Silence and the ethics of partial empathy in Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim

Abstract

This article argues that Tahmima Anam’s novel The Good Muslim highlights the troubled relationship between empathy and silence in order to demonstrate the ethical dangers arising from the failure to accept “partial empathy”, wherein understanding and sharing coexists with incomprehension and disjunction. In doing so, the novel critiques both extremes of the theoretical debate about empathy: the dismissal of empathy, drawing on the Levinasian–Derridean discourse of alterity, for ineluctably subsuming the other’s otherness, and the celebration of empathy as a conciliatory bridge across polarizing differences. Moreover, Anam underlines the ambivalences of silence — which can embody both powerlessness and agency, and which can both participate in and withhold expression — to complicate the current emphasis on silencing in critical theory with concerns about the violation of others’ silences. Examining the silences of trauma and rape in the aftermath of the 1971 Bangladesh War, the novel shows how false empathy silences the other by deeming their experience as already understood while intrusive empathic gestures jeopardize the other’s chosen silences. Further, Maya and Sohail’s negotiation of their irreconcilable differences over religion illustrates how their inability to accept gaps in empathy prompts them to adopt conflict-eschewing silences that lead to the complete breakdown of empathy.