Salman Rushdie: General Introduction: His life of multiple migration

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Salman Rushdie General Introduction His life
of multiple migration

• 1947 born in Bombay, son of a Cambridge-educated
  merchant of Muslim background
• 1961 Studied in England
• 1964 moved with his family from Bombay to
  Pakistan

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Salman Rushdie General Introduction (2)

• 1975 Grimus 1987 The Jaguar Smile A
  Nicaraguan Journey 1990 Haroun and the Sea of
  Stories
• 1980 Midnight's Children
• 1983 Shame
• 1989 The Satanic Verses 1989, Feb.
  "fatwa"
• 1991 Imaginary Homelands
• 1994 East, West
• 1995 The Moor's Last Sigh
• 1999 The Ground Beneath her Feet

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Questions

• Definitions and Implications immigrant,
  emigrant, expatriates, exile, contract laborers.
  
• What are special about immigrant literature and
  writers?

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Rushdies position as an immigrant writer

• Third-World Cosmopolitans like Derek Walcott,
  Gabriel Garcia Marques and Bharati Mukherjee, V.
  S. Naipaul and Michael Ondaatje, and ??.
• They live in or write to a metropolitan center,
  carrying with them a third-world, or
  multicultural, background.
• The complexity of their positions
• 1. Enabling, The Empire Writes Back.
• 2. Awkward. Is Rushdie a "'British-resident
  Indo-Pakistani writer'? Who do they write to?
  What do they write about?

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Rushdie migrant identity

• What is the best thing about migrant peoples and
  seceded nations? I think it is their
  hopefulness... And what is the worst thing? It
  is the emptiness of one's luggage....We have
  floated upwards from history, from memory, from
  Time. (Shame 70-71)
• Pakistan is a part of the world to which,
  whether I like it or not, I am still joined, if
  only by elastic bands. (Shame 23)
• It maybe be argued that the past is a country
  from which we have all migrated, that its loss is
  part of our common humanity. . . . (Imaginary
  Homelands)

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Rushdie Pakistan migrant writer

• Although I have known Pakistan for a long time, I
  have never lived there for longer than six months
  at a stretch...I have learned Pakistan by
  slices...however I choose to write about
  over-there, I am forced to reflect that in
  fragments of broken mirrors...I must reconcile
  myself to the inevitability of the missing bits.
  ... (Shame 70)
• Immigrant writer "the ability to see at once
  from inside and out is a great thing, a piece of
  good fortune which the indigenous writer cannot
  enjoy." (IH 4)
• The only people who see the whole picuture. . .
  Are the ones who step out of the frame. (The
  Ground 43)

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Other metaphors or descriptions of immigrant
writers

• Potted plant (Neil Bissoondath)
• Immigration is a one-way road there is no home
  to return to. (Stuart Hall)

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Salman Rushdie Major Themes

• India/Pakistans National Identity vs. British
  colonization Indian diaspora
• His definition of migrant identity and the themes
  of Indian diaspora in Imaginary Homelands
• His use of English language.
• Colonialism and Gender/Power Struggle
• General Introduction to Midnights Children

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Imaginary Homelands

• 1. The past is a foreign country, so is the
  present.
• 2. Memory Exiled writers need to look back
  and create imaginary homelands. (10)
• -- deal in broken mirrors (p. 11)
• In spite of all the evidence that life is
  discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random
  chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on
  believing in the continuity of things, in
  causation and meaning. But we live on a broken
  mirror (Ground 31)

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Imaginary Homelands

• 1. The past is a foreign country, so is the
  present.
• 2. Memory
• -- p. 121) fragmentation turns things symbolic
  2) a subject of universal significance and
  appeal 3) meaning is a shaky edifice.
• -- Why writes about the past? -- political
  functions
• p. 14 the first step towards changing it.
• -- guilt p. 15

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Imaginary Homelands

• 3. About Midnights Children and India
• 1) Saleem, an unreliable narrator
• 2) India, its non-sectarian philosophy,
• 3) Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration.
• 4. White culture 1) The use of English p. 17
  "to conquer English may be to complete the
  process of making ourselves free".
• 5. British Indian identity. p. 19 1) As
  both insiders and outsiders, they present
  alternative reality, mingling reality and
  naturalism.
• 2) Against ghetto mentality they have two
  traditions.

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Midnights Children

• Plot Exactly at midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, two
  boys are born in a Bombay hospital, where they
  are switched by a nurse. Around that time, a
  thousand children were born and they are the
  midnight children.

Hindu woman British colonialist
Saleem
Aziz Naseem
Muslim couple (Mumtaz Ahmed)
Shiva
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Midnights Children Plot (2)

• Midnight Children as a national allegory
• from cultural conflicts and national movements in
  the colonial period
• to the birth of the
  nation as well as its 3000 midnights children
• to the gradual
  fragmentation of Saleems body, the children, and
  the nation

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Midnights Children narrative methods

• The narrator and narrative methods (p. 3)
• Digressive, foreboding and summarizing.
• Talking about his own writings.
• A mixture of tones humorous, poetic, crude and
  with ribald jokes (e.g. snot)
• Mixing the personal and the historical/political
• Motifs -- e.g. hole in the nose, perforated
  sheet, p. 13 - snot nose, black mango,

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Midnights Children Cultural Identity

• e.g. grandfather Aziz

Indian belief
Aziz
German knowledge
Boatman Tai
His mother
Ghanis house
His wife