Satire's global reach, Iowa City Public Library, September 17, 2010

              Khoyratty 1
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 17, 2010:
Farhad A.K. Sulliman Khoyratty (Mauritius), Maryia Martysevich (Belarus),
David Hill (New Zealand), Pola Oloixarac (Argentina) and Najwan Darwish (Palestine)
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu
Farhad A.K. Sulliman Khoyratty
Recipe for Sweet-and-Sour Satire
Societies are both different from, and similar to, each other. Satire, as a built-in
instrument guaranteeing the health of society, already comes as structurally universal;
globalisation does the rest. And yet, satire is entirely dependent on cultural context. This is true
both at the level of its encoding (its writing) and its decoding (its reader reception).
Satire is by now pretty universal. At a young age I noticed satire in many a woman’s
language use whenever she couldn’t get through to her husband in patriarchal Mauritius. I further
learned to recognise it in abridged versions of François Rabelais, whose Gargantua and
Pantagruel my parents got me to read, then Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and in Don Quixote by
Miguel de Cervantes. I will always remember Don Quixote, who, in a delusional state, decides to
offer big Sancho Panza, sitting on a donkey, governorship of the Baleares as if it was his to give,
and proceeds to teach him a thing or two about being governor, such as how to eat with knife and
fork. Asterix the cartoon from Belgium beckoned, whereby the resistance of Gauls to Roman
Imperialism struck a chord in the hearts of all those who came from repressed cultures. I saw
satire in the transsexuals in Bollywood movies, as they went, nasally: “Tayab Ali pyar ka
dushman hai! hai!” (“Tayab Ali is the enemy of love!”). As I grew up I was exposed to
Mauritian writer Bhishmadev Seebaluck, as he poked fun at Mauritian politicians every week in
his newspaper column. Gaëtan Duval, the most famous and regarded Afro-Mauritian politician,
he said was speaking English in Parliament with the most perfect French accent he could
manage. And drawn caricatures of politicians were spilling out of the very free and insolent
Mauritian press. After a Muslim wedding in Mauritius the Qawwalis would, in their songs, make
the Laila and Qais (the Persian Romeo and Juliet) joke about religion with Sufi good humour.
And then after a lifetime of watching Westerns and identifying with cowboys, I got to watch
Little Big Man, Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel given a new lease of life by Arthur Penn in 1970,
which deals with the genocide of Native Americans in some way similar to Mel Brooks, who
deals with the 1940s German genocide in The Producers, in that great year, 1968.
Satire dates right from Greco-Roman culture and in Ancient Egypt, as well as many other
cultures where it wasn’t recorded. It is still a staple of US television and film culture, whether in
The Late Show, The Simpsons, South Park, Harold and Kumar, or most stand-up comedies.
Empirically, in my own personal travels, which have been quite extensive, I encountered satire
everywhere. The difference was minimal and was usually only related to varieties in literary and
vital tradition as inspiration, to differences in cultural competency of readers, after Noam
Chomsky’s definition.
Satire is based on the juxtaposition of a double text – an original and a parasite (para:
beyond, site: location). On the one hand is an object, on the other, satire caricatures and distorts
that object, imposing its text as the final word. Remember how once a personality is caricatured
it is likely any perception you have of her/him/ is forever infected by it. Retrieving the original
unscathed becomes impossible.
To me, the common underlying structure of satire throughout the world is a particular
inside/outside viewpoint. A first commonality is the satirist’s ‘outsideness’. And this seems
Khoyratty 2
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 17, 2010:
Farhad A.K. Sulliman Khoyratty (Mauritius), Maryia Martysevich (Belarus),
David Hill (New Zealand), Pola Oloixarac (Argentina) and Najwan Darwish (Palestine)
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu
common to all satirists, whether Alexander Pope, persecuted for his Catholicism, or Salman
Rushdie, the mise-en-abyme outsider/insider.
Satire is an old Gulf Arab tradition, but one of the greatest Islamic Empire satirists to
theorise its value was Al-Jahiz. Now Al-Jahiz advocated and practised a satirical approach to
such ‘serious’ academic fields as sociology, zoology, and anthropology and, from what I have
read by him, was peculiarly successful at mixing science and satire, the second feeding the first
with scepticism, with each one part of the same dynamics of scientific investigation.
Al-Jahiz was ethnically mixed: he was at least half ethnically African. Al Jahiz was thus
an insider/outsider to the “Arab” culture of the Abbasid Caliphate as is exemplified by many of
his writings. In Superiority Of The Blacks To The Whites, one of his more than 300 books, he
argues, deterministically, that people of African origin are superior to other racial groups. As an
early orphan and a poor autodidact who took advantage of the relative democracy of books in
Basra under the Abassids, Al-Jahiz was socially an outsider to the intellectual classes.
You see, a certain distance is required from society for satire to become possible. The
satirist is a humorous sceptic, standing far enough outside to be able to assess society instead of
just inhabiting it, or living within it, whether physically, culturally, or otherwise.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the main character is a classic satirist in all but name, as Freud
and Lacan hinted. For satire is based on a refusal to adjust to the world of the reality principle of
a society, and is instead a play with the social signifieds in order to reduce them to signifiers.
Satire is a leveller, like a form of death, abolishing, or at least eating at, hierarchy.
According to Friedrich Nietzsche, “When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks
into you.” Satire is a look into an abyss; it is, whether in one dose or another, a portal that leads
to a grinning skull, humanity without its makeup. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels does just this: it
starts with a degree of innocence about difference in size but then in the final chapter, places a
harsh mirror to the face of humanity, which leads to misanthropy.
According to Martin Heidegger, we are so involved in our everydayness that we only
focus on achieving things. He gives as example the hammer: while we need to use it we aren’t
even aware of its existence. It is just there. Only when it breaks or something goes wrong do we
notice its existence. This is true of our own existence as well. Satire breaks our hammers, if you
will, and acts as a disturbance to usher in lucidity about ourselves.
Ironically, Heidegger’s own “hammer” would be broken by Jacques Derrida who, in
1987, wrote a meta-satirical article entitled De L’Esprit: Heidegger et la question. Derrida’s
own neologistic concept of deconstruction was directly inspired by Heidegger’s notion of
Destruktion, but in De L’Esprit, he uses the flippant, playful French word esprit to unhinge
Heidegger’s own serious German use of Geist, both of which translate as spirit in English but
carry such different concepts. De L’Esprit is ultimately like Derrida drawing a moustache on
Heidegger’s serious face--perhaps an Adolf Hitler moustache!
Rose-tinted glasses are of course necessary for society to work, but culture tends to
coalesce so much that it will end up initiating opposition to dynamics of transformation. Instead
much of satire works at scratching away at the rosy tint. Since all belief systems are constructed,
and since one isn’t normally aware of the very fact that they are constructed, tools like satire are
responsible for uncovering that truth which we miss in our focus on everydayness.
Khoyratty 3
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 17, 2010:
Farhad A.K. Sulliman Khoyratty (Mauritius), Maryia Martysevich (Belarus),
David Hill (New Zealand), Pola Oloixarac (Argentina) and Najwan Darwish (Palestine)
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu
Politically iconoclastic, satire nibbles at power from within, tickling the ribs of the
powerful until they bend over, in flagrante delicto of being human for all to see. Voltaire uses
this abundantly in Candide to strip everyone from the politician to the aristocrat to the priest or
the philosopher, alienating them in turn so the reader can see each for what s/he is.
Perception is, by its very nature, distorted. All our perceptions of things are in
caricatures; In other words, the belief that we see persons and other objects and events as whole,
as accountable, as having integrity of some sort, is illusory. The ambiguity of the language of
satire, on the other hand, reflects the existential ambiguity of being, which is masked by society.
The potency of satire and the source of the laughter it provokes lie in its recognition by those
who read it, as uncovering truths they had been aware of all along. Satire thus confronts humans
with that naked reality which can lead to either better understanding or resistance.
It is in this undressing of reality that lies the power of satire, and in the same breath why
it is feared by those with agendas to hide. For although satire has universal dynamics, its
reception isn’t consistent across the world. In much of my continent, Africa, for instance, satire
is seen as threatening by governments. Satire becomes an act of courage. Indeed, how satirical
writers are treated in a country can very often serve as a more-reliable-than-most litmus paper
test of democracy in a country.
It is no coincidence that, with Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard’s Almanack) and Mark
Twain, few countries have had their nation-building so influenced by the satirical as the United
States. Satire is the language of subversion and part of the mythology of renewal for a country
that has sought to reinvent itself so often.
Jewish humour, a woman’s power-behind-the-throne, Hamlet’s double-entendres, or even
the animated film Shrek, Avant-Garde Congolese writer Sony Labou-Tansi, extreme right-wing
or extreme left-wing caricature, all have something in common: they are born of a certain
powerlessness, whether actual or perceived. For satire can be used to justify any variety of
moralities; it exists beyond societal ethics, as an ontological cry. Bill Maher, who is admirable
for setting records straight, will also use his platform of healthy scepticism to vehicle less
nuanced assumptions, especially about Islam. But extremes are the nature of the satirical beast.
Satire can achieve but a temporary victory at best. For satire, like caricature, is never
original, but a parasite: it depends on an original text, written or otherwise, to make sense. Take
the original text, which generally means the context, and the satire doesn’t make sense anymore.
It falls flat. When othered in terms of time or geography, the impact of the satire can only be
understood with reference to context retroactively or trans-culturally. Yet the basic universal
human power underlying all satire makes it an easily retrievable language enough.
Satirical ink is a fertile inspiration for my writing. For satire is a practice of seeing, and it
keeps the perceptual muscles working, fearing they get atrophied by society.
I conclude with the ending to a short-story of mine, “Compass: Or how Grandpa
Conquered the West” about a young Mauritian man of Indian origin who is warned by his
grandfather not to bring back a white woman as he goes off to study in Europe, gets involved
with a white woman, but finally returns to Mauritius, satirically, the “moral centre of the world”:
[…]
I could see a crescent, large, grey, proud, slicing the sky with gusto. Suddenly, it knelt down
as the fanatical cross of a sword plunged into the bull’s back, and the proud crescent dug
Khoyratty 4
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 17, 2010:
Farhad A.K. Sulliman Khoyratty (Mauritius), Maryia Martysevich (Belarus),
David Hill (New Zealand), Pola Oloixarac (Argentina) and Najwan Darwish (Palestine)
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu
into the soft arena. I shook the image off my mind: where I came from had never
anything to resolve. How could it? It simply did not exist: it was neither Oriental nor
Occidental, neither North nor South. They called it African and it wasn’t ever too
certain. In fact, no one knew where it was. In fact, it wasn’t sure where it was. Indeed, as
I was walking down the Place D’Armes in Port Louis, I suddenly saw the palms of the
Avenida Maritime del Norte. I saw Carmencita. I called her. She replied, in Morisyen, in
only one composite, writhing exclamation:
‘MwamoYildis! ’
‘Your name is Yildis?’
I scanned a smorgasbord of human languages. Should I say Hajime Mashite, but no she
wasn’t Japanese. Or ask: you Ashkenaz or Safarad? Halwein caste? Shona or Ndebele?
Why was I complicating matters? In fact, it was all kismet, Bollywoodish and we
followed the Script: Turkish name, dark face, Mauritian, Muslim, no wedding rings [...].
I winked up at God the Great Matchmaker and she thought I was winking at her. She
smiled timidly, concentrating on her open sandals and hennaed toes, every inch ready for
fertilisation. An older self, sitting inside me melted into grainy Urdu poetry, delicate, like
listening to a beautiful dream.
‘Will you marry me?’ I asked.
Here’s how we do things, I thought, satisfied. No complications. No sitting in bars feeling
lonely and rejected. No uncertainties. No adultery. No drugs. I’d returned to Mauritius,
the moral centre of the world [...]. I was back full circle. Having sought for magnetic
Norths, I was back where I started: with my true North.
Martysevich 1
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 17, 2010:
Farhad A.K. Sulliman Khoyratty (Mauritius), Maryia Martysevich (Belarus),
David Hill (New Zealand), Pola Oloixarac (Argentina) and Najwan Darwish (Palestine)
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu
Maryia Martysevich (Belarus)
Rodeo Clowns versus Belarusian Martyrology
“Belarus is a crazy country: everybody’s too serious here.”
-Siarhej Michalok, a popular Belarusian rocker
The film, Brokeback Mountain, by Ang Lee, gave me an experience its creators hardly
expected anybody to have. While I could easily bring together homosexual and ranch aesthetics,
one aspect was totally surprising to me. There’s a scene in which the protagonist takes part in a
rodeo and suddenly falls off a bull. A rodeo commentator announces: “This guy seems to be in
trouble. It’s high time for a cowboy clown!” And indeed, the audience watches a rodeo clown
run around the ring in order to distract a furious animal’s attention from a fallen cowboy. As I
have never been to a rodeo, I was completely unaware that there were any actors except for a
cowboy, a bull and a popcorn seller. Thus, a gay cowboy as compared to a clown cowboy
seemed to be less controversial. Later, thinking about this character, I made up my mind that a
rodeo clown is a good metaphor for describing the functions of contemporary literature.
The tradition of European literature that I belong to has had two basic ways of dealing
with laughter. The first way is total division of tragedy and comedy as a canon of ancient
literature, as well as literature of classicism. The second one is a mixture of satire and irony with
grief and melancholy, as is the case in baroque and romantic literature. The best example of such
a mix, in my opinion, is Simplicius Simplicissimus written in 1668 by Hans Jakob Christoffel von
Grimmelshausen and inspired by the events and horrors of the Thirty Years' War, which
devastated Germany from 1618 to 1648.
As for Belarusian literature of the twentieth century, known mainly as “Belarusian
Soviet” literature, and which still forms a basis for contemporary writers, it is strongly influenced
by social realism, proclaimed in the 1930s as the only literary method in the Soviet Union. As the
dominant style of a communistic empire, social realism followed classicism and acted similarly.
So there was an undercover description of what could be funny in Belarusian creative writing
and what could not. One was obliged to be extremely serious when writing about The Nation,
The Language, The Revolution, The Nature, The War, The Harvest and The Village. Women
were sometimes allowed to write about The Love, but also with proper pathos. In the 1990s, after
the Soviet Union collapsed, topics of Chernobyl, Faith, God and National History were added to
this unpublished list.
Satire and irony could be used only in definite genres marked as “comic:” comic poetry,
comic song, a fable. They were treated as a low, trifling genre worth publishing only in the last
pages of magazines. And only an external enemy or a dishonest worker could be ridiculed. It’s
interesting that authors of all the most popular satirical poems describing Belarusian society in
the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries preferred to remain anonymous. The main point, I think, was
not to have a “trifle genre” mentioned in biography. It looked like the only possibility of writing
ironically about “serious“ topics in Belarusian Soviet literature was to write for children. This is
probably the reason why a Belarusian philosopher Valiantsin Akudovich recently mentioned the
book Mikolka-Paravoz (Mike-Locomotive) by Mikhas Lynkou among the modernistic Belarusian
canon. This book, beloved by many generations of Belarusian children, describes adventures of a
railwayman’s son during World War I and the Soviet Revolution.
Martysevich 2
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 17, 2010:
Farhad A.K. Sulliman Khoyratty (Mauritius), Maryia Martysevich (Belarus),
David Hill (New Zealand), Pola Oloixarac (Argentina) and Najwan Darwish (Palestine)
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu
While in Russian society in the 1980s such a cultural situation made satire and humor a
power of some postmodern dissidents, Belarusian dissident writers remained extremely serious,
talking about absurdness of Soviet reality. Some psychologists attribute this to national
mentality: in Belarusian dictionaries one can find about 20 synonyms for grief and just one or
two for happiness.
In spite of the changes within the last 20 years, seriousness is a main feature of what I
call “traditional Belarusian literature”. This seriousness is described by some critical intellectuals
as a “Belarusian martyrology.” As a result, the only thing an average Belarusian knew about
native literature is that it’s dull and not worth reading. That it’s something you are forced to
study at school to forget forever soon after finals.
So, a reaction came: around the Millennium, satire, humor and irony became the most
important means of post-modernistic authors in their attempts to stimulate readers’ interest. This
is not surprising, as, in my opinion, irony is the first language of smart people; when they face a
contemporary world, full of contradictions and absurdness.
One of the most ironic authors in contemporary Belarusian literature is the poet Andrei
Khadanovich. His poetry is closely related to the European literary tradition. Three years ago it
became the basis material for my postgraduate research of classical code in post-modernistic
Belarusian poetry. Let me read the English translation from Khadanovich’s book, Berlibres to
introduce you the style of his poetry (please see poem attached).
When making a report on this topic at the conference in my alma mater university, I
faced the lobby of literature studies professors, laughing at every quotation as if they were
watching a sitcom. After I finished, one of them came up to me and kindly said: “Dear girl, take
it easy! All your research is in vain, as I can’t see any “classical codes” in what Khadanovich
does. The only function of his “comic writing” is to entertain such serious authors as me.”
The most terrible thing about this reaction was that I never laughed when reading or
listening to those poems. Sometimes I may have smiled. But mostly I had tears in my eyes, as
irony of modernistic or postmodernistic authors concerns very deep archetypes of Belarusian
life.
In my own writing, I (sometimes unconsciously) match tragic and ironic pathos within
one text. And almost all the time I feel dissonance between my writing and the average reader‘s
feedback. Very often I hear people say that I’m a “stand-up poet.” I think these readers can
hardly imagine the sorrow that usualy makes my writing. Is this sort of misunderstanding good
or evil? I still don’t know. I just can note the ambivalence of contemporary Belarusian writing.
Laughter is a primary and natural emotion; furthermore, it can lead you toward thinking. It‘s up
to you. I’m sure, that what they call “real literature” must act in two ways: to entertain people
while working with rather tough topics, like facing a bull at a rodeo. To provide literature which
I believe is now necessary for my Reader, is the job of a rodeo clown.
By Andrei Khadanovich
COMMEDIA
Which cirle
Martysevich 3
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 17, 2010:
Farhad A.K. Sulliman Khoyratty (Mauritius), Maryia Martysevich (Belarus),
David Hill (New Zealand), Pola Oloixarac (Argentina) and Najwan Darwish (Palestine)
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu
of Dante´s Hell
is meant for the drunkards
who the day before were mixing
sweet wine with beer
and missed their chance to repent before death?
In this very circle
we woke up in the morning,
though formally speaking
we were in Poland
the city of Wroclaw
hotel Wodnik.
The spring sun soothed our pain a little
but didn´t evoke any desire
to talk in tercets.
Morining coffee transfered us to Limbo –
as pagan bastards
(meaning virtuous pagans),
or maybe even unbaptized infants?
(you should have seen the infantile physiognomy
of a poet sitting in front of me!)
We kept ascending
the Dante´s ladder
and here we were in the hotel Purgatory:
Finnish sauna, swimming pool,
TV set, pool table
and everything is free of charge.
Who knows how far into Heaven
we would have gone
if not for the check out time?
The receptionist´s name was Peter;
but we didn´t pay attention to his badge
when giving him our keys
and getting into a taxi.
translated from Belarusian by Valzhyna Mort
Hill 1
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 17, 2010:
Farhad A.K. Sulliman Khoyratty (Mauritius), Maryia Martysevich (Belarus),
David Hill (New Zealand), Pola Oloixarac (Argentina) and Najwan Darwish (Palestine)
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu
David Hill
Obscure Chuckles
Before addressing the topic, I want to say something about one singular aspect of trying
to write humour. I refer to the instant conflation in people's minds of the product with the
person.
My poet friends here at the Writers' Residency may write work that is savage,
despairing, exalted, full of rage or sexual obsession. Yet most of them are modest, balanced
people (up till 9 pm) and nobody feels cheated by this fact any more. The fiction writers,
dramatists, screen writers among them may present epic, anguished themes, yet nobody is
disappointed if they themselves turn out to be retiring and contented. Essayists and other nonfiction
writers are a little different; there's a certain expectation that they, like their material,
will be scholarly and interesting (and I want to stress that in terms of those I've met here, I
have not been disappointed – of course).
But if you write humour, there's an almost universal expectation that you also will be
funny. The result is that in the flesh, we disappoint more readers than writers in any other
genre.
Now the topic: the ways in which cultural changes are affecting humour. My culture in
Aotearoa / New Zealand is that of a small country. In spite of recent growth, we're likely to
remain small in the future. And one quality of our humour is the defensiveness of the little
guy, the sometimes prickly expectation of being condescended to because of our size, and a
tendency to pre-empt such condescension. You see it in NZ satirist Tom Scott's lovely
definition of New Zealand: “Help! Three million people buried alive in the South Pacific!”
More culturally significant, perhaps, is the fact that we're a small country close(ish) to a
much larger country. I refer to the noble nation of Australia. And like any small country, we
rejoice in humorous narratives where we can make guerrilla raids on our bigger neighbour.
For example, Australians maintain that we pronounce the “i” vowel in words like “grit”
or “tin” as an “uh” sound - “grut” or “tun”. This is a vile calumny, of course, but occasionally
it has been used to our advantage. One urban myth in our country refers to the graffiti that
supposedly appeared on a Sydney overbridge: “NEW ZEALAND SUX”. Next morning,
according to the story, another hand had painted below it: “AUSTRALIA NIL”
We're a culture whose national identity, and therefore national humour, is very much
bound up in sport, and the only cultural change I can see happening there is the way our
slowly-increasing diversity has meant a larger number of sports we can make jokes about.
Some years back, there was an infamous incident in a cricket international between New
Zealand and Australia. We were losing – of course; we have so many small-nation, selfdeprecating
jokes about our usually inept cricket team. They're called The Black Caps, and it's
sometimes suggested that this is because they play like toadstools.
Anyway, the nature of this particular cricket game changed suddenly. New Zealand
seemed about to score an unlikely win. We were batting, and from the last ball of the game,
six runs were needed to win. In cricket, the only way to score six runs from one delivery is to
hit it over the boundary fence on the full. The anxious Australian captain – in Australia, losing
a cricket match to NZ is a capital offence – ordered his bowler to bowl his last delivery along
the ground underhand, thus making it impossible to hit high in the air. This wasn't illegal
under the rules, but was emphatically contrary to the spirit of the game. Australia won as a
result. Next morning on the streets of Auckland, people were wearing T-shirts with the slogan
“AUSSIES HAVE AN UNDERARM PROBLEM.” I wonder if that quality of finding
humorous material in defeat is particularly characteristic of a small, edgy culture.
As I said before, Aotearoa/New Zealand is gradually becoming more multi-cultural.
Hill 2
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 17, 2010:
Farhad A.K. Sulliman Khoyratty (Mauritius), Maryia Martysevich (Belarus),
David Hill (New Zealand), Pola Oloixarac (Argentina) and Najwan Darwish (Palestine)
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu
But in the decades when I was growing up, we were essentially bi-cultural: Maori and Pakeha
(European – eg me). My parents would have been appalled to think that they were racist in
any way, yet they, like so many people of their generation, made “jokes” about “Maori Time,”
meaning an unreliability about punctuality. About “Maori PT” (Physical Training), meaning
resting or sleeping. About a “Maori car”, meaning a beat-up old vehicle. One Prime Minister
of NZ in the 1980s used such terms publicly, and was reluctant to apologise.
The renaissance of Maori culture during recent decades, plus – I hope – a greater
awareness on the part of many Pakeha, has meant that such expressions are no longer seen as
funny. One delightful exception is that they've been appropriated and subverted by a number
of Maori artists and performers, to unsettle and chasten the culture that coined them.
Now we also have Pasifika – Pacific Islands – and Chinese comedians who play with
European stereotypes of the feckless, innocent native or the Asian entrepreneur; Indian
playwrights who have had success with plays set in the archetypal Indian-owned corner store
(yes, just like The Simpsons); writers from Eastern Europe who use their experience of
cultural dislocation in funny and sobering fiction or nonfiction. For NZ, it's meant a widening
and shifting of humorous writing.
New Zealanders are also people who travel a lot outside their country, and I suggest that
this habit, with the experience of seeing through wide open, somewhat startled eyes, as Laura
Fish described so neatly in last week's panel, has affected the nature of our humour. We of
course aren't alone in this shock of the new, but I do wonder if for us, there's a higher “This is
how they do things over here?” content, combined with that defensiveness I mentioned earlier
at being reminded of how insignificant we are in the world.
Certainly, since I've been here, I've been constantly delighted – and amused – by all
sorts of little felicities. Coming across the name of a University building: “THE BLANK
HONORS CENTRE”. Buying a book on my first day here, saying “Thank you” to the shop
assistant – which in NZ would have ended the conversation – and then having her reply
“You're welcome”, which so delighted me that I exclaimed “That's lovely!”, to which she
replied “You're welcome,” and I had this instant vision of an exchange of courtesies that
might continue till the heat-death of the Universe. Overhearing another conversation, which
I've changed slightly to save myself from bruising: A: “Whare are you frahm?” B:
“Svitzerland.” A: “That's incredible! Ah'm from Arkansas!”
It's not only Americans who are funny, of course. I was talking to the excellent Andrea
Hirata a few days back. “How long has your family been living in Indonesia?” I asked. A look
of uncertainty and some consternation crossed Andrea's face. After a little discussion, I
realised it was that “i / uh” New Zealand pronunciation again, and Andrea had thought I was
asking how long his family had been loving in Indonesia. For generations, I'm sure, Andrea.
These are all trivial moments, of course, and like nearly all examples of comedy, they
evaporate when they're analysed.
No, sorry, they aren't trivial. I know there's still debate over whether humans are the
only species who laugh, who have a sense of humour. Some studies apparently suggest that
bonobos enjoy slapstick and pratfalls. But certainly for Homo sapiens, humour can be a social
cement, an art form, and an affirmation of our individual significance. It's the small person's
weapon against oppression. Aotearoa / New Zealand is an immensely fortunate place in terms
of personal freedoms, but 30 or so years back, we did have a Prime Minister with dictatorial
inclinations who brought in a series of very harsh financial measures. Within weeks, small,
plastic, children's-type savings banks, the sort where you put your money through a slot in the
top, were on sale throughout the country. They were cast in the shape of this Prime Minister's
emphatically porcine features, which had already earned him his nickname. Yes, our Prime
Minister called Piggy had been turned into a Piggy Bank.
Hill 3
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 17, 2010:
Farhad A.K. Sulliman Khoyratty (Mauritius), Maryia Martysevich (Belarus),
David Hill (New Zealand), Pola Oloixarac (Argentina) and Najwan Darwish (Palestine)
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu
Laughter states that we matter. In my small country, I feel privileged to try and write
material which may occasion it.
Oloixarac 1
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 17, 2010:
Farhad A.K. Sulliman Khoyratty (Mauritius), Maryia Martysevich (Belarus),
David Hill (New Zealand), Pola Oloixarac (Argentina) and Najwan Darwish (Palestine)
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu
Pola Oloixarac
Satire as Hacking
The matter of comedy has deserved very serious treatment throughout the life of books. This of
course includes cinema as well, and I'd like to share with you a 20th century definition, by the
American comedian Woody Allen.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuSaohflsR0]
The horse, channeling Alan Alda's voice, brings it forth: If it bends it's funny, if it breaks it isn't.
Woody was hired to depict this grand man, yet by making a comedy out of a comedian, he breaks the
pact, and ultimately gets fired. We may suppose Alan Alda was asking for the bending quality of
representation, to get the kind of self he was looking for. Instead, in Woody's book, the definition
reverts: If it breaks it's funny, if it bends... well, it just makes Alan Alda happy, and where's the fun in
that?
Mutable, ever-changing definitions of funny can vary violently across eras and authors, can
twirl against each other and even take themselves as their laughable target. However, the viral power of
comedy holds a particular strain, satire, whose almost romantic build-up is closer to timeless epic. For
satire is the genre of the little people against the giants (or the place where Giants and little people live
together, as in Swift's Gulliver’s Travels). It's also the classical genre for narrating the rebellion of
women: Shakespeare's comic heroines and Cervantes' difficult ladies are escaping marriage, are playing
with men's minds, and trying to have a life (if not a room) of their own. Satire has also starred in roles
as morality's bravest ally, more often than it has befriended libertines. Before society grew accustomed,
or trained, in finding aesthetic pleasure in the tale of its own perversities and excesses (that is, before
the trend of social realism came to embed the moral finesse of the culturati), satire was probably the
most powerful technology for twisting the arm of the contemporaries. You could only get away with
your pungent criticism to society by way of bringing tones of fun. You needed to make them laugh to
get your point across. Satire, and her mischievous little sister, Parody, have gone a long way, and have
always shaped themselves by following the contours of power –in order to break it. They are experts in
finding the vulnerabilities of power and breaking into it, filling the gaps with new meaning. Moreover,
as a master satirist may attest, only imminent breakage is proof of worthy writing. Thomas De Quincey
considers, in Murder As One of the Fine Arts, that “and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think
it an unanswerable objection (if we needed any), that, although he carried his throat about with him in
this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it.”
Yet, with all its manifold richness, there is method in its madness. Take a look at a classical
Marx brothers bit. A molecule of their humour shows the gap, the cut between worlds. A says give me a
break! And B pulls a brake out of his pocket. Comedy shows the gap between language and the world,
between ego and its mirrors. It shows that there's nothing natural in what we take for granted, and that
the consolidated powers we've grown to consider part of the natural landscape are artificial, and
therefore, because their engineered whims are reflections of men, can be bitterly comical. It comes to
show that the norm is made of mistakes, contradictions, discrepancies, power struggles, the ruins of old
wars that have become naturalized. And then suddenly you are part of the scene, staring at the invisible
carrot that had been hanging right between your eyes. By breaking the pact with the status quo, comedy
ultimately reveals the political and ideological. But perhaps this is an all-too-romantic definition, a hard
Oloixarac 2
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 17, 2010:
Farhad A.K. Sulliman Khoyratty (Mauritius), Maryia Martysevich (Belarus),
David Hill (New Zealand), Pola Oloixarac (Argentina) and Najwan Darwish (Palestine)
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu
one to maintain these days. Because today, the ideological norm is to be happy. Cheerfulness is
encouraged, and spiritual darkness frowned upon. Laughter is even part of the medical discourse, and a
saturnine character, a sign that something is wrong. Laughter (like sex) is empowering, the sign of a
healthy, successful, morally valuable person; sadness is bad for you (and probably causes cancer).
Comedy is, therefore, its underlying ideology, the global script with the mandate. The proliferation of
comedies of all sorts gives us an idea of a certain soothing quality of comedy that blatantly flatters the
hidden rules that we don't question, to help people live with a number of acceptable problems and to
provide them with a script of possibilities. Romantic comedies, office comedies, teen comedies, terror
comedies, are the hysterical flavors of the American ideological that always need to turn things into a
smile, into a “positive” attitude.
At the same time, our times favour the proliferation of a newborn class of humour and
communication. Parodies: we see them all over, breaking into previous representations, breaking out
into viral swarms: a moving, living form that takes on the electronic lives of online joie de vivre. Walter
Benjamin (born under the sign of Saturn, as Susan Sontag described him) held that, in the era of
massive reproduction, “copy” meant the loss of the aura; that mass-ification of works of art ultimately
kills whatever traces of the author lingered in them. Walter Benjamin was, of course, making a critical
point about American capitalism, and it's not difficult to see how the battle turned out. Eventually, copy
seems to have gained an aura, by way of parody. Every person could repeat, mimic, the former
representation, and hence attach his or her own subjectivity to the parodied object. So, OK, the Author
with capital letters got lost in copy, but now the parody-maker could turn into an author by the
thousands. In a way, it's as if parody has taken a Greek turn. Aristotle defined tragedy as the opposite of
comedy, as the ongoing staging of known facts that happens to noble people. So people in Greece went
to the theater to see Oedipus, and everybody knew how the story went, everybody knew he was going
to turn out blind, yet they would scream to the stage: “Don't go there Oedipus! She's your mom!” only
to watch how the dreaded ending inevitably, took place, to the repeated shock and awe of the viewers.
And the same happens with the most widely watched genres of our times: pornography and parody. In
parody, we see the endless list of people repeating patterns, and taking pleasure at mocking others. In
pornography, we see the on and on unfolding of the same events, the infinitely repeated series of
imperceptible variations on the same mythical scene, drawn to the limits of exhaustion, until the crucial
ending, inevitably crowned by the money shot. Pornography admits no surprises; and parody, no real
subjectivity. There might be juissance, but no further attempt against the ruling powers.
So, the question I'd like to ask you and myself on the topic of satire's global reach could be: how
do we keep comedy a critical endeavor, without losing a sharp edge? Is it possible to be defiant to
powers without being an intellectual clown? Or: which is the all encompassing narrative that hasn't
been hacked by literature? Is it possible to create “pure” satire, to work directly on the level of syntax,
to operate directly on the signs –in order to break them?
In my novel, “The Wild Theories”, there's a special attack designed to hack Google Earth. The
characters throw a party to launch their attack, and include specific instructions for anyone who wants
to partake in the breakage. (So as to avoid legal charges of inciting criminal behavior, I, as an author,
am one of the guests to the party: I, the author, didn't make the hack). The hack is called DNS cache
poisoning, and exploits a pretty interesting vulnerability of the architecture of the internet. There is a
flaw in this architecture that lies, precisely, in ideology. The openness of the internet, or what we call
openness, lies in a few computers that later translate the number of other computers into addresses (IP
addresses). These few computers centralize information, and can easily track it: there is a chain of
command of the authority that gives each computer one name for all to follow. If the web had, say, a
different architecture where all the nodes connected with each other, a true peer to peer connection,
Oloixarac 3
Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 17, 2010:
Farhad A.K. Sulliman Khoyratty (Mauritius), Maryia Martysevich (Belarus),
David Hill (New Zealand), Pola Oloixarac (Argentina) and Najwan Darwish (Palestine)
For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu
information would not be hosted somewhere for scrutiny, the packets would just flow horizontally from
person to person. There would not be pyramidal powers that oversee the packets, the subjects. If this
were this case, Google Earth would remained unhacked by literature, but this is not the case. Vint Cerf,
also known as one of the founding fathers of the internet, has said that this vulnerability is one of the
things that the founders didn't see coming and that they can't fix. In the literature of hacking, this flaw
had been duly noted on an advisory written by EK and Wari in 1997; however, the exploitation of the
flaw, that is, the re-writing of the procedure specifically for the maps came ten years later. DNS cache
poisoning is about the poisoning of images. In the technological side, it allows the hackers to fill up the
landscape screen with all the sentimental/historic/trivial garbage they can think of; ultimately, the
representation of chaos and memory in a fluid present hacked the objective, quantified, allencompassing
narrative of Google.
Our interactions are based on this architecture marked by ideology, which only becomes visible
once you break it, once you show the gap. It was ideological matter I was hacking into. Operating on
signs, breaking their syntax and meaning, the mutation of literature into informatic code, literally
executed by the end of the book, remained political. To poison the tissue of constructed reality had
mighty predecessors: the imps, the little creatures of Saxon folk that enjoyed creating chaos in the
world of men, and that live on in the root of impish, and in the rootkit of power hacks and every code
that revives the ancient promise of language: to utter words, that later happen and become real. In the
strain of epic satire, it wasn't merely a way to tag an EPIC FAIL to the biggest giant; it was about words
and their meaning, and what ultimately makes writing.
Darwish 1
Najwan Darwish
Fabrication
The whole thing is fabricated. Never have I believed the story that says you were slaughtered, and that your blood
poured all the way to the Mediterranean only to be consumed by the sea. I am sure the whole thing is fabricated.
Merriam Kershenbaum and Shlomo Ganor every night at 7:30.
Al-Hurra, “the free” [Satellite Channel], al-Arabiyya, “the Arabian”, and Al-Jazeera, “the Peninsula”. Taken together:
the “Free Arabian Peninsula”.
Merriam Kershenbaum and Shlomo Ganor. I am sure they are also fabricated.
The bills are placed in my mailbox by a person I do not know. The name of my family in three different languages.
They, also, are fabricated.
This woman who loves me through email.
Haifa, too, is fabricated. This is why I never go down the street, and I only look at the sea from a perpendicular angle.
Our friendship was in no one’s account. No one took the time to fabricate it; this is why it remained true. Oh! I forgot,
all truths are fabricated. This is why I enjoyed sharing with you Araq, apples, nuts and other things.
Nothing pressures me. This is why I am not torn when I see our land that has been stolen. The robbery was fabricated,
checkpoints are fabricated and the soldiers are a bunch of kids who still wet themselves. The elderly Greek Orthodox
women crossing the Bethlehem checkpoint this morning are, also, fabricated. “In the name of the cross!” is said in a
fabricated way. Good Friday is fabricated. The Byzantine melodies at the Maronite church in Nazareth is fabricated.
My enemies are fabricated, and my relatives are the epitome of fabrication. Hell is fabricated, and Paradise is fabricated
with even greater skill and spite. (Damn! Is Fairouz’s voice also fabricated?)
Darwish 2
No nightmares haunt me, nightmares are fabricated. I do not suffer any disorders of my biological clock. I have no old
enmity towards the sun, I do not suffer because of my inherited nature. All of these labels are fabricated.
I, too, am fabricated. Not because of who I am, but because all pronouns are fabricated. I do not hate collaborators; see
how I listen to their news commentators without vomiting?
I am not afraid of the alarm clock, or even AIDS or atomic weapons. I do not suffer a phobia from the door bell or the
ringing phone. The world will not end tomorrow. All of this is fabricated news.
I am tired of 21st century romanticism: romance mixed with the shit of consumers from all classes. If you want to live
you too must be tarnished. This theory is also fabricated.
Rejoice and be merry! The boxes filled with defeat stacked up under your grandparents’ beds are fabricated. And you
have been wailing all those years about losing your homeland. Dude! (Wow! As said in Classical way) Loss is
fabricated. A big lie formed by robbers of your existence.
Merriam Kershenbaum Shlomo Ganor, Al-Arabiyya, Al-Hurra Al-Jazeera and that leper who holds the remote control.
Cockroaches and collaborators are nice creatures. Look at how gentle this one is, and how sweet the ugliness of that
one’s face is. Our stereotypical ideas about their cheapness are fabricated.
A sedated group of men sit in the living room listening to the “Voice of Israel”. A respectable group of women make
“Tabbouleh” and think about the future after burying our public dignity. Don’t worry, these are all fabricated.
We cannot respect a few trees in front of our homes, leaving the mountains for those who set up the nets in our naps.
On the 22nd of April, 1948, Haifa surrendered. The date is fabricated.
On the 8th of December, 1917, a few Effendis carried their white flag and a picture was taken of them as they
surrendered Jerusalem. The event truly took place, but the picture is fabricated.
Darwish 3
You can, at any given time, gather a few Effendis and ask them to carry a white flag and march with it to Jaffa Gate to
take a picture.
The time is 11:30 just before noon on the first of April 2010. Everyone went to sleep and awoke, and I am still up.
Pillows are fabricated. In two weeks I will be going to Beirut. The Visa is an enormously fabricated obstacle. Oh, Our
Lady of Lebanon, pray for us (though we know your prayer is fabricated.)
In a while I am going to sleep as my wacky friend rides the bus from Nazareth. Words in Hebrew are flying around her
like flies because she thinks the language of the enemy is a corpse, so I tell her: This is a fabricated ideology, the
language of the enemy is a sexless robot. She bursts into a wacky, fabricated, laughter. We burst into laughter. Oh god,
we won’t die. We run into eternity as our flip-flops tap along. Eternity is fabricated. Everything that preceded was a
fabrication. Everything to come is also a fabrication. And each creature is raising its arms like a tree in this fabricated
poem.
(Translated from Arabic by Sausan Hamad)