Poverty Porn

Mahesh Paudyal

Alleviation of poverty is an age-old joker's cry. It is a cock-sure priority in all budget plans and social welfare projects around the world. It still persists, and is likely to linger on. The sufferers might change, though.

The question of poverty is an intricately complicated socio-psychological issue. It might be an economic state apparently, but it pervades far beyond social realism, and cuts across individual ambitions and innate human desire to rule and dominate. In this context, poverty of the poor becomes a fundamental necessity to those who are economically well-off, and occupy positions of power in the nation, or in the society.

The vexation of this problem of poverty, which in fact is a hundred-percent economic issue, is brought about by political actors, who manipulate the question of poverty for votes or for power. They need the poor mass for distributing dreams, and cashing emotions to ascend the ladder to power. They maintain poverty, in one way or the other, so that the propaganda remains intact till the nation goes on polls next time.

This truth applies equally well between individuals, between societies, and between nations. Poverty as a pretext to rule and dominate may be exemplified at its best in the role of the West in its paternalistic treatment of the post-colonial space, particularly in Asia and Africa. Through every channel the West devises – from poverty alleviation missions to the World Bank – the play is about replacing one type of poverty with another, and nothing beyond. The nations grow poorer in power and decision-making if their poverty alters because of the Western assistance. The helplessness of South Korea –despite its material affluence – in matters concerning its relation with its northern brethren, is an instance. If nations grow richer of their own, they are always at odd with the West, and this, China exemplifies best. This is an inevitable paradox as far as the role of the West around the globe in concerned. 

One of the most coercive exercises of the West upon the so-called 'third-world countries' – a category I personally consider constructed and foisted by ill-will – is its design to cash their poverty. An exceptionally large chunk of the Western entertainment industry is turning toward poverty-stricken space in the third world for easy money. Asian and African poverty in big movie screens and best-seller pages in the West cater a feed to voyeuristic western audience at the cost of the characters represented. Politically speaking, this is how the West is plotting to continue its imperialism in a euphemistic cultural guise.

This plotting exhibits subtle paternalistic designs, much to the detriment of the 'third-world' nations. The West appears in the role of a guardian – perhaps the hangover of the much clichéd white man's burden. Deep down the project, a Tamburlainian ambition seems to be in the offing. The best examples of the same can be seen in the way the Western entertainment industry treats eastern realities. Representation of the non-western cultural space in Western literature and movies, and the ways prizes and awards distributed from the West function explicitly depict the heinous western deliberation to uphold and foreground non-Western poverty and cash the western voyeuristic eyes for two reasons: profit, and prolongation of power-exercises.

Academy Awards for films and Booker Prize for commonwealth writers in recent years show that movies and books exposing the poverty of the world outside Europe are nominated for the prizes. In an article published in Scrutiny 2 in 2008, Ronit Fankel examines the nomination of two books from post-colonial spaces: Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit and Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss and claims that the books are selected fundamentally because, they fulfill a western stereotype of what he calls the post-colonial pathos, poverty being one of the major ones. The novels depict South Africa and India respectively, two former British colonies as places of bitterness, and unrelenting historical determinism.    Luke Strongman's list of books in The Booker Prize and the Legacy of the Empire suggests that majority of the books selected for the booker sell poverty of the post-colonial nation and justify the legacy of the western supremacy. Same is the story with Academy Awards in films.

Vipin Vashishtha, a senior Indian pediatrician in June 2009 issue of a journal Indian Pediatrics lambasts the Slumdong Millionnaire citing the way it encouraged the father of one of its star to offer her for sale. The success of the movie seems to be the only end of the movie, and this teleological end was met when as many as eight Academy Awards came its way. Paradoxically enough, the child stars of the movie are back in the slum, and are not reportedly paid enough. Vashistha questions: Was it right for her to be transported to a film and eventually to the expensive spotlit stage of the Oscars and a day trip to Disneyland – only to be deposited back to a community where access to clean water, let alone education is a struggle?

Many NGOs and INGOs working in poverty alleviation programs operate and survive because poverty exists. They have always been working, and the question of the poverty alleviation – let alone the question of its eradication – has always been in the frontline. In the context of many Asian nations like Nepal, poverty is likely to continue as one of the major national problems for a few more decades. Poverty itself is not shameful, its use as a site of cultural voyeurism is shameful. Even more shameful is the fact that even after a lot of hue and cry poverty continues to exist like a curable, but chronically neglected disease.

Why does this happen after all?  In fact, there are two worlds within the world, and two nations inside every nation: one rich and the other poor. The poor are doomed, and the rich continue their affluence by prolonging the doom. A parliamentary speech by the former South African deputy President Thabo Mbeki delivered in 2008 underscores this reality beautifully.  In the two nations within South Africa – the white, rich nation and the black, poor one – the blacks still occupy a dismal position and virtually have no possibility to exercise what in reality amounts to a theoretical right to equal opportunity. Yet the blacks continue to be sources of money for the white – in pictures, in art, in music and in literature.

Such cultural voyeurism should end. It is, in fact, a kind of pornography, intending to satisfy a few of our rich population, at the cost of the majority, whose primary ambition in life is to manage a pair of meals, and a warm rain-free shelter.