| Monday, April 30, 2007 10:04PM | | | | The most dangerous game | Posted By: Catherine Texier
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| Tags: modern-day Sheherazade, sushi table woman, taboo | Wayne Koestenbaum opened the sex and danger panel with a reading of the most sensational lines of Antonin Artaud’s Momo poem Between the ass and the shirt/
between the gism and the under-bet,/ between the member and the let down,/
between the membrane and the blade…/between the ass and everyone's/seizure/
of the high-pressure trap/ of an ejaculation death rattle/ is neither a point/nor a stone..” a kind of challenge to contemporary writers who write about sex and to publishers. Can they top that? And would those lines be published today?
The theme of the panel was about breaking another kind of taboo: not the taboo of language, per se, but the silence surrounding the sexual act in certain cultures. Four panelists had been invited: Dany Lafferière, whom we encountered earlier in the week at the Maison Français of NYU, and who wrote How to make Love to a Negro without really trying (abbreviated in the States to How to Make Love, since the N word seems to give the jitters to Americans). Lafferière is from Haiti and now lives in Canada, and the label of “sex writer” has stuck to him ever since he published that first novel. Dubbed by his translator, he told a funny/sarcastic story about sex and overpopulation in Haiti that involved a lot of arithmetic, (for instance: how could his mother make love when there were 15 kids in the house – only when she could send them all to the movies) ending with the conclusion that on any given day, in a country of 2 million inhabitants, 1 million cannot make love – “which it the only way to maintain a dictatorship.” In contrast, when he arrived in Montreal, Lafferière was given the key to a room - “A room of one’s own” and if he liked a girl, she would have a key to her own room, and they could make love without problem.
Edmund White, who broke many taboos of his own in his writings about gay sex, contrasted pornography with sexual realism, which was a new and fresh material when he started to write. Nowadays, he is “maligned,” he complained, for encouraging young people to have sex, “as if they need to buy a book to have the idea to have sex!” He mentioned the reactions of students in Texas who balked at one of his books: “we couldn’t get past the pedophilia,” the shocked students said. The scene involved a 16 year old with a 14 year old, and it was clear, in that case, that the younger one had seduced the older one and was exploiting him. For White, the last taboo is consensual sex between an adult and a teenager, like the high school teacher who was sent to jail for having had an affair with a 12 year old student – whom she later married when she got out, and is raising a family with.
But the most frightening taboos were those broken by Tinling Choong and by Camelia Entekhabifard.
Tinling Choong took the podium to explain why she wrote about women’s bodies in her first novel, FireWife, which just came out. A native of Malaysia who now lives in the States, she defines herself as belonging to the Chinese diaspora, and she believes that her experience of having been uprooted means that she belongs everywhere and nowhere, and “when you’ve been displaced, the only thing you can hang on to is the body.” She says she writes from a place of placelessness. The idea for WireFife came from seeing a photograph taken in Japan of a female body, naked and lying down, used as a platter to display sushi. “It’s a rare Japanese practice, the sushi table woman, but I was very affected when I saw that photograph. I was furious. I wrote a short piece that night. I started to write and I couldn’t stop. It set me free. “ Another photo that inspired her was a photo of “pussies smoking in Bangkok.” That’s when Choong decided to create the character of the photographer Nin, who had lived a life of caution and responsibilities, and decided to set out on a five month journey to do a photo essay around the world (taking the photographs that had affected Choong so much), becoming bold and carefree in the process. “Sex,” Choong said, is a “human vacillation. To fuck or not to fuck. To be or not to be.” She added that for her, writing in English, which is not her native tongue, was extremely liberating. She wrote the book with sexual candor, and unselfconscious explicitness. “Passages of the book were published on nerve.com, and won their Henry Miller Award. I called my parents and told them! I wasn’t embarrassed at all. I thought I should have been, but I wasn’t.”
Camelia Entekhabifard experienced first-hand the powerful sexual taboos that dominate Iranian life. She was a journalist in Teheran, writing for an Iranian newspaper, when she started researching a story about sex among religious men. Sexual repression is so brutal in Iran that young women and men are not allowed to go out together in the street, she explained. They can be arrested by the police, and the young woman sent to a hospital to determine whether she is still a virgin. If the doctors determine that she lost her virginity, the young man will be forced to marry her. There is a little town in Iran where religious men congregate, and which has the biggest seminary school in Iran. The town is so devout that women are not allowed to walk outside without the long, black chador. And of course, as in other parts of Iran, no men and women are allowed to get together unless they are married. The holy men’s solution to take care of their irrepressible sexual urges? Marry the prostitutes for a few minutes or an hour, a legal union called a “temporary marriage.” At the end of the time they spent together, the marriage is dissolved, and the woman free to “marry” another “husband.” That was the story Entekhabifard was working on when it became such a scandal that the paper she was working on was closed, and the story never published. And she was thrown in jail.
This was a terribly dangerous situation for Entekhabifard, who was retained in solitary confinement. She was accused of being a spy, a foreign agent, of having insulted the Supreme Leader. She risked several years in jail.
A modern-day Sheherazade, she decided to play a “dangerous game” in order to gain her freedom. “I had to seduce my interrogator, and find a way to flirt with him.” Since she was blindfolded, she only had her hands to seduce him. She became her jailer’s mistress, and she was released. The seduction was successful. We, in the audience, were not surprised. All dressed in black, with crimson high-heeled pumps, she told her story in a soft, slight-accented voice, which must have driven the interrogator crazy, although she acknowledged that when she was free and she met him again, he told her it was her hands that had seduced him.
Entekhabifard immediately asked for political asylum in the States and has been living here ever since then.
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