I was thinking about how Shame speaks to the imperatives of history writing, and how we, as in our class, really came to two different conclusions about Rushdie's writing of history. On the one hand, I feel like he's made a general statement about history--that it only exists within the artifact and that any attempt to write it is necessarily falsely constructed. On the other hand, he's also made a more specific statement about Pakistani history--that it needs to be told in whispered rumors in this subversion, behind-the-scenes kind of way. These two "hands" are not mutually exclusive and actually feed into each other quite well. If any attempt at writing history is falsely constructed (thus destroying any possibility of a true history), then anybody who chooses to write history must write with a specific interpretation in mind (truth having been taken out of the picture).