書評
民主徒有其表時，弱者瘋狂盤剝更弱者
2013年03月29日
Illustration by Josh Cochran
在《溺死者與獲救者》(The Drowned and the
Saved)中，普里莫·萊維(Primo
Levi)描述了奧斯維辛集中營里的一種感受，這種感受曾給他的許多難友帶去殺身之禍。他說剛進集中營的時候他以為，“這樣一群同陷囹圄的人，起碼應該是
團結的。”實際情況是，裡面有“上千個排外的群體，彼此間進行着隱蔽而持續的殊死搏鬥”。萊維稱之為“灰色地帶”，“人際關係的網絡”在這裡“不會簡簡單
單地變成迫害與受害兩大陣營”，“四周都是敵人，裡面也是。”
阿納瓦迪是孟買機場附近的貧民窟，凱瑟琳·布(Katherine Boo)精彩處女作中的故事就發生在這裡，從此處自生自滅的個體掙扎聯想到萊維在納粹集中營的求生，可能有種怪誕的不合時宜。布的書用幾個月的時間跨度， 講述了在阿納瓦迪撿垃圾的年輕人阿卜杜和他的朋友與家人的生活。說不可以和集中營相提並論，是因為這些勇敢頑強的“貧民”說不定就是下一個印度百萬富翁 ——至少近年有那麼一個故事可以供他們幻想之用，他們也許能成為那幸運的百分之一，在遠離阿納瓦迪的五星級酒店嘗一嘗優越生活的滋味。當然，正如《紐約 客》專職作者、2000年作為《華盛頓郵報》記者獲得過普利策公共服務獎的布在書中指出的，按照印度政府的“官方”標準，這些人不是窮人；他們是中央政府 “放手實施經濟自由化”後，“自1991年以來擺脫貧困的一億印度人”中的一員，“是現代全球市場資本主義歷史上最振奮人心的成功故事的一部分”,自我驅 動的經濟體系的建立，促使個體主動而機智地追求個人財富。
的確，“希望”是阿納瓦迪最常見的麻醉劑，比阿卜杜的拾荒夥伴們吸食的廢棄修正液更容易弄到。貧民窟的居民們“輕鬆地談論着美好生活，彷彿財富是他
們家的表親，這禮拜天就要來看他們，未來肯定不會是過去這個樣子”。然而，情況正如布介紹的，“每兩個人在阿納瓦迪的生活有了些許改善，就會有一個人墜入
萬丈深淵。”
包括阿卜杜在內的許多貧民窟居民會拿自己和那些更窮的鄰居比，從而產生生活蒸蒸日上的感覺——那些“逮老鼠和青蛙當晚飯吃”，或者“吃污水池邊的雜 草”的“可憐蟲們”。從處境艱難的農業區逃離的移民導致孟買廉價勞動力過剩，所以有男孩在被切割機切掉一隻手後，“顧不上還冒着血的傷口”，跑去向老闆保 證他不會告發。
兩歲女孩離奇溺死在一隻水桶里，父親把一鍋滾燙的扁豆倒在生病的孩子身上。布在書中解釋說，“有時候生病的兒童會被弄死，男女都有，因為照料他們是 要傾家蕩產的。”她還說，“貧民窟時常有小女孩不明不白地死去，因為大多數家庭沒錢做超聲波檢查，不可能像有錢人家那樣，趕在生下來之前把這些女性累贅處 理掉。”
成年人的命也一樣不值錢。阿卜杜的一個朋友死的時候被挖去了雙眼。傷者無人搭救，失血過多死在去往機場的馬路邊。和布相識的一個拾荒者身上的傷口感 染，蛆蟲在上面安了家。“手指的壞疽一點點向上蔓延，腿肚子腫成樹榦一般粗細，阿卜杜和弟弟打了一個賭，看這些撿垃圾的人里下一個死掉的會是誰。”
對這種持續不斷的死亡，在阿納瓦迪生活的人大多習以為常。阿卜杜和他的朋友們已經“接受了一個基本事實：他們的生活讓這個正走向現代化的、日漸繁榮的城市蒙羞，因此還是封鎖在一個小空間里別出來比較好，他們的生死根本無足輕重”。
有時候死者還會給生者添麻煩呢。所以當阿卜杜的那位脾氣暴躁的鄰居、只有一條腿的法提瑪身上着火時，一群人圍上來看，但沒有一個人出手相救：“大人 們溜達着回去吃飯，幾個男孩留下來觀察法提瑪的臉會不會掉下來。”法提瑪的丈夫想送她去醫院，結果發現開三輪車的紛紛躲着他，因為他們擔心“可能會把座椅 給毀了”。
至於附近的警察，在阿納瓦迪人眼裡完全是恐怖的化身。無家可歸的女孩被強姦，他們不管不問，但是會“很樂意把鼻涕擤到你的最後一片麵包上”。警方居然鼓勵法提瑪把責任推到阿卜杜一家身上，以便敲詐他們。一個政府官員威脅說不給他好處他就去收集偽證。
無論是空有其表的民主，還是充滿惡意卻又離不開奴隸階級的新資本主義，都無法緩解這種社會達爾文主義的殘酷。阿納瓦迪遠不是什麼心比天高的希望或人 類之大無畏精神的明證，它是一個灰色地帶，塵埃般微不足道的居民只有一個訴求，用普里莫·萊維的話說，就是“保住並加強”他們“在更低賤的人面前建立起來 的優越感”。布說，即便是那些相對比較富裕的人也會“阻止其他窮人改善生活，因為這樣就等於提高了自己的生活水平”。
《永遠美麗的背後》（[Behind the Beautiful Forevers]這個諷刺性的書名是有典故的，在阿納瓦迪外圍有一些把貧民窟遮擋起來的廣告牌，其中有一則意大利式地磚廣告上面寫着“永遠美麗”。）描 述了這場發生在城市底層的血腥競賽，但並沒有僅限於羅列暴行——否則就要被傾向於辯解的印度民族主義者貶斥為下水道檢查員報告了。本書是冒險深入阿納瓦迪 作長期調研的結果，通過許多不留痕迹的巧妙分析，在讀者面前構織出這些貧民窟居民的生活，每一個個體都經過紮實的調查。同時，強有力的文字也得益於布的樸 素文筆，只是偶爾會加入些富有想像力的自創表述（“夜燈粼粼的凱悅酒店”）和機敏的隱喻（“每天晚上，他們都扛着裝滿垃圾的麻袋回到貧民窟，就像一幫牙齒 殘缺、一心想着掙錢的聖誕老人”）。
然而《永遠美麗的背後》歸根結底是一場倫理的質詢，延續的是奧斯卡·劉易斯(Oscar Lewis)和邁克爾·哈靈頓(Michael Harrington)的偉大傳統。布在作者札記中提到，孟買呈現的這種“極致而普遍的不平等”景象引發了一系列的疑問：“為這個社會創造機遇的基礎設施 是什麼？這樣的市場和政府經濟和社會政策下，哪些人的能力被增強了？哪些人的能力被削弱了？……為什麼不平等社會出現內部崩裂的情況並不多？”她對政治和 商業的基本事實有着敏銳的觀察，同時也精於洞悉親情、家庭和觸目驚心的荒誕：一個女大學生費盡心思想搞懂《達洛維夫人》(Mrs. Dalloway /HC: VW的小說)寫了些什麼，與此同時，她最親密的朋友面對包辦婚姻，選擇服食鼠藥而死（死前救治她的醫生還向她父母勒索了5000盧比，合100美 元）。
你時不時會對書中那位無所不知的敘述者產生好奇。布本人沒有出現在她的敘述中，這也許是個明智的決定。一個美國白人記者如何克服受訪對象的戒心（以 及警察毫不掩飾的敵意），或者如何應對第一世界和第四世界近距離接觸產生的種種道德難題，這些角度並非本書旨趣所在。在這裡你看不到假裝天真的講解員，或 者在亞洲的險山惡水中跋涉的英勇探險家，你得到的是一種深邃的感受，先前對貧困和鬥爭的體驗細膩地貫穿着每一頁，同時也對意識形態認知提出了隱約的質疑。
印度的民主時常為西方世界所稱頌，與相對強權統治的中國相比，印度被看成具有巨大優勢，但布看到這個民主一樣會變成另一種互惠互利的內部網絡，讓權 勢人物如魚得水：定期的選舉演變為“一場畫餅充饑的國家遊戲，許多印度的老問題——貧困、疾病、文盲、童工——都得到了充分闡述”，可是“弱者對更弱者的 盤剝仍在繼續，極少有人干預”。
同時她也感覺到，為什麼許多支持民主的印度人也和其他一些地方的人一樣，開始對民主失去信心，甚至有些不屑，他們希望政府解除自身的社會福利職能， 而不是增強。布在書中指出，這些印度人“雇着私人保鏢，過濾着市政自來水，付着私立學校的學費。常年積累下來的這些選擇最終演化為一個原則：什麼都不管的 政府就是最好的政府”。
近年一些富有的印度人發起了一場甘地式抗議運動，引出許多關於印度腐敗問題的重彈老調，布在書中巧妙地避開了這些。她展現的腐敗問題，遠不是什麼惡 性的外部擴張，而是和印度的政治、經濟和社會體系緊密結合的。她寫道：“在印度權勢階層中，機會的分配是一場典型的內幕交易。”對於窮人來說，“在這樣一 個被腐敗竊走大量機會的國家裡，貨真價實的機會所剩無幾，而腐敗本身就是其中之一。”
身陷困境重重的當下，《永遠美麗的背後》只能暗暗提示那個沒那麼苦難的過去——一個在阿卜杜聽來與神話無異的“祥和年代”，“窮人選擇接受他們各自 的神靈在他們額頭上寫下的命運，反而可以更友好地相處。”聽上去像是太過羅曼蒂克的東方宿命論。然而事實的確如此，孟買這座幾百年前由英國自由貿易商人協 同其本土買辦建起的城市，從一開始就生活着來自內地農村的窮人，但他們從未像現在這樣絕望和無助。
在過去，來自農村的移民試圖在這座疏離的城市裡重建他們失落的群落傳統，這一度是孟買兩大出口項電影和音樂的重要內容來源。但阿納瓦迪人和以前的幾 代移民不同，他們不能去做那些回歸田園生活和集體共存的美夢。為了說明這一點，布的書暫時把目光移到了印度西部農村，由於被迫要從自給自足轉向全球化的經 濟模式，過去幾十年里西部有成千上萬的農民選擇了自殺。
在這裡，很多市民不只是“不再相信政府做出的脫貧致富的承諾”那麼簡單。布說：“大財閥和政府的現代化改造項目剝奪了他們的土地和世代相傳的生計， 迫使他們成為一場革命的支持者。這場革命是40年前的毛派革命捲土重來，如今在印度627個地區中有約三分之一的地方出現了游擊隊活動，他們用地雷、火 箭、釘子炸彈和槍與資本主義和印度政府展開對抗。”
在“偉大的資本主義成功故事”里赫然出現毛派革命分子，似乎是某種怪誕的時空穿越。但是在他們看來，當下的生活已經成為一場零和博弈，正在對農村進 行着肆意掠奪的財閥和政府也是這麼想的。阿卜杜的母親自然是“志在把兒子培養成一個能在無情的現代競爭中生存的人。這年頭，有人往上爬，有人往下掉，她從 小就告訴他，做人一定要往上爬”。
然而布用令人揪心的細節告訴我們，阿卜杜得到的訓練是不充分的。在被指控謀殺鄰居、成為“顛倒黑白”的司法體系的板上肉後，阿卜杜才發現“這種孤身一人的感覺如何面對，媽媽沒教過”。
近年來，印度表面上的“崛起”讓不少文學和新聞海盜開始打它的主意。印度和冷漠而令人討厭、甚至令人感到威脅的中國不一樣，這裡有說英語的熱心人和 定期選舉，可以很方便地安插到西式的社會進步敘事里。因此，近年大多數關於這個國家的書都不知不覺地摻入了大量的時代套話，諸如自由市場資本主義怎樣創造 普遍的機遇，給最底層的印度人帶去希望云云。
在全球化的時代，當機會進一步累加到已經處於優勢的階層，會是怎樣一番景象？在布的書中我們看到的是政府繼續着低能與腐敗，而多數市民都沉浸在一個個人財富與消費的幻想里，連希望都被私有化了，與任何集體的福祉都毫無關係。
從這一點看，本書並非只是關注近年出現在印度的這種虛妄的壯志豪情。正如布在書中所寫：“孟買呈現出來的東西，其他地方一樣也有”——比如在內羅畢 和智利聖地亞哥，在華盛頓和紐約。“在一個全球市場資本主義的時代，希望和不滿都是很具體的，從而讓一種陷入普遍困境的感覺顯得模糊了一些。”
她進一步解釋道：“面對政府和市場的選擇，窮人會說這是其他窮人的錯，我們這些不貧窮的人，一樣會毫不客氣地把過錯推在窮人身上。”在孟買這樣的地 方，“社會的整體結構中”掀起了“一點微不足道的波瀾”，“富人的大門……依然完好無損，……窮人間殺個你死我活，世界各地充滿不平等的偉大城市都在相對 的和平中繼續奮進。”《永遠美麗的背後》用平靜的語調打破了這種和平，其力度遠強於一些擺出抨擊和論述姿態的作品。這本書沒有局限於地理上的設定，給幾十 年來一直沉迷於意識形態麻醉劑的我們打了一針令人振奮的解藥——正是麻醉劑的作用，才讓我們把四處擴張的“灰色地帶”當做“偉大的成功故事”的一部分。
阿納瓦迪是孟買機場附近的貧民窟，凱瑟琳·布(Katherine Boo)精彩處女作中的故事就發生在這裡，從此處自生自滅的個體掙扎聯想到萊維在納粹集中營的求生，可能有種怪誕的不合時宜。布的書用幾個月的時間跨度， 講述了在阿納瓦迪撿垃圾的年輕人阿卜杜和他的朋友與家人的生活。說不可以和集中營相提並論，是因為這些勇敢頑強的“貧民”說不定就是下一個印度百萬富翁 ——至少近年有那麼一個故事可以供他們幻想之用，他們也許能成為那幸運的百分之一，在遠離阿納瓦迪的五星級酒店嘗一嘗優越生活的滋味。當然，正如《紐約 客》專職作者、2000年作為《華盛頓郵報》記者獲得過普利策公共服務獎的布在書中指出的，按照印度政府的“官方”標準，這些人不是窮人；他們是中央政府 “放手實施經濟自由化”後，“自1991年以來擺脫貧困的一億印度人”中的一員，“是現代全球市場資本主義歷史上最振奮人心的成功故事的一部分”,自我驅 動的經濟體系的建立，促使個體主動而機智地追求個人財富。
包括阿卜杜在內的許多貧民窟居民會拿自己和那些更窮的鄰居比，從而產生生活蒸蒸日上的感覺——那些“逮老鼠和青蛙當晚飯吃”，或者“吃污水池邊的雜 草”的“可憐蟲們”。從處境艱難的農業區逃離的移民導致孟買廉價勞動力過剩，所以有男孩在被切割機切掉一隻手後，“顧不上還冒着血的傷口”，跑去向老闆保 證他不會告發。
兩歲女孩離奇溺死在一隻水桶里，父親把一鍋滾燙的扁豆倒在生病的孩子身上。布在書中解釋說，“有時候生病的兒童會被弄死，男女都有，因為照料他們是 要傾家蕩產的。”她還說，“貧民窟時常有小女孩不明不白地死去，因為大多數家庭沒錢做超聲波檢查，不可能像有錢人家那樣，趕在生下來之前把這些女性累贅處 理掉。”
成年人的命也一樣不值錢。阿卜杜的一個朋友死的時候被挖去了雙眼。傷者無人搭救，失血過多死在去往機場的馬路邊。和布相識的一個拾荒者身上的傷口感 染，蛆蟲在上面安了家。“手指的壞疽一點點向上蔓延，腿肚子腫成樹榦一般粗細，阿卜杜和弟弟打了一個賭，看這些撿垃圾的人里下一個死掉的會是誰。”
對這種持續不斷的死亡，在阿納瓦迪生活的人大多習以為常。阿卜杜和他的朋友們已經“接受了一個基本事實：他們的生活讓這個正走向現代化的、日漸繁榮的城市蒙羞，因此還是封鎖在一個小空間里別出來比較好，他們的生死根本無足輕重”。
有時候死者還會給生者添麻煩呢。所以當阿卜杜的那位脾氣暴躁的鄰居、只有一條腿的法提瑪身上着火時，一群人圍上來看，但沒有一個人出手相救：“大人 們溜達着回去吃飯，幾個男孩留下來觀察法提瑪的臉會不會掉下來。”法提瑪的丈夫想送她去醫院，結果發現開三輪車的紛紛躲着他，因為他們擔心“可能會把座椅 給毀了”。
至於附近的警察，在阿納瓦迪人眼裡完全是恐怖的化身。無家可歸的女孩被強姦，他們不管不問，但是會“很樂意把鼻涕擤到你的最後一片麵包上”。警方居然鼓勵法提瑪把責任推到阿卜杜一家身上，以便敲詐他們。一個政府官員威脅說不給他好處他就去收集偽證。
無論是空有其表的民主，還是充滿惡意卻又離不開奴隸階級的新資本主義，都無法緩解這種社會達爾文主義的殘酷。阿納瓦迪遠不是什麼心比天高的希望或人 類之大無畏精神的明證，它是一個灰色地帶，塵埃般微不足道的居民只有一個訴求，用普里莫·萊維的話說，就是“保住並加強”他們“在更低賤的人面前建立起來 的優越感”。布說，即便是那些相對比較富裕的人也會“阻止其他窮人改善生活，因為這樣就等於提高了自己的生活水平”。
《永遠美麗的背後》（[Behind the Beautiful Forevers]這個諷刺性的書名是有典故的，在阿納瓦迪外圍有一些把貧民窟遮擋起來的廣告牌，其中有一則意大利式地磚廣告上面寫着“永遠美麗”。）描 述了這場發生在城市底層的血腥競賽，但並沒有僅限於羅列暴行——否則就要被傾向於辯解的印度民族主義者貶斥為下水道檢查員報告了。本書是冒險深入阿納瓦迪 作長期調研的結果，通過許多不留痕迹的巧妙分析，在讀者面前構織出這些貧民窟居民的生活，每一個個體都經過紮實的調查。同時，強有力的文字也得益於布的樸 素文筆，只是偶爾會加入些富有想像力的自創表述（“夜燈粼粼的凱悅酒店”）和機敏的隱喻（“每天晚上，他們都扛着裝滿垃圾的麻袋回到貧民窟，就像一幫牙齒 殘缺、一心想着掙錢的聖誕老人”）。
然而《永遠美麗的背後》歸根結底是一場倫理的質詢，延續的是奧斯卡·劉易斯(Oscar Lewis)和邁克爾·哈靈頓(Michael Harrington)的偉大傳統。布在作者札記中提到，孟買呈現的這種“極致而普遍的不平等”景象引發了一系列的疑問：“為這個社會創造機遇的基礎設施 是什麼？這樣的市場和政府經濟和社會政策下，哪些人的能力被增強了？哪些人的能力被削弱了？……為什麼不平等社會出現內部崩裂的情況並不多？”她對政治和 商業的基本事實有着敏銳的觀察，同時也精於洞悉親情、家庭和觸目驚心的荒誕：一個女大學生費盡心思想搞懂《達洛維夫人》(Mrs. Dalloway /HC: VW的小說)寫了些什麼，與此同時，她最親密的朋友面對包辦婚姻，選擇服食鼠藥而死（死前救治她的醫生還向她父母勒索了5000盧比，合100美 元）。
你時不時會對書中那位無所不知的敘述者產生好奇。布本人沒有出現在她的敘述中，這也許是個明智的決定。一個美國白人記者如何克服受訪對象的戒心（以 及警察毫不掩飾的敵意），或者如何應對第一世界和第四世界近距離接觸產生的種種道德難題，這些角度並非本書旨趣所在。在這裡你看不到假裝天真的講解員，或 者在亞洲的險山惡水中跋涉的英勇探險家，你得到的是一種深邃的感受，先前對貧困和鬥爭的體驗細膩地貫穿着每一頁，同時也對意識形態認知提出了隱約的質疑。
印度的民主時常為西方世界所稱頌，與相對強權統治的中國相比，印度被看成具有巨大優勢，但布看到這個民主一樣會變成另一種互惠互利的內部網絡，讓權 勢人物如魚得水：定期的選舉演變為“一場畫餅充饑的國家遊戲，許多印度的老問題——貧困、疾病、文盲、童工——都得到了充分闡述”，可是“弱者對更弱者的 盤剝仍在繼續，極少有人干預”。
同時她也感覺到，為什麼許多支持民主的印度人也和其他一些地方的人一樣，開始對民主失去信心，甚至有些不屑，他們希望政府解除自身的社會福利職能， 而不是增強。布在書中指出，這些印度人“雇着私人保鏢，過濾着市政自來水，付着私立學校的學費。常年積累下來的這些選擇最終演化為一個原則：什麼都不管的 政府就是最好的政府”。
近年一些富有的印度人發起了一場甘地式抗議運動，引出許多關於印度腐敗問題的重彈老調，布在書中巧妙地避開了這些。她展現的腐敗問題，遠不是什麼惡 性的外部擴張，而是和印度的政治、經濟和社會體系緊密結合的。她寫道：“在印度權勢階層中，機會的分配是一場典型的內幕交易。”對於窮人來說，“在這樣一 個被腐敗竊走大量機會的國家裡，貨真價實的機會所剩無幾，而腐敗本身就是其中之一。”
身陷困境重重的當下，《永遠美麗的背後》只能暗暗提示那個沒那麼苦難的過去——一個在阿卜杜聽來與神話無異的“祥和年代”，“窮人選擇接受他們各自 的神靈在他們額頭上寫下的命運，反而可以更友好地相處。”聽上去像是太過羅曼蒂克的東方宿命論。然而事實的確如此，孟買這座幾百年前由英國自由貿易商人協 同其本土買辦建起的城市，從一開始就生活着來自內地農村的窮人，但他們從未像現在這樣絕望和無助。
在過去，來自農村的移民試圖在這座疏離的城市裡重建他們失落的群落傳統，這一度是孟買兩大出口項電影和音樂的重要內容來源。但阿納瓦迪人和以前的幾 代移民不同，他們不能去做那些回歸田園生活和集體共存的美夢。為了說明這一點，布的書暫時把目光移到了印度西部農村，由於被迫要從自給自足轉向全球化的經 濟模式，過去幾十年里西部有成千上萬的農民選擇了自殺。
在這裡，很多市民不只是“不再相信政府做出的脫貧致富的承諾”那麼簡單。布說：“大財閥和政府的現代化改造項目剝奪了他們的土地和世代相傳的生計， 迫使他們成為一場革命的支持者。這場革命是40年前的毛派革命捲土重來，如今在印度627個地區中有約三分之一的地方出現了游擊隊活動，他們用地雷、火 箭、釘子炸彈和槍與資本主義和印度政府展開對抗。”
在“偉大的資本主義成功故事”里赫然出現毛派革命分子，似乎是某種怪誕的時空穿越。但是在他們看來，當下的生活已經成為一場零和博弈，正在對農村進 行着肆意掠奪的財閥和政府也是這麼想的。阿卜杜的母親自然是“志在把兒子培養成一個能在無情的現代競爭中生存的人。這年頭，有人往上爬，有人往下掉，她從 小就告訴他，做人一定要往上爬”。
然而布用令人揪心的細節告訴我們，阿卜杜得到的訓練是不充分的。在被指控謀殺鄰居、成為“顛倒黑白”的司法體系的板上肉後，阿卜杜才發現“這種孤身一人的感覺如何面對，媽媽沒教過”。
近年來，印度表面上的“崛起”讓不少文學和新聞海盜開始打它的主意。印度和冷漠而令人討厭、甚至令人感到威脅的中國不一樣，這裡有說英語的熱心人和 定期選舉，可以很方便地安插到西式的社會進步敘事里。因此，近年大多數關於這個國家的書都不知不覺地摻入了大量的時代套話，諸如自由市場資本主義怎樣創造 普遍的機遇，給最底層的印度人帶去希望云云。
在全球化的時代，當機會進一步累加到已經處於優勢的階層，會是怎樣一番景象？在布的書中我們看到的是政府繼續着低能與腐敗，而多數市民都沉浸在一個個人財富與消費的幻想里，連希望都被私有化了，與任何集體的福祉都毫無關係。
從這一點看，本書並非只是關注近年出現在印度的這種虛妄的壯志豪情。正如布在書中所寫：“孟買呈現出來的東西，其他地方一樣也有”——比如在內羅畢 和智利聖地亞哥，在華盛頓和紐約。“在一個全球市場資本主義的時代，希望和不滿都是很具體的，從而讓一種陷入普遍困境的感覺顯得模糊了一些。”
她進一步解釋道：“面對政府和市場的選擇，窮人會說這是其他窮人的錯，我們這些不貧窮的人，一樣會毫不客氣地把過錯推在窮人身上。”在孟買這樣的地 方，“社會的整體結構中”掀起了“一點微不足道的波瀾”，“富人的大門……依然完好無損，……窮人間殺個你死我活，世界各地充滿不平等的偉大城市都在相對 的和平中繼續奮進。”《永遠美麗的背後》用平靜的語調打破了這種和平，其力度遠強於一些擺出抨擊和論述姿態的作品。這本書沒有局限於地理上的設定，給幾十 年來一直沉迷於意識形態麻醉劑的我們打了一針令人振奮的解藥——正是麻醉劑的作用，才讓我們把四處擴張的“灰色地帶”當做“偉大的成功故事”的一部分。
邦卡姬·米什拉(Pankaji
Mishra)的新書《來自帝國的廢墟：對西方的反抗與亞洲的重建》(From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt
Against the West and the Remaking of Asia)於2012年8月出版。
本文最初發表於2012年2月12日。
翻譯：經雷
本文最初發表於2012年2月12日。
翻譯：經雷
Fighting for Scraps
March 29, 2013
In “The Drowned and the Saved,” Primo
Levi describes an experience that fatally undermined many of his fellow
condemned at Auschwitz. Entering the death camp, he had hoped, he wrote,
“at least for the solidarity of one’s companions in misfortune.”
Instead, there were “a thousand sealed-off monads, and between them a
desperate covert and continuous struggle.” This was what Levi called the
“Gray Zone,” where the “network of human relationships” “could not be
reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors,” and where “the
enemy was all around but also inside.”
It may seem grotesquely inappropriate to recall Levi’s struggles for survival in a Nazi camp while thinking of the apparently self-reliant individualists of a slum called Annawadi near Mumbai’s airport — the setting of Katherine Boo’s extraordinary first book, which describes a few months in the life of a young garbage trader, Abdul, and his friends and family. After all, these plucky “slumdogs” may be — in at least one recent fantasy — India’s next millionaires, part of the lucky 1 percent able to savor the five-star hotels that loom over Annawadi. Certainly, as noted by Boo — a staff writer at The New Yorker who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2000, when she was a journalist at The Washington Post — they are not considered poor by “official” Indian benchmarks; they are “among roughly 100 million Indians freed from poverty since 1991,” when the central government “embraced economic liberalization,” “part of one of the most stirring success narratives in the modern history of global market capitalism,” in which a self-propelling economic system is geared to reward motivated and resourceful individuals with personal wealth.
Indeed, hope is a more common intoxicant in Annawadi than the discarded bottles of Eraz-ex (the Indian equivalent of Wite-Out) inhaled by Abdul’s scavenger friends. The slum dwellers speak “of better lives casually, as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past.” Yet, as Boo details, “for every two people in Annawadi inching up, there was one in a catastrophic plunge.”
Many of the slum dwellers, including Abdul, gain their sense of upward mobility by contrasting their lot with that of their less fortunate neighbors, “miserable souls” who “trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner” or “ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake’s edge.” Migrants fleeing a crisis-ridden agricultural sector cause an oversupply of cheap labor in Mumbai, so the boy whose hand is sliced off by a shredding machine turns, “with his blood-spurting stump,” to assure his boss that he won’t report the accident.
A 2-year-old girl drowns suspiciously in a pail, and a father empties a pot of boiling lentils over his sick baby. As Boo explains, “sickly children of both sexes were sometimes done away with, because of the ruinous cost of their care.” “Young girls in the slums,” she adds, “died all the time under dubious circumstances, since most slum families couldn’t afford the sonograms that allowed wealthier families to dispose of their female liabilities before birth.”
Adults, too, drop like flies. One of Abdul’s friends ends up as a corpse with his eyes gouged out. Injured men bleed to death, unattended, by the road to the airport. Maggots breed in the infected sores of the scavengers Boo hangs out with. “Gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brothers kept a running wager about which of the scavengers would be the next to die.”
These continual human losses are taken mostly in a matter-of-fact way in Annawadi. For Abdul and his friends have “accepted the basic truths: that in a modernizing, increasingly prosperous city, their lives were embarrassments best confined to small spaces, and their deaths would matter not at all.”
Those deaths might even get the survivors into trouble. So when the one-legged Fatima, Abdul’s querulous neighbor, sets herself on fire, a small crowd gathers but does nothing: “The adults drifted back to their dinners, while a few boho'peys waited to see if Fatima’s face would come off.” Trying to take Fatima to the hospital, her husband finds himself shunned by autorickshaw drivers, who are worried about “the potential damage to seat covers.”
As for the nearby policemen, they embody pure terror in the eyes of Annawadians. They won’t balk at raping a homeless girl, and would “gladly blow their noses in your last piece of bread.” The police actually encourage Fatima to blame Abdul’s family so that officers can extort money from them. A government officer threatens to collect false witness statements unless she is paid off.
Neither India’s hollowed-out democracy nor its mean-minded new capitalism, which cannot do without a helot class, seems able to relieve this social-Darwinist brutishness. Far from being a testimony to the audacity of hope, the dauntless human spirit and that kind of thing, Annawadi turns out to be a gray zone whose atomized residents want nothing more than, in Primo Levi’s words, “to preserve and consolidate” their “established privilege vis-à-vis those without privilege.” Even those who are relatively fortunate, Boo writes, “improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people.”
Describing this undercity blood sport, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” (the ironic title is taken from the “Beautiful Forever” advertisements for Italianate floor tiles that hide Annawadi from view) does not descend into a catalog of atrocity — one that a defensive Indian nationalist might dismiss as a drain inspector’s report. The product of prolonged and risky self-exposure to Annawadi, the book’s narrative stitches, with much skillfully unspoken analysis, some carefully researched individual lives. Its considerable literary power is also derived from Boo’s soberly elegant prose, which only occasionally reaches for exuberant neologism (“Glimmerglass Hyatt”) and bright metaphor (“Each evening, they returned down the slum road with gunny sacks of garbage on their backs, like a procession of broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas”).
But “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is, above all, a moral inquiry in the great tradition of Oscar Lewis and Michael Harrington. As Boo explains in an author’s note, the spectacle of Mumbai’s “profound and juxtaposed inequality” provoked a line of questioning: “What is the infrastructure of opportunity in this society? Whose capabilities are given wing by the market and a government’s economic and social policy? Whose capabilities are squandered? . . . Why don’t more of our unequal societies implode?” Her eye is as shrewdly trained on the essential facts of politics and commerce as on the intimate, the familial and, indeed, the monstrously absurd: the college-going girl who struggles to figure out “Mrs. Dalloway” while her closest friend, about to be forced into an arranged marriage, consumes rat poison, and dies (though not before the doctors attending her extort 5,000 rupees, or $100, from her parents).
You wonder, intermittently, about the book’s omniscient narrator. Perhaps wisely, Boo has absented herself from her narrative. The story of how a white American journalist overcame the suspicion of her subjects (and the outright hostility of the police), or dealt with the many ethical conundrums created by close contact between the first and fourth worlds, belongs to another book. Instead of the faux-naïf explainer or the intrepid adventurer in Asian badlands, you get a reflective sensibility, subtly informing every page with previous experiences of deprivation and striving, and a gentle skepticism about ideological claims.
Boo can see how democracy, routinely lauded in the West as India’s great advantage over authoritarian China, can be turned into yet another insider network of patronage in which the powerful flourish: how periodic elections can be absorbed into “a national game of make-believe, in which many of India’s old problems — poverty, disease, illiteracy, child labor — were being aggressively addressed,” even as “exploitation of the weak by the less weak continued with minimal interference.”
She can also perceive why many well-off Indians have grown impatient with, even contemptuous of, democracy and, like their counterparts elsewhere, want to eliminate rather than enhance the social-welfarist obligations of government. For these Indians, Boo points out, “private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way.”
Boo deftly steers clear of the many banal notions about corruption in India unleashed recently by a quasi-Gandhian protest movement supported by affluent Indians. She shows how corruption, far from being a malignant external growth, is integral to India’s political, economic and social system. “Among powerful Indians,” she writes, “the distribution of opportunity was typically an insider trade.” And for the “poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.”
Fully inhabiting India’s troubled present, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” can only hint at a less oppressive past — a “peaceful age” that to Abdul sounds like something out of myth, a time when “poor people had accepted the fates that their respective gods had written on their foreheads, and in turn treated one another more kindly.” This may seem too romantic a picture of Oriental fatalism. It is true, nevertheless, that migrants from the rural hinterland, drawn to Mumbai for hundreds of years — as long as the city, as constructed by British free-traders and their native collaborators, has existed — were never as desolate and defenseless as they are now.
So much of the city’s most popular exports — cinema and music — originated in the past from the attempt by rural migrants to recreate, in the big alienating city, the traditions of their lost community. But unlike Mumbai’s previous generation of migrants, Annawadians cannot have any soothing dreams of a return to village life and its communal solidarities. Boo makes this clear in a brisk digression to a rural region of western India where thousands of farmers, forced out of a subsistence economy into a globalized one, have killed themselves in the previous decade.
Here, many citizens have not only “stopped believing the government’s promises about improving their fortunes.” As Boo explains: “Deprived of their land and historical livelihoods by large-scale corporate and government modernization projects, they’d helped revive a 40-year-old movement of Maoist revolutionaries. Employing land mines, rocket launchers, nail bombs and guns against capitalism and the Indian state, the guerrillas were now at work in roughly one-third of India’s 627 districts.”
The Maoists seem a weirdly anachronistic intrusion in the “great success narrative of capitalism.” But for them, as much as for the corporations and governments dispossessing the Indians in the countryside, life in the contemporary world has turned into a zero-sum game. Not surprisingly, Abdul’s mother, too, has “raised her son for a modern age of ruthless competition. In this age, some people rose and some people fell, and ever since he was little, she’d made him understand that he had to rise.”
As Boo shows in wrenching detail, however, Abdul’s training turns out to be incomplete. Falsely accused of murdering his neighbor, and fully exposed to a “malign” justice system, Abdul learns that “his mother hadn’t prepared him for what it felt like, falling alone.”
The ostensible “rise” of India has attracted its share of literary and journalistic buccaneers in recent years. Unlike China (unlovably aloof, even menacing), India, with its eager English speakers and periodic elections, is easier to slot into a Western narrative of progress. Thus, most recent books about the country, un-self-consciously suffused with the clichés of the age, speak of how free-market capitalism has ignited a general explosion of opportunity, fostering hope among the most destitute of Indians.
Boo describes what happens when opportunity accrues to the already privileged in the age of globalization, governments remain dysfunctional and corrupt, and, with most citizens locked into a fantasy of personal wealth and consumption, hope, too, is privatized, sundered from any notions of collective well-being.
In this sense, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is not just about India’s delusory new culture of aspiration. For as Boo writes, “what was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too” — in Nairobi and Santiago, Washington and New York. “In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament.”
“The poor,” she explains further, “blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.” Meanwhile, only “the faintest ripple” is created “in the fabric of the society at large,” for in places like Mumbai, “the gates of the rich . . . remained unbreached, . . . the poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.” In its own quiet way, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” disturbs this peace more effectively than many works of polemic and theory. Transcending its geographical setting, the book also provides a bracing antidote to the ideological opiates of recent decades — those that made the worldwide proliferation of gray zones appear part of a “great success narrative.”
It may seem grotesquely inappropriate to recall Levi’s struggles for survival in a Nazi camp while thinking of the apparently self-reliant individualists of a slum called Annawadi near Mumbai’s airport — the setting of Katherine Boo’s extraordinary first book, which describes a few months in the life of a young garbage trader, Abdul, and his friends and family. After all, these plucky “slumdogs” may be — in at least one recent fantasy — India’s next millionaires, part of the lucky 1 percent able to savor the five-star hotels that loom over Annawadi. Certainly, as noted by Boo — a staff writer at The New Yorker who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2000, when she was a journalist at The Washington Post — they are not considered poor by “official” Indian benchmarks; they are “among roughly 100 million Indians freed from poverty since 1991,” when the central government “embraced economic liberalization,” “part of one of the most stirring success narratives in the modern history of global market capitalism,” in which a self-propelling economic system is geared to reward motivated and resourceful individuals with personal wealth.
Indeed, hope is a more common intoxicant in Annawadi than the discarded bottles of Eraz-ex (the Indian equivalent of Wite-Out) inhaled by Abdul’s scavenger friends. The slum dwellers speak “of better lives casually, as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past.” Yet, as Boo details, “for every two people in Annawadi inching up, there was one in a catastrophic plunge.”
Many of the slum dwellers, including Abdul, gain their sense of upward mobility by contrasting their lot with that of their less fortunate neighbors, “miserable souls” who “trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner” or “ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake’s edge.” Migrants fleeing a crisis-ridden agricultural sector cause an oversupply of cheap labor in Mumbai, so the boy whose hand is sliced off by a shredding machine turns, “with his blood-spurting stump,” to assure his boss that he won’t report the accident.
A 2-year-old girl drowns suspiciously in a pail, and a father empties a pot of boiling lentils over his sick baby. As Boo explains, “sickly children of both sexes were sometimes done away with, because of the ruinous cost of their care.” “Young girls in the slums,” she adds, “died all the time under dubious circumstances, since most slum families couldn’t afford the sonograms that allowed wealthier families to dispose of their female liabilities before birth.”
Adults, too, drop like flies. One of Abdul’s friends ends up as a corpse with his eyes gouged out. Injured men bleed to death, unattended, by the road to the airport. Maggots breed in the infected sores of the scavengers Boo hangs out with. “Gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brothers kept a running wager about which of the scavengers would be the next to die.”
These continual human losses are taken mostly in a matter-of-fact way in Annawadi. For Abdul and his friends have “accepted the basic truths: that in a modernizing, increasingly prosperous city, their lives were embarrassments best confined to small spaces, and their deaths would matter not at all.”
Those deaths might even get the survivors into trouble. So when the one-legged Fatima, Abdul’s querulous neighbor, sets herself on fire, a small crowd gathers but does nothing: “The adults drifted back to their dinners, while a few boho'peys waited to see if Fatima’s face would come off.” Trying to take Fatima to the hospital, her husband finds himself shunned by autorickshaw drivers, who are worried about “the potential damage to seat covers.”
As for the nearby policemen, they embody pure terror in the eyes of Annawadians. They won’t balk at raping a homeless girl, and would “gladly blow their noses in your last piece of bread.” The police actually encourage Fatima to blame Abdul’s family so that officers can extort money from them. A government officer threatens to collect false witness statements unless she is paid off.
Neither India’s hollowed-out democracy nor its mean-minded new capitalism, which cannot do without a helot class, seems able to relieve this social-Darwinist brutishness. Far from being a testimony to the audacity of hope, the dauntless human spirit and that kind of thing, Annawadi turns out to be a gray zone whose atomized residents want nothing more than, in Primo Levi’s words, “to preserve and consolidate” their “established privilege vis-à-vis those without privilege.” Even those who are relatively fortunate, Boo writes, “improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people.”
Describing this undercity blood sport, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” (the ironic title is taken from the “Beautiful Forever” advertisements for Italianate floor tiles that hide Annawadi from view) does not descend into a catalog of atrocity — one that a defensive Indian nationalist might dismiss as a drain inspector’s report. The product of prolonged and risky self-exposure to Annawadi, the book’s narrative stitches, with much skillfully unspoken analysis, some carefully researched individual lives. Its considerable literary power is also derived from Boo’s soberly elegant prose, which only occasionally reaches for exuberant neologism (“Glimmerglass Hyatt”) and bright metaphor (“Each evening, they returned down the slum road with gunny sacks of garbage on their backs, like a procession of broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas”).
But “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is, above all, a moral inquiry in the great tradition of Oscar Lewis and Michael Harrington. As Boo explains in an author’s note, the spectacle of Mumbai’s “profound and juxtaposed inequality” provoked a line of questioning: “What is the infrastructure of opportunity in this society? Whose capabilities are given wing by the market and a government’s economic and social policy? Whose capabilities are squandered? . . . Why don’t more of our unequal societies implode?” Her eye is as shrewdly trained on the essential facts of politics and commerce as on the intimate, the familial and, indeed, the monstrously absurd: the college-going girl who struggles to figure out “Mrs. Dalloway” while her closest friend, about to be forced into an arranged marriage, consumes rat poison, and dies (though not before the doctors attending her extort 5,000 rupees, or $100, from her parents).
You wonder, intermittently, about the book’s omniscient narrator. Perhaps wisely, Boo has absented herself from her narrative. The story of how a white American journalist overcame the suspicion of her subjects (and the outright hostility of the police), or dealt with the many ethical conundrums created by close contact between the first and fourth worlds, belongs to another book. Instead of the faux-naïf explainer or the intrepid adventurer in Asian badlands, you get a reflective sensibility, subtly informing every page with previous experiences of deprivation and striving, and a gentle skepticism about ideological claims.
Boo can see how democracy, routinely lauded in the West as India’s great advantage over authoritarian China, can be turned into yet another insider network of patronage in which the powerful flourish: how periodic elections can be absorbed into “a national game of make-believe, in which many of India’s old problems — poverty, disease, illiteracy, child labor — were being aggressively addressed,” even as “exploitation of the weak by the less weak continued with minimal interference.”
She can also perceive why many well-off Indians have grown impatient with, even contemptuous of, democracy and, like their counterparts elsewhere, want to eliminate rather than enhance the social-welfarist obligations of government. For these Indians, Boo points out, “private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way.”
Boo deftly steers clear of the many banal notions about corruption in India unleashed recently by a quasi-Gandhian protest movement supported by affluent Indians. She shows how corruption, far from being a malignant external growth, is integral to India’s political, economic and social system. “Among powerful Indians,” she writes, “the distribution of opportunity was typically an insider trade.” And for the “poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.”
Fully inhabiting India’s troubled present, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” can only hint at a less oppressive past — a “peaceful age” that to Abdul sounds like something out of myth, a time when “poor people had accepted the fates that their respective gods had written on their foreheads, and in turn treated one another more kindly.” This may seem too romantic a picture of Oriental fatalism. It is true, nevertheless, that migrants from the rural hinterland, drawn to Mumbai for hundreds of years — as long as the city, as constructed by British free-traders and their native collaborators, has existed — were never as desolate and defenseless as they are now.
So much of the city’s most popular exports — cinema and music — originated in the past from the attempt by rural migrants to recreate, in the big alienating city, the traditions of their lost community. But unlike Mumbai’s previous generation of migrants, Annawadians cannot have any soothing dreams of a return to village life and its communal solidarities. Boo makes this clear in a brisk digression to a rural region of western India where thousands of farmers, forced out of a subsistence economy into a globalized one, have killed themselves in the previous decade.
Here, many citizens have not only “stopped believing the government’s promises about improving their fortunes.” As Boo explains: “Deprived of their land and historical livelihoods by large-scale corporate and government modernization projects, they’d helped revive a 40-year-old movement of Maoist revolutionaries. Employing land mines, rocket launchers, nail bombs and guns against capitalism and the Indian state, the guerrillas were now at work in roughly one-third of India’s 627 districts.”
The Maoists seem a weirdly anachronistic intrusion in the “great success narrative of capitalism.” But for them, as much as for the corporations and governments dispossessing the Indians in the countryside, life in the contemporary world has turned into a zero-sum game. Not surprisingly, Abdul’s mother, too, has “raised her son for a modern age of ruthless competition. In this age, some people rose and some people fell, and ever since he was little, she’d made him understand that he had to rise.”
As Boo shows in wrenching detail, however, Abdul’s training turns out to be incomplete. Falsely accused of murdering his neighbor, and fully exposed to a “malign” justice system, Abdul learns that “his mother hadn’t prepared him for what it felt like, falling alone.”
The ostensible “rise” of India has attracted its share of literary and journalistic buccaneers in recent years. Unlike China (unlovably aloof, even menacing), India, with its eager English speakers and periodic elections, is easier to slot into a Western narrative of progress. Thus, most recent books about the country, un-self-consciously suffused with the clichés of the age, speak of how free-market capitalism has ignited a general explosion of opportunity, fostering hope among the most destitute of Indians.
Boo describes what happens when opportunity accrues to the already privileged in the age of globalization, governments remain dysfunctional and corrupt, and, with most citizens locked into a fantasy of personal wealth and consumption, hope, too, is privatized, sundered from any notions of collective well-being.
In this sense, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is not just about India’s delusory new culture of aspiration. For as Boo writes, “what was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too” — in Nairobi and Santiago, Washington and New York. “In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament.”
“The poor,” she explains further, “blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.” Meanwhile, only “the faintest ripple” is created “in the fabric of the society at large,” for in places like Mumbai, “the gates of the rich . . . remained unbreached, . . . the poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.” In its own quiet way, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” disturbs this peace more effectively than many works of polemic and theory. Transcending its geographical setting, the book also provides a bracing antidote to the ideological opiates of recent decades — those that made the worldwide proliferation of gray zones appear part of a “great success narrative.”
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