Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (8 page)

But my optimism was misplaced.

Over the previous year there had been a spate of novels and memoirs, some of them bestsellers, published by youngish women of Iranian origin. Many of these books, I gathered (I hadn’t read any of them), dealt with the period of the Shah’s downfall and the rise of the fundamentalists, which was the period Nasreen had been attempting to cover in her own novel.

Even the most well-balanced writers are prone to anxiety about their work being preempted by other books. I suffer from it myself. So it wasn’t a huge surprise to learn that Nasreen was unhappy about these rival publications. What
was
surprising, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been, was to find out how she intended to deal with this unhappiness.

“You and Paula pandered my work” was the first clear indication. Over the next few weeks, murkily, but with steadily growing conviction, Nasreen began to elaborate a theory in which I and various Jewish cohorts were guilty of deliberately preventing her from finishing her book so that we could steal her ideas and sell them to these other writers, most of whom happened to be Jewish as well as Iranian.

Like all conspiracy theories, this required constant adjustment in order to accommodate both Nasreen’s own shifting grievances and the obstinate bits of reality that stood in its way. Sometimes I appear to be acting alone; sometimes the complexity of the charges requires me to have been in league with one or both of my “yentas” (Janice and Paula), and sometimes the scale of my operation is perceived to be so vast that Nasreen is forced to link me to entirely new networks of co-conspirators, including, at one time, most of the faculty of the Morgan College writing program. So too with the authors we’re accused of helping: sometimes the denunciations focus on one in particular, sometimes two or more are grouped together, and there are periods in which I and my gang appear to be supplying as many as four desperate, unscrupulous writers with Nasreen’s material, all at the same time.

A kind of feedback effect occurs now, between the increasingly villainous scenarios Nasreen imagines and the pitch of her rage, each intensifying the other. “Janice gives you manuscripts…,” begins one,

that you type up in your boring trying-to-be-white style.

you are the downfall of a culture. go back to england. we don’t want you here.

[…]

We rule now, your ways are OVER. you’re all dying off …

get a toupe.

The emails become more apocalyptic in tone:

oh what will happen to you all … your stupid fortress … your stupid stupid life made from other people’s blood and sweat …

More overtly threatening:

X [one of the Iranian authors] is fucked. And if you have something to do with this, you are too …

More bitterly sarcastic:

i hope the money is worth it

when should i expect to see the rest of my work stolen?

More firmly accusatory even in their moments of apparent lucidity:

I’m sorry I fell in love with you but I don’t understand why you’re punishing me with the books that have come out

More wide-ranging in their vitriol, as in this group email addressed to me, Paula, and Y (another Iranian writer, somehow involved in our conspiracy):

Y, keep your cunts-on-a-leash away from my material. […] You’re all pathetic, and I’ve had enough of your thievery. If you don’t have a single thought of your own and your little empty-headed heiresses don’t either, spare the American reader. But do not touch my work. I know what you’re all up to and so do writers much more influential than anyone in your circle of crows.

More menacing in their demands for compensation:

I want every cent …

of what James made in “ghostwriting” from my emails for Z [another “buyer”] the whore. Or else I’m going to make him pay in other ways.

And more fantastically comprehensive in the evils they attribute to me:

Boycott this man, for God’s sake. He’s the reason behind terrorism.

By now, early 2008, I was beginning to feel seriously harassed, though it was still the tone of the emails rather than the content that was getting to me: the violent hatred they projected, rather than the accusations themselves. These latest ones, in particular, seemed too self-evidently preposterous to worry about. I was even a little relieved that they were as wild as they were. Who could possibly take seriously this idea that I was some kind of literary racketeer who had stolen her material in order to sell it off to other writers? It was too ridiculous to pay any attention to. I also felt, despite the widening embarrassment it entailed, protected by the growing number of people Nasreen now appeared to have in her sights. By this time she had copied me on emails she’d sent not only to Janice and Paula but also to several other writers and teachers she considered part of my conspiracy. These emails reserve their worst venom for me, but since they also attacked the recipients, they gave me a feeling of safety in numbers, at least on this particular front.

But I was forgetting the principles of assymetric warfare. I was forgetting my own observations about weakness as a source of strength, powerlessness leveraged into power. And I was forgetting the spirit of fair play that prevails among most people, whereby anyone claiming to have been victimized must be listened to with an open mind, however far-fetched the claim and however honorable-seeming the alleged victimizers.

“
James’s Amazon Reviews, read em!
” runs the heading of the email Nasreen sent out on the morning of December 30, 2007. The email begins, in taunting parody of the tones of authentic victimhood: “I hope I’m not in trouble for speaking the truth…”

I logged, very warily, on to Amazon.

The review, under the byline “
a former student of lasdun
,” was posted on the page for my book
Seven Lies
. I’d never quite believed in the sensation you read about in novels of print swimming before a character’s eyes at moments of high agitation, but that was precisely the effect. Words seemed to undulate as I looked at the screen. Phrases came in and out of focus: “… writers who teach at mfa programs like mr. lasdun…” “… my work was stolen…” “… after I told him I was raped while trying to finish my novel…” “… he used my writing (emails to him) in that story…”

Even with these preliminary reiterations of the familiar charges, I had the sensation that a new order of harm was being inflicted on me. First the private attacks had been extended to form that little intimate theater of mortification comprised of my colleagues and acquaintances, and now a window had been opened up to the wider world. As if conscious of her new audience, Nasreen adopts a more measured voice. Laying aside the mask of naked rage, she poses instead as the scholar-victim who has taken it upon herself to deconstruct my work and expose the sociopathic attitudes encoded within it:

Having read Horned Man, I think he may have a penchant for sadism. His short story “the Siege” is disturbing in romanticising surveillance […] It’s also racist in sexualizing a black woman from a “revolutionary” country, who loves her husband but is demeaned and made to have sex with “the english composer” to save her true love’s life.

You don’t have to be a writer to imagine how it feels to find yourself the object of a malicious attack on the Internet. An ordinary negative review is depressing, but it doesn’t flood you with this sense of personal emergency, as if not only your book but also your life, or at least that large aura of meaning that accumulates around your life and gives it value, is in imminent and dire peril. Call that aura your “character,” call it your “good name,” your “reputation,” your “honor.” Whatever it was, as I read the review on my screen I seemed to be seeing, as if through a powerful medical instrument, the first stages of some irreversible damage spreading into this nebulous yet indispensable entity. However crudely Nasreen may have been deploying the gestures of critical theory and gender studies in her attempt to brand me as a monster, it seemed to me that she had mounted a successful attack. Needless to say, her description of “The Siege,” like all her other accounts of my work, bears little resemblance to the story itself, but who was going to check? The semblance of an annihilating critique had been created, and for people browsing the Web that is all that matters. Here, for the casual shopper landing on my page, was a reason to move on very quickly.

The multiplying effect of the Internet—the knowledge that anything on it can be infinitely reproduced—is a further element in the alarm this kind of attack induces. So too is its odd nature as a mass phenomenon in which, paradoxically, one participates in the blindest, most solitary manner. Who else has seen what you have seen? Who believes it? Who finds it entertaining? Who has copied it, posted it elsewhere, emailed it to a friend? One never knows, but where malice is involved, one quickly succumbs to the worst suspicions.

But perhaps I was exaggerating the effect of this particular attempt at character assassination. Unless you are a celebrity, nobody is ever as interested in your reputation as you are. Certainly no one who saw the review would have paid it as much attention as I did. And given my modest readership, it’s unlikely that many people ever
did
see it. As soon as I’d finished reading it I hit the “report” button and fired off complaints to Amazon at every address I could find for them. I didn’t get a reply, but after a few weeks the review was taken down. Similar reviews appeared on the Amazon pages of the authors I was accused of selling Nasreen’s work to, and these too were taken down after a while. So I suppose I can’t, after all, claim they did me serious harm.

But having raised the game to this freshly injurious level, Nasreen was hardly likely to give up exploring its possibilities. Her campaign, it appeared, was no longer aimed simply at expressing her anger, or at embarrassing me, but at something much more concrete and practical. It was at this time that she conceived that crystalline formulation of the true nature of her mission:

“I will ruin him.”

Part II

Axes

But having brought the story to this point, I must now commit the cardinal narrative sin of going backward instead of plunging conventionally forward. I do this because, inexplicable as Nasreen’s actions ultimately seemed, I consider myself under an obligation to do everything in my power to account for them, and because I am aware that, in the interest of describing a complicated situation as quickly as possible, I have left things unsaid and failed to examine certain aspects of the situation as thoroughly as I should.

First of all, there is the question of the classroom.

I described Nasreen’s reaction to my praise of her writing as “unflustered,” and so it appeared at the time. But of course it could not have been anything of the kind. When you have as much at stake as students do in these expensive, highly competitive programs, you are not going to be “unflustered” by your teacher’s enthusiasm, however confident you may be in your abilities. I know this from my own experience. I studied English literature at university. There were no creative-writing classes on offer, but my tutor was a well-known poet and one day I plucked up the courage to hand him a sheaf of my poems. He was reluctant to take them, but a few weeks later I received a letter from him in which he praised them and encouraged me to go on writing. His words had a powerful, really almost a shattering, impact on me, one symptom of which was that for a very long time I was unable to relate to him as a normal human being. Having never been daunted by him before (or no more than any student is by their tutor), I suddenly found it hard to talk to him. I became nervous and awkward. Every exchange between us left me feeling anxious that I’d said something crass or offensive that would forfeit his good opinion. By giving me explicit authorization to think of myself as a writer, he had become entangled in my fate, which in turn had imbued him—or, more precisely, caused my mind to flood its image of him—with godlike powers.

So I have to assume, or at least admit the possibility, that Nasreen had in fact been highly flustered by my admiration and that, as with my tutor, the experience had transformed me from a teacher respected merely out of convention into a figure of heightened power, similarly implicated in her fate; similarly crowned, robed, and enthroned in her imagination. It’s hard, almost impossible, for me to accept that such a version of myself, so unlike my own version of myself, could really exist in anybody’s mind. But other than having to share the same physical appearance, there is no reason why other people’s versions of oneself should bear a complete or even a remote resemblance to one’s own. To repeat the words I myself quoted to Nasreen from George Eliot: “The last thing we learn in life is our effect on other people.”

Next, there is the question of the “fiancé.”

I had been struck by the word—the word itself—when she had used it, charmed by its old-fashioned aura, but I had given little thought to the drama of human embroilment it actually denoted. Even when the engagement ended, I had been more interested in her manner of disclosing the news (“I can’t marry A—”)—which had seemed to confirm my sense of her as someone who valued a certain reserve when it came to discussing personal matters—than in the news itself.

What I didn’t consider, and no doubt should have even though I wasn’t being invited to, was that she might have been traumatized by the breakup. As far as I understood, she had been the one to end it, but maybe she wasn’t, and even if she was, she might well have been experiencing feelings of disappointment, failure, even the anguish of sexual jealousy that can afflict jilter and jilted alike in any breakup. People are always in various stages of various different dramas when you encounter them: freshly embarked on some, halfway or more through others. One is always approaching the denouement of this or that subplot of one’s life. And you, the stranger, entering the picture in all your blundering innocence, may well be the catalyst for some long-awaited climax, or the last in a series of minor but incessantly accumulating, and finally backbreaking, straws. Especially if you have done something to engage the interest of that person. We are quick to incorporate other people into our dramas if they “interest” us. It happens without thinking.