Salman Rushdie: the ambivalence of migrancy - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2001 by Shailja Sharma

In her essay on The Satanic Verses, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak temporarily brackets her discussion of the Rushdie affair in order to "attempt the impossible: a reading of The Satanic Verses as if nothing has happened since late 1988" (219). A short while later, she returns to the "cultural politics" of the controversy in order to reconnect the book with its notorious context, the debate between the twin demonologies of "Islam" and "free speech and secularism." The attempt to separate the book from its reception is interesting, not because it can't be done, or done well, but in the way it raises the issue of the Rushdie text and its "proper" audience, its desired reading constituency. Within the field of a text that is marked as "high culture" with respect to its literary antecedents--surrealism, magic realism, and European modernism--and its potential sphere of evaluation, the Booker Prize--the interventions by South Asian Britons in Bradford, Birmingham, Bolton, and London, and by self-serving politicians i n India and Pakistan, along with their range of mis- or nonreadings, are clearly part of a debate that is not intended to be theirs.

Yet The Satanic Verses, as Spivak and a number of other commentators, including Rushdie, have pointed out, is a novel about migrancy in general and about South Asian immigrants to Britain in particular. (1) One of the problems that attends any investigation of migrancy in Rushdie's work is the almost limitless applicability of the concept, fostered not inconsiderably by the author's own moves from India to Pakistan to England, and now to New York. In this essay I discuss the ambivalent ways in which migrancy recurs in Rushdie's life and work as a concept he celebrates, yet one that has historically had undesired consequences for him.

Migrancy can be called the reigning trope of the twentieth century Writers such as Beckett, Joyce, and Rushdie have made it a determining feature of counterhegemonic literature and politics. Rushdie is not alone in being fascinated by the liberatory and metaphysical connotations that attach themselves to the concept. Migration refers not only to the displacements of people in history but to a state of displacement that befalls humankind in general. In his essay on Gunter Grass, Rushdie proclaims, "We all cross frontiers; in that sense, we are all migrant peoples" (279). While that may be true on some abstract level, still we all cross them differently, and thus we are not all migrants in the same way. That experiences of migration differ, I think, is one of the crucial distinctions to be made in any discussion of the subject.

An attendant problem involves Rushdie's shifting claims about the relationship between his novels and history While any straight correspondence between the two would be facile, Rushdie's changing positions with regard to the historicity of The Satanic Verses invites a questioning of the reasons behind such claims and disclaimers. In his letter to Rajiv Gandhi, Rushdie insists that "the book isn't about Islam, but about migration, metamorphoses, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay... How much further from history could one get?" (Appignanesi 35-36). Later, however, in the Observer, he claims that the book is an attempt to "discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time" (Appignanesi 62). And in the same essay, he explains the novel as "an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations, from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent to Britain." In the first case migration is a category far removed from history, and in the second it is inextricably a historical event. The status of such statements as truth claims is hardly the issue. The point, rather, is to understand these shifting patterns of migrancy's relation to history as they appear in his work. While the strategy of disaffiliation that Rushdie performs may in part be attributable to a rhetorical line of defense necessitated by the attacks on his book, exactly what his concept of migration is, and what his place in the migrant population is, still remain to be examined.

The frequent slippages that Rushdie performs, in which he invites his readers' collusion, among tropes of migrancy, immigration, and exile as they traverse semantic, linguistic, and cultural fields often lead to an under-privileging of the political arenas from which immigrant and diaspora politics often emerge. Within such arenas of political and anti-institutional critiques, Rushdie himself is a vocal participant, as can be seen from essays such as "Outside the Whale" and "Handsworth Songs." However, in the explicatory glosses through which Rushdie has sought to project the authorial meaning of his work, his use of the term migration robs it of a certain specificity of history and class. This is especially apparent in the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses. As Tim Brennan points out, it is important to locate the "class resentments that are simmering beneath the surface of an affair that has been seen in religious terms alone" (145). Locating these class tensions not only serves to defuse the simpli stic opposition between secularism and fundamentalism but also uncovers the fissured state of class relations within a community that both the British government and well-meaning liberals seek to portray in homogenizing terms. In that context, Rushdie's claim that his text is written "from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent" is complicated by the controversial and politicized reception of the novel by some of these migrants.