Diasporic Expression of Salman Rushdie

 

In a Strange Land

Diasporic Expression of Salman Rushdie

Name: Parmar Dipali K.

Roll No. : 24

Assignment Sem. 3

Email Id: dipaliparmar247@gmail.com

Submitted to: The Department of English, MKBU.

• About Salman Rushdie:

Sir Ahmad Salman Rushdie, born on 19 June 1947, is a British Kashmiri novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He combines magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations.

His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the subject of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwā calling for his assassination issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989. The British government put Rushdie under police protection.

In 1983 Rushdie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the UK's senior literary organisation. He was appointed Commandeur de l' Ordredes Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States, where he has worked at Emory University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he published Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the controversy over The Satanic Verses.

• Diasporic Expression: 

1. Diaspora Literature: First we should know that what Diaspora

Literature is.

• “Diaspora” is a Greek word which means “scattering”. Few people who are living outside their homelands.
• “Diaspora Literature” means the works written by the writers living outside their homelands. 
   

2. Diaspora Term: There is a large difference in the use of term “Diaspora” of third century B.C. and of twenty first century.

• In the present century diasporism means not only relocation of people but relocation of culture, relocation as well as dislocation of sensibility.
• Postcolonial diaspora theory presents the displaced subject as a bearer of radical political sensibility.
• The term diaspora is very often applied interchangeably with migration; it is normally invoked “as a theoretical device for the interrogation of ethnic identity and cultural nationalism...
  
  

3. Diasporic writers:

• According to Elleke Boehmer these writers are “the descendants of migrants”.
• The writers are those who are oppressed by the prevailing arrangement of power.
• Diasporic literature becomes political instrument with which such writer call into question important aspect of metropolitan, political and cultural hegemony.
• Diasporic writers are cosmopolitans and cosmopolitans belong to more than one world but to no one entirely.

Salman Rushdie is a diasporic writer, though not fit in the definition of Boehmer according to whom Diasporas are the children of migrants. He describes his identity as an Indian writer in England as being

“made up of bits and fragments from here and there.”

In his brilliant treatise Imaginary Homelands (1991) Rushdie asserts “that literature is an expression of nationality” and “books are always praised for using motifs and symbols out of the author's own national tradition ... and when the influences at work upon the writer can be seen to be wholly internal to the culture from which he springs.” This very idea influenced all diasporic writers worldwide.

For Rushdie being an immigrant is bliss. He says in the aforesaid treatise that the immigrant who loses his roots, language and social norms “is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human”

Rushdie is very suspicious of history, that’s why, after all, he is interested in a third world counter narrative. He presents history in his fiction magically. He fictionalizes reality with the help of fantasy and becomes magic realist.

For Rushdie “History is always ambiguous. Facts are hard to establish and capable of being given many meanings.” Rushdie claims to prefer the mode of fairytale’’ which avoids direct reference to actual historical events. He thinks that realism can break a writer’s heart.

Midnight's Children “exploits a range of literary and cultural resource from allegory, satire and surrealism to Hindi cinema, Hindu mythology, science fiction, detective novels, American ‘westerners’ political slogans and advertising jingles.” The novel runs from the infamous Amritsar Massacre to the inauguration of the sovereign socialist and democratic republic of India with Nehru as its first premier, the language riots of 1950s, the Indo-China war of 1965, the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 and finally the dark midnight of Indira Gandhi's Emergency imposed in 1975. In this way the novel proves right the controversial claim that Third World texts are “national allegories”.

Shame (1903) is the story of Rushdie's first exiled country that is Pakistan. It is also an allegorical novel as Rushdie himself says. “The country in this story is not Pakistan, not quite. There are two countries, real and fictional occupying the same space or almost the same space.” The story is knitted around an unwanted girl child, Sufiya Zinobia, who is the embodiment of shame, and her ‘peripheral hero-husband Omar Khayyam, embodiment of shamelessness. Shame is a better diasporic expression than his earlier novel Midnight's Children.

In The Moor’s Last Sigh Salman Rushdie has shown his “experience of the plural and `partial' tensions of diaspora that has encouraged a rigorous rethinking of nation, nationalism, resistance and representation... that above all stresses the ambivalence that characterizes the site of national contestation. It is a hybrid novel that carries forward the legacy of Midnight's Children. It is a story of miscegenation and cultural intermingling.

Shalimar the Clown (2005) gives evidence of Rushdie’s cosmopolitanism and his international historical consciousness. In this fiction Rushdie “puts the past into present tense.''24 He addresses “the past to come to terms with social and political present of-not one nation but the entire world.''

In The Enchantress of Florence (2008), he “regurgitates all his other old concerns--magic realism, religion, power structures, globalization, colonization, history exile to name a few.” This novel is a travelogue of Rushdie that extends from Venice to India of Mughal Period. Thus, the story runs from white to black that is from Occidental to Oriental.

The Enchantress of Florence may be validly considered his latest instance on the diaspora. From reading of this novel, it is clear that the two main protagonists of the novel Mogor del’ Amore and Qara Koz embody the diasporic experience. Interestingly Mogor del’ Amore’s journey is towards East while Qara Koz’s journey is towards the West – and East and West the migrant is at first accepted and then rejected. It is best to sum up the paper in Rushdie’s own words: “Western civilization has been no more than a veneer; a native remains a native beneath his European jackets and ties.”

At last have a look on his aim….

References

• https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1655254469/photo-2.JPG
• https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/9a/f7/64/9af7645149eece18af102f5f25f586a3.jpg
• http://allduniv.academia.edu/DRTIWARI
• http://i.cbc.ca/1.3243899.1443197504!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/original_620/salman-rushdie-quote.jpg

 
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