Islamo-Fascist Terrorism, Neo-Con Tikvah Hypocrites, and Post-Colonial “Palimpsest History” Literature: The Complex Case of Salman Rushdie
David Shasha
Islamo-Fascist Terrorism, Neo-Con Tikvah Hypocrites, and Post-Colonial “Palimpsest History” Literature: The Complex Case of Salman Rushdie
By now we are all aware of the heinous Islamist attack on one of the most important contemporary novelists in the world, Salman Rushdie:
To be honest, I was fully expecting the usual Neo-Con “Bomb Iran” suspects to make a big deal of the stabbing, which is important because the many Jewish media outlets and commentators who are highlighting the tragic event are doing so largely because it once again puts the spotlight on the Mullahs in a HASBARAH context.
Shortly after the stabbing, The Times of Israel posted no less than eight articles on Rushdie, led by an unwittingly ironic piece on Israel condemning it as an “attack on our values”:
Once upon a time, Rushdie – pre-Fatwa – was not at all a favorite of these Neo-Cons; rather, he was a close friend and ally of Edward Said and the intellectual cadre of anti-Imperialists and Post-Colonial disrupters:
https://aaww.org/salman-rushdie-edward-said-and-moral-courage/
Both articles follow this note.
The articles present the Rushdie that those of us who attack the West for its racist Orientalist depredations continue to venerate.
It is a critique best articulated by Zionist bete noire Said in contrast to the Bernard Lewis Neo-Con world of “Clash of Civilization” proponents:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nSdrjtm-qKwYxEkewoX5ZNQpx28lJZs1no8hOmZrVKY/edit
Said and Lewis had it out many times over the years:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/08/12/orientalism-an-exchange/
https://www.mei.edu/publications/edward-said-and-two-critiques-orientalism
https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/565626-orientalism-lewis-said-controversy
Just to make the politics of the thing clear, Rushdie interviewed Said on his impassioned Palestine lament After the Last Sky for the New Left Review back in 1986:
https://www.wrmea.org/1987-july/book-review-after-the-last-sky-palestinian-lives.html
But things changed for Rushdie, as Said himself noted, at the time of the appalling Khomeini Satanic Verses death sentence:
Rushdie’s politics have shifted over the past two decades. Today, his voice is a far cry from dissent. It is now characterized by conformity to neoliberal political ideals and views of Islam, combined with the self-indulgence that comes with celebrity status. Summoned repeatedly as a token representative of the third world condition for Western audiences, Rushdie has used his platform to generalize from his particular individual experience issuing from The Satanic Verses controversy, across a wide spectrum of peoples. In this sense, Rushdie is very different from the late Edward Said, who said he instinctively found himself on the other side of power.
In 2003, Said himself raised the issue of Rushdie’s political transformation, towards the end of a talk at Columbia University. The bulk of the talk was focused on Rushdie’s writings, and Said had described his prose as “verbal fireworks.” Said mentioned that Rushdie’s years of living underground had affected the writer deeply: “He felt confusion, denial and anger for the onslaught against [The Satanic Verses]. There was a sense his own people turned against him.” Sensitively, Said added that because Rushdie was so embattled, “he was not as aware as he could have been of the many people in the Muslim world who defended him and in fact, spoke out.” Said also told the audience that Rushdie’s political views have “changed over time,” referring, amongst other things, to Rushdie’s view on the impending war with Iraq, which Rushdie supported. Said added, “There’s a greater disconnect between his non-fictional prose and his fiction, now, than there was in the decade of the 1980s.” Rushdie did not speak out against the war, nor did he lend intellectual support to the millions around the world who protested against the US invasion of Iraq—a war which left behind multi-headed hydra of devastation.
Here is a review of the Religious Fascist Fatwa and its aftermath:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/11/salman-rushdie-satanic-verses
In many ways, the process of Rushdie’s “conversion” was parallel to that of Christopher Hitchens:
https://reason.com/2010/07/09/the-defector/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/18/christopher-hitchens-socialist-neocon
And herein lies the Tikvah Fascist rub:
That’s right, Bari Weiss, who has sought to “question” the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, and who has completely ignored the Trump Insurrection violence and the threat of the NatCon Right and its Christian Fascism, responded to the Rushdie stabbing almost immediately – once again violating Shabbat rules.
It is clearly a very important moment for her.
Her article is reproduced in full after this note, and naturally does not refer at all to Rushdie – named for the great Muslim rationalist Ibn Rushd, Averroes – as a Post-Colonial fabulist; a brilliant writer who specialized in what has been called Magic Realism.
It is not even clear that Weiss has even read Rushdie’s books, or understands his place in the Post-Colonial ferment and its relation to White Supremacy.
We should also note here that Rushdie’s fiction has been called “Palimpsest History”:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n09/christine-brooke-rose/diary
I take the liberty of including in this post Christine Brooke-Rose’s seminal article, first published in The London Review of Books, and later included in Umberto Eco’s pivotal 1992 collection Interpretation and Overinterpretation, because it shows us the complexities of Rushdie’s novels and the way he deployed history in a very deft manner that played into the Post-Modern movement.
Referring to Rushdie’s complex narrative style in the Verses, Professor Brooke-Rose states:
What an easy step in the light-fantastic to imagine that the 12 harlots in the Jahilia brothel should assume the names of the prophet’s wives. But Rushdie has explained himself on this. My point is that throughout the book we have a different reading, a poetic, re-creative reading, of what is in the Qur’an. Even the incident of the Satanic Verses finds echo in another context or rather, in no context at all, when out of the blue Mohammed is told: ‘When We change one verse for another (Allah knows best what He reveals), they say: “You are an impostor.” Indeed, most of them are ignorant men.’
It is in this sense that “Palimpsest History,” also critically deployed by the great Carlos Fuentes in his classic Iberian novel Terra Nostra, resembles the intricate hermeneutical glossolalia of Rabbinic Midrash, with its fabulist non-literal flights of fancy.
I presented the ideas of Fuentes in my 2012 tribute to him, which also included notes on his brilliant 92nd Street Y homage to Jorge Luis Borges at 100, which laid out the Sephardic Jewish thematic of both writers:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xROeoNl0b5U4iXhYdDw503ppy2GkT-GF786w4PNDp30/edit
I contextualized Terra Nostra, also referred to by Brooke-Rose in her article, to Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, as well as to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and Eco’s Name of the Rose:
Terra Nostra remains a staggering achievement in its stylistic scope and its intellectual achievement. It is a fractured tale of Spanish history that mercilessly skewers the monarchy and lays bare the brutality and barbarity of the land that destroyed the Jews and Muslims and created a system of blood purity that effectively laid waste the glorious civilization built by those Jews and Muslims over the course of five centuries.
It is a novel that is immensely difficult to read, but for those who can plow through its over 750 pages it provides many brilliant insights into the Spanish character and the deep conflicts within it.
The English edition of the novel contains a post-script from the great Milan Kundera, who himself was quite familiar with this sort of post-modern jumble of fiction writing. It remains one of the most potent examples – along with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Hundred Years of Solitude, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose – of the genius that is the post-modern historical novel.
All these great works of fiction return to times past in order to interrogate history. They turn history into profoundly Midrashic readings of the legacies of nations and empires.
Indeed, I have discussed how the Tikvah Neo-Con Jews and their Fundamentalist Christian allies have rejected such Post-Modernism as moral relativism, and who have sought to eliminate its complex hermeneutical view of the past as it applies to the present:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/d9xdUVpsWVw
Weiss, naturally, offensively and reductively turns Rushdie into just another Cancel Culture victim – alongside Dave Chappelle and J.K. Rowling! – as if his Post-Colonial interventions are the same as the usual apologia for bigotry that has become central to her Rufo Austin worldview.
Where Rushdie in his best work sought to illuminate the Post-Colonial and the Imperialist threat and creatively excavate the rich culture of the Muslim world, Weiss has allied herself to Imperial apologists and Islamophobes Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson:
https://www.gawker.com/media/checking-in-with-the-university-of-austin
For those still not familiar with the happy racist couple’s work, here is a brief review:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n21/pankaj-mishra/watch-this-man
https://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11139272/muslim-pseudo-experts
It is for this reason that I have decided to provide some important Rushdie resources for those who might not be familiar with his oeuvre.
His most lasting work is clearly 1981’s Midnight’s Children; the great novel of the India-Pakistan partition and its Imperial connections.
It remains one of the most important novels of the 20th century and is mandatory reading.
Many curious readers will of course be interested in The Satanic Verses, but there are also equally important later Islamic culture-themed works like Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), East, West (1994). and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), the last-named dealing with the Catholic conquest of the final Muslim stronghold of Granada, which is so central to our understanding of Iberian and Sephardic history.
These books provide an inventory of the East/West encounter in a sophisticated manner typical of the polyglot Cosmopolitanism of Rushdie and his deft deployment of “Palimpsest History.”
For those who would like to learn more about the Post-Colonial, Yale French Studies published an excellent two-volume collection of academic essays in 1993 that covers much ground in the matter:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300052701/yale-french-studies-number-82/
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300053975/yale-french-studies-number-83/
Particularly important for Sephardim is co-editor Ronnie Scharfman’s insightful article on the Moroccan Jewish writer Edmond Amran El Maleh:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2930216
And, apropos of Fuentes, I have collected a number of articles on the Reconquista which present the myriad ways in which the New Fascists have exalted the Catholic violence and the Inquisition:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aT7q0lYjUC0dY03NHkdaU1uD6wmR8Gx1SbAUDyOPB_g/edit
While the Verses is a complex assault on the literalist Muslim tradition, the post-Fatwa books deal more generously with Arab and Muslim culture, as Rushdie reflected on the intellectual heritage of his progenitors in the context of the new Islamist terror that has endangered his life.
And it is in these later novels that Rushdie seeks to echo the Andalusian and Mughal traditions and the tolerance of the Islamic Humanism of his namesake:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_Empire
Here are some important Mughal resources for those unfamiliar with the pre-Modern world of the Subcontinent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baburnama
https://www.amazon.com/Babur-Nama-Penguin-Classics-Dilip/dp/0144001497
https://www.amazon.com/Empires-between-Christianity-1500-1800-Studies/dp/1438474342
As we try to understand the British Imperialism and its transformation of the older Mughal Muslim history, Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy is an indispensable addition to Rushdie’s work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibis_trilogy
https://www.amazon.com/Ibis-Trilogy-Box-Set/dp/0143427563
Tellingly, Ghosh has also written his own complex “Palimpsest History” of what the great German-Jewish scholar S.D. Goitein called “A Mediterranean Society,” in his seminal 1992 book In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale:
https://www.amazon.com/Antique-Land-History-Guise-Travelers/dp/0679727833
Ghosh deploys the documents of the Cairo Geniza to tell a cross-cultural tale of India and the Levant:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_an_Antique_Land
Tellingly, given the Rushdie-Said connection, the book was reviewed in The New York Times by Palestinian writer Anton Shammas:
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/01/books/the-once-and-future-egypt.html
I am certain that many of you will be processing the current Rushdie tragedy out of the Neo-Con Tikvah lens, so it is important that I provide this background in Indian, Arab, and Muslim history and culture that has been so central to Rushdie’s work, and which stands in stark contrast to the reactionary ideas and values in the Right Wing Jewish media, and exemplified by the anti-Cosmopolitan Shtetl Ethnocentrism of Tikvah stalwarts like Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Leora Batnitzky, and, of course, Ruth Wisse.
I encourage everyone to purchase copies of Salman Rushdie’s classic novels, and to see that his representation of the Muslim world is rooted in the same Post-Colonial critique as that presented by the late Edward Said in his seminal books, Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), also mandatory reading for Sephardim:
https://www.amazon.com/Orientalism-Edward-W-Said/dp/039474067X
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)
https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Imperialism-Edward-W-Said/dp/0679750541
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_and_Imperialism
I paid tribute to Said in the following tribute newsletter:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GhzRtLG1MEroSyoDlMAvb7iLGCrA9jS_esxuRD7YlOM/edit
So, do not be hoodwinked into thinking that Rushdie is some Bernard Lewis clone or Republican stooge, in the manner of Bari Weiss.
In spite of his political transformation over time, the heady novels of Rushdie remain Post-Colonial classics which stand in the face of European racism and Imperialism, as they teach us how to understand the world of the “natives” and the pain of cruel violence and dispossession.
And neither the Tikvah Neo-Cons or the Islamist terrorists can blunt their significance and our pressing need to read them in their proper context and political framework.
David Shasha
Salman Rushdie: Selected Resources
Wikipedia entry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie
Midnight’s Children (1981)
https://www.amazon.com/Midnights-Children-Modern-Library-Novels/dp/0812976533
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight%27s_Children
Shame (1983)
https://www.amazon.com/Shame-Novel-Salman-Rushdie/dp/0812976703
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_(Rushdie_novel)
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
https://www.amazon.com/Haroun-Sea-Stories-Salman-Rushdie/dp/0140157379
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haroun_and_the_Sea_of_Stories
East, West (1994)
https://www.amazon.com/East-West-Stories-Salman-Rushdie/dp/0679757899
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East,_West
The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)
https://www.amazon.com/Moors-Last-Sigh-Salman-Rushdie/dp/0679744665
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moor%27s_Last_Sigh
We Ignored Salman Rushdie's Warning
By: Bari Weiss
We live in a culture in which many of the most celebrated people occupying the highest perches believe that words are violence. In this, they have much in common with Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who issued the first fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, and with Hadi Matar, the 24-year-old who, yesterday, appears to have fulfilled his command when he stabbed the author in the neck on a stage in Western New York.
The first group believes they are motivated by inclusion and tolerance—that it’s possible to create something even better than liberalism, a utopian society where no one is ever offended. The second we all recognize as religious fanatics. But it is the indulgence and cowardice of the words are violence crowd that has empowered the second and allowed us to reach this moment, when a fanatic rushes the stage of a literary conference with a knife and plunges it into one of the bravest writers alive.
I have spoken on the same stage where Rushdie was set to speak. You can’t imagine a more bucolic place than the Chautauqua Institution—old Victorian homes with screened-in porches and no locks, a lake, American flags and ice cream everywhere. It was founded in 1874 by Methodists as a summer colony for Sunday school teachers. Now, it attracts the kind of parents and grandparents who love Terry Gross and never miss a Wordle. It is just about the last place in America where you would imagine an act of such barbarism.
And yet as shocking as this attack was, it was also 33 years in the making: The Satanic Verses is a book with a very bloody trail
In July 1991, the Japanese translator of the condemned book, Hitoshi Igarashi, 44-years-old, was stabbed to death outside his office at the University of Tsukuba, northeast of Tokyo. The same month, the book’s Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was also stabbed—this time, in his own home in Milan. Two years later, in July 1993, the book’s Turkish translator, the prolific author Aziz Nesin, was the target of an arson attack on a hotel in the city of Sivas. He escaped, but 37 others were killed. A few months later, Islamists came for William Nygaard, the book’s Norwegian publisher. Nygaard was shot three times outside his home in Oslo and was critically injured.
And those are stories we remember. In 1989, 12 people were killed at an anti-Rushdie riot in Mumbai, the author’s birthplace, where the book was also banned. Five Pakistanis died in Islamabad under similar circumstances.
As for Rushdie himself, he took refuge in England, thanks to round-the-clock protection from the British government. For more than a decade, he lived under the name “Joseph Anton” (the title of his memoir), moving from safe house to safe house. In the first six months, he had to move 56 times. (England was not immune from the hysteria: Rushdie’s book was burned by Muslims in the city of Bradford—and at the suggestion of police, two WHSmith shops in Bradford stopped carrying the book.)
Salman Rushdie has lived half of his life with a bounty on his head—some $3.3 million promised by the Islamic Republic of Iran to anyone who murdered him. And yet, it was in 2015, years after he had come out of hiding, that he told the French newspaper L’Express: “We are living in the darkest time I have ever known.”
You would think that Rushdie would have said such a thing in the height of the chaos, when he was in hiding, when those associated with the book were being targeted for murder. By 2015, you might run into Rushdie at Manhattan cocktail parties, or at the theater with a gorgeous woman on his arm. (He had already been married to Padma, for God’s sake.)
So why did he say it was the “darkest time” he had ever known? Because what he saw was the weakening of the very Western values—the ferocious commitment to free thought and free speech—that had saved his life.
“If the attacks against Satanic Verses had taken place today,” he said in L’Express, “these people would not have defended me, and would have used the same arguments against me, accusing me of insulting an ethnic and cultural minority.”
He didn’t have to speculate. He said that because that is exactly what they did.
See, when Salman Rushdie was under siege, the likes of Tom Wolfe, Christopher Hitchens, Norman Mailer, Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney stood up to defend him. The leader of the pack was Susan Sontag, who was then president of PEN America, and arranged for the book to be read in public. Hitchens recalled that Sontag shamed members into showing up on Rushdie’s behalf and showing a little “civic fortitude.” (Read more about it all here.)
That courage wasn’t an abstraction, especially to some booksellers.
Consider the heroism of Andy Ross, the owner of the now-shuttered Cody’s Books in Berkeley, which carried the book and was bombed shortly after the fatwa was issued.
Here’s Ross:
“It was pretty easy for Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag to talk about risking their lives in support of an idea. After all they lived fairly high up in New York apartment buildings. It was quite another thing to be a retailer featuring the book at street level. I had to make some really hard decisions about balancing our commitment to freedom of speech against the real threat to the lives of our employees.”
After the bombing, he gathered all of his staff for a meeting:
“I stood and told the staff that we had a hard decision to make. We needed to decide whether to keep carrying Satanic Verses and risk our lives for what we believed in. Or to take a more cautious approach and compromise our values. So we took a vote. The staff voted unanimously to keep carrying the book. Tears still come to my eyes when I think of this. It was the defining moment in my 35 years of bookselling. It was the moment when I realized that bookselling was a dangerous and subversive vocation. Because ideas are powerful weapons. . . . I didn’t particularly feel comfortable about being a hero and putting other people’s lives in danger. I didn’t know at that moment whether this was an act of courage or foolhardiness. But from the clarity of hindsight, I would have to say it was the proudest day of my life.”
That was the late 1980s.
By 2015, America was a very different place.
When Rushdie made those comments to L’Express it was in the fallout of PEN, the country’s premiere literary group, deciding to honor the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo with an award. Months before, a dozen staff members of Charlie Hebdo were murdered by two terrorists in their offices. It was impossible to think of a publication that deserved to be recognized and elevated more.
And yet the response from more than 200 of the world’s most celebrated authors was to protest the award. Famous writers—Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore, Michael Cunningham, Rachel Kushner, Michael Ondaatje, Teju Cole, Peter Carey, Junot Díaz—suggested that maybe the people who had just seen their friends murdered for publishing a satirical magazine were a little bit at fault, too. That if something offends a minority group, that perhaps it shouldn’t be printed. And those cartoonists were certainly offensive, even the dead ones. These writers accused PEN of “valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.”
Here’s how Rushdie responded: “This issue has nothing to do with an oppressed and disadvantaged minority. It has everything to do with the battle against fanatical Islam, which is highly organized, well funded, and which seeks to terrify us all, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, into a cowed silence.”
He was right. They were wrong. And their civic cowardice, as Sontag may have described it, is in no small part, responsible for the climate we find ourselves in today. (As I wrote this, I got a news alert from The New York Times saying the attacker’s “motive was unclear.” Motive was unclear?)
The words are violence crowd is right about the power of language. Words can be vile, disgusting, offensive, and dehumanizing. They can make the speaker worthy of scorn, protest, and blistering criticism. But the difference between civilization and barbarism is that civilization responds to words with words. Not knives or guns or fire. That is the bright line. There can be no excuse for blurring that line—whether out of religious fanaticism or ideological orthodoxy of any other kind.
Today our culture is dominated by those who blur that line—those who lend credence to the idea that words, art, song lyrics, children’s books, and op-eds are the same as violence. We are so used to this worldview and what it requires—apologize, grovel, erase, grovel some more—that we no longer notice. It is why we can count, on one hand—Dave Chappelle; J.K. Rowling—those who show spine.
Of course it is 2022 that the Islamists finally get a knife into Salman Rushdie. Of course it is now, when words are literally violence and J.K. Rowling literally puts trans lives in danger and even talking about anything that might offend anyone means you are literally arguing I shouldn’t exist. Of course it’s now, when we’re surrounded by silliness and weakness and self-obsession, that a man gets on stage and plunges a knife into Rushdie, plunges it into his liver, plunges it into his arm, plunges it into his eye. That is violence.
From Common Sense with Bari Weiss, August 13, 2022
Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, and Moral Courage
By: Sarah Waheed
This past April, in an op-ed for the New York Times, Salman Rushdie pondered over the ways in which public respect for moral courage has diminished, noting how strange it is that we have become increasingly “suspicious of those who take a stand against the abuses of power or dogma.” Rushdie provided several examples of moral courage, ranging from South African activist Nelson Mandela, to Saudi poet Hamza Kashgari, to the Russian band Pussy Riot. The one that caught my eye was the late cultural critic and scholar of comparative literature, Edward Said (1935-2003). Rushdie, in the op-ed, described Said as an “out of step intellectual,” noting that he was “dismissed, absurdly, as an apologist for Palestinian terrorism.” Said had been one of Rushdie’s greatest admirers, and was particularly enamored of the way Rushdie wove the complexity of cultural differences into his early literature, essays and critiques. One wonders what route the friendship between Said and Rushdie would have taken, since such complexity no longer informs Rushdie’s political stances.
*
A quarter of a century ago, which from today’s perspective appears to have been a more innocent time—before 9/11 and the War on Terror, before the Iraq War and the US invasion of Afghanistan, and even before the first Gulf War and Ayatollah Khomeini’s infamous fatwa—Salman Rushdie and Edward Said sat down to speak about exile and literature. Their intellectual and personal friendship is evident in that 1986 interview, which took place at the PEN Congress in New York, and was published in the New Left Review shortly thereafter. The interview was also later published in Rushdie’s book of essays, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991.
The conversation ranged from American and Israeli perceptions of Palestinian people and Said’s alienation in New York, to Palestinian identity and consciousness, woven throughout with reflections about Rushdie’s novel, Midnight’s Children and Said’s book, After the Last Sky, co-authored with Jean Mohr. Rushdie noted:
In Edward’s view, the broken or discontinuous nature of Palestinian experience entails that classic rules about form or structure cannot be true to that experience; rather, it is necessary to work through a kind of chaos or unstable form that will accurately express its essential instability. Edward then proceeds to introduce the theme…that the history of Palestine has turned the insider (the Palestinian Arab) into the outsider.
It was clear that Said and Rushdie shared an affinity over their shared experiences of displacement and multiple forms of non-belonging.
What Said found particularly appealing about Rushdie’s writing were the innovative strategies of hybridity, multiplicity, irony, and language-play that Rushdie employed in literature—especially as it was connected to imperialism, exile, and boundary-crossing. He told Rushdie, “It is almost impossible to imagine a single narrative (of the Palestinian experience): it would have to be the kind of crazy history that comes out in Midnight’s Children, with all those little strands coming and going in and out.”
Both Said and Rushdie were also robust voices of dissent during the 1980s. In his book, Culture and Imperialism, Said lauded Rushdie’s moral courage in singling him out as one of the few writers in the UK critical of the Falklands War: “In 1984, well before The Satanic Verses appeared, Salman Rushdie diagnosed the spate of films and articles about the British Raj… Rushdie noted that the nostalgia pressed into service by these affectionate recollections of British rule in India coincided with the Falkands War…” In that passage, Said also defended Rushdie against critics who “seemed to disregard his principal point”—that popular representations of the past—of formerly colonized peoples by their former colonizers—were being used to breathe new life into new imperialist goals.
When the dangerously unconscionable fatwa was launched against Rushdie, Said spoke out passionately in his friend’s defense, calling Rushdie, “the intifada of the imagination,” iterating that it was the secular intellectual’s responsibility to defend him, for “freedom of expression cannot be sought invidiously in one territory, and ignored in another.” “Rushdie,” he said, “is everyone who dares to speak out against power, to say that we are entitled to think and express forbidden thoughts, to argue for democracy and freedom of opinion.”
*
Five years before the 9/11 attacks, Said penned a new introduction to the second edition of his 1981 book, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. Said’s contention was that the perception of Islam in the US was undergoing “a strange revival of canonical, though previously discredited, Orientalist ideas about Muslim, generally non-white, people—ideas that have achieved a startling prominence at a time when racial and religious mis-representations of every other cultural group are no longer circulated with such impunity.” Said’s book anticipated some of the more recent historically situated critiques—such as those by Stephen Sheehi and Deepa Kumar —of anti-Muslim racism or Islamophobia, in its current avatar: as handmaiden to the US-led war on terror.
Public critiques of Islamophobia, as was the case prior to 9/11, simply do not have the kind of caché as do stringent critiques of Islamic radicalism. In Covering Islam, Said writes that the corps of ‘experts’ on Muslim peoples “brought out to pontificate on formulaic ideas about Islam” in the media during crisis moments, which he noted had grown to prominence in the mid-1990s, have mushroomed in the post 9/11 world.
Many of the formulaic ideas about Islam that Said had critiqued in his books, Orientalism, as well as Covering Islam, also form the backbone of Islamophobia. Islamophobia relies upon false, oppositional binaries, superlatives, and monoliths. It is “they”, Muslims, who are said to be inherently more violent, belligerent, intolerant, primitive, and un-free; it is “they” who are said to refuse full adoption into modernity; it is “they” who are particularly oppressive towards women; it is “they” who need a reformation; and so on.
Today, in spite of the rise of extremist right-wing radicalism within the US, overwhelming media attention has been restricted to seeing terror as a peculiarly Muslim phenomenon, with Muslim being defined as some racialized other. This is why the Boston bombing was considered to be a national tragedy preoccupying the news cycle for weeks, but the attack against Sikh worshippers leaving six dead, over a year ago, was hardly the focus of similar attention. Nor are anti-Sikh hate crimes limited to neo-Nazi gunmen in Midwestern US: this past Saturday, a professor from Columbia University was attacked by a New York city mob. So racially coded are perceptions of Muslims that several Americans demanded that the July issue of Rolling Stone featuring Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover be taken off newsstands. CVS and Walgreens gave in to the calls for censorship, and decided not to sell the magazine in their stores: people seemed to be offended that that a ‘terrorist’ could be White. So synonymous have the words Islam, terrorism, and Muslims become, that one has to repeatedly provide correctives—as Glenn Greenwald did on Bill Maher’s show—to the view that Islam is uniquely preoccupied with violence and intolerance.
The media cacophony and ceaseless rounds of war propaganda have made it difficult for critiques of Islamophobia to be widely heard. Since the onset of this unending war on terror, for public intellectuals in the US to assert that war is terror by another name while criticizing Islamophobia is often perceived as an unwarranted disengagement from condemnations of terrorism. Some have earned the charge of being apologists for “Islamic terrorism” or “Islamism”—a word, Rushdie had noted in his 2001 op-ed, that “we must get used to.”
Condemning Islamophobia requires the kind of ‘moral courage’ to which Rushdie referred. Rushdie stated in his Times op-ed that “it ought still to be possible to recognize the courage it takes to stand up and bellow them [critiques of America] into the face of American power,” adding as an aside, “One may not be pro-Palestinian, but one should be able to see that Mr. Said stood up against Yasir Arafat as eloquently as he criticized the United States.”
And yet, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Rushdie himself ventriloquized commonly held assumptions and myths about Islam in the US. Opining in the New York Times that, “Yes, this is about Islam,” Rushdie elaborated: “if terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based.” Rushdie also diagnosed millions in this familiar litany:
For a vast number of “believing” Muslim men, “Islam” stands, in a jumbled, half-examined way, not only for the fear of God — the fear more than the love, one suspects — but also for a cluster of customs, opinions and prejudices that include their dietary practices; the sequestration or near-sequestration of “their” women; the sermons delivered by their mullahs of choice; a loathing of modern society in general, riddled as it is with music, godlessness and sex; and a more particularized loathing (and fear) of the prospect that their own immediate surroundings could be taken over — “Westoxicated” — by the liberal Western-style way of life.
As Said had long argued, this un-nuanced view of the world, in which “all Muslim societies” are said to lack, or “loathe” the modern world, is hardly new. For many decades now, a popular, mythological framework masquerading as common sense has preoccupied European and American discussions of Muslims and Islam. According to its facile premise, the world is made up of divisions between Western liberalism and Islam, civilization and the barbarians, progress and primitivism, the modern and the traditional, rationality and religion, liberated Western women and their oppressed Muslim sisters.
Historical, political, and cultural realities are actually quite messy, and do not fit into neat little boxes of either/or, the West and the Rest, or the West and Islam. In 2001, while Rushdie distanced himself from the paleolithic musings of Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations, his public writings also served to refine the anti-Muslim hysteria which was preoccupying the public discourse in Europe and the US. Those who have studied formerly colonized, modern societies where Muslims constitute either majority or minority populations have been at pains to show that such a simplistic perception of the world is deeply flawed. This point is worth considering especially in light of a question Rushdie asked over a decade ago, a question which continues to rear itself repeatedly: “Suppose we say that the ills of our societies are not primarily America’s fault, that we are to blame for our own failings?” Rushdie’s question forced a false choice: blame lies either with the US or with Muslim societies.
*
This sadly binary view of the world is at odds with Rushdie’s celebration of mélange, hodge-podge, and multiplicity. If we return to Rushdie’s earlier experiments with language, and his essays about culture and exile, one hears a more politically engaged and intellectually sensitive voice, such as in his collection of essays, Imaginary Homelands, where Rushdie dwelt on issues of xenophobia in the diverse societies of the UK. For Said, Rushdie’s most significant contribution had to do with how a writer inhabiting the liminal spaces—the spaces between cultural worlds—necessarily demands a double critique when one speaks truth to power: whether that might mean a critique of powerful self-appointed spokespersons of a purist Islamic (or Hindu, or Christian, or secularist) morality who prohibit freedom of speech, or towards those who, under the guise of secular humanism, defend the notion of liberating peoples at gunpoint.
Yet, such notions of complexity and hybridity no longer inform Rushdie’s political stances. Like many public intellectuals who were confidently asserting all sorts of things about Islam in the build-up to the war on terror, Rushdie ignored the complex historical and political encounters between Western and Muslim peoples in his non-fiction writings. These encounters were, of course varied, such as in the 16th century, with the Mediterranean travels of Moroccan born al-Hasan al Wazzan (Leo Africanus), or the Jesuits in the court of India’s Mughal emperor Akbar.
Rushdie’s politics have shifted over the past two decades. Today, his voice is a far cry from dissent. It is now characterized by conformity to neoliberal political ideals and views of Islam, combined with the self-indulgence that comes with celebrity status. Summoned repeatedly as a token representative of the third world condition for Western audiences, Rushdie has used his platform to generalize from his particular individual experience issuing from The Satanic Verses controversy, across a wide spectrum of peoples. In this sense, Rushdie is very different from the late Edward Said, who said he instinctively found himself on the other side of power.
In 2003, Said himself raised the issue of Rushdie’s political transformation, towards the end of a talk at Columbia University. The bulk of the talk was focused on Rushdie’s writings, and Said had described his prose as “verbal fireworks.” Said mentioned that Rushdie’s years of living underground had affected the writer deeply: “He felt confusion, denial and anger for the onslaught against [The Satanic Verses]. There was a sense his own people turned against him.” Sensitively, Said added that because Rushdie was so embattled, “he was not as aware as he could have been of the many people in the Muslim world who defended him and in fact, spoke out.” Said also told the audience that Rushdie’s political views have “changed over time,” referring, amongst other things, to Rushdie’s view on the impending war with Iraq, which Rushdie supported. Said added, “There’s a greater disconnect between his non-fictional prose and his fiction, now, than there was in the decade of the 1980s.” Rushdie did not speak out against the war, nor did he lend intellectual support to the millions around the world who protested against the US invasion of Iraq—a war which left behind multi-headed hydra of devastation.
That was in 2003, ten years ago, the same year that Edward Said passed away.
In the decade since, Rushdie has dismissed the term “Islamophobia,” in what are, within the US, the most Islamophobic times to date. He signed off on a manifesto that claimed Islamophobia is “an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatization of its believers.” The manifesto was written in response to the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005 which had sparked protests amongst Muslims in various parts of the world. Rushdie defended the right of the paper to publish the racist cartoons, for indeed the newspaper did have the right to publish what it so willed. (Largely absent from the entire controversy was the point that depictions of the Prophet had long been a part of the history of Islam, from Indo-Persianate paintings to Ottoman art, to contemporary Iranian images). But, was it really a matter of moral courage for Rushdie to defend racist cartoons while displacing critiques of Islamophobia? Recall Rushdie’s critique in the early 1980s about how nostalgia for the British Raj coincided with the Falklands war. By 2005, Rushdie is seemingly uninterested in such contextual critiques, say, how the literal and figurative depictions of Muhammad by the Danish cartoonists serve a political and cultural purpose at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe is on the rise.
Given his writings about the perceptions of Islam, Said would not have crassly reduced the real phenomenon of Islamophobia to a vague and confusing concept. Said might have even pushed Rushdie to consider his new political stances, and would likely have raised questions about Rushdie’s selective humanism.
After all, Islamophobia is not some confusing concept. Nor is Islamophobia simply limited to the hate-crimes against minorities—both Muslims and those mistakenly perceived to be Muslim—which have seen a dramatic rise in the past decade. Nor is the fear and prejudice against Muslims restricted to the radical right: Pam Geller and Robert Spencer of the anti-Muslim group Stop Islamization of America represent the obscene tip of the iceberg, of what is actually a very widespread, disturbing trend of anti-Muslim racism.
*
Islamophobia today is deeply imbricated in US policy and has led to a virtually separate criminal justice system for Muslims. It justifies the constant surveillance of immigrant communities, the profiling of Muslims in places like streets, mosques, universities and the monitoring of Muslims’ charitable giving; it validates spying on Muslims and the erasure of their civil rights and for them to be detained without being charged with a crime; it also espouses their torture—and not only by state officials, but in propaganda films that are honored at the Oscars; it is used as the script by which the FBI entrap ‘dark-skinned’ men and proclaim foiled terror plots; and of course, it pervades everyday life, not only from Islam bashing metro advertisements, but the discrimination and harassment of Muslims in schools, work places, and other public spaces. Islamophobia means the most vulnerable of Muslim minorities living in Europe and the US—working class immigrants—have borne the brunt of the siege on civil liberties. What psychological impact such a siege is having upon these communities is not altogether clear, since the few resources such minorities do have are mostly being directed against external assaults to their freedoms, instead of the internal problems within their communities.
Ultimately, Islamophobia thrives on the notion that any terroristic attack—whether actual or potential—brings to mind, “Yes, this is about Islam.” Given this state of affairs, one wonders: where was Rushdie’s moral courage ten years ago? When it comes to the widespread anti-Muslim racism known as Islamophobia—one that has been employed repeatedly as justification for the national security state aims of US imperial aggression—Rushdie’s is a withering moral courage.
From Asian American Writers Project, September 26, 2013
Magic realism in relation to the post-colonial and Midnight's Children
By: Nicholas Stewart
'The formal technique of "magic realism,"' Linda Hutcheon writes, '(with its characteristic mixing of the fantastic and the realist) has been singled out by many critics as one of the points of conjunction of post-modernism and post-colonialism' (131). Her tracing the origins of magic realism as a literary style to Latin America and Third World countries is accompanied by a definition of a post-modern text as signifying a change from 'modernism's ahistorical burden of the past': it is a text that 'self-consciously reconstruct[s] its relationship to what came before' (131). The post-modern is linked by magic realism to 'post-colonial literatures [which] are also negotiating....the same tyrannical weight of colonial history in conjunction with the past' (131).
Before discussing magic realism in Midnight's Children, a brief definition of the term "post-colonialism"as I intend to use it in this essay will aid the clarification of the links made between Hutcheon's theory and the following analysis of Rushdie's text. Ania Loomba argues that post-colonialism is a loose term. She notes that
the prefix "post"....implies an "aftermath" in two senses - temporal, as in coming after, and ideological, as in supplanting. It is the second implication which critics of the term have found contestable: if the inequities of colonial rule have not been erased, it is perhaps premature to proclaim the demise of colonialism. A country may be both postcolonial (in the sense of being formally independent) and neo-colonial (in the sense of remaining economically and/or culturally dependant) at the same time. (7)
Loomba's post-colonialism is a malleable definition which can be applied to Rushdie's text. In the 'temporal' sense,Midnight's Childrenis post-colonial as the main body of the narrative occurs after India becomes independent. However, as will be discussed, Rushdie's use of the cinema in relation to magic realism raises interesting questions in relation to Loomba's 'ideological' sense: India's culture is moulded by indigenous fictions and those of the West.
The narrative framework of Midnight's Childrenconsists of an tale -- comprising his life story -- which Saleem Sinai recounts orally to his wife-to-be Padma. This self-referential narrative (within a single paragraph Saleem refers to himself in the first person: 'And I, wishing upon myself the curse of Nadir Khan....'; ' "I tell you," Saleem cried, "it is true...."') recalls indigenous Indian culture, particularly the similarly orally recounted Arabian Nights. The events in Rushdie's text also parallel the magical nature of the narratives recounted in the Arabian Nights (consider the attempt to electrocute Saleem at the latrine (353), or his journey in the 'basket of invisibility' (383)).
In Midnight's Children, the narrative comprises and compresses Indian cultural history. 'Once upon a time,' Saleem muses, 'there were Radna and Krisna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnu; also (because we are not affected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn' (259). At this point Hutcheon's post-modern perspective can be discerned: characters from Indian cultural history are chronologically intertwined with characters from Western culture, and the devices that they signify -- Indian culture, religion and storytelling, Western drama and cinema -- are presented in Rushdie's text with post-colonial Indian history to examine both the effect of these indigenous and non-indigenous cultures on the Indian mind and in the light of Indian independence. It is in this sense, which blends with Loomba's theory as quoted above, that Midnight's Childrenis a post-colonial text, via its presentation and examination of the temporal and cultural status of India as an independent nation. This, as Edward W. Said writes, has been initiated in the text to portray the 'conscious effort to enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories....[This] is of particular interest in Rushdie's work' (260).
Magic realism can therefore be seen -- as Hutcheon has above been noted to write of the style in general -- as, in the particular context of Midnight's Children, a device binding Indian culture of the past to the contemporary multicultural interface. Rushdie's principle use of magic realism in the text involves the telepathic abilities of Saleem and the other thousand and one children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15th 1947 (the date of Indian independance), abilities that enable them to communicate with each other and in Saleem's case, to read the minds of those around him.
Stephen Slemon writes that 'in the language of narration in a magic realist text, a battle between two oppositional systems takes place, each working toward the creation of a fictional world from the other' (11). If we take this to be the world of fantasy and the world of reality, both factors can be seen to be present and competing for the reader's attention. The fantastic is easily discerned in Midnight's Children. Through it, the realistic makes its voice heard. The thousand and one children point not only towards the fantasy of the similarly numbered Arabian Nights, but also to Rushdie's calculations of the Indian birth rate. He estimated that 'a thousand and one children an hour is roughly accurate' (Durix 18). Furthermore, Rushdie's comments enable the gift of telepathy to be perceived as a magical signifier of the objective reality of contemporary Indian society which makes its impression on the individual psyche.'In a country like India,' Rushdie continues, 'you are basically never alone. The idea of solitude is a luxury which only rich people enjoy....it seemed to me that people lived intermingled with each other in a way that perhaps they don't any more in the West....it was idiotic to try and consider one's life as being discrete from all other lives' (Durix 23). As 'All India Radio,' Saleem's '[t]elepathy' becomes a simultaneously magical and realistic device to signify the 'polyglot frenzy' consisting of 'the inner monologues of all the teeming millions' (Rushdie 168). As Slemon notes, 'the real social relations of post-colonial cultures appear, through the mediation of the text's language of narration, in the post-colonial magic realist work' (12).
The cinema: Rushdie's post-colonial cultural interface
'Magic realist texts,' Slemon continues, 'tend to display a preoccupation with images of borders and centres, and to work towards destabilizing their fixity' (13). Rushdie's attempts to achieve this take place within the borders of the cinematic and the cinema screen, a field in which he perceptively examines the effect of the subtle fantasy at play within perceptions of reality moulded by both Hollywood and the Indian film industry. Scattered references to the cinema continually inform the narrative of Midnight's Children. Rashid the rickshaw boy, leaving the cinema, contemplates a film he has just watched, which Rushdie ironically terms 'an Eastern Western' (49). This production is not only a curious hybrid of Hollywood cowboy film and Hindu culture, but also a signifier of the presence of interconnected Western and Indian influences within the post-colonial Indian sphere. The cinematic rendering of the post-colonial presents a benevolent view of the "Bollywood" productions of India: they are representative of a popular Indian medium after independence has been gained, but one which is intertwined with Western "Hollywood" culture. Once again, Loomba's 'ideological' (7) post-colonial sense can be discerned. Mishra notes the rapid growth of the Indian film industy: in 1983, it produced 742 feature films (122).His comments reflect that the status of the cinema in Midnight's Childrenis that of an industry which 'began as a colonial business, and has....never been able to shed its colonial origins' (Mishra 121).
The hybridity of the cinema moulds the individuals who are transfixed by its magical resonance. Saleem's perception of himself in his memory and within his fantastic narrative is shaped by the cinema. Regional events are measured against a medium that exerts a persuasive Western as well as Indian cultural influence. Consider Saleem's comparing events in his life with Hollywood productions: 'would this....young father have behaved like, or unlike, Montgomery Clift in I Confess? (Watching it some years ago at the New Empire Cinema, I couldn't decide.)' (105); 'I may have got all this from an old film called Lost Horizon....'(306). The cinema becomes a further device for Rushdie's magic realism. Films transform the perception of others and their perception of themselves. Consider Inspector Vakeel, who 'leaps into action, swinging up his rifle, shooting from the hip like John Wayne' (147).Once more the magical signifies the composite nature of contemporary Indian culture and society.
After independence has been attained, the Indian film industry becomes a window for the possibility of new investigations and constructions of Indian cultural identity. Said has written that Midnight's Childrenis a 'work based on the liberating imagination of independence itself, with all its anomalies and contradictions working themselves out' (260). Before independence, the regional events of nationalist Indian protest are firmly yoked within a frame that perceives itself as central: Indians appear in a film directed and conceived by the coloniser. The massacre of the Sikhs by Brigadier Dyer's men in 1919 is rendered as if on a cinema screen. 'No close-up,' Rushdie writes, as he "films" the massacre in long-shot, 'is necessary' (35). At the point of independence, the Indian cinematic productions provide a springboard for cultural self-assertion, but this is muted by the presence of Western culture. The two Indian lovers on the cinema screen, forbidden to touch by local culture, transfix the audience who compare them to the Hollywood counterpart.
Rushdie presents the cinematic influence on Indian culture in a joyous manner: there is, however, a simultaneous undercurrent of doubt in his text that criticises the adherence to magical, fantastic fictions -- whether cinematic, oral, Indian, Western, past or present -- and by doing so postulates that there is an objective world of historical events moulding history. Post-colonial culture, with its mixture of the Western and the Indian masks the harsh nature of political and historical events, and by so doing places obstacles in the way of and questions the attainability of a "complete" Indian identity, free both in time, space and culture from outside influences. The irony in the simple song Mary Pereira sings is explicit: 'Anything you want to be, you can be: You can be just what all you want' (Rushdie 127). In simple childlike fantasy, identities can be constructed easily (as in Saleem's case): Midnight's Children presents a nation -- India -- in its infancy, which, like Saleem, enjoys a fantastic tale and sees the magical as omnipresent. Rushdie breaks the magic resonance, in the case of the audience transfixed by the lovers, by the sudden announcement in the cinema of Ghandi's assassination (142 - 3).
This desire for fantasy to comfort an infant nation and culture is perhaps best illustrated in the case of Saleem's uncle, who sits 'pounding out scripts which nobody would ever film....' (241). This is because, in the words of Saleem's aunt Pia, ' "he must write about ordinary people and social problems!" ' (242). The inference is that, whilst this realist style of film making, as typified by Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy(Panther Panchali(1956),Aparajito(1957) and The World of Apu(1959)) (Monaco 444) is critically lauded both in India and internationally, there is no mass demand for realism in a culture whose desire for fantasy marks the nature of its post-colonial identity.
Magic realism, universalism and difference
The cinema screen becomes a field in which an examination of the two polarities, 'universalism,' the 'notion of a unitary and homogeneous human nature which marginalises and excludes the distinctive characteristics, the difference, of post-colonial societies,' and difference, which finds 'universalism....disappearing into an endless network of provisional and specific determinations in which even the most apparently "essential" features of human life become provisional and contingent,' (Ashcroft et al. 55) takes place. This is directly implied when Rushdie writes 'Reality[emphasis added] is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible' (165). Events viewed from a distance are vague generalisations, but as they occur contingently, they can be seen to be made up of complex particles. Describing himself moving closer and closer to a cinema screen, from the back of seats to the front, Saleem considers that '[g]radually the stars' faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves - or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality....' (166).
Writing that 'the illusion itself is reality,' and thereby acknowledging the hypnotic grip of the magic emitted by the cinema, Rushdie both questions and acknowledges the power of the medium as a component of a hybrid post-colonial Indian culture. As Linda Hutcheon writes, 'In granting value to (what the centre calls) the margin or Other, the post-modern challenges any hegemonic force that presumes centrality, even as it acknowledges that it cannot privilege the margin without acknowledging the power of the centre' (132). She concludes by noting that '[t]he regionalism of magic realism and the local and particular focus of post-modern art are both ways of contesting not just this centrality, but also claims of universality' (132).
Conclusion
The midnight children are a magic realist device emphasising the continued struggle to come to terms with identity within the polarities of the post-colonial. They are, by virtue of their midnight birth, 'children of the times,' as Rushdie has asserted, as much as magical creations (Pattanayak 21). Rushdie, through Saleem, writes that the children can be seen as 'the last throw of everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth ridden nation [myth perhaps referring to the more negative influence of Western as well as Indian fictions]....or as the true hope of freedom....' (Rushdie 200). This freedom, at the end of the text, is described as being 'now forever extinguished,' and there is a sour irony inherent in Saleem's thoughts that the children 'must not become....the bizarre creation of a rambling, diseased mind' (200). Rushdie implies that Saleem's generation has failed to consolidate the possibilities inherent in independence. The possibility exists in each passing generation of midnight children, who are the children of each successive era. Each generation, as Saleem muses, will erase the presence of a previous generation that has not yet learnt to define a stable and solid sense identity: 'Yes, they will trample me underfoot....they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who is not his....'(463). The individual voice is swamped by the creeping progression of time and history: nevertheless, the text's conclusion is open ended. There may be no such thing as a single national identity in the contemporary world, where media and communication link cultures and countries: there is perhaps an interchange of cultures, to varying degrees, between all countries. This delicate ambiguity is emphasised in the final sentence of the text, which links magic with realism, the individual with history, the individual and regional identity and self-assertion with the magnet of the universal: '....it is the privilege of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and be unable to live or die in peace' (463). Rushdie weaves a text that fuses tradition and current cultural influences to create an open-ended post-colonial discourse.
Bibliography
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995.
Durix, Jean-Pierre. "Salman Rushdie: Interview." Kunapipi4.2 (1982): 17 - 26.
Hutcheon, Linda. "Circling the Downspout of Empire." Ashcroft, Bill et al., 130 - 5.
Loomba, Ania.Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1998.
Mishra, Vijay. "The Texts of Mother India." After Europe.Ed. Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1989. 119-37.
Monaco, James, ed. The Virgin International Encyclopedia of Film. London: Virgin, 1992.
Pattayanak, Chandrabhanu. "Interview with Salman Rushdie." Literary Criterion 18.3 (1983): 19 - 22.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children. London: Vintage, 1995.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994.
Slemon, Stephen. "Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse". Canadian Literature 116 (1988): 9 - 24.
This project was completed under the direction of Dr. Leon Litvack as a requirement for the MA degree in Modern Literary Studies in the School of English at the Queen's University of Belfast. The site is evolving and will include contributions from future generations of MA students on other writers and themes.
Palimpsest History
By: Christine Brooke-Rose
A familiar notion is particularly well-expressed in Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame. The notion is that of history as itself a fiction; the expression is varied. ‘All stories,’ he says as intruding author, ‘are haunted by the ghosts of the stories they might have been.’ And elsewhere:
As for me: I too, like all migrants, am a fantasist. I build imaginary countries and try to impose them on the ones that exist. I too, face the problem of history: what to retain, what to dump, how to hold on to what memory insists on relinquishing, how to deal with change.
My story’s palimpsest country has, I repeat, no name of its own.
But earlier he had said, also as an intruding author: ‘But suppose this were a realistic novel! Just think what else I might have to put in.’ There follows a long paragraph-full of real horrors, with real names, which ends: ‘Imagine my difficulties!’ And he goes on:
By now, if I had been writing a book of this nature, it would have done me no good to protest that I was writing universally, not about Pakistan. The book would have been banned, dumped in the rubbish bin, burned. All that effort for nothing. Realism can break a writer’s heart.
Fortunately, however, I am only telling a sort of modern fairy-tale, so that’s all right; nobody need get upset, or take anything I say too seriously. No drastic action need be taken either.
What a relief!
The semi-conscious dramatic irony of this last passage is poignant. For, of course, all these quotations also apply, in advance of time, to The Satanic Verses (1988), where two palimpsest countries, India and England, and one palimpsest religion, Islam, are concerned; and which belongs to a type of fiction that has burst on the literary scene in the last quarter of this century and thoroughly renewed the dying art of the novel: Terra Nostra (1976), by the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, is another great example. Some have called this development ‘magic realism’. I prefer to call it palimpsest history.
First I want to distinguish between various kinds of fictional histories: 1. the realistic historical novel, about which I shall say nothing; 2. the totally imagined story, set in a historical period, in which magic unaccountably intervenes (Barth, Marquez); 3. the totally imagined story, set in a historical period, without magic but with so much time-dislocating philosophical, theological and literary allusion and implication that the effect is magical (Eco); 4. the zany reconstruction of a more familiar, because closer, period or event, with apparent magic which is, however, motivated through hallucination (Coover, Pynchon). Fifthly and lastly, the palimpsest history of a nation and creed, in which magic may or may not be involved but seems almost irrelevant – or shall we say almost natural – compared to the preposterousness of mankind as realistically described. This we find in Terra Nostra and The Satanic Verses.
Consider Philip II of Spain in Terra Nostra. He is shown as a younger man (in his memory), massacring Protestants in Flanders, or later building the Escorial as a permanent mausoleum for his royal ancestors and himself. This is history. But he is also depicted as the son of Felipe el Hermoso (Philip the Handsome), who died young, and Juana la Loca (Joan the Mad), still alive and participating. Now the son of Philip the Handsome and Joan the Mad was the Emperor Charles V. There is a curious fusion of the two. Although often called Felipe, he is mostly referred to as el Señor, which could apply to both, and at one point he says, ‘my name is also Philip’ – which makes the reader wonder whether Charles V’s name was Philip. He is also shown as young Philip, forced by his father el Señor to take his droit de cuissage on a young peasant bride. But later he is said to be married to an English cousin called Isabel, which was not true of Philip II, whereas Charles V’s queen was called Isabel, but Isabel of Portugal. This English Isabel he never touches, and although he knows she has lovers, he finally separates from her amicably and sends her back to England, where she becomes the Virgin Queen Elizabeth. Now we know that one of Philip’s four wives was English, but this was Mary Tudor.
Moreover, a constant theme of the novel is that el Señor has no heir, and indeed dies heirless. Obviously Charles V had an heir, Philip II, and so did the historical Philip II, by his fourth and Austrian wife, an heir who later became Philip IV. Thus the only historical items are that he besieged a city in Flanders – though Ghent is never named – and that he built the Escorial – this, too, is never named, only described. And Philip’s retreat into this palace of the dead sometimes sounds curiously like Charles’s retreat to the monastery at Yurta – which, however, he did not build – after his abdication.
A similar fusion or confusion occurs when the New World, to which one of the three triplets and supposed usurpers – who each have six toes and a red cross birthmark on their back – sails on a small boat with one companion, who is killed, and has long and magical adventures in pre-Spanish Mexico. When he returns, Philip refuses to believe in the existence of the Nuevo Mundo which, of course, has historically been well established by his time, since Charles V’s empire was one on which, as schoolbooks say, the sun never set.
None of this impedes the reading, any more than does the reincarnation of some of the non-royal characters in modern times. Why? Not only because it is a rattling good story in its own right, as convincing as the real story. But also because it is a different view of the human condition and what it endures and springs from, of absolute power and its aberrations, of the way its leaders could discount the deaths of hundreds of workers to build monster palaces, or the deaths of thousands of innocents to build monster dreams, to establish the truth as they saw it. In a way, it is what Science Fiction theorists call an alternative world.
But this is not an alternative world: it is alternative history. Palimpsest history. And there are, incidentally, one or two meditations or fantasies, by Philip especially, of palimpsest religion, that look remarkably heretical or even blasphemous but the Christian authorities have never objected to them. Perhaps they learnt from the Inquisition. Or, more likely, they don’t read novels. But then the condemners of Rushdie don’t seem to have read him either.
Of course we should not be surprised that totalitarian governments, and not least theocratic governments, should, when someone draws their attention to such works, object to to palimpsest history. It has happened over and over in the Soviet Union. Such governments are always busy rewriting history themselves and only their palimpsest is regarded as acceptable. And yet there is not a single passage in The Satanic Verses that cannot find echo in the Qur’an and qur’anic traditions and Islamic history. The notion of ‘Mahound’ always receiving messages that justify his double standard with regard to wives, for example, is expressed not by the narrator but by protesting characters in conquered ‘Jahilia’, and finds its echo in Mohammed’s revelations:
Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives to whom you have granted dowries and the slave-girls whom Allah has given you as booty; the daughters of your paternal and maternal uncles and of your paternal and maternal aunts who fled with you; and the other women who gave themselves to you and whom you wished to take in marriage. This privilege is yours alone, being granted to no other believer.
We well know the duties We have imposed on the faithful concerning their wives and slave-girls. We grant you this privilege so that none may blame you. Allah is forgiving and merciful.
What an easy step in the light-fantastic to imagine that the 12 harlots in the Jahilia brothel should assume the names of the prophet’s wives. But Rushdie has explained himself on this. My point is that throughout the book we have a different reading, a poetic, re-creative reading, of what is in the Qur’an. Even the incident of the Satanic Verses finds echo in another context or rather, in no context at all, when out of the blue Mohammed is told: ‘When We change one verse for another (Allah knows best what He reveals), they say: “You are an impostor.” Indeed, most of them are ignorant men.’
And as Rushdie has insisted, all these recreative readings are rendered as the dreams of Gibreel Farishta, an Indian Muslim actor who often played parts of even Hindu gods in the type of Indian films called ‘theologicals’. In other words, the different reading is motivated in much the same way as Pynchon’s events are motivated by paranoia. Indeed the use of dreams is part of Rushdie’s defence, but personally, and on a purely literary level, I think they are almost a pity, and prefer to read them as fictional facts: why should Gibreel, who falls from the exploded plane and survives, not also travel in time? His companion Saladin, after all, changes into Shaitan, with growing horns and a tail, and then is suddenly cured. These, too, are readings, in a way allegorical but also psychological, palimpsest religion. As seen and felt and reread by a modern sensibility. But as Eco says in one of his lectures: ‘To privilege the initiative of the reader does not necessarily mean to guarantee the infinity of readings. If one privileges the initiative of the reader, one must also consider the possibility of an active reader who decides to read a text univocally: it is a privilege of fundamentalists to read the Bible according to a single sense.’
This is certainly what happens with the Qur’an. Only the authorised exegetists are allowed to interpret. A mere author is just nowhere, indeed ‘Mahound’ is made to say in The Satanic Verses that he can see no difference between a poet and a whore. If in addition this author happens to be a non-believer he is even worse than nowhere, for the Qur’an says clearly that Allah chooses the believers and even misleads the unbelievers. ‘None can guide the people whom Allah leads astray. He leaves them blundering about in their wickedness.’ As to possible new readings in time, Allah says after a similar passage about unbelievers not being helped: ‘Such were the ways of Allah in days gone by: and you shall find that they remain unchanged.’ Or again: ‘Proclaim what is revealed to you in the Book of your Lord. None can change His words’ –except, as we saw, Allah Himself.
Interestingly, the unbelievers are several times shown as accusing Mohammed’s revelations of being ‘old fictitious tales’ or, on the Torah and the Koran, ‘two works of magic supporting one another. We will believe in neither of them.’ Islam seems to the non-Islamic reader totally anti-narrative. There are no stories in the Qur’an except one or two brief exempla. This could be regarded as due to the anti-representation rule, if there were not also many bits of stories taken from the Torah (in the wide sense). Tell them about our servant Abraham, Allah says, or Moses or Lot all the way to or Mary and Jesus. This is admirably syncretic. But the stories themselves are unrecognisable as stories, they are fragmented and repetitive, and occur as ‘arguments’ and ‘signs’, and ‘proof’ of Allah’s truth. Apart from these, the Qur’an is amazingly static. There is no narrative line. It is a book of faith and ethics, that establishes a new humanism of a kind, and it proceeds by affirmation and injunction, threats of punishment and promises of reward. The story of Mohammed himself comes from other sources.
I am not an Islamist, and clearly other Arabic and especially Persian traditions do have stories. My point is simply that from the Qur’an alone, it seems hardly surprising that its more rigid interpreters and followers would be incapable of conceiving, let alone understanding, this new fiction that is palimpsest history, palimpsest religion, or palimpsest history of man’s spirituality.
And yet, to a modern sensibility – and if it is true, as many sociologists are saying, that the religious spirit is returning – the agonised doubts of both Gibreel and Saladin, as well as those of Philip II, speak more vividly than can those of the self-centred, sin-and-salvation-centred characters of Graham Greene, precisely because they are anchored in both ancient and modern history, with its migrations and regenerating mixtures.
All the books I have mentioned are large partly because they are packed with specialised knowledge. Pynchon, as Frank Kermode pointed out recently, ‘has an enormous amount of expert information – for instance, about technology, history and sexual subversion’. So does Eco about theology and theosophy, literature, philosophy, mechanical engineering, computers etc, so does Fuentes about the history of Spain and Mexico; so does Rushdie about Pakistan, India, Hinduism and Islam. Like the historian, these authors work very hard on their facts. So, incidentally, does the author of the more scientific kind of Science Fiction.
Now knowledge has long been unfashionable in fiction. Even when praised, a show of knowledge is usually regarded as irrelevant: Mr X shows an immense amount of knowledge of a, b, c, and the critic passes to theme, plot, characters and sometimes style, often in that order. What has been valued in this sociological and psychoanalytical century is personal experience. In the last resort, a novel can be limited to this, can come straight out of the heart and head, with at best a craftsmanly ability to organise it well, and write well.
Naturally I am caricaturing a little, to make a point. Naturally I am not trying to say that the polyphonic palimpsest histories I have been discussing are the only great novels of the century, nor that there haven’t been other types of highly imaginative novels before these. I am only saying that the novel’s task is to do things which only the novel can do, things which the cinema, the theatre and television have to reduce and traduce considerably in adaptations, losing whole dimensions, precisely because they now do better some of what the classical realist novel used to do so well. The novel took its roots in historical documents and has always had an intimate link with history. But the novel’s task, unlike that of history, is to stretch our intellectual, spiritual and imaginative horizons to breaking-point. Because palimpsest histories do precisely that, mingling realism with the supernatural and history with spiritual and philosophical reinterpretation, they could be said to float half-way between the sacred books of our various heritages, which survive on the strength of the faiths they have created and the endless exegesis and commentaries these sacred books create, which do not usually survive one another. It may seem disrespectful to place The Satanic Verses half way between the sacred book that is the Qur’an and the very exegetists who execrate it, but I am here I speaking only in literary terms, which may become clearer if I say that Homer is only partially historical and greatly mythical, or that Fuentes’s history of Spain is as interesting as the ‘real’ history sacralised at school, or Eco’s Pendulum as the ‘real’ history of theosophy. And this is because they are palimpsest histories.
From London Review of Books, May 10, 1990, reprinted in Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Cambridge University Press, 1992