These days embarrassment usually has only a figurative or psychological meaning but, if you bump yourself into it, the pain can be just as sharp & is only too likely to stay with you for the rest of your life – can suddenly make you go all hot & red years later – Oh don’t remind me!
The cause may simply be not knowing how to spell it, or merely social – eating your peas the wrong way, wearing the wrong clothes at a party.
When was the last time you held out your hand to shake someone else’s? Was he an Orthodox Jew?
Leant forward to offer an air kiss to someone? One, two, or three; right first or left?
Opened a door for someone? Was she a feminist?
Referred to that coloured chap?
Grabbed that toddler running towards the edge of the pavement?
Some of these faux pas might be surmounted with a smile & rueful apology. Some might get you all over the news accused of an ism or an ia. And please don’t even mention paedophiles.
Zadie Smith, in her collection of Occasional Essays says that:
It is amazing how many of our cross cultural encounters are limited not by hate or pride or shame, but by another especially insidious, less-discussed emotion, embarrassment.
On one occasion early in our relationship, my husband was at our family traditional roast Sunday dinner, where the vegetable dishes are handed round for each person to serve themselves. My mother was handing the dish of carrots to him when she suddenly drew back her hand & said Oh! Do you eat carrots?
I barely noticed it at the time, & so was perturbed when my husband later told me how upset he had been – Why on earth would she think we don’t eat carrots?
Well, I have absolutely no idea; somehow the occasion never arose when I could just slip the question in. I suspect dealing with exchange students over the years had inured her to dealing with the vagaries of foreign attitudes to English food, but it also seems strange to us now that What do you eat? could be such a loaded question in the early days of post war immigration to Britain. Andrea Levy mentioned it, on World Service Book Club, as one of the taunts she used to face.
Poetry Please on Sunday included a wonderful long poem by Edson Burton about how Iris & Edith learned to overcome their initial embarrassment & suspicion to become the firmest of friends, united by their common experience, indifferent to the difference in their skin colour. An early line leapt out to me from the radio: “They’ll bring down the area with their rice & peas”
Well not any more, they won’t. Not least because it isn’t legal to call them that – or at least to sell the dish under that name. The peas are really beans & should be called by that name alone (unless they are lentils). And anyway, even an English country village these days has its Chinese, Indian & pizza takeaways, as well as the fish & chip shop. On days when the air hangs heavy, it is perfumed with the heady scent of spice.
Sathnam Sanghera did not use the word embarrassment in his column about the day he ‘came out’ to his mother. He talks about awkwardness & susceptibility to cringe, surely just embarrassment under other names.
Of course in his case he was just talking about explaining to his mother how he had been getting along without a nice Sikh arranged marriage, but he makes comparison with Acts of Disclosure: The Coming-Out Process of Contemporary Gay Men, by Marc E. Vargo to explain the problem.
It seems very likely that we can look to gratitude at the removal of an embarrassment as the principle reason why civil partnerships have become so easily accepted in mainstream English society. By this I mean not an embarrassment which was felt by the partners before they could make a public declaration of their status, but by the rest of us who might find ourselves in the awkward position of not knowing quite what to say. May I introduce you to John & - um – his –um - friend? Because even in the days when it was illegal, couples could be, & often were accepted in a wider social circle. And so we are grateful for a discreetly euphemistic adjective to attach to the word partner, so as not to invite the Princess Margaret question & be left searching wildly for an alternative to the crass Cherie Blair solution.
Embarrassment is so painful that we will do all that we can to avoid it. And those efforts will be all the greater if we risk not just a private pain but public vilification & maybe punishment by the law.
Except that effort is not the right word. Too often we will just do what we can to avoid even the possibility of the problem. If we cannot rely on good will, the ability to smile, say sorry when we put our foot in it, we will avoid those people who, we are led to believe, may not take things so lightly. If, in addition, we are constantly being lectured on the need to understand our differences, we may never take the chance to discover, like Iris & Edith, that we have more in common than we do with many of those who are only superficially just like us.
Links
The cringe factor on the day that I came out Sathnam Sanghera ...
Edson Burton - Poetry Can
Andrea Levy - Welcome to my website
Marc Vargo
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