Diyana was a Serb married to a Muslim and lived in Sarajevo. After eight months of enduring the siege, Diyana and her small daughter Sarah were able to join a busload of women and children leaving the city. They suffered many horrors along the way. Eventually the bus arrived in Split in Croatia. Diyana, like many of the other women refugees, had friends in Split who would have given her and her child shelter but this was not allowed. She told me, ‘One of my husband’s relatives came and paid a policeman to let me out with the child but he couldn’t do anything. I think it was political. If we get out, we will stay in Croatia and they don’t want refugees in Croatia. And that was the first time I was humiliated as a refugee.’
She went on, ‘There were about a thousand women and a lot of children who had travelled days to get there in buses, without water, without food. The authorities locked us in a new swimming pool complex and let us sleep on the floor. And round the swimming pool were tiles.’
A new swimming pool complex would undoubtedly contain showers, toilets and ample water. The Croatian authorities refused to let these Serbian and Muslim women use them. Diyana said, ‘They allowed us four toilets, with a small handbasin to wash hands, and by the time I got to the toilets there was no water and the toilets were very dirty. We were locked in. We couldn’t get out. We couldn’t get to a pharmacy to buy the things we needed. My daughter had already got gastroenteritis. I developed the most terrible thrush. I’d never experienced such an uncomfortable feeling, and I couldn’t do anything about it. It was purely stress, caused by stress, and I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t have water to wash myself and I was ashamed. I was clean in Sarajevo. You hear stories about humiliation, when you are not allowed to wash yourselves, you are not allowed to change yourself. You soon realize that you stink. Your hands are dirty, you don’t have anything to wash them. And it’s a humiliation for me, and I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to think about that, because I always remember those terrible two days.’
Shame is very threatening to our meaning structure because we are held in the eyes of other people and are seen. For our meaning structure to stay whole it needs privacy. Pride, both primitive pride and moral pride, erects barriers so that people cannot peer in, and the barriers become the ways we want to present ourselves to the world. But we are always conscious of the danger of being exposed to shame, no matter how excellent our credentials that we present to the world.
I saw an example of this outside Waterloo International Terminal when I had arrived from Paris on the Eurostar. I hurried to join the queue for taxis. Within seconds there were twenty people behind me in the queue. Immediately ahead of me was a tall, well-dressed man who turned round and, over my head, called his two colleagues further back in the queue to join him. They were also tall and well dressed and the three of them immediately fell into conversation. They were Americans of power and influence either in business or government.
I spoke up, distinctly and sternly. I said, ‘I trust that you are all going in the same direction and in the same taxi.’
They looked round at me. One nodded, the others said, ‘Er, yes,’ and they turned away. I had interrupted a busy conversation but now they fell silent. I thought that was because they were surprised at being reprimanded by a little old lady, but this was not so. It was the silence of shame. They had lied, and within minutes their lie would be revealed.
The queue was at right angles to the line of taxis so I had a clear view of what happened. Our queue shuffled forward as taxis arrived, loaded and departed until the two groups of travellers immediately ahead of the Americans claimed the next two taxis to arrive. As these people were loading their bags the three Americans, keeping close together, walked some ten yards away from me to the next empty taxi. The three of them appeared to be conferring with the driver and then getting into the taxi, but then one of them sneaked away and took the next empty taxi.
I watched and made sure they could see me watching. As his taxi moved past me the one whose lie was now manifest kept his head turned away as if he were deeply interested in the wall on the other side of the road.
No doubt the three of them could deal with their shame by assuring themselves they had only slightly inconvenienced me and the other waiting passengers. There was a long line of empty taxis coming to pick us up. I was amused at their behaviour, and relieved. If they had shown no shame I would have been furious at being outwitted. I was pleased they had shown some shame because in their positions of power and influence their ability to feel shame would help keep them honest. I once worked with a consultant psychiatrist who never felt shame. He would lie in front of people who, he knew, knew that he was lying. His lack of shame frightened and confused those who did have the power to challenge and rebuke him, and so, never being called to account, he could continue to improve his own position while bringing havoc into the lives of others.
Shame might be dangerous to our meaning structure, but it is one of the means by which we can establish and maintain good relationships with other people. We have to take other people’s interests into account. But shame is not just a matter of being seen by others. It is also a matter of being seen by ourselves. We can become the viewer and stand naked in our own eyes. In this situation the threat to our meaning structure can be immense and so, knowing this, we can deny ourselves much in order not to be shamed in our own eyes. We can do this in extreme conditions, as Primo Levi recalled:
I entered the Lager as a non-believer, and as a non-believer I was liberated and have lived to this day; actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity has confirmed me in my laity. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice. Why were the moribund packed in cattle cars? Why were children sent to the gas? I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in the October of 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death. Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in my hand, I was waiting to file past the ‘commission’ that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately to the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? And from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected that temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it.41
When we act as the other and shame ourselves we become a threat to our own meaning structure. We know what matters most to us, and when we want to criticize ourselves we know what to say to throw the whole meaning structure into doubt. I like to pride myself on being intelligent and well organized. When I took the wrong set of keys and locked myself out of my house my immediate reaction was to say to myself, ‘How can you be so stupid?’ This is the same phrase I often hurl at the television screen or a newspaper as yet another story of the blind stupidity of those in power or who want to be in power unfolds. This is but one small example of how, although our physiology condemns us to the isolation of our own meaning structure, other people are always part of us.
Others – the Necessity and the Threat
Other people are essential to us because they can confirm our existence. They can break through our essential isolation and confirm our meaning structure. But they can harm and even destroy us by withholding this confirmation. Torturers and jailers the world over know this. In May 1998 Graziella Dalleo was interviewed on the BBC.
While Argentina hosted the World Cup in 1978 and celebrated its success, many of its citizens were being tortured. Graziella