Salman Rushdie: The Laughing Exile

 

"This is what he thought: I'm a dead man. He wondered how many days he had left to live and thought the answer was probably a single-digit number." 

The passage appears on the first page of Salman Rushdie's 2012 memoir, "Joseph Anton," the story of how the author dealt with the 1989 fatwa leveled on him by the Ayatollah Khomeini following the publication of his novel, "The Satanic Verses." 

The stabbing of Rushdie shortly before a talk at New York State's Chautauqua Institution last Friday came more than 33 years after Khomeini's death sentence, a span during which Rushdie has written 17 books, including novels (with one publishing next year), collections of essays, and the aforementioned autobiography of his time on the run. 

Even before it began, as he documented many times, Rushdie’s career is one of exile – making a home away from the place where you were born, the feeling of disconnection which becomes a second skin. In “The Satanic Verses,” the novel that would define not only his career but his life, he wrote, “Paranoia, for the exile, is a prerequisite for survival.”

Rushdie is a figure of absolutes and extremes. An atheist, much of his work deals in characters who are believers. A figure of the cultural left, he found himself needing the protection of Margaret Thatcher and various right wing Western governments. He has attained the kind of world historical significance that most authors dream of, albeit at a terrible price, while surviving the traumatic period to occasionally make forays into films, pop music, and the general culture. At the same time, how many people who know his name have actually read his work?

And the attack comes at a time when Rushdie's creative star has been in decline. The New York Times last year trashed his novel “Quichotte” and accused him of a formula - "Classic Novel or Myth used as Scaffolding, Femme Fatale, Story within the Story (recounted by a Garrulous Narrator), Topical Concerns, Defense of Hybridity."

“The Satanic Verses” deals with the great obsessions of Rushdie’s life – the consciousness of the immigrant, the clash of belief and unbelief, and the question of identity. The two main characters, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are Indian Muslim actors living in the present onboard a hijacked plane. The aircraft explodes, but the two survive, with Gibreel at first transformed into the archangel Gabriel, and Saladin into a devil. The parts of the novel that prompted the fatwa involve extended dream sequences involving a character the reader will recognize as Muhammad. There is also a character who is functions as a parody of Khomeini.

Eventually, through a series of further transformations, the two men eventually make it back to India, but they cannot escape from who they are. The journey has changed them in some areas while leaving intact the loves and concerns that drove them through the story. Gibreel, struggling with mental illness, eventually kills himself. Saladin embraces his identity in his homeland. Each man clings defiantly to who he perceives himself to be. The end, he seems to be saying, does not look promising.

“Who is he? An exile. Which must not be confused with, allowed to run into, all the other words that people throw around: émigré, expatriate, refugee, immigrant, silence, cunning. Exile is a realm of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St. Helena. It Is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.”

The tone of the work is so highly literary, but uniquely Rushdie – one can come from his culture and get all the winks without perhaps noticing homages and asides to Joyce, Shakespeare, Frank Herbert or Pynchon. By the same token, many western readers, who have no familiarity with the hosts of Hindu gods or Muslim apocrypha, might sail right past puns and wordplay devoted to them while seizing on some bit of literary filigree. I never read Rushdie that I don’t feel a bit lost, but that too, I believe, is a calculation on his part. To be an immigrant, an outsider, he appears to say, is to feel a concentrated disorientation, a hysterical blindness, as though you aren’t getting it all, that your understanding is incomplete, and that can be a blessing and a curse. For none of us are really getting it all all the time, are we? Having a pair of cultural blinders on can sometimes allow us to get a little bit farther faster. But what we blind to?

When “The Satanic Verses” appeared on bookshelves, followed by the hysteria, I dutifully bought my hardbound copy and began setting to read what all the fuss was about. The tone mystified me, I will admit. I was a very immature 18-year-old. My pride puffed up at the references I understood, the rest sailed over my head. It was only almost 20 years later, after the end of Rushdie’s exile, 9/11, and the Iraq War that I successfully made my way through the book, able to enjoy it and realize just how prescient Rushdie had been about the world that was about to burst forth. 

It’s upon reading “The Satanic Verses” that one realizes perhaps the harshest bit of irony – the audience Rushdie wrote for, the one who would have presumably appreciated what he was trying to do, was the segment of society which reacted the most violently toward it. Rushdie himself wrote that one of the paradoxes of Islam is that its conservative theology “looking backward with affection toward a vanishing culture, became a revolutionary idea, because the people whom it attracted most strongly were those who had been marginalized by urbanization…” Yet that same group of people reacted violently when they perceived a westernized, urbanized critique (or parody) of Islam. At one time, it was possible to believe in the inevitable triumph of Western-style objectivity against obscurantism, fanaticism, and conspiracy in the service of religion. But to do so, one had to employ one’s own bit of magical realism, chiefly by not consulting the rest of the world.

The constellations of Rushdie’s multiverse can best be viewed in miniature in “Chekov and Zulu,” a short story published in his collection “East/West.” In it, we encounter the title characters, Sikhs known by their nicknames borrowed from “Star Trek.” They are successful, professional men in their conversation, which is sprinkled with the codewords and linguistic vestiges of British colonialism. Why not “Sulu?” Because Zulu “sounds like a wild man” and evokes another image from England’s empire. Coincidentally, because they did not grow up in England, the two men first encountered “Star Trek” not as reruns of American television, but in the only way open to them at the time - paperback novelizations of the episodes.

But in approximately taking the names of the Starship Enterprise’s helmsman and ensign, they are honoring “the ultimate professional servants.” The story begins in 1984 on the day Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. This sets in motion their mission to uncover intelligence about Sikh radicals in the U.K. England has always been a breeding ground for Indian radicals, they observe. Eventually, Chekov “by chance” finds himself with Indira’s son Rajiv on the day in 1991 when he was assassinated by a Tamil revolutionary – a threat closer to home.

“So, finally, we have learned to produce the goods at home, and no longer need to import,” Chekov thinks. “The tragedy is not how one dies… It is how one has lived.” In the calculus of East and West, as on the Enterprise, our two heroes are supposed to be the bit players. The pop mythology merges with their own stories, and all they have is the bond they share with each other.

It is the mind of the exile that Rushdie returns to – the idea of being simultaneously in two worlds, and neither. A richness of life that comes with a terrible poverty – a man who can solve a riddle that people are only asking thousands of miles away in another language, driven by the grudges and creeds recorded in history books that cannot be read in the tongue of those around him on the morning bus. If we find ourselves in such a world, we might feel like a punchline, but unaware of what the joke is supposed to signify. Rushdie might tell us the only option is to still laugh, as an act of defiance.

As of this writing, Rushdie is alive but his recovery appears to be long and uncertain. Many times over the last three decades, he has probably had occasion to imagine something like what occurred on that stage, but perhaps not what might happen after. He has only lived with the knowledge that any freedom is bitterly contested, a fact that one becomes numb to in a setting where nothing seems up for grabs. Rushdie's life, surviving as it has, may once again breathe vigor into the persistent idea that the life of the mind will eventually triumph over all its foes. It's a dangerously complacent idea, and he knew better. In May, speaking at the PEN America Emergency World Voices Congress of Writers, Rushdie said, "A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all satirists are heroes."

One particular quote from "Anton" jumps out at me: 

"Compromise destroyed the compromiser and did not placate the uncompromising foe. You did not become a blackbird by painting your wings black, but like an oil-slicked gull you lost the power of flight. The greatest danger of the growing menace was that good men would commit intellectual suicide and call it peace. Good men would give in to fear and call it respect."