The Puzzle of Left-Handedness (3 page)

4

Taboos, Sex and Handicrafts

In Arab countries the left and right hands have different functions. There too the great majority of people are right-handed, so traditionally the right hand is called upon to do the most important jobs, such as eating, writing and greeting others. The left hand exists to do the opposite, including the dirty work, like the cleaning of the anus. In a culture where people generally eat with their hands, such a division is in fact quite rational, all the more so in the warm climates where Islam has its origins and its greatest distribution. But people will be people, and nothing invites violation so much as a ban based on rational considerations. A taboo works far better, a prohibition grounded in indefinable fear. A taboo it therefore became. The left hand is the unclean hand.

Some claim that within the Islamic world the unclean left hand is intended for the game of love. It’s impossible to find any reliable confirmation of this, and anyhow it seems an improbable story. For a start, rules for hand use are a matter of etiquette – you need to learn which tasks you’re forbidden to perform with the hand you favour – but it holds true in both European and Islamic countries that the more traditional a belief system is, the more people act as if sex doesn’t exist. In the worst case, which is not to say there’s anything rare about such things, you’re not allowed even to look at girls, so you’re hardly likely to be told by someone else which hand to put up your wife or girlfriend’s skirt. The same applies the other way around. No decent girl touches a boy with either her right hand or her left. So one taboo obstructs the spread of another.

Of course most people do engage in amorous little games, but they’re usually left to discover the rules for themselves, on the sly. Etiquette has far less influence here than the natural limitations of our bodies. A great deal depends on the position of the partners in relation to one another. For a start you have to be able to reach, which is not always possible with the left hand.

Anyhow, I’ve asked around. No consistent connection emerges between the favoured lovemaking hand, whether for intercourse or for masturbation, and the hand used for other activities, such as writing. Those who wrote left-handedly sometimes made love with their left hands, but by no means always, and vice versa. Most people did say that when masturbating they had a clear and consistent preference for one hand or the other, just as they did when writing. It simply didn’t work with the other hand. If that preference is so strong and so independent of other factors, then it’s difficult to believe that people, whatever their culture, would override it, especially in the absence of any explicit instructions on the matter.

An apparent exception are the Kaguru, a people of Tanzania. It would seem their youngsters can discuss sex fairly freely between themselves. Young men sometimes boast about how it’s best if a man is able to arrange things in bed such that he has his left hand free and the woman her right. Then he can grope at her to his heart’s content without using his clean right hand. It sounds tremendously exotic, but such a story raises the question of whether the real point is not so much to use the already dirty left hand to touch the conquered lady as to stage a power display. After all, it leaves her with no choice but to touch him with her clean right hand, whether or not that’s something she’s happy to do, so there’s an implicit humiliation here. The suspicion that this has more to do with macho behaviour than with strict beliefs about cleanliness and uncleanliness is reinforced by the fact that those same boys are happy to admit that the positional preference is really only a vague ideal, which they don’t make much effort to put into practice.

Taboos and etiquette are not accorded the same weight at all times. In general we can say that the more formal a situation is, the more strictly the rules are enforced. This is logical, since the more official and staid the occasion, the less well the participants are likely to know each other and the harder it will therefore be for them to set straight any misunderstandings. Clarity and predictability are of immense importance in tricky situations, so we stick to strict protocols, with endless rituals and symbolism. Anyone who takes liberties with the rules will bring down the whole house of cards. This explains why many public figures are quite relaxed about picking their noses at home, or letting out resounding farts, or scratching their heads vigorously, but would never do such things while performing their official functions.

What goes for nose-picking also goes for the taboo against the left side, as the British government discovered to its embarrassment during the Second World War. When Churchill and Roosevelt visited Saudi Arabia for talks with King Ibn Saud, there naturally had to be an exchange of gifts. Churchill promised his host a specially armoured Rolls-Royce, so that at last he could move around safely using a modern mode of transport. King Saud was suitably delighted, if for a quite different reason: such a vehicle would come in very handy for hunting. But when the car was delivered, Ibn Saud realized he’d never be able to use it. As in all English cars, the steering wheel was on the right, so while out hunting the king would be sitting to the left of his chauffeur. For a king that was unthinkable. As in the West, the right side is the place of honour. A disappointed Saud gave the car to his brother Abdullah, who was presumably less bothered about such matters.

Ibn Saud’s Rolls-Royce represents a diplomatic blunder of the first order, one that could easily have been avoided if the British foreign office had stopped to think, but sometimes an insult lurks where you’d least expect it. In 1762–3 an expedition dispatched by King Frederick V of Denmark, manned by four scholars and a painter-engraver, travelled through the south-west of the Arabian peninsula, the region known in Arabic as Yemen (literally ‘the land of the south’) but in Europe called Arabia Felix, or Happy Arabia. The aim was to map the region, make contact with the people who lived there and collect all available facts about the place.

The expedition ended in disaster. Geographer Carsten Niebuhr was the only member of the group to make it back alive, after endless wanderings, and he told the whole story in
Description of Arabia
, published in 1776. In his book he was fairly positive about the Arabs. Anyone who showed proper respect for them could generally depend on being treated decently in return, he wrote. So later expeditions were considerably surprised by the dour, unsympathetic treatment they rece ived. The cause turned out to lie in the maps Niebuhr had made. As was usual in Europe, they were orientated towards the north, so Yemen was on the left side of Arabia. The Yemenis, it transpired, regarded this as an insult. Any right-minded Arab takes his bearings from the east, which puts Yemen, at the south-westerly tip of the pen -insula, on the auspicious, right side of the map. This was precisely the reason why in the Latin world the country was called Arabia Felix. On Niebuhr’s maps, used by later travellers, it instead lay on the accursed left side.

A map of the Arabian peninsula made in about 1800, on which everything currently called Saudi Arabia, plus Oman and the United Arab Emirates on the south-eastern side, is labelled ‘Ayaman’ or ‘Arabia Felix’. That name should really be applied only to the bottom left corner of the peninsula, present-day Yemen.

There’s a direct counterpart to the name Yemen, incidentally. The Arab word for Syria is Sam, a word related to
simâl
, which means ‘north’ and ‘left’. Sam is also connected to the verb
sa’ama
, which originally meant both ‘to bring bad luck’ and ‘to turn left’ but over time acquired a third meaning: to go to Syria. The connection with bad luck is reflected in many sayings and expressions about the unpleasant effects of the desert winds from the north.

Arab culture is certainly not alone in having a strict taboo against the left side and left-handedness. Japan, hardly a paragon of social flexibility and tolerance, is perhaps the worst case of all. left-handedness used to be completely unacceptable there and in many ways it still is. In earlier times, left-handed women are said to have concealed their ‘abnormality’ from their husbands, because left-handedness could be grounds for rejection. Fairly recent research on Japanese schoolchildren suggests that a mere 2 per cent write with their left hands, even though almost everywhere else in the world the number of left-handers is roughly 10 per cent. Japanese researchers have claimed that the low figures are a result of the special qualities of the characters used in the written language, insisting it can be produced only with the right hand. In reality writing Japanese with the left hand isn’t particularly difficult. The cause is more likely to lie in the repressive Japanese school system, which simply refuses to tolerate left-handedness. This conjecture is bolstered by the fact that in Europe and the United States far fewer children wrote with their left hands in the past than now, sometimes as few as 2 per cent, as in Japan. When teachers gradually ceased objecting to left-handedness in the classroom, the percentage steadily rose, eventually reaching that magical figure of around 10 per cent.

A similar hostility to the left side and the left hand can be found in many parts of Africa. Often this has to do with the influence of Islam, but not always. Tribes of the lower Niger have a rule that a woman must use her right hand rather than her left when cooking, unless she needs to use both. The Ovambo in Namibia will never pass you anything with their left hands and a left-handed greeting is a downright insult. The Wachagga tribe apparently goes so far as to exclude left-handed men from hunting and warfare, since they are believed to bring bad luck. No one knows the origin of the most terrible story of all, which began to circulate in the early twentieth century. There were said to be tribes in Africa that cured a child of left-handedness by burying its left hand in a hole over which they then poured boiling water. The mutilated child had to use its right hand exclusively for the rest of its life.

This is a typical case of a story that demands a large dose of scepticism. Quite apart from the fact that its provenance is hazy, a primitive society that treats the few hands available to it as wastefully as this won’t exactly increase its chances of survival. In fact we should be distrustful of much of the information we have about early contact with tribes in inaccessible parts of the world. Its origins often lie with a single missionary, adventurer or anthropologist, so independent confirmation is lacking. Such individuals, especially in colonial times, tended to look through a powerful European-Christian lens and therefore probably misinterpreted much of what they saw. They didn’t necessarily speak the language of the people they were observing. All those lonely seekers after fame and fortune, all those enthusiastic servants of the lord must have guessed, romanticized, exaggerated and even invented a great deal. They undoubtedly sometimes mistook incidental events for customs.

Now and then researchers have had their legs deliberately pulled by the peoples they were studying, and often with good reason. Strangers brought excitement, amusement and intriguing goods and customs. You want to keep on the right side of people like that, in the hope that they’ll stay and give you more things. So the newcomers sometimes got more than they bargained for when they displayed an interest in something. It was an early form of the tourist industry. All over the world, ‘natives’ eagerly threw themselves into traditional handicrafts, dances and musical performances – many of which had never existed before, in that particular form at least.

Whatever the precise truth of the matter, the customs on which the explorers reported often seem to have disappeared without trace by the time the deep interior of Africa and other continents was opened up.

One example of jumping to conclusions is the story of how the Ovimbundu of southern Angola gravely insulted each other with their left arms. It goes like this: you stick your left arm in the air, fist clenched, and with your right hand clasped around your left wrist you shake your left arm back and forth. Observers immediately concluded that the Ovimbundu associated the left with ‘very bad’. But consider what the gesture might represent: if the fist is the head of a person you want to insult, then the wrist is his neck. The other hand squeezes the wrist violently, while shaking it to indicate that the person is struggling. Seen in this way it’s a vivid gesture meaning: I could strangle you! The fact that the left arm takes the role of the victim is hardly surprising. like human beings everywhere, most Ovimbundu are right-handed, so the right hand does the strangling. Only indirectly does this have anything to do with the symbolism of left and right.

5

Lovers of the Left

The association of right with good and left with evil can be found all around the globe, but there are occasional exceptions, the main one being China, the oldest of all the world’s political entities.

It seems at first sight as if things are no different in the venerable Middle Kingdom from how they are elsewhere. On the shores of the Yellow River, around 90 per cent of the population is right-handed and 10 per cent left-handed. As in other parts of the world, Chinese left-handers have been forced to write and eat with their right hands, but in contrast to Europe and America, this has nothing to do with negative attitudes to the left side in general; in fact, in many ways the left side is traditionally seen in a favourable light. In China left-handers are no less valued than right-handers, but there are traditional reasons why certain actions must be performed with the right hand.

The ancient Chinese world view deals dextrously with the incongruities of the country’s history. Western symbolism is based on the contrast between good and evil. Judgement is brought to bear: good things are good and bad things bad by definition. They are opposite poles. The Chinese have always seen matters differently. Rather than being based on a static distinction, Chinese symbolism is all about a balance between the concepts of Yin and Yang. These are opposite poles too in a sense, but they do not directly involve a value judgement. Yin is not good by definition and Yang evil, nor vice versa. They complement each other, creating a harmonious whole.

The symbolic associations attached to Yin and Yang seem suspiciously familiar. Yang is masculine. It stands for leadership, sky, light and the sun. Yin embodies, among other things, the female, submission, blood and earth. But there the parallels end. Astonishingly, Yang is connected with the left, Yin with the right, precisely the opposite of what those of us brought up in Western cultures would expect.

The reason is that the Chinese traditionally orientated themselves towards the south. Emperors, kings and noblemen received their vassals on a podium, facing south as they did so to emphasize their connection with the sun, leadership and Yang. This meant the direction of the rising sun, the east, lay to their left, so the east and the left belong to Yang as well.

Three-man chariot team from the terracotta army of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, standing behind their three horses. The wooden wagon and its shaft have rotted away completely, as have the leather reins the man in the centre once held in his hands. To his right is the pikeman, his hand still curled around his long-lost spear, and to his left is the commander, an archer. Since the commander seems to be supporting his weapon the way a modern soldier holds the barrel of his rifle, he was probably equipped with a crossbow.

The left side is therefore the place of honour, as demonstrated by military tradition. Army leaders in ancient China were archers, commanding their armies from war chariots. leaders were expected to stand facing south, so an army always had to advance southwards. This was made possible by having a red flag carried at the front of the column, symbolizing the sun. But where on a war chariot does the commander stand?

This bronze two-man war chariot was found in 1980 in Xi’an. Here too the driver of the chariot stands to the right, while the commander’s heavy crossbow can be seen at the front left of the chariot and a quiver for cross-bow bolts has been affixed to the left side.

In 1974 peasants ploughing the fields in the district of Xi’an in the province of Shaanxi chanced upon the 7,000-strong terracotta army of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, which had lain underground for more than twenty-one centuries, ready to fight off any attack on the emperor’s grave. As well as infantry and a complete command post, the army had more than a hundred war chariots. The vehicles, made of wood, had rotted long before, but many of their life-sized teams of terracotta soldiers had survived largely intact. It became clear how Chinese three-man chariot teams operated.

In the middle stood the charioteer. To his right was a pikeman, in an ideal position to cause carnage on the right side of the chariot. The commander stood to the driver’s left, not the most convenient place for him, since in most cases he was a right-handed archer. His right elbow all too easily got in the way of the driver and it was hard for him to lean over the side and shoot forwards past the horses. But the left side was the Yang side, and because the symbolic south was in front of the chariot, the left was to the symbolic east, which was also Yang. So even on a two-man chariot with no pikeman, the commander stood to the left of the charioteer.

If left was so favoured, why were left-handed people not the subject of outright devotion? Why are Chinese children always taught to eat and write with their right hands? For an explanation we have to go back to a mythical era, to the story of the Chinese equivalent of Lucifer. In ancient times, when the world was still young and empty, China was appropriately known as the Middle Kingdom. It was at the centre of the world, and little existed outside it. This was an orderly universe, a balanced and strongly built house. The earth was its floor and directly above was its roof, the sky, with the sun at the centre and around it the stars. The sky was firmly supported on four enormous pillars, one in the north-west, one in the south-east, and one at each of the other two corners. The emperor’s throne was in the middle of the universe, which meant that the sun stood directly above the palace and he cast no shadow. From that glittering, sun-drenched throne the emperor ruled his kingdom supported by loyal and competent ministers.

One terrible day one of those ministers, the evil Gong Gong, rose in rebellion against the emperor. He was narrowly defeated, but only after he had severely disturbed the orderly world by breaking into pieces the north-western pillar supporting the sky: Mount Buzhou. The results were dramatic. The loss of that pillar made the sky sink down in the west, and the earth, now that it no longer bore the weight of the sky in the north-west, tilted slightly eastwards. So it came about that the sun and the stars daily slide past from east to west and all the rivers in China flow down from the west to the east, where the seas were created by all that water pouring into them.

Everything had been displaced by the unimaginable violence of the rebellion, the sky towards the west, the earth towards the north-east. So the Imperial Palace never again stood in its original place on the equator, at the centre of the universe.

From then on the world was like a half-collapsed house, with its roof tilted in relation to the floor. In the west the sky stuck out some way beyond the earth; in the east the sky was too short to cover the ground. In other words, on the upper side of the universe there’s a disharmonious surplus to the west, while on the ground the disharmony is to the east. Such a state of affairs has far-reaching consequences for a vision of the world in which everything, large or small, ultimately forms a single entity, including the human body, which according to traditional Chinese beliefs is a replica of the universe on a small scale. The round head represents the round sun and the rectangular feet the flat earth. We can tell how seriously this idea was taken from the fact that for a long time dancers at the Chinese court were forbidden to perform hand-stands, since by doing so they would literally turn the world on its head, the last thing any emperor would ever want to encourage.

That which holds true for the entire universe applies to human beings as well. So people too are imbalanced at the top on the western side. Because of the southward orientation, this means the right side. lower down they suffer from disharmony on the eastern or left side. Since the boundary between top and bottom lies at the navel, eyes and ears belong to the top half of the body, while feet, legs and hands are part of the lower half. After all, when at rest the hands are at roughly crotch level. Because the imperfection at the top resides on the right, the Chinese regarded the left eye and left ear as superior to their counterparts, but the opposite applied to hands and feet: the right foot and the right hand are superior. The right hand therefore served for precision tasks such as eating and writing. This complicated reasoning clearly shows that although the Chinese may have a philosophical bent, deep down they remain a very practical people. The left side can be favoured yet the right hand preferred – in most cases this suits people nicely.

That the preference for the right hand has a practical rather than a moral basis is demonstrated by the ancient Chinese version of the victory procession. A victorious general would hold a sword in his right hand and a flute in his left. War is manual labour, and bloody and unhappy labour at that, of the kind that brings misfortune. War is Yin. The right hand – also Yin – is allocated this particular kind of work and valued accordingly, but a more important role is reserved for the left hand, which is Yang. Victory processions mark war’s end, indeed its successful conclusion. They signify that peace has arrived, so it’s the left hand that carries the symbol of peace, the musical, non-violent flute that brings pleasure and repose.

There are other places besides China where the left hand is not necessarily regarded in a negative light. In East Africa, for example, a tribe called the Wageia-Kavirondo regards the left as the side of good fortune and the right as the side of misfortune. Anyone who stubs his right foot twice while planning to leave on a journey is advised to stay home. If he stubs the other foot, the journey is sure to be a success. The Wachagga, whom we met earlier as the tribe that excludes left-handers from hunting and warfare, are utterly realistic when it comes to feet. If a Wachagga stubs his left foot during a journey, then it does not augur well, since the right foot is seen as the lucky foot, but if he carries on anyway and returns after a successful trip, this is seen as proof that his lucky foot is his left.

Among the Masai, the famous herdsmen of the East African plains, there’s a superstition linking the left hand with health – something that is quite common elsewhere too. On the night of the new moon the Masai cast away sticks or stones with their left hands, calling out ‘give me a long life’ or ‘give me strength’ as they do so. Unusual colour symbolism is involved here. Most peoples in Africa associate right with light and white, left with dark and red, just as Pythagoras did in his Table of Opposites. For the Masai precisely the opposite applies: a man who has killed an opponent in battle is permitted to paint his body, the left side white and the right side red.

Even in Judeo-Christian thinking, left-handedness is by no means always saddled with negative connotations. The Bible certainly creates an impression of bias towards the right, but that’s mainly because the right hand and the right side are mentioned so often, and because on the Day of Judgment the damned move away to the left towards hell. left-handedness is mentioned only twice explicitly, on both occasions in the Book of Judges, and both times in a strikingly positive sense. Ironically, both occurrences concern the tribe of Benjamin, a name that literally means ‘sons of the south’ or ‘sons of the right hand’. The tribe got its name from the fact that its tribal area, the region around Jerusalem and Jericho, was directly to the south of the territory of the Ephraim, the dominant tribe, whereas the ancient Israelites, as was usual in the Middle East, oriented themselves towards the east.

One of the two stories concerns a gang rape by a group of Benjamites, which results in a full-scale civil war between the Benjamin and other tribes. The bloody battle goes badly for the tribe of Benjamin, but not before the vengeful attackers have suffered heavy losses. The relatively small but courageous army of the Benjamites deploys a unit so unusual that it receives special mention: an elite battalion of 700 left-handed slingmen. This seems a huge number for a small people like the tribe of Benjamin; we should probably take 700 simply to mean ‘an awful lot’.

The other story concerns the left-handed hero Ehud, who ends the occupation of Israel by the Moabites. Ehud is specifically chosen by Yahweh to assassinate Eglon, the Moabite king. It is no easy task, since Eglon is as tightly surrounded by security men as a modern American president. Ehud hides a knife under his clothes, against his thigh, and accompanies a delegation to an audience with Eglon. He manages to get past the bodyguards. like everyone else, he is body-searched, but ineffectually, since the guards don’t expect to find anything on the inside of his right leg. Normal people, which is to say right-handers, would carry a weapon on the inside of the left leg. That was precisely why Yahweh had chosen a left-handed man for the job. So Eglon does not survive the visit, whereas Ehud, in true James Bond style, escapes over the rooftops and becomes a national hero.