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Literary Review
On Rushdie
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Rushdie is Whitman in a 21st-Century rush, giving voice to outsiders and hybrids, giving us a literature, to be wielded like a scimitar, poppy, temple flower, says INDRAN AMIRTHANAYAGAM.
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R.V. Moorthy
I FIRST heard Salman Rushdie in the 1980s at the 92nd Street in New York when he read from his account of Nicaragua, The Jaguar's Smile. I jostled along with other early admirers — literati who had woken up some years back to his Booker Prize victory for Midnight's Children, South Asians smiling and proud of this brash, bright prophet who had foisted his sweltering, sultry and contradictory India on the courts of St. James and of literary taste. He read first from his travels in Nicaragua and then from Shame. His barbs still whistle in memory, and what brilliance to fold personal and national memory into the concept and emotion of shame — as basic to the Pakistani and Indian landscape as plastics to the United States of the Graduate.
We shook hands that night for the first time. Years passed mumbling about the Rushdies that I had not finished and those that kept trotting up in memory satisfied with my effort. The first of the unfinished I confess were the Satanic Verses. I bought the book early, before the fatwa, read the first galloping one hundred pages, then lost my breath, as if I had tried to run a marathon at the pace of a 60-yard dash. Perhaps my approach had been influenced by that strange and merciless fall from an airplane which begins the novel, along with memories of the Lockerbie tragedy. Rushdie always seems to be reporting the news in his stories, and at times blood and the imagined disaster appear indistinguishable, swapping places in a bizarre adjustment of stimuli conducted in deep sleep — the one that engenders monsters, not a body refreshed enough to weather the next day's slaughter.
Rushdie, of course, has been a wonderful defense against the day's storms, the forces of darkness, the heavy armour and song-squelching stoppers of Khattam Shud. But I am jumping ahead of my story, as one of Rushdie's or Lewis Carroll's characters might say, and I have not gone right to the end, nor have I stopped.
<15,0m,,0>The curse
WHEN Ayatollah Khomeini (shall I dare to pronounce the name of Voldemort) put a million dollar price on Rushdie's head for apostasy, I felt the sentence like a terrible curse, an edict against civility and speech, my own right, if I so choose, to apostasy. I have always placed my bets on conscience, that one must act according to its dictates and not the pronouncements of a distant cleric or judge or blind clerk. The traffic policeman who listens to the hapless driver's tale and gives it due is my kind of administrator, the one who listens, who cares about the human relationship, who is willing to bend the rule.
I did not cast an eye on the satanic verses of that novel. Buried in a sense of inadequacy before the bravado of Rushdie's energetic narrative, I was also very deeply sad — paralyzed — as I tried to imagine Rushdie's life on the run, hidden in shadows, abandoned by wife and unable to drink a bitter at the corner pub. Rushdie has since written of this period in "Messages from the Plague Years". I will not paraphrase those memories. He himself wonders about the character "Rushdie" who frequents people's imaginations. A taxi driver picked me up in Brooklyn one Sunday evening about 1990 and called me Rushdie and took me for a strange ride via little-used streets near the Manhattan Bridge. He peppered me with questions about Mahound and Mohammad, about how much time I had spent among infidels. He turned off finally towards the bridge and rode the ramp cursing godless New Yorkers before letting me off on the other side in Chinatown.
Rushdie meanwhile treated his readers, including for the first time his son, to Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I sifted through Haroun for clues about Rushdie's whereabouts and his state of mind. His writing became a bellweather for the health of my soul and my sense of place in America. I had traded in my citizenship but still felt excluded from the feast. I worried about the forces that would stirrup my tongue and put stakes in my heart. I wandered about trying to take solace in Ginsberg's hipster streets, in the idea of satisfying my dreams. Of course, the Booker does not toll for poets and the awful need to be recognised, to be called Rushdie by the cabbie, to wear the hair thin and the wisecrack out, all this shadow Neruda, shadow Auden — "in the prison of his days, teach the free man how to praise" — had obliterated any incipient self-confidence, right to walk broadly and along the sidewalk, to own its stonework.
Of course, the idea of ownership is a bit silly. All writers are dependent beings, sprung from the loins of their mothers and the metaphors of those whom they read. And older writers act like Jack and Ernest in the city and country. Uncle Ernest Rushdie, joke-cracking, smart, snooty denizen of London and other metropoli, owner of sidewalks, master blaster of the bloody, sooty, hoary doors at King's College, Cambridge — while that other dark Indian, West Indian prince of 20th-Century letters, Naipaul, sneaked out of similar doors at Oxford — both writers like stars guiding novices in their vigorous first writings, like a twin-headed monster standing guard over the glorious republic of Indian English prose.
Full of narratives
THE republic is full of narratives these days, roaring, whispering, gliding through the medieval alleys of choked full Chandi Chowk, clambering up the fire escapes of Little Manhattan, dipping timorously into the sea to recover lost temples at Mahabalipuram. Whitman would be required to put India into a sentence, to say that it is large, contains multitudes, and contradicts itself. Rushdie is Whitman in a 21st-Century rush, releasing hundreds upon hundreds of story streams into the Ocean of the Streams of Story, a global supplier, multitudinous, many faceted. His subject is at once India, America, Britain, colonialism, outsiderness. He writes movingly about the cross-cultural hybrid, the modern born into multilingual plenty, the child sawn in two by the break-up of empire, the failure of nationalists, the India/Pakistan divide. He has also charmed this reader into identifying with his characters and their speech patterns, their triumphs and failures. Through the mirage of fiction, he appears to write the autobiography of a thousand million intellectually vigorous but psychologically, emotionally and physically displaced Western Oriental Gentlemen. My father coined the latter phrase, making gold out of the leaden and pernicious insult "wog" hurled at me as I stepped cautiously through a London boyhood.
Uncle Salman has taken my generation — and my father's too — on a romp through a world made to listen to our drum beat, Urdu-stained English, black umbrella'd walks under the murderous sun, eating cadju nuts, lips balmed in cumin, cow dung-infested flies buzzing near our nostrils. I do not pretend here to some easy third world patriotism, that our Man in London has done well and deserves a hundred Nobel prizes for courage and pioneering, and writing often more than 500 pages of intelligent prose in a novel (I am in the early stages of The Ground Beneath her Feet, having finished the more modest Fury and contemplating another crack at the Satanic Verses). Salman, you have left more than the 3,000 pages of poetry bequeathed by Pablo Neruda. Your Complete Works do not yet assume the storied breadth of Will Shakespeare, but we are chastened and emboldened by your most important achievement. You have given us — the outsiders, transplants, hybrids, movers, exiles, the dispossessed — a voice, man. You have written us a literature to wield as scimitar, poppy, temple flower in a delicious mishmash of half-remembered philosophies uttered while we pooja ourselves trying to squeeze our sweetened fat into the latest micro fibered track suits on this our 21st Century planet. Meanwhile, the New Yorker devoted a complete issue to India because of you.
The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator — legends of our British and American-inspired fathers, aspirations for all good writer boys and girls on roads to Cambridge and Harvard and literature — still alive, thank god, but curiously sidelined and pocketed in ghettos. Yet, every society's intellectuals find their magazines and seek to influence politics, the community, the way we live as we brush our destinies against gods and demons, worms and tigers, trees and dust. Rushdie is a fierce wit, a charmer. He has verve, flourish. He entertains with his prose. He has picked up a tremendous current and has ridden it through years of plague and years of feasting. In fiction, he has eliminated Khattam Shud, the ogre who wanted to put up a dike against his story, divert its oxygen, send it to water some moon devoid even of unicellular life. Khomeini died, left his fatwa. We are all sentenced to death and to life. Rushdie has kept wrestling the sentence to the ground by writing and writing, sucking the flesh out of the rind, using the rind as well, spitting out the seed, making sure it hits fallow earth and sprouts.
Indran Amirthanayagam is a poet, essayist and translator in English and Spanish. His collections include El Infierno de los Pajaros, The Elephants of Reckoning and Ceylon R.I.P.
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