Shaky Ground, New Territorialities and the Diasporic Subject

Abstract

Diasporic literature is a literature of remembering, not only in the usual sense of the term — a literature geared towards the past, haunted by the lost country and pervaded with a general sense of nostalgia. It is also a literature of re-membering which unearths fragments of the past, pieces them together, or fails to do so, altering the perspective, exaggerating the importance of certain events or, on the other hand, toning them down, thus creating an ‘imaginary homeland’ (Rushdie, 1991). It is in this sense that in his book Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie has defined the specificity of the diasporic writer as someone who recaptures the homeland after the break and from an outside perspective; the diasporic writer’s perception may be fragmentary, but this fragmentation makes the process of recollection more intense and the fragment excavated from the past more meaningful and emblematic. And because he is not too close to the scene he is describing, the diasporic writer may gain a better perspective on things:

It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge — which gives rise to profound uncertainties — that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.

Writing my book in North London, looking out through my window on to a city scene totally unlike the ones I was imagining on to paper, I was constantly plagued by this problem, until I felt obliged to face it in the text, to make clear that (in spite of my original and I suppose somewhat Proustian ambition to unlock the gates of lost time so that the past reappeared as it actually had been unaffected by the distortions of memory), so that my India was just that: ‘my’ India, a version and no more than one version of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions. I tried to make it as imaginatively true as I could, but imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and suspect, and I knew that my India may only have been one to which I (who am no longer what I was, and who by quitting Bombay never became what perhaps I was meant to be) was, let us say, willing to admit I belonged.

This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration; his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory compounded by quirks of character and circumstance, and his vision is fragmentary. It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost. (Rushdie, 1991, 10)