Salman Rushdie’s Fathers

Abstract

So speaks the narrator of The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) in the process of discovering that the businessman father Abraham Zogoiby, whom he has sidelined during his childhood under the dominance of a powerful mother, is the embodiment of evil and of corrupt power. Many of Rushdie’s characters discover who their real fathers are in the course of their fictional lives, or come to terms with ‘the reality of a father’. That is often what makes the ‘weight’ of their stories, in both personal and political terms. If you were to argue (as the novelist Elizabeth Bowen does)² that there is something childish in all writers, especially in a writer as fascinated by childhood as Rushdie, in love with stories and folktales and movies for children, then you could say that the adult Rushdie continues to ‘make fictions’ of his father. Fathers in Rushdie are unreliable, demanding and frequently metaphorical. They threaten or fail their sons; they battle with the rival power of the mothers; they need to be loved, but may not be loveable.

Children make fictions of their fathers, re-inventing them according to their childish needs. The reality of a father is a weight few sons can bear.¹