Carmen Bujdei

52 Carmen Bujdei Narratives of ‘Liquid Modernity’: Translation, Migrancy and Nomadism in Salman Rushdie’s Novels placed himself in the direct lineage of the For Salman Rushdie, an Indian- mohajirs, any endeavour to fix his identity born British writer of Muslim extraction in single, static categorial slots amounts to currently living in America, it seems only enfreakment. Consequently, by deploying natural that his ongoing fictional project tropes of identity that point to some should have targeted questions of self- irreducible organic substratum while at the definition and self-location (in its various same time suggesting its necessary cultural avatars: dis-location, mis-location, re- mutations under the aegis of travel, Rushdie location). As he confesses, his works record commits himself to querying solid, mono- ‘an attempt to come to terms with the lithic notions of individual (as well as various component parts of myself – communal) identity, and adopts translation, countries, memories, histories, families, migrancy, and nomadism as the fluid, gods.’1 It therefore comes as little surprise molecular alternatives to inclusion in molar, that externally-imposed labels such as massifying structures (Deleuze & Guattari, ‘commonwealth’ literature should be 283). Instead of rootedness, ‘cultural trans- rejected as chimerical. A chimera is, after plantation,’ rather than procreation, ‘cross- all, to cite the modern usage of the term pollination,’ and in lieu of clear genea- from the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘a logical traces, a ‘polyglot family tree,’ mere wild fancy; an unfounded conception.’ where direct ancestry is repudiated in favour A phantasm divorced from reality, an of one’s freely choosing, in rhizomatic lines ‘unreal monstrous creature of the ima- of fugue that traverse the east-west divide, gination’ (Rushdie, Imaginary 63) or, to one’s literary forebears, whether they be retrieve its classical definitions from Swift, Conrad, Tagore, or Ram Mohan Roy Homer’s Iliad or Hesiod’s Theogony, a (Rushdie, Imaginary 20-21). Given his fabulous fire-breathing monster admixing in liminal position within the hyphenated its composite body feline, capric and space2 straddling such diverse cultures, serpentine features. Rushdie’s work is ambivalently poised Wherefore this phantom, beastly between both the western and the eastern category, reminiscent of the chthonian, literary traditions, and resorts to what Caren chaotic antagonists of Olympian deities Kaplan calls ‘mythologised narrativisations (Leeming 104)? Notwithstanding its impro- of displacement’ as practices of cultural bability or incongruity, the chimera analogy (self-) identification (2). signals that for a writer who has insistently To this effect, particularly in later narratives such as The Ground Beneath Her fact, one major transfor- 53 Feet (1999), Fury (2001) and Shalimar the mation that distinguishes Clown (2005), Rushdie seems to confirm, as ‘light’ or ‘liquefied’ mo- well as amend to some extent, Zygmunt dernity from its ‘heavy’ or ‘solid’ counter- Bauman’s diagnosis of the progressive part is the breakdown, erosion or melting liquefaction of the age of modernity, away of frontiers. Territorial borderlines whereby solid, rigid, traditional societal and and their function of dividing, separating, power structures are being supplanted, in containing and reinforcing systemic order this ‘post-panoptical’ stage, by more fluid lose both consistency and relevance faced and flexible, extra-territorial figurations. In with spontaneous flows along network-like Bauman’s account of globalised postmo- capillaries (25). Boundaries or, rather, their dernity, contrasted with the solids’ static- permeability in-forms Rushdie’s liminal ness, fixity and spatial containment, the figurations of identity as interconnecting fluids’ mobile and transient occupation of native and foreign, self and other, margin space renders them amenable to comparison and centre, east and west: as he confesses, with travel: ‘I’ve been crossing frontiers all my life – physical, social, intellectual, artistic border- “Fluids travel easily. They ‘flow’, ‘spill’, lines’ (‘The Ground Beneath My Feet’ 42). ‘run out’, ‘splash’, ‘pour over’, ‘leak’, Travel, which for cultural anthropologist ‘flood’, ‘spray’, ‘drip’, ‘seep’, ‘ooze’; James Clifford involves a ‘range of unlike solids, they are not easily stopped practices for situating the self in [a] space’ – they pass around some obstacles, and ‘a figure for different modes of dissolve some others and bore or soak dwelling and displacement’ (1989), is first their way through others still meeting and foremost rendered in Rushdie’s works with solids they emerge unscathed, while as ‘translation,’ understood in its dual sense the solids they have met, if they stay as both transference across spatial frontiers solid, are changed – get moist or and conveyance from one language or drenched. The extraordinary mobility of culture into another. The geographical and fluids is what associates them with the linguistic meanings of ‘translation’ merge in idea of ‘lightness’” (Bauman 2). the following quasi-identical definitions extracted from Rushdie’s non-fictional and Neither fixed by space nor fictional prose, which strike a similar note bounded by time, liquids offer Bauman a with George Steiner’s reference to the potent metaphor for characterising post- ‘extraterritorial,’ homeless, unhoused poets modernity, ‘second modernity’ or ‘surmo- of the twentieth century, who are ‘wan- dernity’ as an age which no longer endorses derers across language’3: the supremacy of sedentarism over nomadism, settlement over free-flowing traffic, or “The word ‘translation’ comes, etymo- location over migration. Instead, with the logically, from the Latin for ‘bearing advent of electronically propagated infor- across’. Having been borne across the mation, which has condensed time to world, we are translated men. It is nor- instantaneity and has volatilised spatial mally supposed that something always distance, “the difference between ‘close by’ gets lost in translation; I cling, obsti- and ‘far away’ or for that matter between nately, to the notion that something can the wilderness and the civilized, orderly also be gained” (Rushdie, Imaginary space, has been all but cancelled” (11). In 17). 54 ‘I, too, am a translated cultures; at other times, that we fall man. I have been borne between two stools’ (Rushdie, Imaginary across. It is generally 15). believed that something is always lost in What is to be gained from existing translation; I cling to the notion […] that in translation, if dislodgment is a common something can also be gained’ (Rushdie, human predicament (‘the past is a country Shame 29). from which we have all emigrated’), expe- rienced all the more intensely by a writer Both statements occur in the literally dis-placed into the ‘elsewhere’ context of attempting to situate Asian implicit in ‘out-of-country’ and ‘out-of- writers in Western culture – itself, as language’ (12)? The answer Rushdie pro- Edward Said remarks in Reflections on vides highlights memory as the archae- Exile, ‘in large part the work of exiles, ological tool for provisionally recon- émigrés, refugees’ (173). Yet exile, in stru(ct)ing the past from the ‘broken pots of Said’s vision, is a ‘condition of terminal antiquity’ into imaginative at-homeness: loss’; it is predicated as one’s pathological dis-engagement from one’s place of origins, “our physical alienation from India as out-of-placeness. Estrangement, the almost inevitably means that we will not ’unhealable rift forced between a human be capable of reclaiming precisely the being and a native place, between the self thing that was lost; that we will, in short, and its true home’ (173) signals a loss of create fictions, not actual cities or integrity, a fall from some prelapsarian villages, but invisible ones, imaginary wholeness or Antaean oneness with the homelands, Indias of the mind’” (10). ground beneath one’s feet, which fractures into unbridgeable chasms between home The plural implicit in the previous and away. Rushdie does underscore Said’s statement signals a refusal to succumb to a definition of exile as a postlapsarian ‘dis- ghetto mentality, which would circumvent continuous state of being’; nevertheless, he the ‘homeland’ within constricting cultural also supplements the exiles’ contrapuntal boundaries, turning physical dislocation into ‘plurality of vision’ (Said 186) by claiming a ‘form of internal exile’ (17). As Said also that given the migrants’ condition of suggests, too strict an enclosure within the simultaneous belonging/not-belonging, geo- borders of ‘familiar territory’ might easily graphical distance implodes and simply veer into a carceral experience: the exiles’ serves to grant them ‘stereoscopic’ aware- defining experience is that of crossing ness, a dialogic rather than monologic pers- barriers ‘of thought and experience’ (185). pective upon a past that corresponds to a Novels like Midnight’s Children lost home and a present that encompasses (1981) and Shame (1983) revolve around foreignness : the articulation of ‘imaginary homelands.’ In contrast with the alleged solidity of the ‘We are Hindus who have crossed the myths legitimating the birth of post- black water; we are Muslims who eat Independence India or of seceded Pakistan, pork. And as a result – as my use of the these narratives appear to promote the Christian notion of the Fall indicates – notion that in order for these countries to be we are now partly of

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