Shame and Shameless

I recently came across an interview that Synne Rifbjerg had with author Zadie Smith at the Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark in 2017. I’m fascinated by Zadie Smith’s ability to understand the human psyche; I chose this interview because I think there is a pretty significant crossover between shame, writing, and publishing. 

The first question that Rifbjerg asks is “What is shame?” to which Smith replies that shame “gets a bad rep these days.” Smith otherwise implies that shame has a negative connotation where the debilitating aspects of shame outweigh the potential for shame to allow you to “propel you on to something.” 

In listening to how Shameless Hussy Press was founded in 1969, I was interested in how Alta settled on the name. She mentions that along with other writers, she had incredible difficulty in getting published. Originally, the press company was supposed to be titled Sisters in Struggle (supposedly to highlight the press company as an alternative for women who were trying to get their work published). However, Alta later changed the name of the press to Shameless Hussy. To me, it seems that Alta was more focused on transforming the “struggle” into an action which, in a way, reclaims the shame surrounding marginalized people who wanted to put their work to print but weren’t given the opportunity to. This is consistent with Smith’s interview where she mentions that there is a “Shame of not being understood, or not being able to make yourself understood is kind of a corrosive type of shame.” Alta suggests that the shame of not being understood challenged her to make her own publishing company, where she was allowed to be shameless. 

Furthermore, alternative publishing companies were motivated by the corrosive types of shame that can debilitate writers and began to organize publishing companies that were shameless. This Bridge Called My Back is certainly another example of the intersection between shame, writing and third world feminism. 

Yet, Alta mentions later in the interview that women destroyed her machinery and burned all of her books. In response, both Alta’s daughter Lorelai, and the interviewer Remi concur that women were threatened by a feminist press. What’s evident to me is the duality of shame, particularly the duality of being shameless. In this case, these women who destroyed the collective works of these authors, writers, and poets were entirely shameless. In fact, the act of destroying and burning books is reminiscent of when Nazis burnt books as a form of religious, and cultural censorship. According to Zadie Smith, “to be shameless is to be very very dangerous.” In turn, Alta and Shameless Hussy Press were able to internalize the shame imposed on them by women and continue to create work that threatened the status quo. That too, is dangerous, considering the fact that their physical being was being threatened. 

In conclusion, shame and being shameless, can both help and hurt depending on the situation. I find that Smith’s words allow shame to come to the forefront of emotions that are associated with writing rather than just a deeply internalized feeling.