Soniah Kamal
“Everyone has some point at which they think that, all things considered, it’s not that in those circumstances lying isn’t wrong, it’s just that telling the truth would be so much worse. I am the SS. Do you have any Jews in your cellar? Does anyone think the right answer is yes, if it’s true?” Appiah went , “But I do think there is a separate issue with identity questions. If you are asked directly to reveal your deepest sense of who you are, it’s particularly difficult not to tell the truth. This is especially true in the free world, in the modern world, because we have this idea that you have the right to express your identity in the social world. And that one of the things that’s wrong with the situations that force people to pass.”
“Black for white passing first brought the Americanism passing into use…passing looks a lot different in our time than it did in the pre-civil rights days…”
from Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are by Brooke Kroeger, 2003
In ‘Passing: When People Can’t be Who They Are’, Brooke Kroeger explores people who pass in our socially less rigid times for who they are not and yet feel they must be to reap advantages otherwise not available to them. Where once upon a time blacks and Jews needed to pass as white or gentiles, as other, to lead better lives if not to outright save their lives, today the modern-day passers Kroeger writes about are predominantly homosexuals whose lives might not be threatened but whose opportunties and dreams certainly are e.g. a gay Jew who want to become a Rabbi, a lesbian Naval officer referred to as the Careerist in the book because even after retirement she cannot come out of ‘hiding/passing’ on risk of being Court Martialed and losing her pension built upon twenty years of service. However there are other instances in the book, for example the Walt Whitman Award winning poet/Village Voice pop music critic who, in order to write his criticisms takes on the pseudonym of a woman simply because the ‘authentic voice’ comes to him in the persona of Jane Dark. When he was ‘outed’, the persons that he’d ‘lied’ to seemed less offended/upset, if at all, than he was upset with himself. Society accepted his ‘deceit/pretense/alter ego/fluid identity’ call it what you will while he himself seemed to find society’s blatant okayness problematic…
In Pakistan– a group oriented society where being an individual, or at least radically different, is routinely discouraged– the one instance of ‘passing’ that seems to be fairly rampant and socially acceptable if not even encouraged is women– and even many men– liberally lying about their age. It is nothing for women, especially if they are single (unmarried has such ugly connotations, no?) to routinely present themselves as at least five years younger than they really are. In fact so insidious is this practice that most people automatically tack on an extra three to five years to a girl’s age.
Which is highly irritating for the likes of me who actually do tell the truth and do not see the merits of passing for younger and frankly couldn’t careless. And yet…and yet…in Pakistan and amongst Pakistanis I routinely find myself avoiding answering questions about my age for the sake of family and friends because apparently not only will I ruin their their lives if the truth comes out, at the very least I will humiliate them and make them the recipient of smug looks from those whose ages will not be outed because they don’t have foolish friends or relatives like me. Passing for younger seems a game the entire country plays even when they know how old someone really is. In Pakistan, where society is such a small milieu, it is quite impossible to not know the real ages of the girls suddenly years younger than you. Come on! Girl! Guy! We know you are close to forty and not the thirty you purport to be and please no need to take out your passport or other ID with Date-of-Birth to verify the truth of your lies. But this is the way in a country where marriage prospects are eons better if one is younger on account, you see, of ovaries apparently going defunct pass age twenty, and in a world where prospects in general seem better the younger one is. If one person breaks the chain, I am warned, we all fall down and that will not do. So for your collective malaise I’m to sacrifice my individual rights? This will not do. I would like to tell the truth, and, guilty, I do. Only to be glared at by family and friends: what purpose can telling your real age possibly serve? Well, the only purpose that faking one’s age serves is perpetuating the myth that youth is fairer and lovelier, and perpetuating a poisonous culture wherein ‘there is a prime for woman’ after which she dulls and fades and may as well hide her face and die…
Who has not sat through a movie where a perfectly lovely heroine has been maligned with comments such as ‘boori ho gayee hai, thakhi wee lag rahee hai, hero kee Ma lag rahee hai ‘, she looks aged, she looks tired, she looks like the hero’s mother’. I had the pleasure during a recent trip to Pakistan to watch, with a group, the Indian film ‘Bhoothnath’ starring Amitabh Bachan, Shahrukh Khan and Juhi Chawla. Part way into the movie, the men, all around forty years of age, began confirming with each other that indeed Juhi was looking older, much older, indeed she had become decrepit, Shahrukh kee Maa lag rahi hai. The women at the gathering are all thirty plus or younger and they all glance at each other almost guiltily, all perhaps wondering what I was wondering. Really? said I out loud. Shahrukh kee Ma lag rahi hai, is it? You men are welcome to your opinion but pray, do tell, from where exactly does Juhi look old? Because I think she looks bloody gorgeous. Better than any of you any day. And how come she looks old enough for you to merit comment but Amitabh Bachan who is old enough to be her Daddy jee and looks it never-the-less merits not a single comment from the collective-you. I suppose Sean Connery, and Clint Eastwood, and Robert Redford, and Mel Gibson playing strapping, nubile heroes are perfectly kosher with y’all even if they should be babysitting their leading lady rather than romancing her. I am told in, all good humor of course, that I’m insane, and while in Pakistan to shut up and please get with the program and once I return to America (where these sexist double standards exist in Hollywood too) to shout out my feelings from the rooftops. And yet, as more popcorn and Sprite and Black Label is brought out, the men do look sheepish and the women decidedly smug even if, come tomorrow, they’ll be telling me not be insane, not to under any circumstances, force them into a corner by divulging my real age.
