Writing Home: ‘Unfinished Business’ in Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses (1989)

Abstract

‘Do you hear?’ exclaims the narrator of Rushdie’s short story ‘The Courter’, ‘I refuse to choose’. Unlike the 70-year-old Ayah, nicknamed Certainly-Mary, whose desire to return ‘home’ in the end outweighs her newly found passion for the Eastern European porter (turned ‘courter’) of the London block of flats where she now lives, Rushdie’s young narrator remains adamant about keeping the lines of communication open between East and West despite the potential silencing implied by the choice. The title of Rushdie’s collection of short stories, East, West (1994), echoes, ironically of course, the proverbial rhetoric of Empire ‘East, West, Home’s Best’,⁵ a discourse built on the myths of Empire and the notion of England forever as ‘home’ wherever in the world you may be. It also evokes the possibility of a late twentieth-century postcolonial and diasporic reading where not only is the notion of ‘home’ increasingly mobile, enacting a deterritorialization that, as Bryan Cheyette suggests in the epigraph above, can be both ‘a blessing and a curse’, but is also perhaps an illusory and fictional place constructed through the myths and fragments of the migrant imagination. The shifting and ambivalent boundaries of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ have been the preoccupation of Rushdie’s work from the creation of his utopian fantasy in Grimus (1975) — set mainly on an island in the Mediterranean caught between East and West — to his ‘imaginary homelands’⁶ in Midnight’s Children (1981) and Shame (1983), as well as the more focused and explicit exploration of the ‘stresses’ and transformations of the ‘migrant’ experience in London in Satanic Verses (1988).⁷ Even in one of his most recent novels, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), one of the central preoccupations is the theme of migration and the myth of transformation.

But I, too, have ropes around my neck, I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose. I buck, I snort, I whinny, I kick … I choose neither of you, and both. Do you hear? I refuse to choose.

Salman Rushdie¹

History is an interplay of various peoples, and it’s gone on forever. I can think of no one culture that’s been left to itself. It’s a very simple view that borrowing just began the other day with the European expansion. Think of all that was brought back by the crusaders of the Middle East. The tiles in churches, the pulpit … There’s always been this interplay.

V. S. Naipaul²

Wherever one looks, whether in the West or in the societies of the Third World, it would seem that moral being cannot be divorced from a deepened cycle of creativity through which we may visualize a breakthrough from absolute violence. Such a breakthrough requires us to accept the adversarial contexts in which cultures wrestle with each other but descend as well into camouflages and masks as flexible frames within the mystery of genuine change.

Wilson Harris³

The experience of diaspora can be a blessing or a curse or, more commonly, an uneasy amalgam of the two states. It is not a coincidence that the Hebrew root for exile or diaspora has two distinct connotations. ‘Golah’ implies residence in a foreign country (where the migrant is in charge of his or her destiny), whereas ‘Galut’ denotes a tragic sense of displacement (where the migrant is … the passive object of an impersonal history). Both words, in current usage, have a pejorative feel about them because they suggest an undesirable exile from an autochthonous ‘homeland’… the distinction … is worth keeping as it encapsulates a sense of differing historical possibilities in our current idealization of an abstract ‘diaspora’.

Bryan Cheyette⁴