Performances of power, desire

To end is to begin. When something finishes, something starts, too. And that is how Pakistani author Mohammed Hanif’s Rebel English Academy begins — with the death of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979. “On the night of the hanging, everything is as calm and orderly as it should be in a jail devoted to the safety and care of one very important man.” Pakistan was a nation in flux, its democratic foundations being chipped away by the authoritarian Islamist regime of Zia-ul-Haq. Under martial law, political parties were restricted, labour strikes were banned, the press was censored, and the people were suppressed through permits and curfews.

The Hudood Ordinances further inserted the state into the most intimate corners of life— sex, adultery, rape, women’s bodies — rewriting the law in the language of religious authority. It was a nation being remade in the image of its worst impulses, and it is into that remaking that Hanif sets his story.

This state, in Hanif’s telling, is embodied by Captain Gul, a military intelligence officer tasked with crushing the “Bhutto Lives” movement, a “soldier of the mind” in the loosest possible sense, a man who dreams of charming Indira Gandhi and impressing American presidents, a man with a high libido and little shame.

Baghi or Salim Ahmed Salim is a former revolutionary hollowed out by state torture, now teaching English to the city’s underclass from a corner of the Gol Mosque compound, a gay atheist in a nation where both his desires and doubts are criminal. Beaten and tortured by the state, all he’s left with is his Rebel English Academy, where he tries to give his students “a sense of complexity. If they can hold the opposites in their head at the same time, within the same sentence, they are educated.”

Baghi’s friend and landlord is Maulvi Rafique, “Molly,” a man who has found the new order quite profitable.

His mosque is a marketplace, his piety a performance, his religiosity a career, his hypocrisies wrapped in the gift paper of piety. 

Into his and Baghi’s world arrives Sabiha Bano, a young widow and the daughter of a jailed labour leader, carrying a rusted pistol and a sports bag, with no illusions about the men offering her shelter. “Nothing makes a man harder than a woman on a chain, a woman in a cage, a woman on a chain in a cage.”

She has been thrown from one place to another, always in the service of her so-called saviours, a woman with few dreams and fewer options, and she knows it. 

In here, everybody is performing, and the performance is always slightly wrong. The state performs authority, the clergy performs virtue, the revolutionaries perform conviction, and the partner performs loyalty. Heck, even death is a performance, the best of them all.

“If death can be described as your reunion with your creator, your one and only rendezvous with your beloved, your carousel into an eternal life, your chance at sharing a heavenly abode with seventy-two beautiful ladies who never fart or menstruate and whose orgasms last for eight hundred years, why would you just call it death?”

But whether it’s the state or the mosque, the fuel remains the same: desire masquerading as piousness. Captain Gul, watching a recording of a woman being raped, “feels horny and then rage at feeling horny. A righteous anger uncurls in his chest.” 

In another scene, Molly is pressuring his wife to accept a new wife, Sabiha, the widow he lusts over. When asked back whether she should then “spread my legs in front of another man” after his death, Molly, first confused, then gets furious, “What are you saying, woman? Do you have no shame?” This shame travels in one direction only, always belonging to someone else. 

The novel’s great recurring joke is not really a joke. “It is often overlooked that the centuries-old wisdom that has arrived at our doorstep might be an ancient accumulation of lack of wisdom thereof or a litany of tomfooleries perpetuated through the ages.” The novel may be set in 1979, but the story has no interest in staying there.

The names may change, the uniforms may change, the slogans may change, the ordinances may get rewritten, but the shame, as always, travels downward. The story doesn’t end there, never does. It merely relocates.