate otherness. As Suzanne Keen (2007) discusses in her chapter “Contesting empathy”, postcolonialists and feminists remain particularly wary of empathy because of its putative association with the Enlightenment conception of universalism that disregards differences of cultural contexts and lived experience. Relatedly, Peter Goldie argues in his essay “Anti-empathy” that empathetic perspective-taking “usurps the agent’s own first-person stance […] [which] only the agent himself can take” (2011: 303). Goldie sympathizes, however, with what he calls “in-his-shoes perspective taking”, which implies shifting your perspective to “imagine what thoughts, feelings, decisions […] you would arrive at if you were in the other’s circumstances” (2011: 302). Carolyn J. Dean critiques this position for its “presumptions about the centrality of [one’s] own experience”; she argues that instances of “empathic logic in which the imagination absorbs and thus annihilates what it contemplates” constitute “a disguised form of […] hegemony” (2004: 11). In this line of thought, empathy inevitably privileges the discourse of the self, which becomes the basis of interpreting and understanding others’ experiences; empathy thus variously neglects, appropriates, and obliterates the other’s otherness in its attempts to foster identification and affinity.
On the other hand, advocates of empathy have argued that an excessive focus on difference perpetuates polarizing, discriminatory narratives of othering, and neglects the potential that empathy holds for imagining the other’s perspective and bridging our distance from them. Scholars such as Patrick Hogan (2010: 38) argue that while “false and duplicitous universalism” that has served colonial, racist, and patriarchal ends must be condemned, we must make room for universalism that derives from the “sense of shared subjectivity” across the spectrum of human experience. Similarly, Aleida Assmann and Ines Detmers contend that “a strong sense of difference and distance […] blocks empathy”. Despite vast differences, they contend, “similarity can always be discovered and generated […] by bracketing the rigid patterns of pre-existing norms” and recognizing the other as “a fellow human being” (2016: 8). Accordingly, Tim Gauthier asserts that we must allow for the possibilities of empathy, which “open[s] up channels of potential interaction and understanding between diverse others” (2015: 29). This becomes particularly important in order to counter systems of oppression that, as Judith Butler’s analysis in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence shows, invariably rely on a “restrictive conception of the human”, characterizing marginalized lives as “unreal” and “ungrievable” by exaggerating their difference from the dominant group (2004: 33).
Both the unqualified celebration and rejection of the possibilities of empathy then carry dangers of perpetuating oppressive relations with others. In light of this conundrum, I suggest that ethical engagement with otherness entails accepting “partial empathy”. Because of the very nature of the self–other relationship — which encompasses similarities and differences, connections and disjunctions — empathy is always already limited in enabling the self’s grasp of the other. However, the partial nature of empathic understanding and sharing tends to get eclipsed amid pursuits of complete empathy and absolute eschewals of empathy. I accordingly offer the term “partial empathy” to emphasize that empathic understanding does not dissolve all distances between the self and the other, even though it does enable some proximities. Partial empathy must not be understood as an inferior form of an ideal, fully-fledged empathy. In fact, drawing on the theoretical debates about empathy outlined above, I contend that it is precisely the partial nature of empathic understanding and sharing that carries its ethical potential. The critique of empathy suggesting that it ineluctably subsumes or neglects the other’s otherness holds true only for conceptions of “full” empathy that hypothesize complete understanding of the other. Conversely, the emphasis on connections and similarities underpinning the case made in favour of empathy serves primarily to dispel notions about the absolute impossibility of empathic understanding. In contrast, an ethics of partial empathy takes seriously David Palumbo-Liu’s suggestion that “notions of radical alterity” must be considered “just as tentative[ly] as notions of universalism and unproblematic commonality” (2012: 14). Partial empathy acknowledges that the empathic relationship involves traversals in a space of ongoing negotiation with sameness and difference — as in the space of the boundary, which Stephen Clingman suggests, “cater[s] to the reality of differentiation without cutting off the possibility of connection” (2009: 6).
As this article shows, The Good Muslim approaches the ethics of partial empathy by focusing on the ethical risks and failures of refusing to accept both the possibilities and limitations of empathy, rather than by illustrating the positive consequences of embracing partial empathy. Inhabiting the domain of partial empathy often produces epistemic–affective anxiety for people, causing them to reject it in favour of binary categorizations of others as fully comprehensible or completely unknowable. Accordingly, Anam’s novel emphasizes the challenges that its characters face in accepting partial empathy with others, demonstrating the ethical dangers that arise when they fail to recognize the co-existence of empathic affinities and disjunctions.
The ambivalences of silence
As mentioned before, silences between the self and the other often compel active engagement with the troubling domain of partial empathy. In this section, I theorize silence and its vexed relationship with language and power to understand the varied ways in which silences shape empathic interactions with others. Further, I examine the particularities of the silences of trauma, rape, and irreconcilable differences, which occupy central positions in Anam’s novel.
The concept of silence carries within it an aporia, an irresolvable contradiction between its ideal, absolute form that gestures towards the complete absence of expression and its actual manifestations that are always situated within the discourse of language. Just as silence “haunts language”, to use Derrida’s words (1978/1967: 65), language also haunts silence so that no silence is completely devoid of meaning. The employment of silencing as a tool of oppression follows from the fallacious assumption that silence equals total erasure. However, as feminist thinkers have shown us, silences always signify something — even if simply a telling omission — and they must be considered carefully in our attempt to understand any discourse. 7 And yet, while silence is always meaningful, it also resists easy comprehension and presents heightened interpretive difficulty. Always pointing toward the unspoken/unspeakable even when it participates in speaking, silence indicates an inexhaustible range of connotative possibilities that cannot indubitably be reduced to a single interpretation.
In this sense, silence embodies radical otherness, the kind of otherness that totalizing forms of empathy seek to reduce to sameness by subjecting it to forcible, and often false, comprehension. In Silence and Subject in Modern Literature: Spoken Violence, Ulf Olsson contends that within the language-driven process of subjectification, silence “withdraws from, or resists, form; becomes an Unknown, which, if the circulation of […] power is to remain [intact], must be made to speak” (2013: 6). Silence challenges the empathic desire to gain “knowledge and understanding of the other’s situation [that] can only be demonstrated through its incorporation within a recognized form of expression” (Gauthier, 2015: 10). As noted above, silence can and does participate in “recognized forms of expression” (Gauthier, 2015: 10), but since it often resists determinate meaning, the other’s silence disturbs the empathizer’s attempt to fully comprehend their experience. In response, empathic desire often transforms into endeavours to break the other’s silence or to substitute it with one’s own narratives of their experience.
At the same time, however, the challenge that silence poses for empathy is also deployed as an instrument of othering to deem the other impossible and/or unworthy to understand and communicate with. The phenomenon of othering through silence comprises two complementary processes: that of forcing marginalized voices into silence through various means of violence, censorship, and neglect; and that of positing silence as the marker of an absolute breakdown of communication and empathy. In Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, Cheryl Glenn demonstrates the privileging of language as an essential constituent of humanity by quoting Max Picard and Thomas Mann, who write respectively that “it is language and not silence that makes man truly human” and “the word […] preserves contact — it is silence which isolates” (Picard and Mann, qtd. in Glenn, 2004: 3). The act of silencing the other is, then, the denial of their ability to communicate with the self, of their ability to establish their shared humanity that allows for empathic connections (however limited) with the self.
Both the imposition and breach of silence can therefore participate in oppressive operations of power. However, the current emphasis on silencing in critical theory has meant that silences tend to be read primarily as evidences of powerlessness. While the ongoing, pervasive silencing of marginalized communities requires our continued attention, forcible invasion of someone’s chosen silence also needs to be recognized as an equally harmful form of violence. Of course, the inherent difficulty of determining whether a particular silence has been coercively produced (because silencing tends to expunge its own traces) complicates the process of recognizing autonomous silences. Yet, we must make room for the possibility of silence being an expression of agency, especially when a subject actively resists speaking. Further, as Gayatri Spivak (1988) has shown us in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, the ethical risks — of epistemic violence, ventriloquism, and appropriation — involved in unsilencing the silenced must be acknowledged and critiqued in order to prevent the perpetuation of the power relations that had silenced them in the first place.
The ambivalence of silence vis-à-vis agency and powerlessness is perhaps nowhere more troubling than in theorizing the experience of trauma. While trauma theorists have acknowledged the double-edged nature of traumatic silences — “it serves […] both as a sanctuary and as a place of bondage”, writes Dori Laub (1992: 58) — they ultimately characterize silence as pathological, insisting on the need to make the survivor speak in order to initiate recovery. Trauma theory’s insistence on shunning silence has, however, invited criticism from scholars who suggest that it “privileges the act of speaking or narration as the primary avenue to recovery” (Balaev, 2008: 153) at the expense of other possible modes of healing. In particular, postcolonial theorists have suggested that this reflects the neglect of non-Western cultural practices of dealing with trauma, some of which advocate the potential that silence holds for recovery. 8 At the same time, however, proclaiming the potentially recuperative value of silence becomes vexed in the context of traumas inflicted on people precisely to silence them. The trauma of rape that is inextricably linked to gendered silencing and erasure exemplifies this. Scholars have shown that rape “functions as a means of claiming the victim not only as body but also as speaking subject” (Tanner, 1994: 5). As the discourse of the birangona shows, the particular, intersectional connotations of rape are constituted by the socio-cultural contexts in which it takes place, but rape always enacts a smothering of the victim’s voice and agency, at least for the moment.
In addition to the silences of trauma, the other kind of silence that I discuss in this article is the silence that results from irreconcilable disagreements. When one or more parties conclude that they have reached an ideological deadlock, they sometimes withdraw into the silences of resentment, evasiveness, and/or indifference that may or may not take the form of formal estrangements. 9 This retreat from the other often stems from the tendency to view the gap in empathy as the complete impossibility of empathic engagement and dialogue. Ironically, this silence often exacerbates the gap in empathy — perpetuating the condition from which it originates.
Traumatic silences and the pitfalls of empathy
In this section, I explore the novel’s engagement with the silences of war trauma and rape in the aftermath of the 1971 War. Emphasizing the multiplicity of trauma survivors’ relationships with silence, the novel shows that totalizing empathic gestures can infringe on the other’s chosen silences, and also, paradoxically, silence the other by deeming their experience as always already understood through meta-narratives. I demonstrate the novel’s critique of ethical failures resulting from the refusal to accept partial empathy by examining the responses that Sohail’s and Piya’s respective embrace and rejection of silence evoke. First, I show how Maya’s inability to accept empathic gaps in her relationship with Sohail shapes her attempts to break his silence, and then, I illustrate how Sohail’s and Maya’s false empathy for Piya lead them to silence her. 10
The novel dramatizes the anxiety against empathic gaps that silence evokes through Maya’s insistent desire to break Sohail’s silence about his war trauma. 11 Maya urgently wants to restore the emotional intimacy of her relationship with Sohail, which, she believes, requires them to empathize fully with each other’s experiences of the war. So, during the first few weeks of Sohail’s return, Maya hopes that he will “unravel himself, tell her the whole thing, from start to finish, war to peace, so that by the end of it, it would be as if she’d been there, the distance between them traversed, forgotten” (Anam, 2011a: 67). 12 In assuming that the act of narrating would evoke full empathy between Sohail and her, Maya seems oblivious to the limitations of language, storytelling, and the empathic imagination. Contrasting with her illusory vision of full empathy achieved through narrative sharing, Sohail’s silence strikes Maya as the embrace of an alienating otherness that would always keep them apart. It is with a sinking feeling that Maya realizes that Sohail “had no intention of telling her anything, that he was going to keep it all to himself […] and […] it would lie between them, silent and angry” (67). Maya finds it difficult to accept that even a relationship as intimate as the one she had shared with Sohail must include the empathic gap that her brother’s silence necessitates.
Maya’s indignation at Sohail’s silence prompts her to retaliate with her own silence; she chooses not to share her experiences with Sohail even though she wants to do so. Maya’s insistence on reciprocity as the condition of her sharing again symptomizes her desire to dissolve the empathic gaps haunting her relationship with Sohail after the war. Although Maya believes she can find emotional comfort in sharing her experiences with Sohail, she refuses to do so: Maya “grows angrier and angrier at [Sohail’s] silence […] reproach[es] him with a stony silence. Silence for silence. When he asks her about her work at the Women’s Rehabilitation Centre, she snaps, what, you don’t think women are victims of the war too?” (125). Interpreting Sohail’s silence as both a devaluing of their relationship and a claim to a more profound trauma, Maya neglects the singularity of each person’s relationship to silence, which cannot serve as a comparative index either of the intensity of their pain or of their devotion to relationships with others.
Moreover, Maya fails to understand how oppressive Sohail finds her repeated attempts to break his silence, even if they are intended to foster empathy between them. In the brief sections that focus on Sohail’s perspective — interrupting the text’s predominant focalization through Maya’s perspective — the novel provides glimpses of Sohail’s distress in response to the voyeuristic and appropriative propensities he observes in Maya’s empathic inquires. For instance, Sohail thinks: “Most of all he is afraid to talk. Maya is always regarding him hungrily, eager for small scraps of detail” (124). Sohail resents his experience being reduced to an object of consumption for Maya. Specifically, Sohail worries that Maya expects him to tell “stories of heroism” that would bolster the triumphant narratives of post-war nationalism and justify the violence of the war (124). But, after having witnessed Piya’s suffering and having killed an innocent man at the end of the war, Sohail knows that he “has no story of this kind” (124). Haunted by his traumatic experiences, Sohail can no longer relate to the pre-war ideals that he had shared with Maya. He consequently resists Maya’s unrelenting efforts to make him speak.
At the same time, however, although Sohail resents Maya’s insistence on talking about his war experience, he does not reject the possibility of establishing a partial empathic connection with his sister. In fact, the novel suggests that Sohail actively desires for Maya to empathize silently with his trauma. In doing so, the text unsettles the popular idea that silence necessarily blocks empathy, indicating that silence can also function as a medium for empathy. Even as Sohail refrains from answering Maya’s questions, he “wants her to be quiet so she can hear the roar in his head, thinking that if she could hear that roar, the roar of uncertainty and the roar of death, she might understand. But she refuses to be quiet for long enough” (124). Sohail’s desire for silence is, therefore, not a call for isolation; that he yearns for Maya to “hear the roar” within him shows that he yearns for her to empathize with the overwhelmingly chaotic nature of his trauma, which he finds himself unable and/or unwilling to articulate. Sohail’s disappointment at Maya’s inability “to be quiet for long enough” resonates strongly with Dori Laub’s warning that the witness to trauma must “recognize and meet the victim’s silence” (1992: 64), which is for the latter “a fated exile” (1992: 58). 13 Sohail wishes Maya would empathize with the ineffability of his traumatic experience without demanding to know the details of the events.
While the novel thus underlines the harms caused by Maya’s insistence on breaking Sohail’s silence, it also draws attention to the silencing of trauma survivors who do desire to speak. It does so by juxtaposing Sohail’s story with that of Piya, whose wish to narrate her experience of war rape is repeatedly silenced by Sohail and Maya, both of whom, for different reasons, fallaciously believe that they can empathize with Piya’s traumatic experience without listening to her story. Of course, Piya herself seems unsure about choosing speech over silence as she understandably internalizes the social stigma associated with rape, especially after her family turns her away from home, but she makes an effort to share her experiences with the siblings. However, when Piya tries to talk about her rape, Sohail and Maya suggest that she need not narrate her experience because they already understand her plight; the text notes that, in response, Piya “grew silent, but they could hear her breathing, as though the words were struggling to get out of her and she was struggling to keep them in” (76). While Maya’s role in silencing Piya is more directly informed by the discourse of the birangona, Sohail’s suppression of Piya’s story stems from his conviction in the value of forgetting as the most viable way of recovering from trauma.
Sohail’s false empathy with Piya leads him to overlook the differences between Piya’s and his own responses to trauma. He projects his own impulse for silence on to Piya, believing that it would be beneficial both for her and their future together. So, when Piya refers to her rape, Sohail tells her, “It doesn’t matter […] Forget it. You should try to forget it” (76). Further, the text suggests that Sohail’s stake in maintaining Piya’s silence also derives from his desire for silence about his own experience, since his trauma is profoundly entangled with hers. Sohail’s most traumatic experience — of having killed an innocent man after the war — is fuelled by his shock and anger at finding Piya shackled in the barracks where she had been repeatedly raped. Sohail’s intent to have Piya forget her trauma is, then, also laced with his wish to shut out events that trigger his own trauma. This reveals itself prominently in the scene where Sohail proposes marriage to Piya. When she responds by saying she is “not a good woman” for him to marry, he briskly reassures her that the rape was not her fault, adding: “I want to forget everything that that happened before. I want our children to live in the country, free children in a free country” (247). Sohail fails to understand that his resolve to forget silences Piya’s need to express herself in order to move past the shame she harbours because of her rape. Additionally, since Sohail does not know about Piya’s pregnancy from the rapes, he does not understand that the new future, which he envisages as premised on forgetting the past, raises more complicated questions for Piya than it does for him.
While Sohail’s silencing of Piya’s story thus draws from the implications it holds for his own engagement with trauma, Maya’s complicity in suppressing Piya’s voice arises from her false empathy that draws on the generic meta-narrative of the birangona, reducing the singularity of Piya’s experience. As Nayanika Mookherjee has argued, the discourse of the birangona created “a public culture of ‘knowing’” that rested on “a homogenous understanding of gendered victimhood […] [and] suggest[ed] that wartime rape [was] experienced in the same way by all victims” (2015: 6). Maya’s response to Piya reflects this culture of “knowing” in a rather heightened way; her familiarity with other rape survivors’ stories at the women’s rehabilitation centre, where she works as a doctor, convinces her that she can already empathize with Piya without knowing her particular experience: “She knew exactly what had happened to Piya. No explanation was necessary” (70). In contrast to her insistence on hearing the particularities of Sohail’s war trauma, Maya does not mind eliding the details of Piya’s story, as she unwittingly participates in the conspiracy of silence around rape. Moreover, when Piya expresses her reservations about aborting her “war baby”, Maya ignores Piya’s conflicted feelings, urging her to accept the state’s stance that birangonas should abort their rape-induced pregnancies in order to rid themselves of the “seed of the enemy” (243). Eventually, however, Maya does realize her complicity in silencing Piya, and to make amends, she takes it upon herself to bring Piya to the people’s tribunal organized by Jahanara Imam, providing her a platform to speak.
Irreconcilable differences and the crisis of empathy
Having discussed the ethical dangers of empathy in response to others’ traumatic silences, let me now turn to the novel’s illustration of how the inability to accept partial empathy can prompt the embrace of a conflict-eschewing silence that leads to a complete breakdown of empathy, which in turn causes fatal misunderstandings. In this section, I focus on the siblings’ ideological differences over religion, which gradually begin to mirror the more extreme ends of the secular–religious divide in the national imaginary of Bangladesh, as both of them grow increasingly entrenched in their positions. I first examine how the widening ideological rift between Maya and Sohail engenders gaps in empathy that leads them to adopt silence rather than dialogue with each other. Then I show that the ensuing silence between the siblings leads to an outright failure of empathy between them, leading to misunderstandings that bring about Zaid’s tragic death. I suggest that in emphasizing the dangers of withdrawing completely from the other, rather than participating in partial empathic exchanges with them, the novel gestures toward the ethical possibilities of the latter mode of engagement with otherness. In doing so, the novel also points to the political dangers facing Bangladesh if the two sides of the secular–religious schism refuse to engage meaningfully with each other.
The siblings’ rejection of partial empathy plays a significant role in the gradual development of their silence-driven retreat from each other. For instance, Maya ultimately rejects her initial empathic identification with Sohail’s embrace of religion as a solace from trauma because of her apprehension that empathizing with particular aspects of his religious experience would eventually entail sharing his entire worldview. Maya equates empathy for Sohail’s religious solace with a betrayal of her ideological commitment to secularism, which she considers foundational both to her personal sense of self and to the national identity of Bangladesh: She sees that […] this Book is what […] allowed him to breathe. She sees too, in herself, the need for such a rescue […] But because she feels the twinge of his yearning, […] she decides, at that moment, that it cannot be. She will not become one of those people who buckle under the force of a great event and allow it to change the meter of who they are. (126, emphasis added)
This telling moment shows that Maya’s failure to envision partial empathy — where feeling “the twinge of [Sohail’s religious] yearning” does not necessarily imply “chang[ing] the meter” of who she is — ensues from the fear of otherness superseding the self. Rather than allow for the possibility of streams of otherness existing within the self, Maya eventually silences her own impulse for religious consolation as well as rejecting Sohail’s growing convictions.
Refusing to permit herself even partial empathic resonances with Sohail, Maya decides to try dissuading him from religion instead. Maya’s failed attempts to do so show that coercive attempts to change the other’s viewpoint can widen the empathic gap, often leading to the embrace of resentful, evasive silences. For instance, Maya organizes a birthday party for Sohail, hoping that “she could persuade her brother to change his mind” by renewing his ties with old friends who would revive his erstwhile enthusiasm for secular pursuits (158). Although Sohail comes to the party, he maintains an aloof distance from the group’s merry-making that involves alcohol and irreverent jokes about Islam. When all of them join to sing a song celebrating the Bengali identity of the country, Sohail remains pointedly quiet, so that after the song, “there [is] a long, solid silence” (163). This silence embodies both sides’ refusal to engage empathically with each other. While Sohail considers it futile to discuss his reservations about his friends’ conduct, the rest of the group cannot quite decide how to react to the new Sohail who seems unrecognizable to them.
The growing wedge between Maya and Sohail reaches a breaking point, however, when Sohail decides to burn all his other books to show his single-minded devotion to the Qur’an. The unfolding of the book-burning scene again demonstrates the inevitable failure of forcible attempts to bridge empathic gaps. Initially, Sohail intends only to dispose of his books, but Maya tries to dissuade him from doing so by trying to re-establish their empathic connection. Significantly, she begins by asking him to talk about his war experiences. “You never told me anything about the war”, she says, returning to her long-held belief that sharing their war experiences would bridge the empathic distance between them as well as relieve his trauma, in turn loosening religion’s grip over him (241). When this endeavour fails, Maya decides to tell Sohail about her traumatic experience at the women’s rehabilitation centres and about Piya’s pregnancy, intending to “shock him into realizing he wasn’t the only one who was suffering because of what he had done” (242). Maya’s recounting of Piya’s suffering does touch a chord with Sohail; however, contrary to Maya’s hope that it would make him empathize with her, Piya’s story reminds Sohail of his own trauma and the profound solace that religion had provided him.
The empathic gaps between the siblings infuriates both of them at this juncture, leading them to take drastic steps that tear their relationship apart as “each sibling seeks to silence the other” (Chambers, 2015: 146). When Maya realizes that her attempts at empathy fail to change Sohail’s mind, she threatens to eventually bring back all of the books that he discards. In return, Sohail says quietly that he will find another way to get rid of the books. Maya still does not imagine that he will burn them, but in her fury, she begins to sing aloud songs by Tagore and Nazrul, invoking a rather stereotypical image of Bengali cultural identity, as she exhorts Sohail to confront what he is rejecting. (The facts that Sohail’s book collection mainly comprises Western classics and Maya turns to Bengali songs in her attempt to dissuade him point to the interesting nexus between the terms “secular”, “Western”, and “Bengali” within the Bangladeshi cultural imaginary, wherein they are often conjointly positioned as antithetical to Muslim identity.) However, Sohail ignores Maya completely and, to her shock, sets fire to all of his books. Although the siblings’ mother blames Maya for pushing Sohail to this extreme step (“You mocked him […] you led him here […] You couldn’t stand him to be different”, she says), the incident highlights ethical failures on both Sohail’s and Maya’s part (252–253). While Maya’s insistence on changing Sohail’s mind pushes him further away, his decision to burn the books instead of engaging with Maya reflects his withdrawal from empathic dialogue with others.
The book-burning incident precipitates an enduring silence of irreconcilability between the siblings that takes several forms over the years. In the immediate aftermath of this event, Maya decides to leave home; this results in a seven-year period of no contact between her and Sohail. The novel highlights this literal silence between them through a gap between the two narrative threads, which tell the stories of the siblings’ relationship in the periods of 1971–1977 and 1984–1985 respectively. The silence of this seven year-long estrangement concretizes the siblings’ interpretation of the empathic gap between them as the impossibility of any form of empathic engagement with each other.
However, when Maya returns, the proximity of inhabiting the same household dissolves the literal silence between the siblings, forcing them to confront their differences again. But in this phase of her relationship with Sohail, Maya avoids her earlier propensity for argument and opts for reticence, as she mistakenly hopes that silence can pave the way for harmonious coexistence with her brother. While Maya sees her silence as an attempt to engage with Sohail, rather than to give in to the “urge to run from him”, the novel suggests that resorting to silence in order to evade differences can worsen the situation by impairing dialogue and fostering misunderstandings (84). For instance, when Sohail outright rejects Maya’s proposal to enroll Zaid in a secular school, she feels a “burning sensation” of frustration rising in her (84). However, instead of expressing her exasperation or arguing over the principle in question, she stifles her inclination to tell her brother how she feels: “She swallowed her anger” (84). Although Maya’s choice of silence seems to momentarily smooth the conflict between the siblings, it eventually widens the distance between them. Sohail agrees to let Maya teach Zaid, but his doing so makes Maya believe that she would be able to eventually “persuade [Sohail] to send the boy to school” (84). However, Maya soon understands how mistaken she is when Sohail eventually sends Zaid to the madrassa, ignoring the child’s protestations.
Further, The Good Muslim dramatizes how evasive silences can lead to fatal misunderstandings through its staging of the conversation between Sohail and Maya that sets in motion the chain of events that ultimately leads to Zaid’s tragic death. When Maya realizes that Zaid might be suffering sexual abuse at the madrassa, she forgoes reticence, imploring Sohail to withdraw his son from the madrassa immediately. However, because of the siblings’ habitual tendency in this phase of their relationship to opt for reticence rather than debate, Maya remains uncertain whether Sohail’s vague promise to “ensure [Zaid’s] safety” reflects sincere intention to do so or constitutes an attempt to avoid an argument with her (261). So, when Sohail refuses to confirm that he would fetch Zaid the next day, Maya concludes that “he had not believed her” after all, that his obscure promise to secure Zaid’s safety was merely a ploy to conclude their conversation and sidestep an ideological debate (262). In response, Maya takes it upon herself to rescue Zaid — a move that leads to Zaid’s accidental drowning in the river. After Zaid’s death, the novel reveals the misunderstanding concealed in the siblings’ conversation discussed above, when Sohail asks his sister, “What did you think, Maya — that I wasn’t going to get him out of there?” (287). Maya offers a feeble explanation for why she had thought so before accepting that she had indeed misinterpreted him. While Maya’s overwhelming guilt leads her to take responsibility for the misunderstanding between her and Sohail, the text indicates that it results from the breakdown of communication between the siblings that accretes from the silences they both adopt at various points in their relationship. Here, Anam underlines the dangers of conflict-eschewing silences that emanate from treating gaps in empathy as a crisis.
Conclusion
The Good Muslim thus illustrates the ethical dangers resulting from the failure to accept partial empathy in engaging with others’ silences. The novel shows how the refusal to acknowledge the co-existence of empathic connections and dissonances often leads people to either embrace oppressive forms of empathy that violate others’ silences or to forego empathy completely by adopting evasive silences. The text thus engages with the ethics of partial empathy by highlighting the risks and failures of empathic gestures that seek to mark others as either fully comprehensible or totally unknowable.
The novel ends on a hopeful note, however, by gesturing toward the ethical potential of embracing partial empathy. After Zaid’s death, Maya believes that she shares with Sohail the guilt and trauma of having taken an innocent life. While this understanding complicates Maya’s perception of Sohail’s devotion to Islam, reanimating strongly her appreciation for the spiritual solace that religion can provide, it does not entirely dissolve her misgivings, especially regarding his orthodoxy: every time she closes her eyes and sees the picture of who Sohail has become, knowing that they will never go to the cinema […] or share a joke or a book […], her heart will break. But she recognizes the wound in his history, the irreparable wound, because she has one too. His wound is her wound. Knowing this, she finds she can no longer wish him different. (293)
Maya’s recognition of Sohail’s wound — “because she has one too” — dissipates her resentments, but she cannot share his perspective on religion (293). However, Maya no longer sees this gap in empathy as a crisis that needs to be resolved by changing her brother. In choosing to end the novel on this note, Anam refuses the simplistic celebration of full empathy between the siblings arising out of their shared experience of trauma and guilt, even as she underlines the reconciliatory possibilities of partial empathy, which neither discounts empathic gaps nor positions them as a crisis in the relationship with the other.
