Home

That is the title of the Vintage Mini book by Salman Rushdie, a self-described ‘emigrant from one place and a newcomer in two.’ This slim but substantial book contains selections form Rushdie’s books including the novel Shame; the essays in Imaginary Homelands; and his memoir titled Joseph Anton. When Rushdie went into hiding after the Ayatollah of Iran issued a fatwa (death sentence) on Rushdie in 1999 after the publication of his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, Rushdie had to look for a name while under protective custody of British intelligence. He chose Joseph Anton – after his two favorite writers – Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.

The book’s blurb captures it all in a concise manner. ‘Writing with insight, passion and humour, he looks at what it means to belong, whether roots are real and homelands imaginary, what it is like to reconfigure your past from fragments of memory and what happens when East meets West.’

The book begins with tender excerpts from Joseph Anton, all the way back to Rushdie as a young boy uprooted from India and transferred to a snooty British boarding school. ‘In later life he would wonder at the choice made by this thirteen-year-old self, a boy rooted in  his [Indian] city, happy in his friends, having a good time at school (apart from a little local difficulty with the Marathi language), the apple of his parents’ eye. Why did the boy decide to leave it all behind and travel halfway across the world into the unknown, far from everyone who loved him and everything he knew?’

Later in his life, the exile would trace the influences that drove him to study and live in England. The usual suspects in the colonial’s mind are confections of British art and culture. They include the books of Agatha Christie as well as Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, a series of books about children having a marvellous time in the Lake District, all those words that transported him into that grey island cut off from the great continent of Europe.

He studied in the boarding school, did well, but faced the spectre of racism. One day, he found one of his essays torn to pieces and scattered on the seat of his red arm chair. ‘Once somebody wrote the words WOGS GO HOME on his wall. He gritted his teeth, swallowed the insults and did his work. He did not tell his parents what school had been like until after he left it (and when he did tell them they were horrified that he had kept so much pain to himself).’

But Rushdie, like all artists, turned such suffering into the gold of art. While writing his early novels he was working as an advertising copywriter in the City of London and one brilliant copy was attributed to him. When asked to write a snappy copy for a doughnut, the young Salman Rushdie wrote: ‘Naughty, but nice.’

That soundbite could also encapsulate the books he would later write: literary novels that ended up in the international bestsellers’ lists. He said: ‘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.’

Along with the German Gunter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum and the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Rushdie’s novels – especially Midnight’s Children – turned history into a protagonist, a live and slippery character in his massive novels. Whereas before it was said that character was destiny, in the novels of these three men, history was destiny. And how to show the flabbergasting complexity of 2oth-century history than by writing big and sprawling novels that show continents finding their new voices?

To write, then, is to capture what has vanished. Rushdie said: ‘It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigres 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.’

The main conceit of Midnight’s Children is that it deals with Saleem, the main character who was born on the stroke of midnight before India’s independence from British rule in 1949. Readers who know history already have the advance knowledge that Pakistan would later secede from India in a bloody war, and that much later, Bangladesh would leave Pakistan after another brutal upheaval. Thus, the vision of independence from the British to forge the dream of one country was shattered into bits.

Fragments and broken mirrors are motifs in Rushdie’s essays and novels. He added:  ‘This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration; his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory compounded by the quirks of character and of 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.’

The Nobel Prize-winning poet W.H. Auden calls it ‘elsewhereishness.’ Auden was born in England and grew up there, but would later pull up his roots and migrate to the United States. This sense of bi-furcation, of being from another country and now living in a new one, seems to be the condition of the postmodern writer.

For too long I have resisted the call to leave, always returning to the Philippines after my postgraduate studies in the United Kingdom and the United States. But now I am writing this, in an office at the University of Nottingham in the UK, where I am staying for two weeks. I will return to the University of Nottingham in Malaysia afterward, to teach at the International Summer School in July. And in August, I will attend the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in the US, where I was one of the few writers chosen from thousands of applicants, to discuss our works and meet with literary agents. Perhaps one day, the words we wrought from the dark nights of our souls would be published out there: East finally meeting West in a dance of the seven veils.

Comments can be sent to [email protected].