Every disclosu
re of truth happens at a decisive moment, when we hardly expect someone out there who has come to disclose it. I have heard an anecdote1 about someone destined to be called 'insane' by a society which unfortunately considers itself sane. The man was running naked. He abhorred clothes. The whole village is running after him to clothe him. 'Civilisation is indispensable,' the chasers remind the man, 'the faster you run, the nearer you are to getting civilised.' They caught him, bound him down and, despite his wild, empty, wails, clothed him.
I got thought-provoking feedback to this anecdote. 'Was it not a great achievement for them to give him awrat,' the Islamist said, having relieved about an averted calamity. 'The man is a rebel and a revolutionary in the making. There is no doubt about that. The problem is that his rebellion and revolution does not have an organised and formal outlet,' the Marxist said, as if the organised naked marathon of the whole Polit Beareau members would turn the capitalist social order upside down.
Anecdote 2: Mary Haskel: Nudity, love and hatred (From my reading of Kahlil Gibran: Man and Poet, a new biography, Suheil Bushuri and Joe Jenkis)
For Gibranophile, Mary Haskel needs no introduction. She was the patron, lover, teacher and editor of the Lebanese poet. When Gibran moved without direction, she anchored him. She gave him money whenever he needed it (to set up studio, to organise an exhibition etc). Mary thought her financial aid to Gibran was a token of her love. But she did not reveal it to the poet (How intensely he would dislike the love founded on m
oney). But she insisted on the repayment of money through his gifting of his paintings to her instead. This was meant for keeping the poet responsible to some extent. But the pent-up secrecy in these dealings exploded one day. Mary could not drive the poet home to why she was helping him, leading him to misunderstanding. They parted.
Later, painter Arthur B Davies made arrangements for drawing Mary. 'When she arrived at his studio, he asked her to pose nude. She was surprised, not shocked: “it never occurred to me to suggest waiting till we were better acquainted. It seemed wholly impersonal. We talked and it was over.” When she told Gibran that she posed nude, he burst into jealous fury. [Arthur was Gibran's sort of rival].
To this anecdote, Noushad, himself a Gibranophile who gave me the book to read, responded: 'I think love enables you even to hate.' I did not think in the same way. I smsed back: 'Perhaps, lovers frustrated over not being loved in the same intensity and abandon that they love, would go to whatever extent possible to give vent to their frustration. It's unpredictable. This frustration is not hatred. But love in its stark intensity.'
At the surface level, as for an aesthete like Mary, posing nude is a non-issue. But, deeply, does she not believe in the sanctity of body being covered, when she violates it at the spurt of her anger? Although Gibran had drawn many nude models before, he had not drawn the one of Mary before. Nor had Mary posed nude for anyone before. Do all women not believe in the sanctity of their body, which the ogling eyes and pathologically erect penises violate without her consent or which she is forced to violate out of professional or emotional compulsions?
This leads me to what Alija Izet Begovic says about nudity, while discussing about Milan Kundera's character in his 'Prison Notes':
'Kundera's Theresa felt nakedness as a sign of the compulsory uniformity of concentration camp, a sign of humiliation.'
Is this post-modernity, in which nudity is a cult, not another concentration camp, which, through many a wardrobe malfunction and many an item number, compulsorily but subconsciously unifies the choice of whether to wear or not and of what to wear or not.
Surely, the whole discourse on nudity, including this post, is conditioned, bordering as it is on the nudity of a subject- the women.
Anecdote 3: Teaching the chastity of nudity.
A parent did not send her daughter to Mary's school because Gibran's nude painting was hung on the wall. Of this Mary wrote to Gibran. The poet replied: 'The wisest and kindest thing to do is to take down from the walls all the pictures that offend the girls and their mothers. The thought that a painting of mine is making someone uncomfortable, in body or in spirit, is a source of pain and unhappiness in me. We cannot teach the chastity of nude. People must find it for themselves. We can't lead people to the heart of life. They must go by themselves, and each one must go alone.'
'Nudity and clothes date back to Adam and Eve in Eden. Eden, which was shrouded by the clothes of civilisation, is our dream and destination,' Gibran's nude pictures whispered when I saw them.
1Courtesy Noushad
