Writing god

There are, as we know, many ways to express our private thoughts about the divine.

Sometimes, however, they can be too subversive for authorities to bear. Novelist and noted advocate of the freedom of artistic expression, Salman Rushdie, brought to my attention the following way in which Saudi poet and journalist Hamza Kashgari paid tribute to the Prophet Mohammed; he composed three tweets:

On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.
On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.
On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.

Kashgari was promptly jailed by the Saudi monarchy on charges of apostasy and is awaiting "trial."

The contemporary American poet Carl Phillips' way of remembering God is altogether casual and remarkably intimate.

In a prose poem, "Neon," he writes:

Comes a day when the god, what at least you've called a god, takes you not from behind, the usual, but pins you instead, his ass on your chest, his cock in your face, his mouth twisting open, saying lick my balls, and because you want to live, in spite of everything, you do what he says, heaven and earth, some rain, a few stars appearing, harder, the way he tells you to, then not so hard, a tenderness like no tenderness you've ever shown. 

A stark difference in approach to the sacred, but if Kashgari's mere humanizing (or, as they say, "historicizing") of the Prophet begets imprisonment, one shudders to think what he would have been sentenced to had he echoed Phillips'-like sentiments

I like Phillips' evocation better, as god here is an embodied individual, i.e. invested with a body and a personality. He is gay and male, of course (so is Phillips), but he is also fierce.

Kashgari's Prophet is an abstraction and he sounds somewhat deferentially-inclined toward the entity.

Can representation be violent?

The recent killing of four Americans in Benghazi over an online video about the prophet Mohammad, has prompted a myriad of responses in the Western media.

Most register a deep anger over the violence and some like Defence Secretary Leon Panetta have labelled the Muslim violence as a terrorist attack. 

The general consensus in the U.S. media is that such acts are violent and violence is unecessary and uncalled for as a reaction against a mere visual representation of a Muslim religious figure. 

Little attention has been given to the possibility of representation, whether visual, written or aural, as being an act of violence itself. 

The assumption is that all acts of violence are physical.

Even academics in their otherwise insightful explanation of the incident, don't consider violence to inhere in certain acts of representation.  

I agree that the Muslim rage over every bit of trivialization of their religious symbols is an overreaction. The trivialization isn't something one condones, but the Muslim reaction should have been a little more controlled and proportionate to the offence committed.

Yet isn't the video portrayal of Prophet in a mocking tone a sacrilegeous act in complicated ways? Isn't representation an act of violation? Do all violence have to be committed on the body?

Edward Said's take on the violence of representation resonates here. He saw representation as an act of power--in a world of unequal distribution of power, the powerful often end up representating the powerless in ways that are violating. In such instances the powerless hit back at the powerful through bodily violence.

The video is a mere video. But the Muslims, in context of a world where Muslims see themselves as powerless victims in the face of Western machination to subordinate them, see the video as an act of violence.