Shame is a wedge. Wedged between the best known books in Salman Rushdie's oeuvre, Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, it does not seem to have received the public attention it would rightly deserve. It is overshadowed by the famous former, which gave voice to a nation desperately trying to find one, and earned its author a place among the most influential writers of the century; and the infamous latter, which shattered the border between decency and iconoclasm and earned its author a death sentence and a decade of political barrage. One is a celebration of culture at its best, when not confined by a predetermined set of imposed narratives; the other a celebration of imagination when set against a predetermined set of repressive ideas. [...]My attempt will be to point at and disclose how Shame functions as a decompository construct, simultaneously replacing and deconstructing the communicational structure of “oppressor and oppressed” in a genuinely postmodern way. It is my belief that by doing so we are not only able to provide a meaningful and productive reading of the text, but also to shed a light on the workings of authoritative discourses in a contemporary context. As I shall try to argue, Rushdie, in the book, seems to build up a dialectic structure between the male (powerful) and female (powerless) sides of the story, but intentionally represses the voice of the latter to enhance our sense of repression on the dominating regime's part. This, however, doesn't mean that a voice of resistance is not articulated – it is produced by the narrator's constant metafictional presence, his essayistic additions to the story itself, outside the story itself, the only place where the voice of the oppressed can truly be heard.