Rushdie, Naipaul, and Blurring Postcolonial Borders

Rushdie's superimposition of his homeland on the geographical Pakistan insistently points us to another common characteristic of the literary products of postcoloniality; namely, their frequent modification or even abandonment of the generic boundaries inherited from the literatures of colonizing cultures, most strikingly in their erasure of the boundary separating the fictional from the non-fictional. Thus Rushdie's satiric seriousness also has parallels to Carl Muller's comical and scabrous reminiscences of his vanishing ethnic community in Sri Lanka, a hybrid form to which he applies the coinage "faction," defined with a cheekiness worthy of Ondaatje as "more fact than fiction, if you please, but that will always remain, I suppose, a matter of personal opinion." (Yakada Yaka ii). More common yet are claims to factuality which disguise fictions, as Wimal Dissenayake and Carmen Wickramagamage have pointed out in the case of V.S. Naipaul's travel writings which, for all their elaborate apparatus of objectivity, borrow preexisting descriptive topi. Dissanayake and Wickramagamage give perhaps the subtlest and most carefully reasoned of all analyses of Naipual, recognizing not only his debt to Western epistemologies and pathologies of representation (see the general statement on travel writing in 1-20), but also some of the complexity of his attempt to achieve a "fuller comprehension of his own self-identity" (73), something that critics like Rob Nixon fail to see.

And just as Naipaul's fictions are those of a journalist, and Ondaatje's those of a lyric poet, Rushdie's fictions are narrated by an "I" who cannot forget that he is at heart an essayist, who cannot help lapsing from time to time into non-diegetic commentary and Calvinoesque interactions with a second-person addressee -- nowhere more so than in Rushdie's most recent novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, where the character-narrator steps out of his fiction to play the role of movie critic (see 168-169), a role which a certain Salman Rushdie once played for the newspapers.

Where in these mongrel works the narrator's "I" is in its purest form as representation of "self," where the onion has been peeled to the point of tears, is probably in the moments of unadulterated emotion: the Rushdie who defends himself against murderous accusations of apostasy, the Rushdie who claws at the jugular of the Commonwealth because of the patronizing comments of a lady from the British Council and the no less patronizing comments of a university literature don, or the Chinua Achebe who finds himself having to denounce Conrad anew because of a chance encounter in a parking lot (see Hopes and Impediments 1-2). Rushdie tells us that he experienced these incidents occurred weeks apart, but they are sandwiched in his memory as almost simultaneous and cumulative (Imaginary Homelands 61). What is most extraordinary in these instances are that these post-colonial encounters took place in those bastions of progress, universities, Cambridge in Rushdie's case and Amherst, Massachusetts, in Achebe's.

There already exists a vast literature of encounters -- Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra on the Nile, Stanley's Stanley and Livingston in darkest Africa, Bulgakov's Jesus and Pontius Pilate somewhere far from Moscow -- but these post-colonial encounters have something very special about them. Read, for instance Kurt Vonnegut's tear-stained eyewitness account of the slaughter of Biafra in the midst of whose death-throes a young Achebe is reduced to writing poetry ("Biafra: A People Betrayed," in Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons 149-151). Or witness Naipaul first setting foot in India and encountering another "faceless" Naipaul who, lacking the distinctiveness of the Naipaul of Trinidad and England, could "sink without trace into that Indian crowd." (see An Area of Darkness 43). Or consider the Berkeley of R.K. Narayan, where encounters with wonderfully pleasant people leave him so translated by sweetness and light ["I have lived under the illusion that I would never have to leave Berkeley. All the friends I seem to have in the world seem to be gathered there"] that one wonders why in the end he did pack up his bags and return to Mysore or, as Naipaul would have it, to his own imaginary retreat from reality, Malgudi, the chronotope to which Narayan returns in all his fictions, a place even more idealized and even more prone to delicate ironies than the real counterpart Narayan describes with such affection in his autobiography. (Narayan's Berkeley is confined to pages 164-167 of his autobiography, the only section which quotes journal entries, while Naipaul's deconstruction of Malgudi takes around nine pages of classical close-reading (India: A Wounded Civilization, 18-27).

It is through an irony somewhat harsher than those we encounter in Malgudi that I, too, had my most memorable post-colonial encounter at Berkeley where I was briefly in the employ (as a grader of essays) of a fairly well-known literary don, and a Shakespeare pundit at that, in the English department. Literary dons, apparently, are not that far apart whether they reside in the heart of the Olde Empire or in the young Wild West. In addition to his general dissatisfaction with my illiteracy, this don regarded me-the lone darkling thrush in a flock of graders-as the person best qualified to carry his books and to set up his microphone in anticipation of his advent in class. When I objected to the procedure and suggested that The Complete Works of W.S. be kept in a cupboard in the classroom, I was vouchsafed the enigmatic reply, "So we don't plant cotton," a line which he probably felt I would not recognize since it comes from a classic of American musical theater and presumes a certain cultural competence. When, eventually, our falling-out became a matter of departmental concern, my Complete Works were already packed and waiting to go. Uneasy lie the heads that bear the white lie's burden.

Needless to say, my academic derailment was nothing on the scale of Paul's epiphanal collapse on the way to Damascus, or Gandhi's ejection from a train at Bloemfontein, but it did change the direction of my life sufficiently for me to appreciate Naipaul's anger at Narayan's "almost hermetic philosophical system," a system which valorizes a quietistic retreat from harsh realities and from the polyglossic influence of alien ideas (see India: A Wounded Civilization 27). Naipaul parodies Narayan viciously, nowhere more so than in In a Free State, in which Santosh, one of a gaggle of character-narrators, retreats into a closet rather than face the terrifying freedom of Washington D.C. (the allegory is applied rather thickly), and who observes rioters setting the city on fire with the grim satisfaction that his "suttee" could expiate the sin of sexual contamination by a black woman. Naipaul's willingness to vilify, willy-nilly, all that he encounters, has not won him many friends, but the facile and near-universal imputations of a consistent heart-felt racism and orientalist misogyny seldom survive close scrutiny. Which is not to say that Naipaul may not be a misogynistic racist, but rather that most criticism of his work is trivial, hopelessly oblivious to the complexity of his tortured negotiations of his own post-coloniality, to his near-permanent alienation as expressed through a series of surprisingly different and surprisingly defective narrators who are placed in an astonishingly similar succession of chronotopes. Santosh's ridiculous claustrophilia and Salim's terrified retreat from the freedoms of London in A Bend in the River, are not only part of an unceasing vendetta against what Naipaul regards as dreams and illusions, but also an admission of his own claustrophobia (however far he travels, he always seems to end up in the same unpleasant, overcrowded place). He has the wanderer's fear of attachment: the things in which his characters place surplus value are chimerical, like Mr. Biswas's eternally mortgaged house, a torture chamber to which he grows attached as do many of Naipaul's characters to their balls and chains.

The great critical difficulty posed by Naipaul is, of course, that there is no real center to his novels, no easily-defined point-of-view. The unnamed "I" of The Mystic Masseur, his first novel, appears only twice, on both occasions to redeem the easily lost truth and to deflate the pretensions of the protagonist, while the omnipresent "I" of a late novel, The Enigma of Arrival, proves again and again to be a poor judge of that which he describes. And those who abhor Naipaul's obsession with India's filth, dirt and decomposition should also observe his treatment in this last novel of the environs of Stonehenge-the mystical geographical epicenter of the dying Empire in Hardy, but a quite unmystical, dung-strewn no-man's-land of firing ranges and rusting machinery, the detritus of a dead Empire, in Naipaul. And that death Naipaul describes as a painful one whose last gasps are a series of humiliations and horrors, not only to the once-colonized but also to the atavistic castaways of Empire, Jane in Guerillas, Yvette in A Bend in the River, Bobby in In a Free State, whose quest for sexual adventure in the "Third World" leads to brutal mistreatment, whose expectations-in a hideous parody of ejaculation-lead to expectorations.

That Naipaul is complex does not mean that we should unreservedly admire him, but it does mean that even at his worst he is a far more interesting a novelist than, for example, the much-praised Julian Barnes. In The History of the World in 101/2 Chapters Barnes manages a rather cunning burlesque of Conrad, while Naipaul's much earlier, ambivalent meditation on Conrad, his grudging admiration for the latter's stodgy, over-patinated (and as Achebe makes clear, artificial) realism, proves little more than a defense of his own insufficiencies of imagination and style; see Barnes 191-220 and Naipaul's "Conrad's Darkness" in The Return of Eva Perón 223-245. But it is Naipaul's essay which in identifying what is central to the reading of Conrad-his inescapable effect even on those who (like Achebe) detest him-is in the end more consequential and less ephemeral than Barnes's Amazonian caprice (whose conclusion, amazingly, is very Naipaulesque). By the same token, Naipaul's importance as a novelist need not be taken as a endorsement of his approach, for as Rushdie points out there are other, equally valid approaches in the creation of mongrel literatures:

El realismo magical, magic realism, at least as practiced by Márquez, is a development out of Surrealism that expresses a genuinely "Third World" consciousness. It deals with what Naipaul has called "half-made" societies, in which the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new, in which public corruptions and private anguishes are somehow more garish and extreme than they ever get in the so-called "North," where centuries of wealth and power have formed thick layers over the surface of what's really going on. In the works of Márquez, as in the world he describes, impossible things happen constantly, and quite plausibly, out in the open under the midday sun. It would be a mistake to think of Márquez's literary universe as an invented, self-referential, closed system. He is not writing about Middle-earth, but about the one we all inhabit. Macondo exists. That is its magic. [Imaginary Homelands 301-302]

Again we can discern a writer defending his own chronotopes: Macondo is but another name for Peccavistan. Yet there is also a bold assertion which I find very important, and in its own way very moving, of a faith in a commonality of experience that can bridge the vast oceans between continents and between styles. And it is a faith that, whatever the odds are against us, we must cling to as Bakhtin did in the stygian night of Stalinist monologism, a fervent hope that some day things will cease to be done "in the usual way" and that our collective postcoloniality will indeed be replaced by a universal multicultural polycentrism. Until that time I shall continue to break the inherited rules, and end with a quotation, again from Rushdie, and again about one of those post-colonial encounters at one of those tiresome parties he can no longer attend. The chit-chat left him with the anger that gave birth to one of his greatest novels:

As to Afghanistan: after returning to London, I met a senior British diplomat at a dinner, a career specialist in "my" part of the world. He said it was quite proper, "post-Afghanistan," for the West to support the dictatorship of President Zia ul-Haq. I should not have lost my temper, but I did. It wasn't any use. Then, as we left the table, his wife, a quiet civil lady who had been making pacifying noises, said to me, "Tell me, why don't people in Pakistan get rid of Zia in, you know, the usual way?" Shame, dear reader, is not the exclusive property of the East (Shame 24).

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www.postcolonialweb.org

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Problems with the Term PostcoloniaL

"When," an Indian friend of mine (with a progressive cast of mind and a firm conviction in the idea of technological advancement) asked in exasperation, "does the state of postcoloniality end?" Questions of the same order have been plaguing literary scholars for a while, and a number of profound thinkers and theorists have done their best to abolish the term "postcolonial" altogether. In articles first published in 1994 in the journal Social Text, both Ella Shohat and Anne McClintock point out that "postcolonialism" never really existed except as a designation of convenience, and that it is no more, in essence, than colonialism attached to a "post-" (and straining at its tether to reassert its modes of thought).

In an essay of more than a decade earlier Salman Rushdie made a seemingly parallel argument: he, too, sought to banish an insufficient term, "Commonwealth," which according to him creates an "exclusive ghetto" whose effect is to change the meaning of English literature into "something far narrower, something topographical, nationalistic, possibly even racially segregationist." Rushdie went on to point out that "at best, what is called 'Commonwealth literature' is positioned below English literature proper," placing "Eng. Lit. at the center of the world and the rest of the world at the periphery," a situation which inverts priorities and obscures more fundamental literary issues. (I paraphrase Rushdie's angry essay, "'Commonwealth Literature' Does Not Exist" Imaginary Homelands 61-70.)

There is a distinction, however, between Rushdie's denunciation of "Commonwealth" and the no less passionate attacks of recent critics on "postcolonialism." For Shohat and McClintock the thing described by the offending word is no more real than the world mapped by colonialism, while for Rushdie it is not the thing described (to which he permits a tangible existence) but the concept represented by the term itself which is an insidious "chimera." Rushdie's essay is replete with references to writers -- Indian, Latin American and African -- who do share a certain commonality of experience, and throughout he is a celebrant of what he calls a "transnational, cross-lingual process of pollination" (69) -- what the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin terms, with no less approbation, "polyglossia" Bakhtin introduces the concept of polyglossia in his early essay "Epic and Novel" (The Dialogic Imagination 12), although he elaborates on its import only in his longer works (61-67).) Indeed, even in his fictions Rushdie seems to delight in the word "mongrel," a term he associates particularly with the grand melange that is India, but which can be applied more broadly to a polyglot state.

The occasion for my embracing "mongrel," however, is not Rushdie's predilection for it, but its use in 1996 by an Australian politician to describe the offspring of parents of mixed race. As a term which has already won some celebrity in other contexts, and one which would easily encompass such freckled monsters as Joyce and Yeats in the same polyglot potpourri (and those poor creatures could only wish they were postcolonial), it seems to have no less a ring to it than other fortunate pejoritives like "Impressionist" or "Fauve," and surely could be adopted with no less felicity than Aimé Césaire's "négritude." Moreover, the program for a theory of mongrel literature is already present, albeit in a form I do not find entirely acceptable, in Rushdie's essay:

. . . if we were to forget about "Commonwealth Literature," we might see that there is a kind of commonality about much literature, in many languages, emerging from those parts of the world which one could loosely term the less powerful, or the powerless. The magical realism of the Latin Americans influences Indian-language writers in India today. The rich, folk-tale quality of a novel like Sandro of Chegem, by the Muslim Russian Fazil Iskander, finds its parallels in the work-for instance-of the Nigerian, Amos Tutuola, or even Cervantes. It is possible, I think, to begin to theorize common factors between writers from these societies-poor countries, or deprived minorities in powerful countries-and to say that much of what is new in world literature comes from this group. This seems to me to be a "real" theory, bounded by frontiers which are neither political nor linguistic but imaginative. [69-69]

Where I think Rushdie falters in his definition is in vacillating in his choice of umbrella under which his writers shelter, at one moment an economic and political one, at another "imaginative." Interestingly, long before Rushdie placed the writers from the margins at the center of "what is new in world literature," Mikhail Bakhtin had made rather similar claims about the distinctive and innovative qualities of novelistic discourse; for instance, in "Epic and Novel" (The Dialogic Imagination 11-12).

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[The essay, which is Part One of Anthony R. Guneratne's "Virtual Spaces of Postcoloniality: Rushdie, Ondaatje, Naipaul, Bakhtin and the Others," has been adapted, with kind permission of the author, from the no-longer extant NUS site on which the original paper for the First Conference on Postcolonial Theory appeared. [External Link] = linked materials not in the original print version.GPL]

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Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children voted best Booker Prize winner

READERS have voted Salman Rushdie's 1981 novel Midnight's Children the greatest Booker-prize winner of all time.

The "Best of the Booker" was awarded to the controversial British author to mark the 40th anniversary of the Booker prize, regarded by many as one of the world's most prestigious literary prizes.

The 61-year-old author won the 25th anniversary "Booker of Bookers" prize for the same novel in 1993.

Rushdie, whose 1988 novel The Satanic Verses outraged many Muslims and prompted death threats against him, was widely tipped to win the award, which was voted for by readers online and via SMS.

Rushdie was in the US on a book tour when the award was announced in London last night Sydney time.

"Marvellous news!" he said in a statement. "I'm absolutely delighted and would like to thank all those readers around the world who voted for Midnight's Children."

Victoria Glendinning, chair of the panel who drew up a shortlist, said: "The readers have spoken in their thousands. And we do believe that they have made the right choice."

Roughly 8,000 people from around the world took part in the online poll. Midnight's Children was the clear favourite, winning 36 percent of the vote.

Some critics believe it to be Rushdie's finest work, eclipsing even The Satanic Verses, for which he remains best known - and most reviled.

Rushdie beat nominees including Australian literary heavyweights J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey.

The full list comprised Rushdie, Pat Barker (The Ghost Road), Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda), Coetzee (Disgrace), J.G. Farrell (The Siege of Krishnapur) and Nadine Gordimer (The Conservationist).

Both Coetzee and Carey have won the Booker Prize twice. Carey, who now lives in New York, described being shortlisted for the "Best of the Booker" as being similar to being hit by truck.

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www.theaustralian.news.com.au

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Habiburrahman El Shirazy: No intentions to counter 'Satanic Verses'

Islam is an easy target for misrepresentation. It has been misunderstood and misused for centuries by its ignorant followers as well as its "enemies".

It is no surprise then that questions about the nature of the religion have been reiterated over the past three decades.

Does the faith recognize human rights? Is it compatible with democracy? Does it respect women? Is it tolerant? Can it cope with modernity and adopt its modern institutions? A bulk of scientific, philosophical articles have been written to answer these indicting questions, but the prejudices against the faith persist.

It is in such a frustrating situation that Muslim author Habiburrahman El Shirazy writes his novels and now plans to translate his most popular piece, Ayat-Ayat Cinta (Verses of Love), into English.

The movie based on the novel, which bears the same title, has proved to be wildly popular -- making schoolgirls and even the President shed tears.

"I just want to show the beauty of Islam that I feel and comprehend. Islam encourages its adherents to do good unto others and orders them to develop and respect the truth," the 32-year-old told The Jakarta Post in a email interview.

Graduating from Cairo's Al-Azhar University, the oldest and the most prestigious university in the Islamic world, Habiburrahman is among the few Indonesian Muslim writers who is well-versed in traditional Islamic studies such as the hadith, fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and Koranic exegesis. He was also brought up in a pesantren (Islamic boarding school) culture in Demak, Central Java.

His past distinguishes him from other Muslim writers, especially those from local state universities -- like the University of Indonesia, Gadjah Mada University, Padjajaran University and the Bandung Technology Institute -- who were mostly brought up in secular schools and who learned about Islam from translated books and by participating in the tarbiyah movement, the genesis of the Justice Prosperous Party (PKS).

Kang Abik, as his friends call him, said his novels do have a purpose -- the propagation of Islam.

To some readers, his works might sound irritatingly preachy as they were written with the conviction that "one of the ways to serve God is to use art as a medium to promote virtue".

"Art in Islam is considered to be in accordance with human nature, or fitrah. Islam recognizes that human beings need beauty, or arts. As serving God is the ultimate purpose of human life, everything (including making art) is a form of ibadah (worship) if it is aimed to serve God," he said.

But is not art identical with the freedom of expression?

"Every human being has desire. There is always this desire that tells a person to do evil. This desire has often turned art into a medium of gratification and freedom of expression is often used as an excuse. It contradicts the true nature of art, which is the beauty that enlightens people," he said.

Art and religion have long been part of Abik's life.

"It all started when I participated in a poetry reading competition in elementary school and won it. I read a poem by Chairil Anwar entitled 'Pangeran Diponegoro' (Prince Diponegoro). I was so happy because they gave me books as the prize. Since then, I have continued to enjoy literature. It all started with that poem," he said.

He said he started reading novels when he was in elementary school.

"There were several novels about the national struggle for independence in the school's library. There was a movie titled Serangan Fajar. I think that's the reason why I loved reading novels with a national theme," he said.

Before leaving for Egypt to study at Al-Azhar, he had won many art competitions. He had also written and directed a theatrical poem entitled Dzikir Dajjal (The Remembrance of the Anti-Christ) during high school.

In Ayat-Ayat Cinta, which is based on his contemplations of one the verses in the Koran, Kang Abik tries to present the "correct" Islam. One of the things that he tries to highlight is the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, especially the ahlul kitab, or "people of the Book".

"The most important thing in becoming a Muslim is contemplating the Koran consistently and responsibly. I believe if people understand the Koran correctly, they can be as mature as Fachri (the protagonist in the novel) when he interacts with Maria, who is a Coptic Christian," he said.

His novel goes further than telling Muslims to respect their Christian neighbors and guests. There are two sensitive issues, he said, that mainstream Muslims in Indonesia have missed or intentionally overlooked in the novel and the movie.

Kang Abik believes that interfaith marriage -- as conducted by Fachri and Maria -- is allowed in Islam, though with "several important conditions".

"The ground is clear as stated by sura Al-Maidah verse 5," adding that he was "following the opinion of the majority of the ulema".

The other issue concerns the controversy of polygamy. While a number of Muslim preachers promote polygamy, Kang Abik believes that "Islam demands justice, including in marriage".

"I believe that monogamy is more just than polygamy."

The character Fachri is loved by four women and marries two of them, but the novel highlights Fachri's natural inclination to be monogamous and -- as clearly shown in the movie -- depicts the psychological effects of a polygamous marriage.

"Polygamy is commanded by God as a solution, not a purpose. In the words of the majority of the ulema, polygamy is arukhsah (relief or dispensation), which should be carried out in a condition of emergency. We have to see this matter correctly. Sharia never intended to abuse people," he said.

Amid his activities as a lecturer and manager of his pesantren, Basmala Indonesia, and traveling from one city to another to talk about Islam, Kang Abik still proves himself to be a prolific writer.

Besides Ayat-Ayat Cinta, his other novels include Diatas Sajadah Cinta (On the Carpet of Love), Ketika Cinta Berbuah Surga (When Love Bears Heaven), Pudarnya Pesona Cleopatra (The Fading Charm of Cleopatra), Ketika Cinta Bertasbih (When Love Praises God, two volumes) and Dalam Mihrab Cinta (In the Pulpit of Love). He is now finishing Langit Makkah Berwarna Merah (the Red Sky in Mecca), Bidadari Bermata Bening (The Angel with Bright Eyes) and Bulan Madu di Yerussalem (Honeymoon in Jerusalem).

He reiterated that he writes his novels to promote kindness, not to counter other novels, including the famous work by Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, which is considered blasphemous by the majority of Muslims.

"Ayat-Ayat Cinta will be translated into English, it is not aimed at countering any novel."

Source: The Jakarta Post

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Wilders film ‘Fitna’ in Nederland and Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’ play in Potsdam

After Geert Wilders released an anti-Islam film "Fitna" criticizing Islam and its holy book the Koran on Thursday, Muslims are again upset at Satanic Verses play in German.

A forthcoming stage play in German to be based on the controversial novel, The Satanic Verses by Indian-born author Salman Rushdie, is a “provocation,” a Muslim leader in Germany warned.

The stage adaptation is to premiere on Sunday, March 29, 2008, at the Hans Otto Theatre, known by the acronym HOT, in the city of Potsdam, south-west of Berlin. The script is by two Germans, Uwe Eric Laufenberg and Marcus Mislin, and is based on Rushdie’s 1988 novel. Police in the city said there had been no threat to the theatre, but they would guard it on Sunday as a precaution. Germany’s various Muslim groups have differed in their reactions with one group, the Central Council of Muslims, calling for calm.”

Read more this article complete with pictures at http://kafee.wordpress.com

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THE CRUCIAL BOOK OF: SALMAN RUSHDIE

"Joyce built a whole universe out of a grain of sand"

Salman Rushdie, the author of the "Week of the Book" present, was carried along by James Joyce's Ulysses as though the book was rocket fuel.

The wing of the Rijksmuseum looks like a fort. His bodyguards (beside his own there are three other of the city of Amsterdam) have left for a cup of coffee, and the one walking along Salman Rushdie watches me with a slightly disturbed and slightly concerned expression. Many images must haunt the head of the man who wrote this year's "Week of the Book" present: frightening images, images of the future, images of old myths and modern internet legends. Somewhere in that hyperactive brain also roams the spirit of the Irish-born writer James Joyce (1882-1941). Rushdie: "Joyce is always in my mind, I carry him everywhere with me".

Who it was who called his attention to Ulysses (published in Paris in 1922) Rushdie does not remember, but he knows that it was in the first year of his study of history.. "Everyone said that it was such a sealed book, hard to penetrate, but I did not think so at all. You never hear people say that there is so much humor in the book, that the characters are so lively or that the theme - Stephen Daedalus in search of his lost father and Bloom looking for his lost child - is so moving. People talk about the cleverness of Ulysses and about the literary innovation. To me it was moving, in the first place"

Stephen and Bloom, those were the characters which touched him immediately. He quotes from memory: "Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls". Those were the first lines of the second chapter. "I am myself disgusted by that kind of organs", he grinned. "There are still so many little things I always have to smile about when I think of them. That commercial, for example: "What is home/without Plumtree's Potted Meat?/ Incomplete". That is still funny. Joyce used many stylistic means which were novel in his time, newspaper headlines for instance. Is it not moving that he makes Ulysses happen on the day that he met his wife! He kept that newspaper, carried it always with him and used all of its details, including the names of the horses in the races. In short, he built a universe out of a grain of sand. That was a revelation to me: so that is the way one could also write! To somebody who wanted to be a writer, like me, it was so perfect, so inspiring, that it made one need to recover. I have thought for some time: I quit writing, I become a lawyer. Later I thought that there may be some little things still worth doing."

Such as in the field of linguistic innovation? "Joyce spoke against the politisizing of literature, but his language is a purposeful attempt to create an English which was just not a property of the English. He employs a lot of borrowed words from other European languages and creates an un-English kind of English". Was that not also the goal of Rushdie himself? "Certainly. The Irish did it, so did the American and the Caribian writers. While English traveled around like that, the people felt the need to innovate it. So I did. But the Joycean innovation was the greatest of all. It is an example that deserves to be followed".

And what about Joyce's famous monologue intérieur ? "That stream of consciousness was not an invention of Joyce, but he used it more subtly than anyone else. Bloom's inner voices were about very common things, about a hungry feeling or so. Joyce demonstrates that the material of daily life can be as majestic as any great epic. The lives of ordinary people are also worthy of great art. One can create grandeur out of banality. That was precisely the criticism Virgina Woolf had on Joyce. Woolf was a bit too snobbish for it".

As the best example of the stream of consciousness Rushdie "of course" considers Molly Blooms monologue at the end of the book. "In the past I could recite whole parts of it: "and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." That conclusion is absolutely rocket fuel at the end. You have a book behind you in which the behavior of people is not strictly transparent and then suddenly you feel not only the skin of that woman, but her whole body, all her flesh and blood, that is a baffling climax. Of course also very erotic, although as yet the novel was not erotic at all. At that time literature did not extend to erotics, to the sexual fantasies of women. Impossible to imagine Virginia Woolf doing something like that".

Ulysses is in fact a national epic about Ireland. "It is a grand homage to the country that has never understood him" says Rushdie. "He was regarded there as a pornographer and blasphemer. Now he is viewed as Ireland's national monument. Well, that's easy. I do understand how Joyce felt. I am close to him. I feel a kinship, not so much between our types of authorship, but rather between his eye and ear, his mind and mine. The way one looks at things".

Nevertheless, they would not have become friends, he believes. "Joyce was not very good at friendship. There is a story about his put-down of Samuel Beckett, who adored him and often came along his place. He plainly told him that he only loved two people in the world: the first being his wife, the second his daughter. His only encounter with Proust was also very comical. Joyce and Proust met each other when leaving a party. Proust had his coach standing at the door and was wrapped up fom head to foot, afraid as he was to catch a cold. Joyce jumps into the coach uninvitedly, lights a cigar and opens the window widely. Proust says nothing, neither does Joyce. It is like a silent movie. Two masters of the word, who say nothing to each other and yet disclose themselves. Fantastic!"

In Portrait of the artist as a young man Joyce mentions the weapons with which a writer can defend himself against the outer world: silence, exile, and cunning. Are those the weapons Rushdie recognizes? "Well, that was a very good stratagem in the time of Joyce. Like Voltaire, Joyce believed that a writer should live near a border, so that he could leave immediately if problems arose. At present that does not work anymore: I have experienced it personally. And silence is an overrated artform, which people now too often impose upon you".

But are writers not regarded more and more as intellectuals and are they not continually asked for an opinion? "I believe that worldwide there are more and more efforts to impose silence upon writers - and that not only applies to me. It is easy to point to the Arab world, or to China, but even in the United States there are people who want to ban Harry Potter books from schools, because they contain something about witchcraft. Even something harmless like that provokes an attack. We live in a time with an increasing urge to censorship. Various interest groups--including antiracist or feminist movements-- demand it. When Kurt Vonnegut is banned from public libraries and not everywhere it is allowed to teach about Huckleberry Finn, then you just cannot assume straight-away that there is something like freedom. Against silence it is that now we have to fight. And exile does not work. Therefore, cunning is the only thing that remains".


Every year there is in the Netherlands a special week, called the Week of the Book, in which-- to promote the new titles-- anyone spending more than $10 in a book store receives an extra book, which is specially written for the occasion. In 2001 it was Salman Rushdie who was invited to write the book, and his Woede (i.e. Fury in English) became the year's present. He was also invited to the Gala of authors with which the Week of the Book started. This year the party was held in a wing of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.) It was here that Margot Dijkgraaf, literary critic of the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, interviewed Salman Rushdie for the series The Crucial Book, in which writers expound their views on the book that has most influenced their ideas. [K.G.]
Translated by K. Gwan Go, reproduced by permission of Margot Dijkgraaf.

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Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses and the Fatwa

The publication of The Satanic Verses in September 1988 caused immediate controversy in the Islamic world because of what was perceived as an irreverent depiction of the prophet Muhammad. The title refers to a Muslim tradition that is related in the book. According to it, Muhammad (Mahound in the book) added verses (sura) to the Qur'an accepting three goddesses that used to be worshipped in Mecca as divine beings. According to the legend, Muhammad later revoked the verses, saying the devil tempted him to utter these lines to appease the Meccans (hence the Satanic verses). However, the narrator reveals to the reader that these disputed verses were actually from the mouth of the Archangel Gibreel. The book was banned in many countries with large Muslim communities.

On 14 February 1989, a fatwa requiring Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, calling the book "blasphemous against Islam." A bounty was offered for the death of Rushdie, who was thus forced to live under police protection for years to come. On 7 March 1989, the United Kingdom and Iran broke diplomatic relations over the Rushdie controversy.

The publication of the book and the fatwa sparked violence around the world, with bookstores being firebombed. Muslim communities in several nations in the West held public rallies in which copies of the book were burned. Several people associated with translating or publishing the book were attacked, seriously injured, and even killed.^[11] Many more people died in riots in Third World countries.

On 24 September 1998, as a precondition to the restoration of diplomatic relations with Britain, the Iranian government, then headed by moderate Mohammad Khatami, gave a public commitment that it would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie."^[12][13] Hardliners in Iran have however continued to reaffirm the death sentence.^[14] In early 2005, Khomeini's fatwa was reaffirmed by Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a message to Muslim pilgrims making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.^[15] Additionally, the Revolutionary Guards have declared that the death sentence on him is still valid.^[16] Iran has rejected requests to withdraw the fatwa on the basis that only the person who issued it may withdraw it^[15], and the person who issued it is dead.

Salman Rushdie reported that he still receives a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran each year on February 14 letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to kill him. He was also quoted saying, "It's reached the point where it's a piece of rhetoric rather than a real threat."^[17] Despite the threats on Rushdie, he has publicly said that his family has never been threatened and that his mother (who lived in Pakistan during the later years of her life) even received outpourings of support.^[18]

Hezbollah's failed assassination attempt

A 1989 explosion in Britain is believed to have been a Hezbollah "attempt to assassinate British novelist Salman Rushdie [which] failed when a bomb exploded prematurely, killing a terrorist in London."^[19] There is a shrine in Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery for Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh that says he was "Martyred in London, August 3, 1989. The first martyr to die on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie." Mazeh died priming a book bomb loaded with RDX explosives that took out two floors of a hotel in Paddington, central London. A previously unknown Lebanese group, the Organisation of the Mujahidin of Islam, said he died preparing an attack "on the apostate Rushdie". Mezeh's mother was invited to relocate to Iran and the Islamic World Movement of Martyrs’ Commemoration built his shrine in the cemetary that holds thousands of Iranian soldiers slain in the Iran-Iraq War.^[12] During the 2006 Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah declared that "If there had been a Muslim to carry out Imam Khomeini's fatwa against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabble who insult our Prophet Mohammed in Denmark, Norway and France would not have dared to do so. I am sure there are millions of Muslims who are ready to give their lives to defend our prophet's honour and we have to be ready to do anything for that."^[20]

Pakistani International Guerillas film

In 1990 a Pakistani film was released in which Rushdie, played by Afzaal Ahmad, was depicted as plotting, soon after his publication of The Satanic Verses, to cause the downfall of "Pakistan, the stronghold of Islam" by opening a chain of casinos and discos in the country. The hero of the story, played by Mustafa Qureshi, learns of the plot and decides to quit his day job as a police officer to recruit his unemployed brothers and create a mujahid (God's soldiers) group to pursue Rushdie and slay him before the plot can go into effect.^[21][22] The film was popular with Pakistani audiences, and it “presents Rushdie as a Rambo-like figure pursued by four Pakistani guerillas”^[23] and surrounded by the Israeli armed forces.^[24] Rushdie is protrayed as "a smug, bespectacled butcher in a double-breasted suit, who lives in palatial splendor, [and who] personally slaughters his enemies with a huge blood-soaked sword".^[25] In the end as the trio of brothers and their mother are being crucified by Rushdie, Allah frees them with bolts of lightning and "Rushdie is attacked by a quartet of floating holy books (the Koran, Tawrat, Zabur, and Injil), which shoot laser beams into his skull until he bursts into flame"^[25], "a scene that evoked shouts of approval from [Pakistani] audiences."^[23] The British Board of Film Classification refused to allow it a certificate, as "it was felt that the portrayal of Rushdie might qualify as criminal libel, causing a breach of the peace as opposed to merely tarnishing his reputation."^[24] This move effectively banned the film in Britain outright. However two months later, Rushdie himself wrote to the board, saying that while he thought the film "a distorted, incompetent piece of trash" he would not sue if it was released.^[24] He later said "If that film had been banned, it would have become the hottest video in town: everyone would have seen it".^[24] While the film was a massive hit in Pakistan, it went virtually unnoticed in the UK.^[24]

[source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie]

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Who is Salman Rushdie?

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) on 19 June 1947. He went to school in Bombay and at Rugby in England, and read History at King's College, Cambridge, where he joined the Cambridge Footlights theatre company. After graduating, he lived with his family who had moved to Pakistan in 1964, and worked briefly in television before returning to England, beginning work as a copywriter for an advertising agency. His first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975.

His second novel, the acclaimed Midnight's Children, was published in 1981. It won the Booker Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), an Arts Council Writers' Award and the English-Speaking Union Award, and in 1993 was judged to have been the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award's 25-year history. The novel narrates key events in the history of India through the story of pickle-factory worker Saleem Sinai, one of 1001 children born as India won independence from Britain in 1947. The critic Malcolm Bradbury acclaimed the novel's achievement in The Modern British Novel (Penguin, 1994): 'a new start for the late-twentieth-century novel.'

Rushdie's third novel, Shame (1983), which many critics saw as an allegory of the political situation in Pakistan, won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. The publication in 1988 of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, lead to accusations of blasphemy against Islam and demonstrations by Islamist groups in India and Pakistan. The orthodox Iranian leadership issued a fatwa against Rushdie on 14 February 1989 - effectively a sentence of death - and he was forced into hiding under the protection of the British government and police. The book itself centres on the adventures of two Indian actors, Gibreel and Saladin, who fall to earth in Britain when their Air India jet explodes. It won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1988.

Salman Rushdie continued to write and publish books, including a children's book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), a warning about the dangers of story-telling that won the Writers' Guild Award (Best Children's Book), and which he adapted for the stage (with Tim Supple and David Tushingham. It was first staged at the Royal National Theatre, London.) There followed a book of essays entitled Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991); East, West (1994), a book of short stories; and a novel, The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), the history of the wealthy Zogoiby family told through the story of Moraes Zogoiby, a young man from Bombay descended from Sultan Muhammad XI, the last Muslim ruler of Andalucía.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet, published in 1999, re-works the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the context of modern popular music. His most recent novel, Fury, set in New York at the beginning of the third millennium, was published in 2001. He is also the author of a travel narrative, The Jaguar Smile (1987), an account of a visit to Nicaragua in 1986.

Salman Rushdie is Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made Distinguished Fellow in Literature at the University of East Anglia in 1995. He was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1993 and the Aristeion Literary Prize in 1996, and has received eight honorary doctorates. He was elected to the Board of American PEN in 2002. The subjects in his new book, Step Across This Line: Collected Non-fiction 1992-2002 (2002), range from popular culture and football to twentieth-century literature and politics. Salman Rushdie is also co-author (with Tim Supple and Simon Reade) of the stage adaptation of Midnight's Children, premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2002.

His latest novel is Shalimar The Clown (2005), the story of Max Ophuls, his killer and daughter, and a fourth character who links them all. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award.

Salman Rushdie became a KBE in 2007.

[source: http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth87]

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