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Narrative
persona
18: … the present author, who has already been obliged to leave many
questions in a state of unanswered ambiguity, is capable of giving
clear replies when absolutely necessary…
28: I tell myself this will be a novel of leavetaking, my last words
on the East from which, many years ago, I began to come loose. I do
not always believe myself when I say this. It is a part of the world
to which, whether I like it or not, I am still joined, if only by
elastic bands.
59: This is a novel about Sufiya Zinobia … Or perhaps it would be more
accurate, if also more opaque, to say that Sufiya Zinobia is about
this novel.
68: If this were a realistic novel about Pakistan, I would not be
talking about Bilquis and the wind…
69: I have learned Pakistan in slices, the same way as I ave learned
by growing sister. … But suppose this were a realistic novel! Just
think what else I might have to put in.
70: …. If I had been writing a book of this nature, it would have done
me no good to protest that I was writing universally, not only about
Pakistan… Fortunately, however, I am only telling a sort of modern
fairy-tale…
71: … every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it
prevents the telling of other tales…
116: All stories are haunted by the ghosts of the stories they might
have been.
Question: How does
Rushdie weave his narrative persona into the narrative and its
thematic concerns?
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Translation/Diaspora
29: I, too, am a translated man. I have been borne across. It is
generally believed that something is always lost in translation; I
cling to the notion … that something can also be gained.
39: No matter how determinedly one flees a country, one is obliged to
take along some hand-luggage…
63: All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack
it into bundles and boxes…. It is the fate of migrants to be stripped
of history
85: I am an emigrant from one country (India) and a newcomer in two
(England, where I live, and Pakistan, to which my family moved against
my will)…. We have flown.
86: Migration, n., moving, for instance in flight, from one place to
another. To fly and to flee: both are ways of seeking freedom…. When
nations come unstuck from their native land, they are called migrants.
When nations do the same thing (Bangla-desh) the act is called
secession. What is the best thing about migrant peoples and seceded
nations? I think it is their hopefulness.
87: … we have come unstuck from more than land. We have floated
upwards from history, from memory, from Time.
I may be such a person. Pakistan may be such a country.
87: As for me: I, too, like all migrants, am a fantasist. I build
imaginary countries and try to impose them on the ones that exist. I,
too, face the problem of history: what to retain, what to dump, how to
hold on to what memory insists on relinquishing, how to deal with
change.
Question: How does Rushdie relate migration at
the level of the individual with secession at the level of nation?
What do you regard are the salient features with which Rushdie
represents their commonalty?
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Pakistan
43: In those days, people were not so keen on the servants of God as
we are told they have become at present…
61: This was the time immediately before the famous moth-eaten
partition that chopped up the old country and handed Al-Lah a few
insect-nibbled slices of it… A country so improbable that it could not
exist.
67: … the new, moth-nibbled land of God.
77: In that hot season, the two newly-partitioned nations announced
the commencement of hostilities on the Kashmiri frontier…..
78: …national leaders, rising brilliantly to the challenge, perfected
no fewer than one thousand and one ways of salvaging honour from
defeat.
82: … well, there were a few voices saying, if this is the country we
dedicated to our God, what kind of God is it that permits…
87: … Pakistan, the peeling, fragmenting palimpsest, increasingly at
war with itself, may be described as a failure of the dreaming mind.
88: The exiled Czech writer Kundera once wrote: ‘A name means
continuity with the past and people without a past are people without
a name.’ But I am dealing with a past that refuses to be suppressed,
that is daily doing battle with the present…
144: Men who deny their pats become incapable of thinking them real.
251: … it’s my opinion that Pakistan has never been a mullah-dominated
society…. Islam and the Muslim State were, for him, political and
cultural ideas; the theology was not the point….. So-called Islamic
‘fundamentalism’ does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people. It is
imposed on them from above…. This is how religion shores up dictators;
by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are
reluctant to see discredited , disenfranchised, mocked.
Question: How would
you contextualize Rushdie’s notion of nation as dream or fantasy with
Benedict Anderson’s notion of the nation as an “Imagined Community”?
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Gender
67: I am wondering how best to describe Bilquis. As a woman who was
unclothed by change, but who wrapped herself in certainties; or as a
girl who became a queen, but lost the ability possessed by every
beggar-woman, that is, the power of bearing sons…
74: … it was believed that the mere fact of being married did not
absolve a woman of the shame and dishonour that results from the
knowledge that she sleeps regularly with a man…
173: It is commonly, and I believe, accurately said of Pakistan that
of her women are much more impressive than her men … their chains,
nevertheless, are no fictions. They exist. And they are getting
heavier.
191ff: [Eighteen shawls…]
Question: To what
degree is Rushdie’s treatment of the fictional characters in this
novel compatible with feminism? Would you call him a feminist? Or
would you qualify that affiliation?
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Shame/`Sharam'
28: … shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and
it becomes part of the furniture.
29: Shame, dear reader, is not the exclusive property of the East.
38: This word: shame. No, I must not write it in its original form,
not in this peculiar language tainted by wrong concepts and the
accumulated detritus of its owners’ past, this Angrezi in which I am
forced tow rite, and so for ever alter what is written…
Sharam, that’s the word. For which this paltry ‘shame’ is a wholly
inadequate translation…
84: Don’t you know that shame is collective?
104: … an atmosphere in which the stink of honour is all-pervasive.
115: We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still
grasp what must seem unthinkable to peoples living in the aftermath of
the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest
love on the implacable altars of their pride.
122: Sufiya Zinobia Hyder blushed uncontrollably whenever her presence
in this world was noticed by others…. Guilt for a crime,
embarrassment, propriety, shame? … Then what happens to the unfelt
shame?
123: Blushing is a slow burning.
141: The plague of shame … spread rapidly through that tragic being
whose chief defining characteristic was her excessive sensitivity to
the bacilli of humiliation…. What is a saint? A saint is a person who
suffers in our stead.
238: The Beast has many faces. Some are always sad.
242: … the violence that had been born of shame…
263: … she had never been more than a rumour, a chimaera, the
collective fantasy of a stifled people, a dream born of their rage…
Question: How does
Rushdie allegorize the notion of “shame”? How does that enable
narrative to imply a position about history, nation, and their
interconnected to the condition of women in that state or nation?
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Frederick
Jameson has argued that writers from the "new" nations often feel
compelled to writing what he called allegories of nation. How far do
you think this applies in Rushdie's case? In developing your position,
take into account the two essays by Aijaz Ahmad, reprinted in his book
In Theory: one on Jameson, and the other on Rushdie.
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