RAINBOW AND GRANITE
The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism By Deborah Baker, Viking, Rs 450
In her essay, “The New Biography” (1927), Virginia Woolf, quoting Sir Sidney Lee’s remark that “the aim of biography is the truthful transmission of personality”, writes: “No such single sentence could more neatly split up into two parts the whole problem of biography as it presents itself to us today. On the one hand there is truth; on the other there is personality. And if we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers have for the most part failed to solve it.” Woolf, of course, was writing this at a time when the art of life-writing was in its infancy. Since then, biographers have failed in varying degrees in getting the right mix of granite and rainbow. Deborah Baker, however, belongs to the category of those who have succeeded. I was tempted to add ‘miraculously’ after ‘succeeded’, but The Convert proves that the process of combining fact and fiction involves more painstaking research and detective work than miracles. In fact, if this book has a setting, it is the New York Public Library’s archives and manuscript division, from where starts the story of Margaret Marcus of Larchmont as told by Deborah Baker, when the latter chances upon 24 letters written between 1962 and 1996 by Margaret.
Baker’s version starts on April 18, 1962, when Maulana Abul A’la Mawdudi of Icchra, Lahore sends a letter to young Maryam Jameelah, expressing his joy at her acceptance of his invitation to come to Pakistan and live in his home. This Maryam Jameelah was known as Margaret Marcus in another life of intense dissatisfaction, when she was the daughter of middle-class Jewish-American parents, Herbert and Myra Marcus. In the early 1960s, when she was 28 years old, Margaret converted to Islam, because, as she said in a letter to her parents, she had chosen “to live according to her most deeply held beliefs”. Later, in Pakistan, Margaret would become a fierce apologist for Islam, upholding its values as the panacea for all that ails the West. Rejecting the idea of parenthood as she believed was embodied in Herbert and Myra, she found a surrogate father in Mawdudi, better known as the founder of the radical Islamic group, the Jamaat-e-Islami, and a home in Islam. In denouncing her biological parents and their faith, Margaret was indicting not just her upbringing but also the whole of the philistine West. As she sailed to Pakistan on the Maulana’s invitation, she watched ordinary men and women going about their daily tasks in Muslim Egypt and wrote: “I see their dignity and gentleness, their exquisite manners and open-arm hospitality, their unquestioning faith. I envy them their lives, beyond the reach of ‘technical assistance’ and the poisoned fruit of modernization.”
This will sound precocious if one is in a kind mood, and annoyingly patronizing and ignorant if one is inclined to be less than charitable. The letter from which the above sentences are quoted comes at the very beginning of the book. It is the first letter in Margaret’s own voice, following the two from Mawdudi and Herbert Marcus. Baker allows the reader to form her own judgment of Margaret before she begins to analyse and interpret her subject for the reader. After the letter, Baker joins in to say: “Anonymity is my vocation. I inhabit the lives of my subjects until I think like them…. I find myself most susceptible to those tuned to an impossible pitch, poets and wild-eyed visionaries who live their lives close to the bone. Haunting archives, reading letters composed in agony and journals thick with unspeakable thoughts, I sound the innermost chambers of unquiet souls; unearth dramas no one would ever think to make up.”
So here is the image of the biographer as a bookworm, leading an unassuming life hidden among dusty shelves in library archives, but with a secret life in which she sometimes becomes “a woman who dreamed of words as numbers” (In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding), sometimes the gaily-feathered Beatnik poets (A Blue Hand), and here, a damaged idealist who gave up the supposed freedom of a Western lifestyle for the dark security of the purdah. Writing biographies becomes a kind of fictioneering, as the writer enters the lives of her subjects imaginatively and sees feelingly. So much for the rainbow. The letters, journals and writings form the bedrock of granite from which the flights of fancy take off. Baker gives another twist to Margaret’s already twisted tale by confessing at the end that she has “rewritten and greatly condensed [Margaret’s] letters”. But before Baker, her subject herself had rewritten her own life in the letters, manipulating facts to suit her needs.
Since life-writing is in vogue now, Baker’s efforts would probably have gone unnoticed had it not been for her sharpness and the disarming honesty with which she takes the reader along with her on the quest for her subject’s haunted life. The assumed reader is another ficto-fact which Baker keeps addressing constantly even as she sifts through Margaret’s correspondence. She can expertly pre-empt the reader’s responses because she is not just the author of Margaret’s life but also the reader of the fiction Margaret creates of herself in her letters.
Taken in by the tale of the upright exile, Baker ardently examines Margaret’s life for answers to such searing questions as: is the bridge between the East and the West really unbridgeable, as Margaret seemed to insist, or are they caricatures of each other? Can one find a solid justification for Mawdudi’s call for global jihad if one looks from the East to the West instead of the other way round? In other words, to use the well-worn cliché, is one man’s freedom-fighter the other man’s terrorist? At no point does Baker trust Margaret completely as a narrator. Yet, as a baffled researcher “exiled to a state of devastation and doubt” by the seemingly irreconcilable differences and, more alarmingly, by the similarities, between the Orient and the Occident, she “looked to her for the outsider’s crucial insight, a blind seer’s clarifying truth”.
Starting off from New York, touching base in Lahore, the search ends where it all began — in the lunatic asylum. Margaret, with her persistent questioning of the values the West lived by, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia by American doctors who swore by Freud, and institutionalized. She had found her way out in Islam and Pakistan. Yet, within a few months of her stay in Pakistan, Margaret is committed to an asylum again, this time by Mawdudi, who had once welcomed her to a new life of dubious freedom.
Perhaps Margaret, with her obsession for absolutes, had always been mad. Or is madness another name for discomfiting questions which society must disavow to keep itself safe? Whatever the case may be, as Baker reads the descriptions of Margaret’s interactions with her American psychiatrists (who inevitably attribute her uncontrollable anger at and extreme disaffection with America’s cherished ideals to sexual repression), she finds in them an “uncanny portrayal of the relationship between America and the Muslim world: a catastrophic folie à deux in which both sides brought out the monster in each other”.
With monsters and madness we are back to Herr Freud, one of whose doomsayings forms the epigraph to this book: “Whoever undertakes to write a biography binds himself to lying, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flummery.” After going through the tumult that is The Convert, such a pronouncement sounds ridiculously uni-dimensional, if not entirely false. This work does not lie, it just blurs the boundaries between truth and falsity, between fiction and fact. The meaning of the book is condensed in its jerky form, which becomes the battleground where the inner demons of the West and the East fight one another over a seemingly insignificant woman who had the courage to summon them up. Perhaps this is what Woolf, in her essay, “The Art of Biography”, had called “that high degree of tension which gives us reality”.
ANUSUA MUKHERJEE
I once said Islam is about magical relaism. I stand vindicated.