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Reframing : the Politics of Representation and New Media in Transnational Public Culture

by Tawnya Ravy

B.A. in English, May 2007, Randolph College (Randolph-Macon Woman’s College) M.A. in English, May 2009, The George Washington University

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

January 19, 2018

Dissertation directed by

Kavita Daiya Associate Professor of English

Judith Plotz Professor Emerita of English

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies

that Tawnya C. Ravy has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy as of October 30, 2017. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Reframing Salman Rushdie: the Politics of Representation and New Media in Transnational Public Culture

Tawnya C. Ravy

Dissertation Research Committee:

Kavita Daiya, Associate Professor of English, Dissertation Co-Director

Judith Plotz, Professor Emerita of English, Dissertation Co-Director

Robert McRuer, Professor of English, Committee Member

Evelyn Schreiber, Professor of English, Committee Member

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© Copyright 2018 by Tawnya C. Ravy All Rights Reserved.

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Dedication

To my mother, Nancy Novak, and father, Keith Novak, whose support and encouragement made this work possible, and to my loving husband, John Azar, who believed in me always.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my Dissertation Co-Directors, Kavita Daiya and Judith Plotz

whose tireless efforts to help me reach my goal of completing this work will resonate with

me for the rest of my life. I would also like to thank my committee members Evelyn

Schreiber and Robert McRuer for their support and guidance throughout this process. Many

thanks to Dane Kennedy and Antonio Lopez for volunteering their time to read my work and participate in my defense and to Daniel Dewispelare for stepping in as my defense chair. I

would also like to thank the research team at the Gelman Library for helping me with my

social media data collection and the archive specialists at the Manuscripts, Archives, and

Rare Books Library at for the opportunity to work with the official Salman

Rushdie archive and to learn about its creation.

I want to thank my incredibly supportive friends and family for helping me make it to

the finish line. I could not have made it here without my dissertation writing group and

especially the inspiration and support of Leigha McReynolds and Erin Vander Wall. Most of

all I want to thank Nancy Novak and Keith Novak, my incredible mother and father, for

supporting and pushing and loving me all the way through this incredible journey. And

finally I want to thank my husband, John Azar, for being my rock during this labor of love.

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Abstract of Dissertation

Reframing Salman Rushdie: the Politics of Representation and New Media in Transnational Public Culture

This dissertation examines the politics of representation in Salman Rushdie’s published works and social media feeds. As a literary celebrity and public intellectual with significant influence over the way in which western media frames discussions about the East,

Rushdie’s modes of representation deserve critical scrutiny. I evaluate four areas of representation in Rushdie’s work and argue that these representations have changed over the course of his career as well as reflect the ways in which he attempts to frame himself to the wider public. Ultimately my dissertation seeks to interrogate Rushdie’s politics of representation, reevaluating the early works that made him famous and analyzing his more recent works for comparison as well as to examine Rushdie’s position as a contemporary author and public intellectual.

Chapter 1 discusses the ways in which Rushdie depicts physical and mental abnormality in Midnight’s Children , , The , and Luka and the Fire of

Life. Chapter 2 analyzes his female characters in light of his own claims to be a feminist in Midnight’s Children , Shame , , and Two Years, Eight Months, and

Twenty-Eight Nights. Chapter 3 looks at Rushdie’s changing representations of Islam and

Muslims in Midnight’s Children , Shame , The Satanic Verses , Shalimar the Clown ,

Enchantress of Florence , and Joseph Anton. In the fourth chapter I perform a qualitative analysis and close-reading of Rushdie’s Twitter and feeds to establish patterns in his social media usage and draw conclusions about the way in which he represents his public persona through these mediums.

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Table of Contents

Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………….iv

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..v

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………...……vi

Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………...vii

List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………...viii

Introduction. “Double Perspective”: Examining Rushdie’s Politics of Representation…..1

Chapter 1. Postcolonial Disability in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children , Shame , The Satanic Verses , and Luka and the Fire of Life……………..…14-49

Chapter 2. Demanding Inclusion: Rushdie’s Literary Representations of Women in Midnight’s Children , Shame , Shalimar the Clown , and Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights ……………………………………………………………..50-86

Chapter 3. Is Rushdie an Orientalist?: Representing Islam in Midnight’s Children , Shame , The Satanic Verses , Shalimar the Clown , Enchantress of Florence , and Joseph Anton ………………………………………………...……87-123

Chapter 4. The Man Who Would Be Popular: An Analysis of Rushdie’s Twitter and Facebook Feeds….……………………………………………………124-154

Conclusion. Tracing the Trajectories of Rushdie’s Politics of Representation……155-159

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………...... 160-182

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List of Figures

Figure 1. Photo of villa in Breach Candy, Bombay. (2010)...... 143

Figure 2. Facebook Post of , Voltaire Bust, and Salman Rushdie (2012)...... 144

Figure 3. Facebook Post of Review of Books (November 4, 2012)...... 146

Figure 4. Facebook Post of Satanic Verses Book Page (, 2014)...... 147

Figure 5. Facebook Post of Salman Rushdie Day Certificate Issued by City of Tulsa (September 28, 2015)...... 150

Figure 6. Facebook Post of a Photo of Milan and Zafar Rushdie (August 9, 2014)...... 151

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Introduction

“Double Perspective”: Examining Rushdie’s Politics of Representation

“In the immortal words of Popeye the Sailor Man: I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam,” wrote Salman Rushdie in his Twitter profile after claiming his handle and proving to the Twitterverse that it really was him and not some imposter with the same name. For Rushdie, this quote was as much a light-hearted tribute to his extensive love of popular culture references as it was a pointed declaration that he would no longer respond to the stream of tweets inquiring if it really is him or not. No stranger to television appearances, radio segments, and printed articles and interviews by the time he joined the world of social media, Rushdie was looking forward to having two advantages unique to social media platforms compared to more traditional public relations mediums: 1) direct control over the content and 2) unmediated access to a large audience. Even though he might not have realized the true potential of social media for having real-world ramifications when he joined, Rushdie understood enough about celebrity and public perception to embrace the control and access that social media offered. Navigating his identity in the public sphere has been a decades-long occupation, beginning even before he became a published author when he was a young man living in the heart of the old empire facing the racist slurs of his boarding school peers.

When Rushdie published Midnight’s Children in 1981, he could neither have predicted the immense success it would have nor its potential to elevate him to the heights of a literary celebrity. In addition to winning the in 1981, the

Booker of Bookers in 1993, and the Best of Bookers prize in 2008, it also had widespread ramifications in the western literary market. Prior to the publication of Midnight’s

Children , “‘books on didn’t sell’” in the West (Goonetilleke 20). Not only did

Midnight’s Children remain in the top of the bestseller lists for weeks after its publication, but it is also credited with inspiring and enabling the success of several other prominent, contemporary South Asian authors. 1 Its success ultimately provided Rushdie with a platform from which to comment on contemporary events, culture, and politics. In the years that followed, he became what can be called a “public intellectual,” publishing opinion editorials and frequently giving interviews as a subject expert on the topics of

South Asian and Middle Eastern politics.

During this period of his early success, Rushdie became more purposeful in his self-presentation for a wider public. He published the article “” in which he addresses his own personal position of authority to write about and commentate on South Asian history, politics, and culture and connects it to the broader experience of those “who have migrated into the north from the south” (Rushdie, Imaginary 19). He suggests that not only do migrants have authority to write about their former homelands, they actually possess a unique advantage over others to describe it because “they are capable of writing from a kind of double perspective: because they [are…] insiders and outsiders in this society” (Imaginary 19). Over the years, Rushdie has shared many stories about his personal life, responding in part to the public’s eagerness for details about his past. The stories he chooses are not only indicative of how he wants to be perceived by the public, but also of his investment in connecting the personal to the political. Rushdie’s often-quoted story of his graduation from Cambridge University, 2 for

1 In Chapter 2 of Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace Ana Mendes cites the four major South Asian literary figures who are often described as “Rushdie’s children”: , , Shashi Tharoor, and Rohinton Mistry. 2 In his commencement address for Bard College, Rushdie relates how he was almost barred from graduating because the college erroneously blamed him for throwing gravy all over his room and because he wore brown shoes instead of black to the ceremony. 2 example, is frequently invoked as a starting point for a larger discussion of the kinds of systemic and overt racism facing minorities in the West.

When he received the news that the Khomeini of had issued a fatwa proclamation urging the faithful to execute him for the publication of his novel The

Satanic Verses in 1988, he experienced a massive crisis of identity: “He was the person in the eye of the storm, no longer the Salman his friends knew but the Rushdie who was the author of Satanic Verses , a title subtly distorted by the omission of the initial The ”

(Joseph 5). The man who had spent years publicly criticizing individuals, artistic works, and government policies for their racism was suddenly attacked for being racist himself in The Satanic Verses : “I did not invent British racism, nor did The Satanic Verses . The

Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), which now accuses me of harming race relations, knows that for years it lent out my video-taped anti-racist Channel 4 broadcast to all sorts of black and white groups and seminars” ( Imaginary 411). While Rushdie went into hiding for ten years under the protection of the British secret service, he remained the subject of intense debate as the British and European press challenged the merits of protecting him and explored the controversy of freedom of expression versus the protection of religious sanctity. As noted fiction author and Rushdie’s good friend Martin

Amis remarked, Rushdie “had vanished into the front page.” For Rushdie, the loss of his previous public identity was devastating: “How easy it was to erase a man’s past and to construct a new version of him, an overwhelming version, against which it seemed impossible to fight” ( Joseph 5). One of my objectives with this project is to trace how he reconstructed his post-fatwa identity and how it has informed his representations of others in his published works. How has Rushdie’s identity changed over the course of his

3 career? What are his politics of representation—both for himself and for other groups?

How does Rushdie’s public self-fashioning compare to his literary representations of otherness? For example, is Rushdie’s identification as a feminist represented in his literary depictions of women and women’s issues? What impact has the digital age had on his politics of representation?

Perhaps the most important question to begin with is, “why Salman Rushdie?” In

Decentering Rushdie: and the Indian Novel in English , Pranav Jani argues for shifting the critical focus away from Rushdie since his novels are hardly representative of the investment in nation of other English-language and because his popularity in the academy depends partly on being both problematically exotic enough and yet still palatable for western readers. Jani challenges Rushdie’s position as the voice of the continent 3 and how Rushdie’s cosmopolitan and post-national work has come to represent an entire body of national literature. According to Jani, postnational texts, like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children , only represent, “the orientation of a specific section of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia whose changed subject positions and left-leaning ideological stances translated, after period, into aesthetic practices and political stances that were in vogue in the West” (25). At the center of

Jani’s critique of Rushdie’s centrality are the issues of who has the authority to represent others and for whom those representations are ultimately intended. Undoubtedly

Rushdie’s position as a British-educated, cosmopolitan man offers him an access to western literary markets that is not possible for other South Asian authors. While Jani’s larger point stands concerning Rushdie’s work dominating discussions of South Asian

3 A reference based on article describing Midnight’s Children as an example of a “continent finding its voice.” 4 and , the fact is that his work continues to be widely taught and read by audiences around the globe, and his viewpoints continue to have significant purchase in shaping western attitudes about non-.

After he emerged from hiding, Rushdie enthusiastically reentered public life, framing his frequent appearances at A-list events as a triumph over the terrorists who had threatened his life for so many years: “Only by living openly, visibly and fearlessly, and being written about for doing so, could he reduce the climate of fear around him” ( Joseph

593). He also resumed appearing on television spots and radio shows, again asked to comment on controversial news concerning the Middle East and South Asia, but even more frequently than before due to his higher profile in the mainstream media. In 2011, for example, he was asked to speak on a televised panel discussing relations between

Israel and the US. He appeared on the radio show in 2012 to discuss the rise of radical Islam and was featured on ’s show to talk about the attacks in 2015. In addition to frequent appearances in western news media, he is also invited to discuss South Asian politics on a variety of non-western news stations, including New Delhi Television Limited and India Today Conclave. Prior to his years in hiding, Rushdie’s status as a public intellectual was confined largely to printed interviews and opinion editorials; however now he is one of the most televised fiction in the world. Whether or not Rushdie should speak for and about the East (in particular South

Asia and the Middle East), the reality is that he has privileged access to western audiences and significant authority granted by them to comment on eastern cultural, social, and political issues. When an author has such a large platform and willing audience, it matters greatly how he navigates the politics of representation. How Rushdie

5 identifies himself and others warrants a thorough study of how he represents himself and others to the public.

Politics of Representation

Beginning with the publication of Midnight’s Children , Rushdie has

“demonstrated an insistent concern with the politics of representation" (Mondal 112). In his essay “Outside the Whale” (1984), he interrogates the representations of South Asians in western film, arguing that representations are, in fact, political: “the purpose of such false portraits was to provide moral, cultural, and artistic justification for imperialism and for its underpinning ideology, that of the racial superiority of the Caucasian over the

Asiatic” ( Imaginary 89). He sees it as his responsibility to illuminate and criticize these false representations; “that to do otherwise is to legitimize it” (88). More recently, he took the blockbuster film to task, arguing that this film has replaced the "raj-tourism" movies about India with "slum tourism," giving western audiences just enough violence for it to seem authentic without compromising their expectations

(Rushdie "A Fine Pickle"). Rushdie also criticizes the film director's outsider position, arguing that the praise the director received for directing a project about a place he had never been is an example of "the double standards of post-colonial attitudes." He also appeared on NDTV in 2013 to comment on the aftermath of the trailer for Innocence of

Muslims , a video depicting the Prophet as a “womanizer, a homosexual, and a child abuser” (Kirkpatrick “Anger”). It caused widespread protests around the world, and Rushdie described it as “disgusting” while at the same time defending its right to exist in a free society.

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His novels also reflect a deep interest in the discursive power of representation.

Saleem Sinai of Midnight’s Children , the Moor of The Moor’s Last Sigh , and Rai

Merchant of The Ground Beneath Her Feet are all narrators whose artistic projects are tied to the politics of nationalism, religious extremism, and globalization, respectively.

From exploring the everyday humiliations facing minorities in Thatcherite Britain in The

Satanic Verses to the rhetoric surrounding contemporary terrorism in Shalimar the

Clown , Rushdie’s novels examine how discourses of otherness are shaped by social, economic, and political factors. As Edward Said writes in his 1994 Afterword to

Orientalism , Rushdie’s work succeeds in the “re-appropriation of the historical experience of colonialism, revitalized and transformed into a new aesthetic of sharing and often transcendent re-formulation” (351). Sabrina Hassumani in Salman Rushdie: A

Postmodern Reading of His Works discusses Rushdie’s representations within the context of postmodernism, arguing that his postructuralist strategies effectively address the problematic binaries that can shore up identity-based divisions and damaging stereotypes.

In Salman Rushdie , Catherine Cundy suggests that Rushdie is trying to find a “new kind of cultural representation that is an amalgam of both the Eastern and Western influences that comprise his experience” (13).

However some see Rushdie’s view of his diasporic identity as problematic when it comes to how he represents the East. Vijay Mishra in his article “Diasporic Narratives of Salman Rushdie,” examines Rushdie’s representations of diasporic populations in the context of Rushdie’s insistent defense of artistic expression even if it is considered to be offensive:

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The secular defense of art which presupposes the ‘freedom to question

orthodoxies and hence to give offence’ (Steiner 121), however, sits

uncomfortably with the felt life-worlds of people of the diaspora. Agitated,

unhappy, sometimes traumatized lives…feel uneasy when their worlds are

critically exposed to readers with little sympathy for their plight. What is

this hallowed status of the aesthetic order if its defense makes for even

greater wretchedness within diaspora? The liberal nation-state of course

reads a diaspora’s panic retreat into its own essentialisms as symptoms of

its inherent illiberality, its incapacity to understand the values of a civic

society, indeed its barbarism (231).

In his introduction to Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997 , Rushdie claims that “prose writing—both fiction and non-fiction—created in this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the 16 ‘official languages’ of India” (viii). While some view his comment as an empowering reclamation of English as an Indian language, 4 others like the Bengali and critic see this claim as an echo of Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education” in which Macaulay claims that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and

Arabia” (Narayanan).

In The Archaeology of Knowledge , Foucault writes, “discourse is […] an asset - that consequently, from the moment of its existence (and not only in its 'practical applications'), poses the question of power; an asset that is, by nature, the object of a struggle, a political struggle” (120). Rushdie’s work is arguably as much an exploration

4 See Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice by Suresh Canagarajah. 8 of the power to describe as it is a product of that power. This study examines both how

Rushdie illustrates the relationships between discourses like nationalism and the systems of power that support them and how Rushdie’s privilege informs his own discursive power. In particular I analyze his representations of women, his representations of physical and mental disability, his representations of Muslims and Islam, and his self- representation using social media platforms. I do so in order to examine the relationship between his politics and his methods of representing others and himself to the wider public.

A Note on Structure

In Chapter 1, I explore the intersection between the fields of disability scholarship and postcolonial scholarship through an analysis of Rushdie’s representations of physical and mental abnormality in his novels. Both fields offer ways to rethink how disability is constructed in different contexts. Scholars from both fields have briefly touched on how an intersection of these fields might address some of how disability functions in a postcolonial context. Ato Quayson’s Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of

Representation and Michael Davidson’s work in Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability in an Age of Globalization both address some of the issues of representing disability in postcolonial narratives, including using disability as a metaphor for the experience of colonization and alternatively ignoring some the material conditions of the third world that produce states of disability. For example, Rushdie explores how physical and mental disability is materially tied to and figurative space for the experience of being politically, socially, and culturally marginalized. In his 2015 remarks as a speaker on the Disability

Rights Panel at Emory University, Rushdie acknowledged that his treatment of disability

9 has been problematic. In light of this public realization, I critically address Rushdie’s self-assessment and explore how some of his literary portrayals of disability might provide productive moments of tension and revelation between the fields of disability studies and postcolonial studies. I examine Rushdie’s representations of physical and mental disability in Midnight’s Children , Shame , The Satanic Verses , and The Moor’s

Last Sigh , touching briefly as well on his children’s novel published in 2007 Luka and the

Fire of Life .

In Chapter 2, I examine Rushdie’s self-construction as a feminist against his constructions of gender in Midnight’s Children , Shame , Shalimar the Clown and Two

Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Days . I revisit the existing scholarship on

Rushdie’s treatment of gender in these novels and focus on his constructions of women.

His treatment of gender in Midnight’s Children and Shame extends to the experiences of

South Asian women, but also how “violent masculinity” is associated with nationalism

(Daiya 46). The publication of Shame forced Rushdie to articulate and clarify many of his attitudes about women and specifically women in South Asian communities. Gayatri

Spivak summarizes why Rushdie’s female characters are so problematic:

One of the most interesting features about much of Rushdie's work is his

anxiety to write woman into the narrative of history. Here again we have

to record a failure. In Shame , the women seem powerful only as monsters,

of one sort or another. […] within a gender code that is never opened up,

never questioned, in this book where so much is called into question, so

much is re-inscribed (82-83).

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Others like Justyna Deszcz in “Salman Rushdie’s Attempt at a Feminist Fairytale

Reconfiguration in Shame ” and Ambreen Hai in “Marching in from the Peripheries:

Rushdie’s Feminized Artistry and Ambivalent Feminism” find evidence of Rushdie’s feminism in his early works. I provide an overview of this scholarly debate, noting some of Rushdie’s responses to the criticism he received from postcolonial scholars on his representations of women and feminism more broadly. In this chapter, I analyze how

Rushdie’s female characters mimic and deviate from the orientalist tropes about South

Asian womanhood that historically appear in colonial and postcolonial literature. I also study how his constructions of women and gender change in two of his later works

Shalimar the Clown and Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Days , arguing that even as his representations of strong, dynamic female characters improves, his constructions of feminism often still rely on problematic assertions of western superiority.

Chapter 3 briefly examines Rushdie’s postcolonial project as it is developed in

Midnight’s Children , Shame , and The Satanic Verses before turning to three of his more recent published works, Shalimar the Clown , Enchantress of Florence , and his memoir

Joseph Anton , to examine how his representations of Muslims and Islam have changed since the fatwa. In Culture and Imperialism , Said writes of Midnight’s Children : “The conscious effort to enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories is of particular interest in Rushdie’s work, and in an earlier generation of resistance writing”

(216). Against this framework of Rushdie’s novels serving as “resistance writing” and as critical commentaries on marginalization, hybridity, and racism, I read his post-fatwa

11 representations of Muslims and Islam. Radical Islam, or Islamism as Rushdie terms it, is perhaps the topic about which he comments the most since his experience with the fatwa.

He considers to be a largely erroneous term, and he cautions his audiences against the liberal traps of and religious exemptions (“Manifesto”).

These moves have provoked the question of whether Rushdie’s changing politics have resulted in increasingly stereotypical, orientalist literary depictions of Islam and Muslim communities.5 At the 2013 Rushdie in the 21 st Century Conference, for example, keynote speakers Vijay Mishra and Priyamvada Gopal addressed this question at length.

Addressing the potential disconnect between Rushdie’s reputation as a postcolonial author and his post-fatwa representations of Muslims in Fiction After the

Fatwa: Salman Rushdie and the Charm of Catastrophe , Madelena Gonzalez posits that

Rushdie is “a postmodernist rather than a post colonialist, but the postmodernism he practices is indubitably part of the grand narrative of capitalism still firmly hegemonic in the world,” (17). Gonzalez agrees with Timothy Brennan in Salman Rushdie and the

Third World: Myths of the Nation that Rushdie’s work contains some “patronizing Neo-

Orientalism” thanks largely to his position as a western intellectual elite author. Other scholars like Lisa Lau and Anouar Majid are more critical of Rushdie’s representations, suggesting that they are firmly rooted in the orientalist tradition to the detriment of how eastern culture is perceived in the West. Still others, including Graham Huggan and Ana

Mendes, see Rushdie’s use of orientalist tropes as a strategic move to ultimately usurp the western reader’s expectations. In this chapter, I evaluate his early novels in light of these differing opinions and consider his more recently published work alongside his

5 At the 2013 Rushdie in the 21 st Century Conference, for example, keynote speakers Vijay Mishra and Priyamvada Gopal addressed this question at length. Additionally, see Rachel Trousdale’s “Salman Rushdie and Islamophobia” and “New Directions in Rushdie Studies” by Ana Mendes and Charlie Wesley in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature Special Issue on Salman Rushdie. 12 increasingly critical stance on Islam to assess the possibility that Rushdie’s postcolonial project collapses under the weight of the orientalist binaries that frame his representations of Islam and Muslim communities.

Finally, in Chapter 4, I analyze the politics of Rushdie’s self-representation in recent years through an extensive analysis of his celebrity author persona and his social media engagement. Social media studies is a growing field and relatively unexplored in the field of literary studies; however, as Matthew Kirschenbaum suggests in “What is an

@uthor?” the “threshold of critical responsibility” has shifted in the digital age.

Rushdie’s active use of social media platforms provides literary scholars a unique opportunity to study forms of public, digital writing in connection with an author’s published works. Rushdie has used social media platforms to engage with wider publics and cultivate his public persona unmediated by the press. This social media presence is read along with other recent gestures, such as the opening of his official archive at Emory

University and publishing his memoir Joseph Anton —gestures that suggest his desire to control how he is perceived now and in the future.

For my study I look at his posts on Facebook and Twitter from the day he started using the platforms November 2016. Using qualitative analysis, I track trends in

Rushdie’s social media posts and isolate examples of these trends for close reading. Since there is no model for performing this type of research on an author’s use of social media,

I hope to establish some viable routes for both capturing an immense amount of digital data and for analyzing how social media can offer valuable insights for literary scholarship.

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Chapter 1

Postcolonial Disability in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children , Shame , The

Satanic Verses , and Luka and the Fire of Life

On February 25, 2015, Rushdie on a panel with three disability scholars

Benjamin Reiss, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Eva Kittay at Emory University. The panel began from the position of universal human rights, responding to the 2008 U.N. document on rights for people with disabilities. While the panel debated the autonomy of the self and the role of environment in creating disability, Rushdie mainly participated by discussing the definition of “human” in the context of disability and the literary uses of disability. He posited that, “disability is often used […] to put in sharper relief the dependence we have on others to secure our liberties” (“Disability”) and also addressed the social stigma that disability continues to face in South Asian contexts. Most significantly, he acknowledged his own propensity for exaggerating a specific capacity of a character to make him/her abnormal “in ways that sometimes now feel problematic […] illness isn’t metaphor, it is illness; it’s wrong to use it as a metaphor” (“Disability”). This specific apology seems like a nod to Garland-Thomson’s critique of the narrative prosthesis in literature. However, Garland-Thomson kindly responded to him that disability in literature is a “tremendous narrative resource through which the human condition has been illustrated,” and noted both the “limitations of those representations” and “also the possibilities” (“Disability”). While the concession that literary representations of disability are not always “bad” seems like a placation for Rushdie’s apology, in fact it reflects a shifting attitude toward critiquing all literary depictions of disability as limiting or negative.

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Although problematic in many ways (often sexist, orientalist, and ableist),

Rushdie’s depictions of disability and deviance denote power and triumph despite carrying rather burdensome historical, political, and economic back stories. Moraes

Zogoiby’s hand is lame, but it can pack a super-punch. Sufiya Zinobia is classified and treated as mentally damaged, but she becomes a supernatural being capable of exacting revenge on those who wronged her. Saleem Sinai’s body may be cracking up, but he is telepathic and his overly-large nose has super-sensory capabilities. All of these examples, though they touch on familiar disabilities recognized under the medical model, fall neatly under the umbrella of magical realism and are thus potentially problematic for reading

“disability” as a cultural product in a postcolonial context. However I intend to demonstrate how magical realist depictions of bodily difference can carry the subversive potential desired by disability studies scholars for literary representations of disability.

Magical Realism both nullifies the typical (non-disabled) reader responses to disabled bodies and resists the typical need for explanation, resolution, or obliteration. Rushdie also depicts disability as it relates to the legacies of colonialism, the problematic modern politics of India and , and the continuing impact of neocolonial economic and political systems of power. In The Moor’s Last Sigh , Lambajan is maimed as a result of his struggle against imperial injustice. Shiva’s father in Midnight’s Children tries to break his legs so that he has better earning potential as a slum beggar. Saladin in The Satanic

Verses is transformed into a satyr because of his detention and treatment at the hands of

British border officials. These examples demonstrate how the discourse of disability is shaped by postcolonial and non-western contexts. Because Rushdie’s work is so well- known to both South Asians and western audiences, I also seek to situate his two-pronged

15 approach to writing disability within a larger discussion of various attitudes towards disability in South Asian culture.

Literature Review

Analyzing the disabled characters and deviant bodies in Rushdie’s work also allows for an exploration of the potential intersections of postcolonial studies and disability studies. In recent years scholars from both disciplines have noted the need for such an examination and how the two approaches could help one another address problematic assumptions and rhetoric within the respective fields.6 Postcolonial literature is particularly suited to a disability studies reading because of, among other reasons, the repeated use of the body as allegory for nation. In addition to the use of bodies as metaphor and the emphasis on the experiences of the marginalized in postcolonial texts, the rampant ableist rhetoric used in postcolonial studies makes the project of reexamining the field through this lens both necessary and exciting. At the same time, the analysis of identity formation, the focus on marginalized populations, and the commitment to exploring the diverse specificity of human experience as part of postcolonial studies has significant value for scholars in the disability studies field which, up until recently, lacked a global perspective. 7

6 Historically the two fields have done a disservice to each other. Despite their comparable concerns with how representations can be violent and reductive to those being represented, they have both been guilty of neglecting the unique experience of the disabled postcolonial subject. As Clare Barker and Stuart Murray point out, postcolonial critics often treat “disability as prosthetic metaphor,” adopting ableist rhetoric to describe legacies of colonialism and continued struggle with neocolonialism. At the same time, disability studies "transports theories and methodologies developed within the Western academy to other global locations, paying only nominal attention to local formations and understandings of disability" (219). 7 Barker and Murray also encourage us to complicate the concept of a generic environment designed for a specific type of normal body that can be altered to accommodate disabled communities (a western conception of the problem) which does not “account for environments in which exclusion and inaccessibility are by no means unique to people with disabilities” (232). Furthermore, it is crucial to consider specific places and historical moments where disability is the “norm” whereby “whole” bodies appear as “obscene privilege” (229). 16

In their well-known literature survey “Disabling ,” Clare Barker and Stuart Murray provide a comprehensive list of scholars who have gestured at the problems and possible frameworks for thinking about the intersection of postcolonial studies and disability studies including David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s Cultural

Locations of Disability (2006), Ato Quayson’s Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the

Crisis of Representation (2007), and Tobin Siebers’ Disability Theory (2008). However, both Barker and Murray suggest that none of these authors fully develop a framework that attends to the ontological and material conditions that shape disability experiences in postcolonial texts. They suggest that Robert McRuer’s recent work (“Reflections”) is perhaps the most promising because of his focus on the complex social, political, and environmental factors that contribute to the development of disability. They also suggest that Michael Davidson’s work in Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability in an Age of

Globalization asks the right kinds of questions as well as offering a potential road-map for thinking about disability more globally. 8

The prevailing view of disability’s function in literary discourse is “first, as a stock feature of characterization and, second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device”

(Mitchell, “Narrative” 205). This second function embraces the “materiality of metaphor” which looks to the corporeal body to express abstract concepts. This use of disability as a

“narrative prosthesis” to symbolize a myriad of ideas ignores “disability as an experience of social or political dimensions” (205) as well as the “more complex and banal reality”

8 In “Universal Design: The Work of Disability in an Age of Globalization” Michael Davidson argues that thinking globally about disability forces us to redefine key concepts like stigma, normalcy, and bodily difference “from a cultural perspective” (118). Additionally, looking at disability spatially enables us to unpack the systems of power and material circumstances related to disability: “if we imagine that disability as defined within regimes of pharmaceutical exchange, labor migration, ethnic displacement, epidemiology, genomic research, and trade wars, then the question must be asked differently: does disability exist in a cell, a body, a building, a race, a DNA molecule, a set of residential schools, a special education curriculum, a sweatshop, a rural clinic? The implications of seeing disability spatially force us to rethink the embodied character of impairment and disease" (119). 17 of disabled individuals (213). The resulting fantasies of wholeness within these narrative encounters with disability are also problematic; the use of disability as symbolic elides

“the malleability of bodies and their definitively mutant natures” (212). The main critique is not that narrative depictions of disability have been too “negative,” but rather that we should challenge “the undergirding authorization to interpret that disability invites”

(212).

While this evaluation of the metaphorical purpose of disability is valuable for understanding some of the function of disability in narrative, it does not account for more global disability contexts. As Davidson suggests, “The first world texts that have been the site of most work in disability studies may very well have narrative closure as their telos, but regarded in a more globalized environment, the social meaning of both disability and narrative may have to be expanded" (“Universal” 120). Barker and Murray offer an illustration of what this might look like when they discuss the significance of disability experiences which shape cultural histories. "Disability metaphors may be meaningful not just as ‘crutch[es]’ (Mitchell and Snyder, 49) in the telling of some 'other' tale of postcolonial experience, but as part of foundational cultural and historical disability narratives" (233). One example they give is scars on the bodies of slaves. Furthermore, this critical view does not consider how disability metaphor can be reclaimed and utilized in the service of so-called “disabled” populations. Davidson urges a "consideration of what analogies might signify to the (disabled/postcolonial) community they represent and how they function within a particular literary form and cultural logic, rather than the wholesale dismissal of metaphor as damaging , ableist or stigmatizing" (“Universal”

234). In “Comment from the Field: Reflections on Disability in Haiti” McRuer gives a

18 valuable example of how disability metaphor can be more than just a narrative prosthesis.

He references Naomi Klein who in her book, In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster

Capitalism (2007), uses the metaphor of 20 th century shock treatment for mentally ill patients to describe the experience of neoliberal economic policies; the idea being “a clean slate: a mind wiped clean of illness and disturbance; a region wiped clean of forces that might block the deregulation of industry and trade and the privatization of social services” (McRuer 330). McRuer argues that this use of the shock treatment metaphor is more generative than typical disability metaphors because of the cultural and historical contexts of disability in the places and periods described in Klein’s study and because

“the notion of a ‘shock doctrine’ arguably allows for the imagining of embodied forms of resistance, and of impairment and disability themselves as potential sites for collective resistance” (331).

Within postcolonial studies, few writers have addressed the representation of disability in postcolonial literature except to address its role as a metaphor for nation and/or other marginalized identities. In “Disability as Third Dimension,” Cindy LaCom gestures to a potential theoretical intersection of postcolonial criticism and disability studies when she argues that disabled bodies act as Homi Bhabha’s third dimension – a space where identity is negotiated and the self/other binary breaks down. LaCom posits that disability can serve to “disrupt hegemonic paradigms and revise cultural norms,”

(140), but that most literary texts do not intentionally assign transgressive power to disability. Instead, disability becomes the way to “define normalcy and, by extension nation” (140). LaCom’s disability reading of postcolonial texts critiques hyper-masculine and reductive narratives of nationalism:

19

the colonized are only able to 'become men,' to establish a national identity

in the historical moment of decolonization, through the reification of a

new category of monsters --the disabled, the deformed, the mad. To that

end, disability designates a docile body upon which nationalist tendencies

can be arbitrated and against which a rationalist ideology can pull a

collection of disparate peoples into a self-identified nation' (141).

Where LaCom’s argument becomes problematic is when she suggests that disabled, postcolonial bodies are “doubly other” or “doubly colonized” (138). This assessment ignores both spaces and time periods in which disability is the norm as well as spaces and places where colonial and postcolonial bodies are perceived as inherently deviant or disabled.

Mark Sherry in “(Post)colonising Disability” is also critical of LaCom’s concept of “doubly colonized” subjects in postcolonial literature, and suggests that “more sophisticated approaches” to such questions are needed (16). Despite this critique, Sherry is also invested in the productive intersection of disability studies and postcolonial studies—namely that the disabled/non-disabled divide is just as problematic as the black/white divide because “people often position themselves somewhere in-between or outside these binary categories, and this positioning is fluid and contextually dependent”

(19).

Definition of Terms

Within this study of Rushdie’s work, I examine both the medical and social models of disability to discuss literary representations of disability and their connection to both real impairment and social constructions of disability in postcolonial contexts. I

20 also work with a definition of postcolonial that encompasses cultural products both affected by imperial history and continuing histories of colonial and neocolonial economic, cultural, and political domination. In fact, disability and impairment have long been linked in narratives of postcolonialism. The large majority of disabled people live in developing countries and disability metaphors are regularly employed to describe the condition of third-world populations. 9 This association is rooted in the histories of colonialism wherein the discourses of orientalism were employed to construct colonial natives as physically and mentally deviant. 10

The disabled character critiques colonialism which Quayson argues has been “a major force of disabling the colonized from taking their place in the flow of history other than in a position of stigmatized underprivilege” (“Looking” 228). This is perhaps an accurate description of one way in which disability is used in postcolonial texts, but it also highlights one of the significant criticisms of postcolonial critics by disability scholars and that is Quayson’s use of ableist language to describe the negative legacy of colonialism. Furthermore, as critics like Sherry argue, scholars in both disciplines should seek to move beyond this general interest in disability as a prosthesis in postcolonial texts: “Rather than simply bemoan disability as a symbol of the horrors of imperialism, a far more interesting approach is to unpack the power dynamics which link the two experiences, both in practice and in rhetoric” (Sherry 16). Rushdie is well-known for his use of the disabled body as an allegory for nation, but instead of using it to shore up wholeness and a hyper-masculine nationalism, he uses it to critique colonial legacy,

9 See Davidson Michael’s “Universal Design: The Work of Disability in an Age of Globalization.” The Disability Studies Reader (2006): 117-128 and Mark Sherry’s “(Post)colonising Disability” Wagadu 4(2007): 10-22.

10 Said, Edward. Orientalism . Vintage Books: New York, 1979. 21 traditional nationalism, and neocolonial legacies. In much of Rushdie’s work, he champions bodily deviance, associating it with superhero status. Additionally he often aligns himself as the narrator/storyteller with a disabled character. For example, both

Moraes in The Moor’s Last Sigh and Saleem in Midnight’s Children are writer/artist characters whose bodies fail them, but who prevail in telling their stories despite those failing bodies. Finally, he also explores the historical, political, and economic circumstances that generate disabled bodies and subsequently how they are managed by the ruling elite and or absorbed/covered up by nationalist rhetoric and neocolonial policies.

Midnight’s Children

Midnight’s Children is arguably Rushdie’s most well-known publication and certainly one of the only books written by him to be analyzed for its depictions of physical abnormality. As a foundational text in the study of postcolonial literature and as one of the most famous novels about South Asia in the West, its depictions of colonial and postcolonial disability deserve more critical attention. Beginning with the story of a

Kashmiri family with a western-educated patriarch and traditional Muslim matriarch,

Midnight’s Children explores the promises for and alternate histories of India and

Pakistan throughout their independence and partition. Saleem, as the protagonist, is born at the hour of midnight on the eve of independence and subsequently finds himself tied to the history of his nation. Through the story of his life, the reader experiences the significant moments of Indian and Pakistani history after the partition. As part of his project, which is to critique South Asian post-independence and partition politics,

Rushdie examines the codes of nationalism and history and specifically the systemic

22 exclusion of certain kinds of people and certain kinds of histories from the official narratives of nation.

Until recently, most of the scholarship on Midnight’s Children focuses on

Saleem’s allegorical role in the context of postcolonial nation-building. One exception is

Eliana Avila’s “Neither Sword Nor Pen: Phallacious Impotence in Midnight’s Children” wherein Avila argues that the narrative impotence so often claimed by the narrator serves largely to shore up Saleem’s story as a master narrative which reinforces gender and class norms. Although Avila only briefly alludes to Rushdie’s use of a deformed body as a problematic metaphor, her observations concerning disability in the story pave the way for a complex and nuanced reading of Rushdie’s inclusion (and exclusions) of physical and mental difference. Another exception is “Disability and Postcoloniality in Salman

Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Third-World Novels” by Sanjeev Uprety. Uprety argues, "It is this experience of disability that is literalized in the works of third-world artists, an experience of losing their voice and vision even as they enter the symbolic networks of the global culture and political economy" (381). In the case of Midnight’s

Children , he suggests that Rushdie challenges the imaginary “wholeness” of nationalism with the magically gifted midnight children whose deviance is constructed entirely by a local elite bent on forcing bodies to assimilate to a specific, national standard. In 2014 and in response to the avocation by scholars for an intersection of the two fields described above, Clare Barker published “Interdisciplinary Dialogues: Disability and

Postcolonial Studies.” Barker suggests that Rushdie’s approach to disability in

Midnight’s Children is complex instead of reductive, and she argues for reading practices of disability that “account for the multiple vectors of difference and the diverse cultural

23 contexts of disability that postcolonial writing offers.” Barker’s analysis focuses on examining traditional modes of reading Saleem as an allegory for nation and the problematic use of a disabled body as a metaphor for postcolonial experience as well as how Rushdie crafts a pointed and culturally-specific critique of the exclusion of difference in modern myths of nation. Barker concludes correctly that “[v]arious strands of meaning are present in Rushdie’s engagements with disability – celebratory and oppressive, progressive and recidivist alike – […] This does not mean, however, that it is definitively damaging. Indeed, texts like Midnight’s Children grant disability the opportunity to be as multiple, as complicated, and as contradictory as any other aspect of identity.”

While Rushdie’s depictions of disability and bodily deviance often complicate dominant notions of citizenship and selfhood as part of his larger postcolonial project, he also uses disability regularly as a metaphor, or narrative prosthesis ,11 for colonial and postcolonial experience. Saleem is an allegory for nation and his crumbling, deviant body signifies the fragmentation, potential, and marginalization of the post-independence

Indian nation. The use of allegory to tell the story of nation is not uncommon in postcolonial literature. 12 Lenny Sethi in Cracking India is an example of this trope. Both

Saleem and Lenny are disabled characters whose lives are inextricably linked with the histories of their countries. Lenny’s position as a disabled character is linked to both the legacies of colonialism and the development of postcolonial nationalism:

11 In “Narrative Prosthesis and Materiality of Metaphor,” Mitchell and Snyder define narrative prosthesis as: “first, a deviance or marked difference is exposed to a reader; second, a narrative consolidates the need for its own existence by calling for an explanation of the deviation’s origins and formative consequences; third, the deviance is brought from the periphery of concerns to the center of the story to come; and fourth, the remainder of the story rehabilitates or fixes the deviance in some manner” (209).

12 See Jameson, Frederic. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multi-National Capitalism.” Social Text 15(1986): 65-88. 24

it is Lenny's disabled, minor body that is continually linked to the

fragmenting national body; her birthday falls on the day India is

partitioned, and her disability due to polio (blamed by Dr. Bharucha on the

British who brought polio to India) is a metaphor for the birth of two

nations as disabled by the British partitioning of the subcontinent. Thus,

the child Lenny's minoritized, female, disabled body materially represents

the legacy of British colonialism: disease and a disabled South Asia

(Daiya 78).

Similarly, Saleem is born at midnight on the eve of partition, the product of a departing

British official and an Indian servant, and his subsequent physical deterioration is linked both with the country’s colonial past as well as the postcolonial histories of India and

Pakistan. “Handcuffed” to forces of history, Saleem faces a literal disintegration of his body as a result of a chain of related “disabling” moments including developing bowed legs, losing hearing in one ear, maiming a finger, and castration: “I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug—that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams” (36). While his crumbling body serves to illustrate the disastrous effects of post-partition India and

Pakistan, this representation of disability resists becoming a merely “opportunistic metaphoric device” (Mitchell, 15). Instead, Rushdie’s disabled characters “provide powerful counterpoints to their respective cultures’ normalizing Truths about the construction of deviance in particular, and the fixity of knowledge systems in general”

(Davis 207).

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This is perhaps most evident in Rushdie’s depictions of Saleem’s fellow midnight children, all of whom are born on the eve of India’s independence. Each of the children has an extraordinary gift such as changing sex at will, telepathy, and independent flight.

With the rise of the postcolonial state, these individuals become a threat to the ruling regime. The midnight children and their deviant bodies stand in for the subversive individuals that become the scapegoats of national identity after independence. By representing their condemnation by society and persecution by the state as grounded in their bodily deviance, Rushdie critiques the notion that “the colonized are only able to

‘become men,’ to establish a national identity in the historical moment of decolonization, through the reification of a new category of monsters —the disabled, the deformed, the mad” (LaCom 141). Traditionally, these children would function narratively as visibly deviant monsters, against which the image of the healthy, ideal citizen can be articulated.

Though they are the children of the independence, they would not have a place in its future because their heterogeneity threatens the homogenizing and unifying impulse of nation-building. Mitchell and Snyder suggest that “One cannot narrate the story of a healthy body or national reform movement without the contrastive device of disability to bear out the symbolic potency of the message” (“Narrative” 215). Thus Rushdie’s reliance on the narrative prosthesis is not an unconscious use of disability as metaphor, but rather a productive examination of the “normalizing” impulse for deviant bodies located within national boundaries and identity.

Rushdie’s depictions of disability also attend to the “material analysis of disability in its familial, social, and national contexts” (Barker). For example, Rushdie critiques the reality of India as “a country where any physical or mental peculiarity in a child is a

26 source of deep family shame” (Barker) by illustrating the rejection by his father after

Saleem speaks up about his magical gift. Rushdie also alludes to the connection between poverty and disability that exists within the postcolonial context. 13 India’s beggar slums are notorious in the West for the wide-spread mutilation of children for higher profit. It is estimated that 44,000 children are rounded up by beggar mafias per year (“Child

Beggar”). In Midnight’s Children , Shiva, who is Saleem’s arch-rival and fellow midnight child, is born into a slum community and faces forced mutilation to increase his earning potential as a beggar. However, he stops his father’s attempt to break his legs with a hammer by using his midnight gift—extraordinarily strong knees. Later, he initiates the bulldozing campaign to wipe out the “slums” of Bombay and participates in the capture and forcible vasectomies/oophorectomies of the other midnight children. This incident in the narrative gestures to the forced sterilization of slum inhabitants during the Emergency which was spear-headed by Indira Gandhi. 14 In Shiva’s story, Rushdie depicts the material conditions of disability in postcolonial South Asia and explores how poverty itself is coded as a disability that is endangering the health of nation.

I would venture to argue that Rushdie, in this brief but significant mention of

Shiva’s history, illustrates Rushdie’s optimism about the future potential of the midnight children to change what seems like predetermined fates based on restrictive social, political, and economic factors. Essentially Rushdie pits the deviant bodies and extraordinary gifts of the midnight children against the exclusionary practices of postcolonial (and neocolonial) economics and systemic oppression within a postcolonial

13 See Michael Davidson’s “Universal Design The Work of Disability in an Age of Globalization” and Clare Barker’s “Interdisciplinary Dialogues: Disability and Postcolonial Studies.” 14 Gwatkin, Davidson R. “Political Will and Family Planning: The Implications of India’s Emergency Experience” Population and Development Review 5.1(1979): 29–59. 27 context. This potential, however, is never realized not only because they are thwarted by the regime of Indira Gandhi and the Emergency, but also because they succumb to sectarian divisions. Rushdie expresses the potential of the midnight children in Saleem’s vision for a limitless Utopia in the Midnight Children’s Conference, but also in their ultimate defeat by the Widow:

But what I learned from the Widow’s Hand is that those who would be

gods fear no one so much as other potential deities; and that, that and that

only, is why we, the magical children of midnight, were hated feared

destroyed by the Widow, who was not only Prime Minister of India but

also aspired to be Devi, the Mother-goddess in her most terrible aspect,

possessor of the shakti of the gods, a multi-limbed divinity with a center-

parting and schizophrenic hair. (504)

As “potential deities” the midnight children are positioned as a potential alternative to the corrupt and oppressive rule of Indira Gandhi’s politics. Her defeat of the midnight children suggests that modern Indian politics are trampling the potential of an entire postcolonial generation—a view that Rushdie has also expressed elsewhere. 15

After the forced operations on the midnight children, Saleem returns to being

“nine-fingered, horn-templed, monk’s-tonsured, stain-faced, bow-legged, cucumber- nosed, castrated, and now prematurely aged” (515). Robbed of his ability to procreate,

Saleem’s investment lies in finishing his story and in raising his adopted son. While many scholars have debated about the significance of the story’s ending, Rushdie has

15 See “The of Indira Gandhi” in his essay collection Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. 28 clarified his intention for an optimistic view of the future of India many times. 16 Saleem ends his story by imagining his own life ending: “cracking now, fission of Saleem, I am the bomb of Bombay, watch me explode, bones splitting breaking beneath the awful pressure of the crowd, bag of bones falling down down down…they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust” (533). While its optimism for the future of

Indian politics may be questionable, the ending’s value lies in its refusal for closure. As

Barker states, “The novel ends ambiguously with an image of Saleem’s unruly, protesting body fragmenting and being absorbed into the heterogeneous crowd of India. Rushdie therefore stakes a claim for a national identity that incorporates impairment.” In contrast to some of the postcolonial works under discussion in the scholarship of disability and postcoloniality, Midnight’s Children does not attempt to end its narrative with an imagined sense of wholeness or an imagined body that is not deformed or deviant. As part of Rushdie’s project to uncover the complexities of identity within narratives of nationalism, Saleem’s fragmentation is neither cured nor pitied, but absorbed into the body of the nation.

Shame

In Rushdie’s Shame , disability is designed as both a literal and metaphorical critique of societal norms. Although Shame ’s narrator makes a distinction between the

“real” country of Pakistan and his fictional landscape, it is generally agreed that the novel acts as a postcolonial critique of Pakistan’s history and its general social and political trajectory. Similar to his motivations for Midnight’s Children , Rushdie explores the

16 In “Imaginary Homelands,” Rushdie says of Midnight’s Children “I do not see the book as despairing or nihilistic […] The form— multitudinous, hinting at the infinite possibilities of the country—is the optimistic counterweight to Saleem’s personal tragedy” (16). 29 malaise of postcolonial reality in Shame . “Both India and Pakistan are shown as not having fulfilled the expectations of their founding fathers, Gandhi and Jinnah, respectively” (Goonetilleke, 46). While Sufiya, as the novel’s main deviant character, is often easily reduced to a metaphor for disappointed nationalism or indicative of

Rushdie’s larger issues with misogyny, as a disabled individual she functions on a number of complex levels, productively exploring the intersections of gender and disability in South Asian culture.

Sufiya is the daughter of General Raza Hyder who is thought to stand in loosely for General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, the sixth president of Pakistan and largely considered to be a notorious dictator. Sufiya is born with a sensitivity to feeling shame attributed to her parents’ disappointment in her gender, but she also suffers a brain fever which results in permanent brain damage and an even more intense sensitivity to feeling shame. Faced with the shamelessness of her family, Sufiya enters trances in which she murders animals and people. Eventually Sufiya exacts revenge on her family and explodes, overwhelmed by the intensity of the shame she feels from others. The narrator, who is designed as a reflection of Rushdie himself, offers several explanations of

Sufiya’s transformation into a cognitively disabled person such as the cure for her brain fever: “the unfortunate side-effect of a potion so filled with elements of longevity was to retard the progress of time inside the body" (100) and potentially the “wild blows of exasperation” (123) she receives from her family. This speculation reflects the

“authorization to interpret that disability invites” (Mitchell “Narrative”); however, it also stands as a criticism of the medical and cultural conditions that frame Sufiya as damaged goods.

30

In an interview with John Haffenden, Rushdie reveals his fear and anxiety over the character of Sufiya, describing the uncanny way she “made herself up” (254) as a character and the way she resists meaning: “she did frighten me. I think it’s unusual to be frightened by one’s own creations, but she did make me worried about her. I worried about what she meant. Why is it that the character who is the most innocent in the book is also the most terrible? In the end I thought it would be dangerous to go asking that sort of question – since that unresolved ambiguity was obviously at the center of her, and it is what makes her moving” (255). Rushdie attributes her designation as a mentally

“retarded” character to her willfulness as a character. However he contradicts himself when he acknowledges his complicity in crafting her: “Somebody who behaved like an ordinary person could not carry the kind of metaphorical weight that I wanted the character to have!” (109). Indeed both the interviewer and Rushdie explore the way

Sufiya is “both alarmingly real and a metaphorical agent” (254). Furthermore, Rushdie posits that this representation is less fantastic and more of an “intensified [image] of reality” (246). Thus Sufiya is meant as both a representation of real mental disability and a metaphor for the shame/honor culture which Rushdie critiques.

As an “intensified” version of reality, Sufiya’s experiences reflect, in Rushdie’s view, the predominant attitude towards disability in South Asia, namely that it is intensely shameful. In particular, he explores the prevailing cultural belief that it is the fault of the mother. Sufiya’s mother declares her daughter’s condition as “‘a judgment’”

(100) for her marital infidelity. Even at the level of the narrative, Rushdie forges this association when the narrator speculates that Sufiya may have inherited her condition from her mother who is a “frenzied woman.” This also reflects Rushdie’s interest in

31 critiquing the gender dynamics of South Asian culture. In the relationship between Omar

Khayyam and Sufiya, she is initially just an interesting medical case, and he capitalizes on her condition by publishing The Case of Miss H. which “becomes famous in medical circles [and] doctor and patient are forever linked in the history of science" (147). He then falls in love with her and asks for her hand in marriage despite the fact that she has the mind of a seven-year-old. Rushdie’s narrator accuses Omar of marrying her simply because marrying a mentally disabled girl was the only way he would be able to marry a pretty wife. More broadly this reflects a k problematic power dynamic that individuals with cognitive disabilities, especially women, endure. Her mother is all too eager to hand her off to the willing suitor despite her husband’s objections, claiming: "'In a woman's body […] the child is nowhere to be seen. A woman does not have to be a brainbox. In many opinions brains are a positive disadvantage to a woman in marriage'" (168) Here,

Rushdie hints at how women are infantilized and often characterized as disabled by society because of their gender. He would argue that this is especially the case in a country like Pakistan which he depicts as uniquely anti-female in its politics and culture.

Rushdie further explores this wider critique of society when he makes the family’s shameful behavior the catalyst for Sufiya’s episodes, suggesting the

“problem” is not in the girl herself, but in the family, community, and nation instead.

For the narrator, Sufiya is a composite character derived from two young women in particular: a London girl murdered by her father for supposedly sleeping with a white boy and an Asian girl who was beaten to death by a group of white boys in a London subway. Rushdie comments on these incidences with, “Humiliate people for long enough and a wildness bursts out of them” (119). He asks us to imagine a world in which these

32 women had the power to harness that and seek revenge. Sufiya is just such a woman whose most defeating experience, shame, is transformed into hypnotic power and super- strength. Thus she embodies an avenging angel fantasy designed to both punish a society that imposes shame while behaving shamelessly and to empower those who normally lack recourse within an honor/shame society. But why make Sufiya mentally disabled?

Rushdie’s narrator asks himself that question as well causing the narrative to self- reflexively explore the function of disability in a story. He explains his decision:

I did it to her, I think, to make her pure. Couldn't think of another way of

creating purity in what is supposed to be the Land of the Pure…and idiots

are, by definition, innocent. Too romantic a use to make of mental

disability? Perhaps; but it's too late for such doubts. Sufiya Zinobia has

grown, her mind more slowly than her body, and owing to this slowness

she remains, for me, somehow clean (pak ) in the midst of a dirty world

(123).

Here Rushdie’s narrator acknowledges the problematic use to which mental disability is put in the narrative and yet he proceeds to use her through juxtaposition as a critique of a hypothetical version of Pakistan. Given the source material of Sufiya’s character (the two murdered young women in London), it is also possible that Rushdie seeks to strip Sufiya of any implication that she is somehow complicit in her abuse as women often are.

Instead she is merely a “sponge, a host of unfelt feelings” (124). Attached to this is also a slight implication that it is somehow mystical or supernatural: “Yes. Idiots can feel such things, that’s all” (125).

33

In this manner, Rushdie perpetuates the stereotype of the mentally disabled as innocent, mystical beings whose impairments are often paired with supernatural gifts

(often as a result of being specially connected to a deity). However, in Sufiya’s case, from her birth she is “preternaturally receptive” (124) to shame which is wholly unconnected from her cognitive disability which arrives later in the text. Instead her impairment enables her to act on the feelings of shame – to exact revenge on a shameless society by hypnotizing sentient beings and ripping off their heads with her bare hands. It is not an accident that Rushdie associates her with the Hindu goddess Kali who is depicted as dark-skinned, emaciated, having fang-like teeth, and wearing a necklace of human heads acquired from decapitating (or effectively castrating) her victims (121).

Similarly, Sufiya is described as “on all fours, naked, coated in mud and blood and shit, with twigs sticking to her back and beetles in her hair” ( Shame 304) after having ravished much of the country and adopting an animal-likeness that is nearly impenetrable.

Eventually Sufiya explodes because shame “cannot be held for long within any one frame of flesh and blood, because it grows, it feeds and swells, until the vessel bursts” (305).

This imagery is similar to that of Kali, who is also depicted as ravaging the country in a grotesque, naked form. This association is normally interpreted as misogynistic, invoking a general fear of the feminine and in particular the sexuality of women. 17 This parallel to the goddess Kali is also a larger metaphor for the postcolonial critique of Pakistan’s future: “According to ancient Indian theories regarding the duration of the universe, the

17 According to Aijaz Ahmad, Sufiya’s turkey decapitation has a “certain orgiastic relish” (1468) and her sexual “frustration and anger” (1468) drive her to seduce and kill the boys. The “enormity of her sexual appetite as well as her malevolence” is a result of her mental retardation (1468). Ahmad summarizes this link as “the oldest of the misogynist myths: the virgin who is really a vampire, the irresistible temptress who seduces men in order to kill them, not an object of male manipulation but a devourer of hapless men” (1468). For Ahmad, Sufiya does not seem like an object of manipulation because by the time she kills her husband, she is so transformed that the reader cannot find sympathy for her (1468). Lotta Strandberg uses the Sufiya-Kali parallel to suggest that while they may have a “form of agency” (150), they are, for the most part, “subjected to the demands and wishes of others or the necessity of the situation” (150). This is part of a feminist reading of the text, which Grewal seconds: “Sufiya’s position is…imposed upon her and not open to her choosing” (35). 34 present age is Kali-yug, the fourth and last cycle, the age of moral degradation, which will end in universal dissolution” (Goonetillke 66).

Rushdie demonstrates Sufiya’s power when he describes her as “one of those supernatural beings, those exterminating or avenging angels, or werewolves, or vampires, about whom we are happy to read in stories," (207) the implication being that in reality we would be terrified by such a creature. However, Rushdie, again, displaces the origin of deviance from the deviant subject to the surrounding environment when he describes the basis for that terror: "This was the danger of Sufiya Zinobia: that she came to pass, not in any wilderness of basilisks and fiends, but in the heart of the respectable world

[…] namely the impossible verity that barbarism could grow in cultured soil, that savagery could lie concealed beneath decency's well-pressed shirt" (210). Ultimately,

Sufiya’s monstrosity is a product of her environment—an oppressive society that denigrates bodily deviance and problematically straddles the concepts of shame and shamelessness.

Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses was published in 1988 with considerable anticipation after the remarkable success of both Midnight’s Children and Shame . After the Iranian Ayatollah

Khomeini issued a fatwa for its publication, the book faced a myriad of criticism and support from around the world. 18 The novel is a transnational tale comprised of three different stories woven together: Gibreel and Saladin’s lives, the origin story of Islam, and Ayesha’s quest with the villagers to . The narrative spans from 7 th century

Arabia to 1980s London where the main drama takes place. Rushdie writes: “If The

18 See Paul Weller’s A Mirror for Our Times: “The Rushdie Affair” and the Future of Multiculturalism . Continuum: New York, 2009 for a complete history of the Rushdie Affair. 35

Satanic Verses is anything, it is a migrant’s-eye view of the world. It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis…that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity”

(Imaginary 394). Ultimately, Rushdie’s aim is to write about the transformative power of hate and love and the experience of longing for and returning home.

Throughout the novel, disability and bodily deviance are not only present, but significant in shaping the trajectory of the story. Gibreel, for example, becomes a paranoid schizophrenic after a mysterious illness and loss of his faith, and he eventually takes his own life. His schizophrenia enables his desire to remain an “untranslated man” 19

(Rushdie 467) and, in contrast to Saladin, to change London to suit him instead of assimilating. It also enables the telling of the two other tales which are both framed as projections of Gibreel’s mind. In this way Gibreel’s mental illness is more of a plot device and, like the female suicides and filicides that also take place in relationship to

Gibreel, it is elided as a legitimate signifier with material conditions. Rushdie’s use of disability in this book is often uncritical and problematic; however, Rushdie’s overarching theme in The Satanic Verses is transformation. In the beginning the narrator poses the question “How does newness come into the world?” (8), and both the dream narrative and the “real” story explore the frustrating and problematic processes of change and deviance from societal expectations.

The only scholar who thoroughly addresses disability in The Satanic Verses is SK

Uprety in his article “Disability and Postcoloniality in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s

Children and Third-World Novels” which appeared in the first edition of the Disability

Studies Reader (1997). Curiously, Uprety’s major positions on the function of disability

19 Goonetilleke 86-87 36 in the text largely serve to reinforce the pattern of postcolonial critics who use disability as a metaphor for colonial experience. Citing the position of the author as a third-world

“colonial ‘writing’ in a hybrid space” (376), Uprety equates hybridity with disability:

"[s]ymbolically fathered by many traditions, a third-world subject has to enter multiple symbolic orders; and though each entry brings with it additional benefits, it also affirms his/her lack more acutely, leading to a sense of disability, to a sense of having been deformed or deviant" (372). Rushdie, however, views hybridity as an asset to perception instead of a lack. 20 Additionally, Uprety claims that postcolonial texts “attempt to overcome the experience of deformity by seeking a 'normal' body in the realm of traditional religion, mythology, folklore, dreams, and unconscious” (377). Ignoring the problematic use of disability as metaphor here, this assertion is hardly adequate to describe Rushdie’s use of the dream sequences, religion, or nationalism with The Satanic

Verses . Although Saladin’s story ends with “reconciliation with father and nationality”

(Spivak 83), the sense of wholeness emerges less out of a reestablishment of political and familial norms, and more out of a reconciliation with his hybrid identity and transformed body.

The novel centers on two major characters, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel, who are taken hostage in a plane hijacked by terrorists and subsequently dropped from the exploding plane onto the shores of Britain where they survive and experience bodily transformations. Both Chamcha and Saladin’s bodily deviance is narratively connected to the socio-political reality of the 20 th century. It is the “air-space […] the place of movement and of war, the planet-shrinker and power-vacuum, most insecure and

20 In his essay “Imaginary Homelands,” Rushdie writes that culturally hybrid individuals can offer a “double perspective” in the place of “‘whole sight’” (19) and that even though something is lost in translation, he clings, “obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained” (17). 37 transitory of zones, illusory, discontinuous, metamorphic” (5-6) which transforms them, suggesting a tangible connection between the ontological and material conditions of the globe and the production of disabled bodies. Throughout the novel, Rushdie depicts the experience of rejection and alienation that bodily difference incurs. His purpose is primarily to focus on racial and ethnic difference. In the context of the racial tension of

1980s Britain 21 , certain bodies are not allowed to be full citizens because they deviate from the norm and are thus treated as sub-humans. As a result of their treatment at the hands of the government, their deviant bodies become excessively, magically deviant as they transform into hybrid animal-humans. Rushdie suggests that their deformity is not inherent or even objectively “real,” but a result of the power the British state has to describe marginalized people: “they have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct" (175). Saladin and Gibreel’s entry into this space is designed to expose the absurdity of this system for determining personhood. Gibreel is the true

“undocumented immigrant;” however it is Saladin who is imprisoned for being brown and without identification on British soil. Saladin, who for most of his adult life has been attempting to assimilate completely with British norms in an attempt to disassociate himself from his father and his Indian culture, is stripped of his identity and castigated for his bodily deviance.

Even before his incarceration, Saladin is marked in the text as somewhat physically suspect because he carries a chromosomal defect which prevents him from having children: “there was something the matter with some of his own chromosomes, two sticks too long, or too short, he couldn't remember. His genetic inheritance;

21 See Paul Weller’s A Mirror for Our Times: “The Rushdie Affair” and the Future of Multiculturalism . Continuum: New York, 2009 for an in-depth history of the racial tensions in 1980s Britain and specifically those incidences that Rushdie references in his work. 38 apparently he was lucky to exist, lucky not to be some sort of deformed freak" (51).

While this negative language resonates as stereotypical for depictions of disability, it is ultimately framed by a man who has refused to embrace his full identity and to acknowledge the malleable nature of identity and bodies. This chromosomal defect also serves as a reference to Rushdie himself who has discussed and written about his own chromosomal defect and its potential risk to his offspring ( Joseph Anton 481). In this way, Rushdie aligns the reader with Saladin as the most ostracized and deviant character, suggesting a positive association with his physical deviance.

In an attempt to explain the transformation of the main characters, Rushdie’s narrator references Mr. Lamarck whose theory of Acquired Characteristics posits the potential to inherit adaptive traits from a parent. Mr. Lamarck invokes Darwin to support a potential theory of “notion of mutation in extremis, to ensure survival of species" (259).

By the South Asian community, however, Saladin’s deformity is not taken as proof of a natural phenomenon or as evidence of the supernatural; rather it is proof that he is excluded from definitions of British citizenship: "his metamorphosis into this supernatural imp - was being treated by the others as if it were the most banal and familiar matter they could imagine.’ This isn't England,' he thought, not for the first or last time" (163).

In the fifth part of the novel, significantly titled “A City Visible But Unseen,”

Rushdie explores the reactions of the South Asian community to Saladin’s transformation. Unlike the British policemen, they see his physical deformity not inherent to him as a racially-other individual, but forced upon him by the systemic abuses of the nation. After Saladin’s escape from the government ward, he ends up by the family and

39 tenets of Mr. Muhammad Sufyan, all of whom agree with the patriarch when he aligns

Saladin’s physical difference with the practices of the British state and its abuses toward their community: “‘What has happened here? A: Wrongful arrest, intimidation, violence.

Two: Illegal detention, unknown medical experimentation in hospital,’ - murmurs of assent here, as memories of intra-vaginal inspections, Depo-Provera scandals, unauthorized post-partum sterilizations, and, further back, the knowledge of Third World drug-dumping arose in every person present" (261). Their acceptance of Saladin’s mutations relies less on magical realism, and more on their intimate knowledge of abuse from western, imperial policies, and they suggest that the “cure” is to be among his own people (261). While this seems to suggest a stereotypical view of “curing” deviance through the reinforcement of community-generated norms, Saladin’s fraught relationship with his racially and culturally-other identity complicates this perception. At the same time, Saladin’s condition is absolutely associated with physical and cognitive disability.

For example, the matriarch compares his transformed body with “some kind of Elephant

Man illness, a thing to feel disgusted by, not necessarily to fear” (284). Additionally, even a gesture of welcome and inclusion is overwritten with problematic cognitive disability references: “‘Best place for you is here,’ he said, speaking as if to a simpleton or small child. ‘Where else would you go to heal your disfigurements and recover your normal health? Where else but here, with us, among your own people, your own kind?’"

(261)

At one point, Saladin’s devil-goat appearance is co-opted by the black community during the racial tension of 1980s Britain. Mr. Sufyan’s daughter tells Saladin, “‘you're a hero. I mean, people can really identify with you. It's an image white society has rejected

40 for so long that we can really take it, you know, occupy it, inhabit it, reclaim it and make it our own’" (296). In this example, Rushdie explores the way in which deviance can be symbolic of resistance, but also how it can be manipulated by society in the service of other causes. In this incident is reflected the experience of disability used as both rallying cry for progress and a specter to decry the abuses facing a disadvantaged population.

Near the end of the novel, Saladin is restored to his human form (although changed for the long-term), and he contemplates this transformation and change in himself and Gibreel as he watches television: "the box was full of freaks: there were mutants […] misshapen human by-products of the newest notions in modern medicine, and its accomplices, modern disease and war" including cyborgs, humanoid robots, metamorphic bodies, lycanthropy, and sex-change operations (419) and suggesting an age in which abnormality is the new norm. While Saladin views this as problematic and even repulsive, this rejection is framed as self-hatred by a man who has refused to embrace his past. His initial reaction is to castigate the freaks he sees on the television, lumping together cyborgs and transgendered individuals with problematic language because he does not want to associate what happened to him with what he sees. He is, again, attempting to rigidly control his identity, excluding essential experiences and identifications that threaten his views of wholeness (Englishness, whiteness, etc.).

Absorbing the popular culture of the 20 th century after experiencing his own hybridization and transformation challenges Saladin’s conception of the normate: "The effect of all this box-watching was to put a severe dent in what remained of his idea of the normal, average quality of the real; but there were also countervailing forces at work" (420). Eventually Saladin disassociates physical deviance from the term

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“monstrous” and comes to embrace the experience he went through with Gibreel: "What he was rejecting was a portrait of himself and Gibreel as monstrous. Monstrous indeed: the most absurd of ideas. There were real monsters in the world - mass-murdering dictators, child rapists" (422).

The Moor’s Last Sigh

In The Moor’s Last Sigh , Rushdie both explores disability as a legacy of colonialism and interrogates the cultural model of disability which is supported by modern Indian political and social mores. While his larger project is to critique the failed potential of the Indian state and what he perceives to be the increasing concentration of fundamentalism and extremist politics, he effectively illustrates the colonial and postcolonial factors involved in the creation, maintenance, and exclusion of disabled bodies. Beginning with a reference to the end of Arab-Islamic dominance of the Iberian

Peninsula, the story spans hundreds of years to arrive at the consequences of post- partition politics in South Asia and the failed promises of independence. The narrative focuses on a specific family with ties to Moorish and the expulsion of the Jews and which embodies what Rushdie sees as the complicity of commerce and corruption.

Entering into this world is the story’s main protagonist, Moraes or Moor, whose rapid aging disorder acts as a metaphor for the rapid changes (and potentially pessimistic future) of modern India (Goonetilleke 135).

In The Moor’s Last Sigh , the first narrative encounter with disability outside the frame of magical realism is the house guard Lambajan who has one wooden leg and whose story about how a former white elephant king ate his missing leg the narrator explains away with the true story of the house guard's disability. Integral to the

42 presentation of Lambajan as a disabled character is the politics of class and colonial history. The loss of Lambajan's legs occurs against the backdrop of the Royal Indian

Navy strike of 1946 in which 45 warships and 10,000 men went on strike to protest racial discrimination, unequal pay, and pension difference within the British Navy. In a traditional reading of the following passage, it appears as though Rushdie is using disability as a narrative prosthesis in order to critique the colonial discrimination and subsequent political landscape of South Asia:

The first point to note is that people's limbs got detached more easily in

those days. The banners of British domination hung over the country like

strips of flypaper, and, in trying to unstick ourselves from those fatal flags,

we flies -- if I may use the term 'we' to refer to a time before my birth --

would often leave legs or wings behind, preferring freedom to wholeness.

Of course, now that the sticky paper is ancient history, we find ways of

losing our limbs in the struggle against other equally lethal, equally

antiquated, equally adhesive standards of our own devising ( The Moor’s

Last Sigh 129).

In this description, Rushdie specifies that a condition of freedom is fragmentation - a familiar trope in narratives of partition. 22 Although this certainly acts a metaphor for the postcolonial condition, Rushdie here invokes a necessary, and often hidden, history of colonial India in which disability, as a direct result of colonial rule, was a lived reality for many colonized individuals. I suggest that although this fragmentation is indicative of prosthesis for the larger condition of postcolonial history, it is also doing the work to

22 For example, in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children . 43 depict the reality of disability under colonial rule and the place of the disabled within very real class and caste strictures.

For example, in telling us Lambajan’s story, Rushdie highlights the limited options for a disabled body in colonial India as well as implicates class difference as both a culprit contributing to the creation of disabled bodies and in attempting to “fix” them.

Lambajan is a sailor in protest of the British Navy when he loses his legs. The protagonist's mother, Aurora, treks into the strike zones around the city so that she can exercise her socialist sensibilities and draw "clearly subversive, clearly pro-strike" (131) sketches. Despite this sympathy with the aims of the strikers, Aurora descends on them in her "car that was as big as a house and even had curtains over its windows," (130) an upper-class spectator both inside as a colonial subject and outside as a "rich bitch in a fancy car" (133). When the crowd becomes so congested that she cannot drive, she panics and accidentally drives over Lambajan's legs four times. In describing Aurora's handling of the situation, Rushdie gestures to two fates for the disabled in Bombay: a quaint caricature in the service of the upper-class or a street beggar: "She brought him home and changed his life. She had diminished him, subtracting a leg and therefore his future in the navy; and now she sought fiercely to enlarge him again, providing him with a new uniform, a new job, a new leg, a new identity and a grumpy parrot to go with it all. She had ruined his life, but she saved him from the worst, gutter-dwelling, begging-bowl consequences of that ruination" (135). The act of “enlarging” him, in fact, is little more than an attempt to shape Lambajan’s disability into something more palatable by turning the wooden-legged man into a proper pirate, nicknaming him Long John Silverfellow and buying him a parrot for his shoulder.

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Rushdie gestures significantly to the social model of disability in describing the life of the protagonist, Moor. He is born with a number of peculiar abnormalities including rapid aging, a deformed hand, and his extraordinary height. Upon his birth, his abnormalities are described uncomplicatedly as negative. His rapid aging "permits only half a life" (145). His hand is "welded into an undifferentiated chunk, the thumb a stunted wart" (146). His height is only conspicuous because he lives "in a country where the average male rarely grows above five foot five" (162). Moor describes the difficulty of

"feeling […] ugly, malformed, wrong" (162) and how his deformed hand is made worse by the fact that he had to use his left hand despite being "naturally right-handed" (162).

His mother's initial rejection of his deformed visage is smoothed over by the declaration that even masterpieces can have a "smudge" and his "messed-up mit, this lump as misshapen as modern art itself, became no more than a slip of the genius's brush" (147).

Implicated in this description is the mother's responsibility for any abnormalities in offspring. However even this reframed view of her son's deformity and her attempt to remedy her initial revulsion by breast-feeding him herself (a privilege denied her daughters), Aurora remains far from accepting of her son's conditions. Moor's abnormalities "were subjected to repeated scrutiny" at the Breach Candy Hospital—a cheerful name for what is, for Moor, "a benevolent torture chamber, a zone of infernal torments run by well-meaning demons who mortified me" (162). Although Moor forgives his medical team and his mother who instigated the treatments, his bitterness about the experience of attempted "correction" (162) is still clear. When the hospital staff fail to fix him, they turn to “Ayurvedic specialists, Tibia College professors, faith-healers, saints”

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(162) despite his family's general disgust for these belief systems, the need to "fix" Moor apparently outweighing their other prejudices.

Moor's abnormalities are set against a narrative of superheroes. His nursery is painted with superhero characters like Batman and Superman, giving him knowledge of their strangeness and "how profoundly a super-hero could yearn for normality" (152).

Although he rejects the notion that he is any kind of superhero, he does identify with them: "I never thought of myself as a super-hero, don't get me wrong; but with my hand like a club and my personal calendar losing pages at super-speed I was exceptional all right, and had no desire to be" (152). Disability’s connection to superhero narratives has only recently been explored by scholars perhaps because of a resurgence of interest in these narratives within popular culture. 23 Supercrip refers to the inspirational disabled body that has “overcome” its disability, exceeding the “compulsory able bodiedness” that

McRuer describes (“Compulsory”). The supercrip can also refer to a disability that gives way to or generates a super-ability of some kind like Daredevil’s super-hearing as a result of his blindness. Both of these depictions can be problematic for the assumptions they convey about the lived experiences of disability and their reliance on normative standards of ability. In “Have you tried not being a Mutant?: Genetic Mutation and the acquisition of Extra-ordinary Ability,” Martin Mantel explores the connection between comic superheroes and anxiety about genetic mutation. In Mantel’s view, the extraordinary abilities of the superheroes reflect cultural concerns with deviation from bodily norms:

“In these films, deviation becomes deviance.” Mantel suggests that to frame super- abilities as deviations, “they rely on disability scripts as the language of deviation.”

23 See Alaniz José’s Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond . Jackson: Mississippi UP, 2014, Susan Squier’s “So Long as they Grow Out of It: The Discourse of Developmental Normalcy, and Disability.” Journal of Medical Humanities 29.2(2008): 71-88, and Zach Whalen’s Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives . Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2016. 46

Similarly, Rushdie locates deviance in the body which is largely characterized as the enemy of progress:

In Bombay, my old hovel'n'highrise home town, we think we're on top of

the modern age, we boast that we're natural techno fast-trackers, but that's

only true in the high-rises of our minds. Down in the slums of our bodies,

we're still vulnerable to the most disorderly disorders, the scurviest of

scurvies, the plaguiest of plagues. There may be pet pussies prowling

around our squeaky-clean, sky-high penthouses, but they don't cancel out

the rat-infested corruption in the sewers of the blood (145).

The body is a slum and the blood is a sewer because they are vulnerable to contamination, but also to random acts of biology that defy modernity and privilege.

Rushdie's protagonist does not serve the same allegorical purpose as Saleem in

Midnight's Children and nor do his abnormalities spring from magical realism, as Moor, himself, attests: "No need for supernatural explanations; some cock-up in the DNA will do. Some premature-ageing disorder in the cells" (145).

Eventually Moor’s super-strength enables him to defy his family and become a strongman in a Bombay street gang led by Raman Fielding, nicknamed Mainduck, who is based on Bal Thackery, founder of Shiv Sena, a right-wing Marathi party. 24 Using his fist as a “hammer” enables Moor to finally be proud of his deformed hand: “I could enter, at long last, into myself - my true self, whose secret was contained in that deformed limb which I had thrust for too long into the depths of my clothing. No more! Now I would brandish it with pride. Henceforth I would be my fist; would be a Hammer, not a Moor"

(295) Far from suggesting that the only home for deformity in modern Bombay is street

24 Rushdie’s sentiments on Shiv Sena – not good 47 gangs employed by extremist politicians, Rushdie uses this association to highlight multiple issues of inclusion and exclusion. Rachel Trousdale in “‘City of Mongrel Joy’:

Bombay and the Shiv Sena in Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh” argues that The Moor’s Last Sigh is ultimately a critique of the partial application of pluralism in post-partition India. Rushdie’s ideal is “a productive, inclusive cosmopolitanism;” however the “partial solutions” of intellectuals and politicians “only make the problem of inequality worse, destroying what they were designed to preserve” (95).

Conclusion

It is perhaps no coincidence that after joining the faculty at Emory University in

2007, Rushdie published Luka and the Fire of Life which arguably includes his most thoughtful, if brief, narrative exploration of disability. The young hero of this children’s book is left-handed and laments being “unusual” in a right-handed world. He is also cautioned to avoid “The Left-Hand Path” which leads to dark magic (12). Unlike some of

Rushdie’s “deviant” characters, his left-handedness does not transform into an extraordinary gift of some kind. However, Luka does come to embrace his left- handedness, and this acceptance is exactly the self-awareness he needs to ascend the

Mountain of Knowledge and retrieve the Fire of Life so he can save his father. What is remarkable about Rushdie’s discussion of handedness is his examination of the context which makes left-handedness either “normal” or “unusual.” Although his treatment of

Luka’s handedness is brief, in many ways it showcases Rushdie’s evolution in writing disability into his narratives.

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While Rushdie chastises himself for his narrative use of disability in the past, his actual exploration of the same is complex as well as problematic. He does utilize disability as an allegory and narrative prosthesis, and yet he also includes it to critique the political and material conditions that generate disability in postcolonial contexts. In some cases his attempt to empower a traditionally disabled character as a supercrip is unthinking and simplistic, and in other cases his use of magical realism disrupts traditional readings of disabled characters. In many cases, Rushdie includes disability to critique what he believes are antiquated and damaging attitudes toward class, gender, and race that persist in South-Asian and western culture. While Luka stands out as his most self-aware and balanced representation of disability, his general treatment of the discourse is aligned, for better or for worse, with his determined pursuit of the marginalized and their experience within the broader social, political, and cultural networks that shape our world.

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Chapter 2.

Demanding Inclusion: Rushdie’s Literary Representations of Women in Midnight’s

Children , Shame , Shalimar the Clown , and Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-

Eight Nights

In 2015, when asked if he is a feminist, Rushdie replied,

Yes. What else is there to be? Everything else is being an asshole. These

are your choices. I have three sisters, and no brothers. In my family it is all

women, and they are very strong, opinionated, professional women, and

the idea that they would be in some way disadvantaged by comparison to

men was just ludicrous, and if you had tried to suggest it to them you’d

have got hit. So I learned it early (“15 Famous”).

Over the course of his career, Rushdie has consistently articulated his support of women’s rights and his admiration of their strength, citing his own mother and sisters as foundational models. 25 While Rushdie has much to say about the many women with whom he has had personal and professional relationships, one passage from his memoir

Joseph Anton addresses how Rushdie’s representations of women’s experiences have resonated for writers and readers alike: Assia Djebar, in a letter published in 1994 to support Rushdie during his years in hiding from the fatwa, wrote, “ He is the first man to have lived in the condition of a Muslim woman (and…he is also the first man to be able to write from the standpoint of a Muslim woman) ” (Rushdie, Joseph 410). Extending this assertion, other critics have praised different dimensions of Rushdie’s work that

25 He cites this in many interviews, but see Chandrima Pall’s interview “My Family is Full of Terrifying Women: Salman Rushdie” in of India as an example. 50 challenges dominant discourses of gender and sexuality in South Asia. For instance,

Samir Dayal suggests that Rushdie’s repeated feminization and emasculation of his male characters and the masculinization of his female characters disrupt gender binaries, threatening masculine codes and asking subcontinental men to “reconsider their notions of masculinity and the implied trappings of power and therefore violence” (46). Keith

Booker agrees, noting that his work on gender is largely informed by western liberalism:

“Still, despite his questioning of the stable, unified subject and despite a somewhat modern (though not radical, by feminist standards) sensitivity to gender issues, his basic political vision seems to be informed by a remarkably traditional liberal humanism”

(994). Booker also touches on how Rushdie’s feminist project is realized mainly in his critique of the oppression women face in Islamic societies. Dayal and Booker are joined by other critics in praising Rushdie’s explorations, in both his fiction and in his activism, to address the lived experience of women in postcolonial nations and nonwestern cultures. In spite of this support for Rushdie’s feminist claims, this chapter strives to answer several lingering questions both about Rushdie’s claims regarding feminism and his reception among scholars for the same. How can we critically consider Rushdie’s work and Rushdie himself feminist? How do his own claims to value and include

“progressive, liberated” female characters as agentive subjects in the postcolonial nation stand up to a close reading of his works? What are the limits of Rushdie’s feminism and treatment of gender?

While scholars like Dayal and Booker are careful to highlight evidence of

Rushdie’s self-described feminism in his works, other critics challenge this assertion, noting that Rushdie’s representations of gender are often informed by problematic binary

51 divisions and sexist stereotypes. For instance, Harveen Mann argues that we need to question Rushdie’s preoccupation with oppressed Muslim women as problematic:

In writing against the orthodox Islamic concern with female chastity,

Rushdie goes too far in the opposite direction, casting his female

characters as eroticized bodies…[He] has come uncomfortably close to

replicating the Orientalist stereotypes of Eastern women as erotic,

tempting appendages to male existence, and perhaps even more

regrettably, to reinforcing Western notions of gender inequality as a mark

of Islamic cultural inferiority (296-297).

Mann’s argument touches on several objections to Rushdie’s treatment of women in his novels, including their constructions as flat, foil characters, their frequent characterization as hyper-sexual, and his reliance on binary divisions between eastern and western ideas of feminism. Mann is not the only scholar who sees Rushdie’s attempts to criticize what he claims is an anti-feminist culture/religion (he arguably conflates these as I will discuss further in Chapter 3). Following the publication of Shame , Rushdie received some harsh criticism of his treatment of women in his novels. 26 Both Inderpal Grewal and Aijaz

Ahmad argue that Rushdie’s representation of women in Shame is reductive and problematic, relying on sexist, orientalist stereotypes to ostensibly represent the burden of shame that women feel in eastern culture: “it’s is linked up, further, in a most disagreeable manner, with imperialist and misogynistic myths: the image of freedom- fighter as idiot-terrorist; the image of a free—or freedom—seeking—woman as vampire, amazon, man-eating shrew” (Ahmad 1468). For Grewal, "Rushdie's novel thus

26 See Aijaz Ahmad’s “Salman Rushdie’s Shame: Postmodern Migrancy and the Representation of Women,” Inderpal Grewal’s “Salman Rushdie: Marginality, Women, and Shame,” and Gayatri Spivak’s “Reading The Satanic Verses.” 52 reinscribes the patriarchal role of [Pakistani] women as passive, ineffectual, or mediators of male power," noting that Rushdie problematically blames the oppression of eastern women on “tradition” and their own “passivity” (30).

Much scholarship in the fields of feminist and postcolonial studies has elaborated the complex position of women in the postcolonial nation-state. For instance, Robert

Young 27 has pointed out how, after the anti-colonial movements in South Asia and elsewhere, women were included as equal participants in the struggle against the British empire in the post-independence period, many of the promises of equality made to women were belied. What Young, Rajan and other critics have pointed out is that in postcolonial nation-states, when the state “attempts to assert the forces of homogenization and centralization” (Rajan 6) against repressed groups, women, like other minorities, are subject to discrimination and violence. Thus, as Partha Chatterjee has pointed out in the

Nation and Its Fragments , in both the colonial and postcolonial period, women have been discursively produced as sites of contestation and control for the elaboration of nationalism. “The conflict between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in various spheres also feeds into the problematic, and a similar fraught but passive subject-position is created for women” in the process of postcolonial nation-building (Rajan 6). The role of the feminist critic then becomes “‘the critique of male discourse’” built on the continually constructed realm of femaleness that is so often determined by “modes of ideology

(patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism)” (Rajan 129).

In what follows, I will analyze how Rushdie constructs femaleness, and more briefly, masculinity, in Midnight’s Children , Shame , Shalimar the Clown , and his most

27 See his book Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction 53 recent work, Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights . These novels mark different and significant moments in the evolution of Rushdie’s work and his political philosophy, offering readers a comprehensive overview of Rushdie’s treatment of gender.

Additionally, these analyses of masculinity and femininity will be read within the context of Rushdie’s self-fashioning as a feminist man and writer over the course of his career.

For each novel I examine his constructions of masculinity and femininity, his attempts at various feminist projects within the text, and his limitations for writing both. In the process I show how Rushdie’s representations intervene in popular and patriarchal discourses about South Asian womanhood as well as how they are limited by his overreliance on gender stereotypes and binary definitions of eastern and western feminism.

The Women of Midnights Children (1981)

Midnight’s Children traces the story of Saleem Sinai, born on the eve of India’s independence and so-named a Midnight Child because of his birthday’s political significance. On August 14, 1947 the former British India was partitioned by the British

Government into India and Pakistan. Earlier that year, the British decided to decolonize the region, and by August they granted both India and Pakistan their independence from

British rule. In Midnight’s Children , Saleem’s life acts as an allegory for the new nations, his personal experiences intimately linked with the post-partition historical and political futures of India and Pakistan. Saleem is both character and narrator, telling his story/the story of partition and Indian/Pakistani nationalism, starting with his grandmother and grandfather’s union in the valley of Kashmir and ending with the events of The

Emergency in India. Saleem tells this story of his life and the “lives” of the two nations

54 through the frame of his own impending demise. His faithful partner, , is his sometimes audience and caretaker. At his story’s conclusion, he confronts both his arch-rival, Major Shiva and the uncertain fate of his beloved homeland as depicted by the crushing mass of Indian citizens and lamenting the promises of post-partition nationalism—the very legacy of the Midnight Children.

Rushdie’s representations of women in Midnight’s Children are central to both the personal and political stories of this text. As Saleem himself notes, his story is entirely dependent on the “too-many-women” (467) that have shaped his life: “Women have made me; and also unmade. From Reverend Mother to the Widow, and even beyond, I have been at the mercy of the so-called (erroneously, in my opinion!) gentler sex” (465). While his list of key women is extensive, this analysis will focus on Saleem’s audience/partner (Padma), his adopted mother (Amina), his adopted grandmother

(Reverend Mother), and the character based on Indira Gandhi (the Widow).

One of the most contested aspects of Midnight’s Children in the scholarship on

Rushdie’s treatment of gender is his characterization of Padma, Saleem’s companion and frequent audience for his tale. Saleem meets Padma at the pickling factory where he is writing the story of his life. She enters into a relationship with him, feeding him and taking care of his room where he works. She appears both essential for his storytelling project and in constant danger of derailing it: “How to dispense with Padma? How give up her ignorance and superstition, necessary counterweights to my miracle-laden omniscience?...I have become, it seems to me, the apex of an isosceles triangle, supported equally by twin deities, the wild god of memory and the lotus-goddess of the present”

(170). Critics take issue with Padma’s limited character development and Saleem’s

55 apparent disregard for her feelings as he slowly reveals how he can never satisfy her desires. While she can be read as merely a foil for the narrator, her attempts to overcome

Saleem’s impotence so she can carry their child highlight her agency and desire. In this narrative, Padma’s desire for reproductive intimacy is made visible, not denigrated. Even though she feeds him a potion to “engender the lusty force of beasts” (222) which almost ends up killing him, Saleem does not blame her—the incident even prompts him to declare how essential she is to his creative endeavor: “once again Padma sits at my feet, urging me on. I am balanced once more—the base of my isosceles triangle is secure. I hover at the apex, above present and past, and feel fluency returning to my pen” (222).

One of the most radical representations of women and sexuality in the novel is

Saleem’s adopted mother, Mumtaz Aziz (who is later named Amina Sinai after her second marriage). Mumtaz is described as “black as midnight” (57) and a dutiful daughter. Her dark skin minimizes her chances for a good marriage, so she ends up marrying Nadir Khan who seeks refuge in the Aziz home after he is threatened with death by political assassins. The marriage, however, goes unconsummated. Instead, Saleem discovers that his mother and Nadir were sexually intimate without the traditional act of

“consummation”: “And her hands are moving […] they stray below decks…yes, this is what we used to do, my love, it was enough, enough for me” (183). Her enjoyment of this non-reproductive intimacy is significant. Even though she always wanted children and comes to love her second husband piece by piece, she can never “manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood” (245), preferring instead her first husband’s impotency and sexual favors. She continues to fantasize about her first husband and even arranges to meet with him in the Pioneer Café to experience

56 the “eroticism of the indirect kiss” (249). In terms of the larger story, this incident with

Amina and Nadir serves to anger her son Saleem for his mother’s “infidelity” and to facilitate Saleem’s own arrival to puberty and manhood. Amina’s relationship with Nadir also acts as a critical commentary on the religious and cultural mores in India that ban public displays of affection, even on the silver screen, something that Rushdie has criticized as part of a larger argument about the dangers of fundamentalism. 28 At the same time, Rushdie’s construction of her as a desiring, sexually potent Muslim woman despite the societal strictures that prevent her from realizing her desires is commendable.

Thus, many works by Rushdie are concerned with how women are used as ideological tools. In a departure from colonial or even early postcolonial narratives of the subcontinent, traditional behaviors for women, and specifically traditions within Muslim culture, are antithetical to postcolonial progress. Tradition becomes a foil for the liberations of postcolonial modernity, and, within the frame of the novel, its other. For example, the narrative forecloses the Reverend Mother’s choice of tradition as a viable option in postcolonial India. In one scene, Aadam Aziz suggests that his wife move her body during sexual intercourse: “‘Move how?’ He became awkward and said, ‘Only move, I mean, like a woman…’ She shrieked in horror. ‘My God, what have I married? I know you Europe-returned men. You find terrible women and then you try to make us girls be like them!’” (31). She refuses both to come out of purdah and to engage sexually with him: “‘What else?’ she says in muffled tones. ‘You, or what? You want me to walk naked in front of strange men’” (32). Aadam warns her that she must “‘forget about being a good Kashmiri girl [and] start thinking about being a modern Indian woman.’” (32). In

28 In his opinion editorial “Fighting Forces of Invisibility,” Rushdie outlines the many things that fundamentalists are against, including “kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement…” 57 order to become a national, political subject, the Reverend Mother must not only reject her (notably Muslim) religious and cultural traditions, but also her regional identity

(Kashmiri) in favor of a national one (Indian). Although she asserts herself and challenges his will, “Mother Reverend” as she becomes known, is figured as an unattractive tyrant whose ignorance and superstition become not just irritating for

Aadam, but also threatening to his existence.: “She had become a prematurely old, wide woman, with two enormous moles like witch’s nipples on her face; and she lived within an invisible fortress of her own making, an ironclad citadel of traditions and certainties”

(40). Rushdie suggests that these unattractive traits (her premature aging, her wide figure, and her moles) are tied to her unyielding and conservative personality (especially as it manifests in her adherence to her religious beliefs). That he effectively punishes her in the narrative with becoming unattractive (a criticism itself that is couched in misogynistic attitudes) points to Rushdie’s problematic assumptions about how “tradition” as antithetical to contemporary feminism. After her initial rebellion against her husband’s wishes to modernize, Reverend Mother becomes an orientalist stereotype that is never unpacked or challenged. Within this narrative, the female subject’s choice of tradition, or retreat to the norms of her upbringing be in it sexual behavior or dress, is depicted in negative ways: demeaned for her refusal to ‘perform’ in the marital bed by her husband, there is no space for her to articulate an alternative relation to postcolonial modernity.

At the same time, Rushdie depicts the enemy of the midnight children as ultra- feminine and hyper-sexual in order to critique the politics of the Emergency. For example, Indira Gandhi’s son, Sanjay, and his Youth Congress are described as “men with the same curly hair and lips-like-women’s labia as himself” who seek to “destroy the

58 city slums and sterilize the men” (433). Here, the feminine aspects of Sanjay and his

Youth Congress are aligned with their emasculating actions. Another example is the

“Widow’s Hand,” a doctor employed by Indira Gandhi to “fix” the midnight children.

The “Widow’s Hand” is a “gorgeous girl with big rolling hips” (503) who owns a jewelry shop and who ultimately sterilizes Saleem and the other midnight children. This sexualized, feminine figure not only removes their reproductive organs, but drains them of their midnight powers as well. The Widow’s Hand essentially acts as the stereotypical vagina dentata whose sexual charms are ultimately a trap in which emasculation and death can be found. The Widow herself is described as “Devi, the Mother-goddess in her most terrible aspect, possessor of the shakti of the gods, a multi-limbed divinity with a center-parting and schizophrenic hair” (504). That she possesses the shakti, the reproductive juices, of the gods signifies a usurpation of the masculine role in the act of reproduction. Rushdie is of course using these figures to make a pointed commentary on the violations committed under the Emergency and during the whole of Indira Gandhi’s tenure, but these representations problematically rely on the threat of female sexuality and female-controlled fecundity to make their point.

Finally, what compromises Rushdie’s feminist critique is also the persistent punishment meted to female characters for their infidelity, reproducing patriarchal norms for heteronormative coupledom. As powerful as Amina’s sexuality is the novel, her so- called “transgressions” as a wife and mother make her a figure over which Saleem feels compelled to exert phallic control. Angered by her infidelity to him and to his father,

Saleem sets up an elaborate net to catch another woman in the act of sexual transgression to teach his mother a lesson: “there were to be two punished women, one impaled on

59 each fang of my forked snake’s tongue” (299). All the unfaithful women in the novel are punished, including Saleem’s aunt who spends the rest of her post-divorce days pumping gas with the Reverend Mother: “Pia Aziz, however, was not content with ‘pumpery- shumpery.’ She began a series of liaisons with colonels cricketers polo-players diplomats

[…] she, too, felt her personality draining away with the years” (376). Saleem’s mother is also punished in the narrative by becoming pregnant late in life and withering under the weight of the pregnancy. At first she receives the news of her pregnancy with joy, but

the effect on Amina was devastating […] As the months passed, her forty-

two years began to take a terrible toll; the weight of her four decades grew

daily, crushing beneath her age. In her second month, her hair went white.

By the third, her face had shrivelled like a rotting mango. In her fourth

month she was already an hold woman, lined and thick, plagued by

verrucas once again, with the inevitability of her hair sprouting all over

her face; she seemed shrouded once more in a fog of shame, as though the

baby were a scandal in a lady of her evident antiquity (380).

Though the narrator does not state explicitly that she is punished by this pregnancy because of her unfaithfulness, the image of her aging face echoes Saleem’s description of her bare buttocks which he saw as a child while spying on her as she masturbated to her first husband’s memory: “And there it is, scaring my retina—the vision of my mother’s rump, black as night, rounded and curved, resembling nothing on earth so much as a gigantic, black Alfonso mango!” (184). This imagistic connection suggests a problematic link between her young, desiring unfaithfulness and her crushing, aging pregnancy.

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Although Rushdie attributes much of Saleem’s personal story to “too-many- women,” most of the women occupy minor, tangential roles to Saleem and the movers- and-shakers of Indian and Pakistani nationalism. His exploration of female desire, even in the face of strict societal mores prohibiting such desires, is one of his strengths in representing women. As with some of his later works, the issue of oppressed South

Asian women, especially Muslim women, is both an area of strength for Rushdie in terms of his feminist stance and a site of weakness where women are often trapped between the binary choices of tradition and modernity. Where he is perhaps most progressive in his treatment of gender is in thinking through the issue of masculinity in the context of nationalism. A thorough discussion of this is outside the scope of this chapter; however it is notable that the novel’s hero rejects the hyper-masculine model as the way forward for the new nation. 29

The Muslim Woman and Agency in Shame

The questions posed in the introduction of this chapter are well-met in Rushdie’s second novel, Shame . This novel traces the life of Sufiya Zinobia through the tumultuous political history of post-partition Pakistan. Although the narrator in Shame confesses that he wrote a “feminine” story by accident, the novel is very clearly about bringing women's narratives to the forefront and critiquing the considerably anti-feminist culture of

Pakistan. In one of his earliest interviews, Rushdie states that he does not think Shame will be used as a “women’s text or tract” because it has “too many ambiguities”

(“Interview by John” 53). In fact, he states several times in the same interview that he did

29 In Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture , Kavita Daiya explains more fully how failed masculinity is a metaphor for the postcolonial condition. Saleem’s “class and cultural hybridity make Saleem an embodiment of a utopian vision of secular ” (46). Conversely, the “narrative reveals and problematizes the heroicization of the violent masculinity of late, statist, Hindu nationalism, represented in the figure of major Shiva.” 61 not know exactly what Sufiya signified even after finishing the novel. Later on, after several reviews of Shame and then The Satanic Verses came out concerning his depiction of women, Rushdie bade readers to consider how “there are very strong female characters in the novel whose stories are struggling for space against the stories of the men in the novel” and that showing this struggle does not “mean [he’s] writing a misogynist novel”

(“Interview by W. L.” 97). Shame is arguably Rushdie’s most adamantly feminist work as it is based on two stories of incredible violence against women, one motivated by the bigotry and xenophobia of the West and one by the misogyny and shame culture that, in

Rushdie’s estimation, plagues the East. In Chapter 7, the narrator interrupts the story to explain the origins of the character of Sufiya Zinobia who is modeled on a Pakistani girl from East London murdered by her father for dating a white, British boy. The narrator writes that while he balked at the horrific story, he also, on some level, understood the father’s actions: “We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must be seen unthinkable to peoples living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy” ( Shame 117-118). Although he speculates that shame is a universal foundation of societies everywhere, he relates that to really write about the subject of shame he had to “go back East, to let the idea breathe its favourite air” (118). Sufiya is also based on the story of Rushdie’s own sister who was once assaulted on a train by a group of white teenagers. The narrator laments the lack of agency that both of these women had, and imagines, on their behalf, a way in which their rage could manifest into a powerful, vengeful force that could right the wrongs they faced.

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Following the publication of Shame , Rushdie received mixed reviews, most of which focused on his depictions of women. Both Justyna Deszcz and Ambreen Hai 30 praise Rushdie’s exploration of the oppression women face in societies like Pakistan and his artistic development of strong female characters. Deszcz responds to critics who view

Rushdie’s portrayal of Sufiya as lacking agency by arguing that Omar’s eventual acceptance of his bestial wife is not only an acknowledgement of her agency, but a complete submission to the legitimacy of her power and rage. Hai argues that Rushdie’s use of female artistry to represent his own artistry “borrows or competes with what he sees as strategies of feminist revision to enable or situate his own postcolonial narration”

(19). Hai suggests that Rushdie views storytelling as an almost “feminine” art in its marginalization in modern culture, and so he identifies with it (and women), seeing it as a potentially subversive act. She also argues that Rushdie’s work has grown more definitively feminist over time.

In contrast, other critics have argued that his women are one-dimensional, stereotypical, and therefore lack the kind of believable agency that would truly make this a feminist work. Aijaz Ahmad is perhaps the most well-known critic of Rushdie’s handling of gender in Shame . He notes that while Rushdie’s treatment of women is complicated, his self-styled 31 feminist project ultimately fails. His first objection is

Rushdie’s treatment of Sufiya’s mental illness:

Now, the problem with this metaphor of mental illness is that the pressures

and processes of gendering, which are social and historical in character,

and which impose upon great many women the possibility of deformation

30 See “Salman Rushdie’s Attempt at a Feminist Fairytale Reconfiguration in Shame ” and “Marching in from the Peripheries: Rushdie’s Feminized Artistry and Ambivalent Feminism” respectively. 31 Ahmad bases this entirely on several interviews that Rushdie gave on Shame and not on any specific statements expressed by the Rushdie-narrator in the novel. 63

and incapacity, but which are open to resistance and reversal by women’s

own actions, are given to us in the form of a physiological insufficiency on

her part, and the novel therefore becomes incapable of communicating to

us, in whatever grotesque forms, the process whereby a women’s

intellectual and emotional abilities may be sapped, or regained (1467).

His second objection is Rushdie’s treatment of Sufiya’s so-called agency which he argues is “linked up, further, in a most disagreeable manner, with imperialist and misogynistic myths: the image of freedom-fighter as idiot-terrorist; the image of a free—or freedom— seeking—woman as vampire, amazon, man-eating shrew” (1468). Much underlying

Ahmad’s argument is this insistence that Rushdie is not living up to the task of a third world writer; that is, the novel is not reflective enough of the actual lived experiences of third world inhabitants. In “Salman Rushdie: Marginality, Women, and Shame,” Inderpal

Grewal agrees with Ahmad that Rushdie’s portrayal of Pakistani women is problematic.

She argues that there exists a disjunction between Rushdie’s inclusionary project and his authoritative stance. Rushdie aligns himself (the narrator/emigrant) with the women in a decolonized Asian country because they are both "peripherialized" (27). This alliance breaks down because it fails to account for the position of power that the male narrator/emigrant has relative to the women: "Thus, though Sufiya's genocidal mimicry is meant to be a critique of patriarchal culture, it fails because its horror can only operate by playing on a patriarchal fear of women […] Revengeful women, jealous women, adulterous women, and bestial women are all meant to shock the reader into deperipherializing them" (37).

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In this chapter I will argue that both elements of gendered representations appear in Shame . In his novels, through many female characters, Rushdie unveils the disproportionate burden that women face in a politically oppressive society; through their stories about self-expression and silence, Rushdie offers a powerful feminist critique that, while it centers largely Muslim cultural practices in South Asia, is applicable to the kinds of shame many women experience around the globe. I will then gesture to how this feminist critique is limited in two ways: one, Rushdie’s narrators often fall back on essentialist and binaristic ideas about gender difference; two, in many of his works, the potential of female rebellion is reduced to withering away in locked rooms or turning into explosive violence. In the process, I hope to show that Shame is relatively successful as a feminist work and that Rushdie’s public self-fashioning as a feminist emerged as a result of the backlash he received for his so-called misogynistic depictions of women in Shame .

One of Rushdie’s strengths is his comprehensive exploration of how misogyny acts as both a foundation for and symptom of an oppressive society. Bilquis’ father,

Mahmoud, is initially referred to as a “woman” because he is a widower taking care of his daughter, but it morphs into a commentary on his weakness and failure: “when children spoke of Mahmoud the Woman they meant Mahmoud the Weakling, the

Shameful, the Fool” ( Shame 58). Mahmoud connects his descent with the word woman:

“‘what a term! Is there no end to the burdens this word is capable of bearing? Was there ever such a broad-backed and also such a dirty word?’” (58). Here Rushdie shows what a sexist culture can do to morph something beautiful, like caring for one’s child, into something abhorrent. This sentiment is echoed again in the birth of the novel’s main character, Sufiya. When his second child is born and declared a girl, Sufiya’s father,

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Raza, refuses to believe it as if to submit to the reality of the child’s sex would be weak:

“Defeat? But this was Old Razor Guts himself, conqueror of glaciers, vanquisher of frosty meadows and ice-fleeced mountain sheep! Was the future strong-man of the nation so easily crushed? Not a bit of it” (88). He even attempts to “affect biology by a super- human act of will” (89) as he tries to discern a bump that suggests a penis rather than submit to give up in “defeat” and admit that his child is female. Later, Raza is forced to

“put on the humiliating black shroud of womanhood” (65) in the form of a burqa, thoughtfully provided by his wife, to escape his own death. This incident serves to mock

Raza’s sexism as it is ultimately his wife (a woman) and a female garment that saves his life.

Given Raza’s aversion to all things female, it is perhaps not surprising that he delivers both his daughters into the hands of men who would abuse them. Talvar, a police captain, polo player, and clairvoyant, marries Raza’s first daughter, Naveed. In his selection of Naveed as his wife, Talvar thinks only of her baby-producing capacity, marrying her only “‘On account of the hunger of [her] womb’” (170) and dreaming only of “the profusion of children who would make him puff up with pride while she disintegrated under the awesome chaos of their numbers” (171). He does not cease his attentions to Naveed even when the number of children reaches twenty-seven, and yet he denies her any sexual intimacy that is not solely reproductive: “He came to her once a year and ordered her to get ready, because it was time to plant the seed, until she felt like a vegetable patch whose naturally fertile soil was being worn out by an overzealous gardener” (218). This behavior ultimately ends with her suicide and the narrator notes that her husband “would never be brought to trial on any charge” (241). Thus, the novel

66 critiques Naveed’s domestic and sexual enslavement in the heteronormative marriage, such that suicide is the only escape she can imagine.

Raza’s second daughter, Sufiya, is delivered into the hands of the novel’s anti- hero, Omar Shakil. Omar is characterized as a poor excuse for a man, riddled with anxiety about women thanks to his overbearing mothers, who uses hypnosis to rape women and then convince himself that he is not making them do anything they would not do otherwise. Forbidden by his mothers to feel shame, he acts shamelessly: “Omar, as a master of illusion and hypnosis, has the “remarkable talent for persuading [himself] of the authenticity and nobility of aspects of [himself] which are in fact expedient, spurious, base” (209). Thus the reason he marries Sufiya is not simply to help treat her mental condition as he tells himself. The reason Omar chooses to marry Sufiya who is 31 years younger than him and who “only managed to get a hold of around seven years’ worth of brains” (207) is because of his desire for control. After a long period of “debauchery”

(read: rape) on Omar’s part, he settles on the girl who is, in most respects, as child-like and vulnerable as a woman can be.

One of the most debated topics in a discussion of Rushdie’s feminism in Shame is his decision to make Sufiya mentally challenged. Critics like Ahmad have suggested that

Sufiya’s limited mental capacity nullifies her agency and therefore her potential as a feminist character. The Rushdie-narrator addresses this question himself in his aside at the start of Chapter 7: “Why did I do that to her?—Or maybe the fever was a lie, a figment of Bilquis Hyder’s imagination, intended to cover up the damage done by repeated blows to the head” ( Shame 119). Even in interviews, Rushdie is uncertain about this choice except to say that because of the juxtaposition of her as the most innocent and

67 also the most terrifying character, she is powerful and “moving” (“Interview by John”

51). I would argue that Rushdie’s choice in making her a vulnerable young woman from an upper-class family serves instead to highlight the gross injustices that Sufiya suffers.

Part of what makes her so threatening later on in the story is that she is created “within the citadels of propriety and decorum” (210). Sufiya represents “the impossible verity that barbarism could grow in cultured soil, that savagery could lie concealed beneath decency’s well-pressed shirt” (210). Her initial status as non-threatening makes her rage all the more powerful and highlights the unbearable burden of shame that she experienced. Even the narrator’s speculation on why he made her this way points to the systematic abuse she suffered as a result of being not only a girl in a house that wanted a boy, but a “damaged” girl at that. While his decision to make her mentally disabled is problematic in other ways 32 , Rushdie’s construction of Sufiya ultimately enables a feminist reading of the gendered experience of shame.

Another point of contention for critics about Rushdie’s representations of women in

Shame is the repeated failure of female resistance. 33 For example, even though Rani

Harappa is imprisoned in her home and shunned by her family, she crafts eighteen magical shawls depicting the shameful acts committed by her husband. Using her

“serenity” (200) to manipulate her jailers, Rani acquires the supplies she needs to craft these shawls, and, because of her powerless position, they ignore her work even as she uses her embroidery to say “the unspeakable things which nobody wanted to hear” (201).

Rani’s narrative stands subversively opposed to the official account of her family’s

32 See my discussion of Rushdie’s depictions of disability in chapter one. 33 See Inderpal Grewal’s “Salman Rushdie: Marginality, Women, and Shame.” 68 legacy. Even though Rani is never in a position to exact revenge for her relegation to the margins, her shawl work still functions as a form of resistance.

Grewal has argued that because Rani’s shawls are ultimately locked up and delivered into the hands of a woman notorious for perpetuating the oppressive systems of the masculine elite, the novel’s feminist intervention is limited. After her return to power,

Rani’s daughter Arjumand “arrests, retribution, trials, hangings, blood, and a new cycle of shamelessness and shame” (294), and in response to her mother’s shawls, Arjumand has “her own mother placed under guard” (294). Thus Rani’s protest goes unheard except by the reader. One way to read Rani’s failed attempts to assert herself is Rushdie’s admiration for and celebration of women who find ways to protest within the extreme confines of oppressive circumstances. Her guards never suspected her because she chose a medium that is traditionally feminine and typically innocent; thus she worked with the strictures of the sexist culture to her advantage. However, the ineffectual outcome of her protest compared to Sufiya’s rage is what prompts critics like Grewal to argue that

Rushdie’s imagination for effective female protest is limited. The novel valorizes

Sufiya’s rage as a form of resistance over Rani’s embroidery; this, Grewal contends, is sexist because it suggests that any successful “opposition of women can only take the form of terror” (Grewal 39). In support of Grewal’s point, Rushdie’s narrator’s explanation for why he created Sufiya the way he did seems to suggest that uncontrollable violence and rage is the inevitable outcome of the undue burden of shame that women carry in misogynistic societies. Sufiya’s rage reads more as a warning than advice on how to fight the patriarchy, but neither does Rani present oppressed women with a viable option for resistance. Having only these two options in a novel about

69 feminism in shame/honor cultures would suggest that Rushdie’s imagination is limited when it comes to representing successful forms of female resistance in oppressive contexts.

Rushdie’s second limitation as a potentially feminist writer is that many of his narratives rely on binary definitions of gender differences. Even Hai, who largely views

Rushdie as attuned to the subversive potential of female narration, points out this limitation: “His narratives undermine their own (proto)feminist strains by regressing

(perhaps because of a concurrent anxiety about effemenization/emasculation) into reifications of stereotypes of gender and sexuality, or odd ways of asserting a beleaguered masculinity, and into replaying surprisingly parochial and patriarchal discourses of gender and sexuality” (19). For example, his parallel characters Arjumand (“the Virgin

Ironpants”) in Shame and Jamila (“Voice of the Nation”) in Midnight’s Children , both of whom reject the romance of male suitors, become masculinized figures who end up perpetuating systems of oppression. After returning to power, Arjumand carries on her father’s legacy of abuse. After her fame as a singer exploded, Jamila “became public property, ‘Pakistan’s Angel,’ ‘The Voice of the Nation,’ the ‘Bulbul-e-Din’ or nightingale-of-the-faith […] Publicity imprisoned her inside a gilded tent; and, being the new daughter-of-the-nation, her character began to owe more to the most strident aspects of the national persona than to the child-world of her Monkey years” (Rushdie,

Midnight’s 359). In Shame , the narrator’s often-quoted aside regarding the masculine and feminine aspects of his story reveals this limitation succinctly:

I thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an almost

excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition, power,

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patronage, betrayal, death, revenge. But the women seem to have taken over;

they marched in from the peripheries of the story to demand the inclusion of

their own tragedies, histories, and comedies, obliging me to couch my

narrative in all manner of sinuous complexities, to see my ‘male’ plot

refracted, so to speak, through the prisms of its reverse and ‘female’ side. It

occurs to me that the women knew precisely what they were up to—that their

stories explain, and even subsume, the men’s. (181)

Here Rushdie seems to be making space for the inclusion of women, and also framing that space-making as entirely of their own will. On the one hand, this gesture is in line with his own claims to write a feminist novel. On the other hand, the extended metaphor that he uses here reveals some of his limitations when it comes to including and representing women and women’s narratives. First, this description depends problematically on the male/female binary. The “male” plot stands in contrast to “its reverse and ‘female’ side” as though they are two distinct concepts which never meet, overlap, or dissolve. Moreover, to suggest that the qualities of the masculine tale (sexual rivalry, ambition, power, etc.) are exclusively masculine is reductive. The feminine intrusion is depicted as burden to the male narrator, forcing him to “couch” his narrative in a winding series of “complexities.” Even the image of the female “prism” is disruptive and limiting. It suggests that the female side serves merely to alter the male narrative instead of generating its own narrative. In spite of Rushdie’s enthusiasm in this passage for the inclusion of women and his strength in communicating their own agency in the matter, his use of this imagery highlights some of the limitations in his thinking through the representation of gender.

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It was not until some unfavorable reviews regarding his representations of women were published, that Rushdie’s focus in his interviews on Shame changed. Whereas his early interviews highlight his uncertainty and borderline ambivalence about Sufiya’s origins and purpose, his later interviews emphasize her strength as a female character and her position in the feminist critique of the shame/honor culture in Pakistan. 34 Even if it was only marginally on his mind, Rushdie’s portrayal of how misogyny and political tyranny are intertwined is a credit to his feminist assertions. The limitations of his feminist project extend to his overreliance on gender binaries and the trope of the repressed woman whose only recourse for successful rebellion, as Sufiya demonstrates, is extreme violence.

The Kashmiri Woman, Infidelity, and Archetype in Shalimar The Clown (2005)

In Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown , the question of gender representation is essential to this story of interfaith intimacy and globalized conflict. The story begins in the valley of Kashmir, extolling the beauty of that region as well as its harmonious community of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. This harmony is expressed in the marriage between Shalimar (Muslim) and Boonyi (Hindu) after they are discovered to be intimate.

At the same time, the peace of the valley is broken by the arrival of the Indian army and the burgeoning conflict over the Kashmir valley. The arrival of the American ambassador, Maximilian (Max) Ophuls, and his subsequent affair with Boonyi signals the end of the communal harmony of their village and acts as an allegory for American interference with the politics of the subcontinent. Max takes Boonyi as his lover, impregnates her, and finally abandons her in the wake of an embarrassing international

34 Two examples are John Haffenden’s 1983 interview with Salman Rushdie and W. L. Webb’s 1988 interview with Salman Rushdie in Conversations with Rushdie. 72 scandal. Max’s then wife, Peggy, takes Boonyi’s daughter, India/Kashmira, to raise her as her own. What follows is a decades-long revenge plot wherein Shalimar seeks to kill his unfaithful wife, her former lover, and the illegitimate child of that union. To do this,

Shalimar becomes an international terrorist and inserts himself into the lives of Max and his daughter. He succeeds in killing Max and Boonyi before meeting his own end at the hands of India/Kashmira. Interwoven with this family drama is the history of the conflict in Kashmir and the development of the modern, global terror network. For Rushdie,

Shalimar the Clown is also an ode to the region of Kashmir which he describes as the closest thing to paradise that he has ever found. His regret over the loss of its “human beauty” (Rushdie, “Interview by Steve”) based on a culture of tolerance informs the whole novel.

Rushdie again demonstrates his attentiveness to the ramifications for women of politics and policies dictated entirely by men. He is careful to expose the misogyny of the

Indian army as represented by General Hammirdev Suryavans Kachhwaha whose unrequited desire for Boonyi leads him to neglect his protection duties and turn a blind eye to the atrocities perpetrated by his men in Kashmir: “then there was the sexual dimension to consider, the demoralization of the population through the violation of its women. In that dimension every color was bright and tasted good” (291). He also shows the chauvinist policies of the extremist Muslims as represented by the Lashkar-e-Pak

(Army of the Pure) who force the women of Kashmir to conform to strict religious dress and behavior codes: “Women teachers were doused with acid for failing to adhere to the

Islamic dress code. Threats were made and deadlines issued and many Kashmiri women put on, for the first time, the shroud their mothers and grandmothers had always proudly

73 refused” (277). At the same time, Rushdie gives voice to the women who refuse to conform: “‘I don’t intend to watch my TV programs through a hole in a one-woman tent, nor do I plan to be liberated into a different kind of jail’” (277).

Another way in which the novel’s representation of female subjectivity is interesting and complicated is in the representation of female desire in the face of patriarchal demands. For example, Boonyi acts on her ghost-mother’s advice to seize her desire to be physically intimate with Shalimar despite the fact that they held different faiths and were not yet married. Rushdie’s commitment to his portrayal of Boonyi’s desires is part of what makes Shalimar one of his best feminist narratives. For Boonyi, living a heteronormative life in her village “was not remotely enough for her, didn’t begin to satisfy her hunger, her ravenous longing, for something she could not yet name, and that as she grew older her life’s insufficiency would only grow harder and more painful to bear” (114). While Kashmir is described as a kind of paradise or utopia where

“The words Hindu and Muslim had no place in their story [...] these words were merely descriptions, not divisions” (57), the severity of Boonyi’s crime underscores the patriarchal violence inflicted on women in this supposedly idyllic society. The spy who reveals them tells Boonyi, “‘You are disgraced, of course, your face is blackened and your good name is dirt’” (107). Even though the village council agrees to support the love match, their decision is that they marry immediately. Boonyi’s honor can only be restored by making their union legitimate despite the fact that Boonyi has no desire to become

Shalimar’s wife and live out her days in the same village of her birth. Boonyi’s union to

Shalimar becomes a symbol to the village of “ Kashmiriyat , Kashmiriness, the belief that at the heart of Kashmiri culture there was a common bond that transcended all other

74 differences” (110). Even so, Boonyi seizes the first opportunity to leave her home and pursue her ambitions. Boonyi’s decision to break this symbol of Kashmiriness could be read as a simple allegory of the political chaos that eventually overruns Kashmir; however, her role as a desiring woman in the face of the patriarchal expectations for her body and her life is powerful.

Boonyi’s daughter, India/Kashmira, similarly resists patriarchal expectations.

Upon the death of her father, India shuns the persistent, but ultimately unwanted, attentions of her former lover and the offers for “protection” by the many police and counterterrorism experts: “She was an innocent woman. She owed nobody anything and to suggest otherwise was ugly” (Rushdie, Shalimar 332). After learning of her mother’s death at the hands of Shalimar and her banishment from the village for her infidelity, she rejects the blossoming love she feels with her new suitor, citing love as a “deception and snare” (370) and thinking “It was men who were the cowards and women who were the warriors” (369). At the end of the novel, India transforms herself from the hunted woman about to die at the hands of her mother’s chauvinist, murderous husband to the hunter who is able to avenge both her parents’ murders. Notably, Rushdie makes the bow and arrow “her weapon of choice” (397) symbolizing her role as a hunter, but also pointing to her physical prowess in being able to wield an Olympic standard bow which requires substantial upper body strength. Her decision to use the bow is also a pointed response to the contents of Shalimar’s threatening letters: “My letters are poisoned arrows […] Now you are my target and I am your marksman however my arrows are not dipped in love but in hatred. My letters are arrows of hate and they will strike you down” (374).

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Using allegory to tell the story of the conflict in Kashmir, Rushdie risks perpetuating the problematic associations between women’s bodies and the nation which appear frequently in colonial and postcolonial narratives. However, instead of using women’s bodies to explore nationalism in the traditional sense, he uses Boonyi and her daughter India/Kashmira to critique the nationalist politics and western interference that have so damaged the Kashmir region: “Although Kashmir and India are here problematically feminized, embodied respectively by the Kashmiri Hindu Boonyi and by her racially hybrid daughter India, Rushdie deploys this image to criticize the nation-state system” (Daiya 204). Additionally, Rushdie seems aware of the burden of allegory that both women carry, allowing them the agency to challenge the symbolic associations that others are eager to place upon them. For example, India rejects the name her adopted parents gave her largely because of its associations with the “exotic” East: ‘India’ still felt wrong to her, it felt exoticist, colonial, suggesting the appropriation of reality that was not hers to own” (5). After she discovers the truth of her parents and the death of her mother,

India considers permanently rejecting her name in favor of the one her birth mother had given her: Kashmira. Similarly, Boonyi changes her name from Bhoomi, meaning

“earth.” According to Shalimar, “There was the earth and there were the planets. The earth was not a planet. The planets were the grabbers. They were called this because they could seize hold of the earth and bend its destiny to their will” (45). While Boonyi claims she does not care for her given name because it signifies “‘mud and dirt and stone’”

(Shalimar 46), she also rejects it because of the implication that she will bend to the will of other planetary forces. Boonyi also turns allegory on its head when she uses the metaphor of the Indian Armed Forces to criticize Max for his routine violations of her

76 body: “At that moment she decided that the term ‘Indian Armed Forces’ would secretly refer to the ambassador himself, she would use the Indian presence in the valley as a surrogate for the American occupation of her body, so, ‘Yes, that’s it,’ she cried, ‘the

Indian armed forces,’ raping and pillaging” (197).

Despite these strong, desiring female characters, the narrative’s representation of

Boonyi’s infidelity is problematic, resonant with the representation of infidelity in

Midnight’s Children that I discussed earlier. During her time as the ambassador’s mistress, Boonyi comes to the realization that, “What she thought of as her former imprisonment had been freedom, while this so-called liberation was no more than a gilded ” (195). Instead of exploring the lack of freedom in both her options, Rushdie depicts her regret for following the financial and social opportunity provided by the ambassador and uncritically tracks her path to redemption, beginning with extreme self- hatred: “In his place she would have hunted herself down and murdered herself in a gutter, like a dog, so that the shame of it would outlive her” (196) and ending with her desire for total self-erasure: “She had to let go of her anger and achieve humility. She had to let go of everything and be as nothing. […] by adopting the abnegatory posture of the disciple before the Divine, by erasing herself, she might also erase her crime and make herself what her husband could once again love” (226). A parallel is drawn between

Boonyi and Zoon, another “living ghost” (224) who was sexually assaulted and yet refused to take her own life. Zoon advises Boonyi to not be bitter and to try to

“understand the grief that killed you” (224). While the reader is presumably meant to be critical of the way in which Boonyi is “dead” to her family and her village and the way in which a sexual assault survivor is expected to either kill herself or live as a ghost, this

77 practice is not opened up or questioned. One of Boonyi’s last thoughts is to blame herself for her figurative death of shame and her literal death at the hands of her husband.

Shalimar’s hyper-masculine, violent, and religious identity is a focus of critique for the novel. Even though Rushdie explores the complicity of the West in the problems of the East through the figure of the American ambassador, Shalimar’s development into an international terrorist is the central issue. Rushdie attributes Shalimar’s adoption of terrorist actions to both Boonyi’s betrayal and the attacks in Kashmir, saying “it's as if what he's trying to do is to reconstruct his sense of his manhood, his masculinity, and that in the end is what leads him to pick up the weapon, not just Islamic doctrine, if you like”

(“Interview by Steve”). In fact, Shalimar’s violent nature and desire for dominance over

Boonyi is made clear from their first intimate encounter: “Don’t leave me, he said, rolling over onto his back and panting for joy. Don’t you leave me now, or I’ll never forgive you, and I’ll have my revenge, I’ll kill you and if you have any children by another man

I’ll kill the children also” (Rushdie, Shalimar 61), and he remains one of the most unsympathetic characters in the novel. Part of Rushdie’s project in writing Shalimar was to understand why a young person might turn to the life of a terrorist with the hopes of showing western readers that “one has to look at this as a human issue, not just as an ideological one, and to see that people are getting involved in these terrible events for often very trivial reasons” (Rushdie, “Interview by Steve”). As an exercise in exploring the reasons why a man might become a terrorist, however, it is reductive. The material conditions that might shape one man into a terrorist are limited to injured masculinity.

Furthermore, Rushdie offers the reader the one element that he feels might humanize the terrorist Shalimar—the betrayal of his wife—which lacks a sympathetic foundation since

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Shalimar is depicted as inherently violent and because Boonyi had little choice in becoming his wife in the first place.

Shalimar the Clown is one of Rushdie’s stronger works in depicting both the social barriers that women face in having control over their lives as well as the genuine moments of agency they might have within different contexts. As desiring, defiant, and persistent women, Boonyi and India function as more than simple allegories for the conflict in Kashmir. At the same time, Rushdie is critical of the wounded masculinity that seeks to punish Boonyi’s betrayal with death and which fuels the growing network of terrorism around the globe. He highlights how ideology is pressed upon populations from outside groups and how this can specifically burden women caught in the middle.

Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015)

As the title suggests, Two Years takes the frame narrative strategy of the Arabian

Nights as its model, telling first the story of the philosopher Ibn Rushd and then a story about the war between the world and the human world. The narrators are a race of futuristic humans looking back at earth’s history (or mythology, they are unsure) and marveling at the numerous divisive and violent tendencies of their forbearers. At the heart of both stories is the jinnia (female jinn) Dunia. She takes Ibn Rushd as her lover and produces a brood of children who then go on to people the world. Generations later,

Dunia returns to earth to help her descendants fight the evil jinn who are attempting to plunge the world in violence and chaos lead by the religious philosophy of her former lover’s arch-rival, Ghazali. Throughout, the battle between unreason (or belief) and reason dominates the narrative in this, Rushdie’s most pro-Atheist novel. Although the

79 fantastic nature of this story does not lend itself to a traditional feminist reading, Rushdie treats gender in interesting ways that suggest the female force is essential to a world ruled by reason (and yet tolerant of fantasy) and that a world of reason should both acknowledge the fluidity of a concept like gender and strive for a future where sexism as well as other forms of oppression should be relegated to history (or mythology).

In keeping with some of his earlier works, Rushdie seeks to establish a connection between oppressive systems of power and the reign of unreason; specifically he is invested in speaking up about the threat to women within fundamentalist interpretations of religion. In Two Years , Rushdie again praises Scheherazade for her “Stories told against death, to civilize a barbarian” (11). He holds a similar fascination with the female storyteller in Midnight’s Children when Saleem identifies with her need to tell stories for survival and again in his “Blood Relations” which he penned in 2006 to accompany an art installation designed by .35 Similarly, Rushdie’s main character (based on the historical figure responsible for the western concept of secular philosophy) Ibn Rushd identifies his work as attempting to be a civilizing force against the “fanatical Berbers” (12) whose religious dogma threatens the generative potential of the Islamic medieval world. At the same time, Rushdie notes that Ibn Rushd is a sort of

“anti-Scheherazade” because Scheherazade’s stories were designed to ward off certain death and his work endangers his life. Here the reader can see Rushdie’s own

35 “Blood Relations” poses a series of questions concerning the perspective of the two sisters in One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Rushdie as narrator speculates about how they were able to survive so many years in their difficult situation, how they were able to fall in love with the two brothers, and whether or not they orchestrated, with their father, the eventual outcome in which the Vizier becomes a king and the two brothers die. Rushdie concludes the story by focusing on Scheherazade’s silence about this outcome: “Love and blood were at war within her, and she could not speak.” His last lines point out that although her story includes the deaths of 3,216 people, only “thirteen of the dead were men.” This story, coupled with Kapoor’s graphic art installation is a feminist revisitation of this well-known collection of stories, emphasizing the monstrosity of the king and the blood-soaked history of women within its pages

80 identification with his namesake, Ibn Rushd, and the brave storyteller Scheherazade. For

Rushdie, the forces of barbarism that Scheherazade sought to overcome are the same he faces throughout the fundamentalist Islamic world—both informed by a detrimental misogyny that flies in the face of all reason.

Rushdie uses the frame narrators to depict a future in which humanity has moved beyond the overt sexism that shaped so much of the human experience and contributed to many of its violent tendencies. These futuristic humans look at humanity’s past with distaste. For example, they critique the way that women used to be viewed by humanity before the world of the jinn was closed off to the world of humans:

In the age before the separation of the Two Worlds women in most parts

of the world had been considered to be secondary, lesser entities, chattels,

homemakers, to be respected as mothers but otherwise disdained, and

though these attitudes had changed for the better in some parts of the

planet at least, the dark jinn’s belief that women were provided for men’s

use and support were still those of the dark ages (245).

Rushdie’s reference to “certain parts of the world” the reader knows to be the Middle

East, and specifically Afghanistan. In the “country of A” the king brings “his country into the modern age, introducing free elections, defending women’s rights, and building a university” (226), but then the King is murdered and foreign powers attempt to invade and fail, leaving a vacuum of power which is filled by the “Swots” (the ) who begin forbidding things including, “women’s faces, women’s bodies, women’s education, women’s sports, women’s rights. They would have liked to forbid women altogether but even they could see that that was not entirely feasible, so they contended themselves with

81 making women’s lives as unpleasant as possible” (227). Instead of Islam as the target for his feminist critique as in his previous works, here he focuses solely on a specific group; albeit one that claims to uphold all the tenets of Islam.

Into this war on women, Rushdie sends Teresa Saca, descendent of Dunia, to become an avenger of “every spurned, wronged, abused woman who had ever lived”

(245). Even though Teresa is a troubled character because of her past misdeeds and fatalistic thinking, she ultimately functions as a powerful, feminist weapon, gaining strength every time she eliminates another enemy of women:

She discovered she was good at this, the sudden appearance, the startled

horror on the face of the target, the thunderbolt like a bright lance through

the chest, or sometimes, just for fun, his genitalia, or his eye, they all

worked. And then back into the nothingness towards the next rapist the

next abuser the next subhuman creature the next piece of primordial slime

the next thing that deserved to die (247).

In spite of the obvious strength of his female characters in this novel, Rushdie has faced criticism for his cartoonish and even masculine female characters.36 While the fantasy aspects of the story do create some unusual female characters, Rushdie succeeds in illustrating the very real gender-based barriers they face in their communities. Dunia, even as a jinnia, faces abandonment by Ibn Rushd as soon as the Berbers are defeated and then the subsequent usurpation of her right to rule in Peristan thanks to the dark jinn.

Another example is Alexandra (the Lady Philosopher) whose work is accused of being no

36 See Ursula Le Guin’s article “Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie review—a modern Arabian Nights” published in on September 4, 2015. 82 more than “sentimental” by the academic community even though “she would

[eventually] be seen as a kind of prophetess” (46).

It is not coincidence that the perpetrators of the violence and upholders of

Ghazali’s fundamentalist philosophy are the dark male jinn. Their leader, Zabardast, decides to seize on Ghazali’s instructions to “‘Instill fear’” because “‘Only fear will move sinful Man towards God’” (126). Although his real reasons for causing chaos in

Ghazali’s name are not clear, the violence his proxies commit against women is attributed, in part, to the sexual boycott of the jinnia against the dark jinn for their crimes:

“women were not only violated but killed thereafter, these new women, many of whom rejected the idea of their inferiority, and needed to be put back in their place” (245). Even though the jinn think little about humanity and its differences, this plot point suggests that

Rushdie wants the association between fundamentalist religion and violence against women to be clear. Additionally, Rushdie returns to a familiar theme from Shalimar the

Clown —the way in which failed masculinity is tied to terrorism: “Mind-altering frustration, and the damage to the male ego which accompanied it, found its release in rage and assaults. When lonely, hopeless young men were provided with loving, or at least desirous, or at the very least willing sexual partners, they lost interest in suicide belts, bombs, and the virgins of heaven, and preferred to live” (213-214).

In the war between Ghazali’s fanaticism and Ibn Rushd’s secular philosophy, humanity does “turn from faith to reason, in spite of all the inadequacies of the rational mind” (127). This is developed in the passages concerning the frame narrators who live in a world in which sexism, as well as racism and violence, has been eradicated:

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Our mastery of the human genome allows us chameleon powers unknown

to our predecessors. If we wish to change sex, well then, we

straightforwardly do so by a simple process of gene manipulation. If we

are in danger of losing our tempers, we can use the touch pads embedded

in our forearms to adjust our serotonin levels, and we cheer up. Nor is our

skin color fixed at birth. We adopt our hue of choice (207).

This description of the future of humanity might be read as tongue-in-cheek; however

Rushdie’s insistence on the triumph of reason, expressed at length throughout the story, suggests that this is a somewhat desirable future even if it is a little dull. Rather than a warning of the potential for hyper-rationalism, passages like these seem to be attempting to illuminate how technology will help humanity overcome divisions based on physical parameters. While a world without sexism is desirable, this blueprint for eradicating it is problematic as it reduces concepts like racism and sexism and the potential for oppressive politics to the mere manipulation of physical appearance.

Although largely unconnected to the main storyline, Rushdie includes a sizable passage on the fluidity of gender and sexuality. The main male character in the plot about the war between humanity and the jinn, Mr. Geronimo (a human), hypothesizes:

that there were more than two sexes, that in fact each human being was a

gender unique to himself or herself, so that maybe new personal pronouns

were required, better words than he or she . Obviously it was entirely

inappropriate. Amid the infinity of sexes there were a very few sexes with

which one could have congress, who wished to join one in congress, and

with some of those sexes one was briefly compatible, or compatible for a

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reasonable length of time before the process of rejection began as it does

in transplanted hearts or livers. In very rare cases one found the other sex

with whom one was compatible for life, permanently compatible, as if the

two sexes were the same, which perhaps, according to this new definition,

they were. Once in his life he had found that perfect gender and the odds

against doing so again were prohibitive, not that he was looking, not that

he ever would. (48)

This passage initially reads like an intellectual exercise, challenging the binary of male/female and the related pronouns for describing gender identity. That there might exist an “infinity of sexes” (if he, in fact, means “gender identities”) is a progressive stance on human gender identity and sexuality. However it is problematic to use the terms “gender” and “sex” interchangeably, and it is not clear what, if any, distinction the character has about using both these terms. Additionally, it seems as though he is simply replacing “person” with sex/gender to describe the difficulty of finding true love.

This “adult fairy-tale” is certainly one of Rushdie’s most unusual stories, but it bears scrutiny for its treatment of gender because of its very clear stance on politics and oppression. He succeeds in exploring the systemic cultural barriers that women face and the misogynist attitudes that underlie much of the violence that plagues humanity. His brief forays into the discussion of gender as non-binary are intriguing, if clumsy, and I would argue that they reflect his years as a sitting academic at Emory University.

Conclusion

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Throughout this chapter, I have tracked Rushdie’s representations of women over the course of his writing career. Some of the patterns remain consistent, notably his interest in exploring the societal restrictions placed on women in South Asian culture and the ways those are contrasted with western, secular liberalism. He also explores the strength of women, even in circumstances which are limiting, arguably offering his female characters substantial agency. Connected to these patterns is his critique of the culture of hyper-masculinity which thrives on control and violence, perpetuating the myth of the inferiority of women and fueling other types of systemic oppression. Where the pattern changes over the course of his novels is in his descriptions of masculinity and femininity. His earlier books rarely open up the gender code despite the persistent masculinization of women and emasculation and/or feminization of men that Dayal suggests. His later books depict gender as more fluid and less binary, exploring how strength is not always coded as masculine and weakness as feminine. Rushdie’s archive can thus be acknowledged as both illuminating of women’s condition in what he considers to be oppressive third-world contexts as well as one in which stereotyping and the prominence of heteronormativity limits the potential for the imaginative liberation of women, Muslim or not.

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Chapter 3

Is Rushdie an Orientalist?: Representing Islam in Midnight’s Children ,

Shame , The Satanic Verses , Shalimar the Clown , Enchantress of Florence , and

Joseph Anton

At the 2013 “Salman Rushdie in the 21 st Century” conference in Lisbon,

Priyamvada Gopal somewhat controversially argued that “Rushdie has become what he used to critique.” She was not the only panelist to suggest that Rushdie and his work have become increasingly conservative in recent years. In fact, several Rushdie scholars have speculated about a shift in the author’s politics for many years now, some seeing a clear demarcation between his pre and post-fatwa work both in its political bent and in quality.

Ever since Rushdie gained notoriety as a voice for the subcontinent in the West, he has faced criticism as such because of his position as an upper-class, western-educated, and diasporic author. 37 This scrutiny has only increased in recent years as he distances himself (and is distanced) from the subcontinent and as he continues to take what some see as increasingly conservative viewpoints on a number of issues, but perhaps most especially on the issue of Islam and the West. While Rushdie has brought scrutiny to

Islam and its adherents even in his earliest work, in recent years he has made it one of his primary concerns. Using the various platforms available to him including news columns,

TV spots, and his own published works, Rushdie has expressed his disdain for what he terms “Islamists” (fundamental adherents to Islam), institutionalized religion more broadly, and his disappointment in the western notions of cultural relativism and

37 For example, in Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian Novel in English Pranav Jani criticizes how Rushdie has become emblematic for postcolonial literature in the western academy, urging scholars to consider the specificity of his social, cultural, and educational background before he can be seen as evidence of a “Continent finding its voice” as suggested by the New York Times . 87

Islamophobia. In the wake of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad Cartoon controversy, 38

Rushdie joined with other public intellectuals to pen their Manifesto “Together Facing a

New Totalitarianism” in which they outlined their opposition to Islamism and their support for “universal values” like freedom of expression in order to avoid a century of

“obscurantism” in favor of one of “Enlightenment.” While Rushdie’s support of enlightenment values is not new, 39 his increasingly critical stance on devout Muslims and

Islam itself is new, leading many to wonder if his experience with the fatwa is to blame and if he isn’t justified in his view. At the same time, it has slowly begun to change the way Rushdie is perceived by critics and the public at large. Are Rushdie’s views on

Muslims and Islam warranted or a sign of Islamophobia? At what point does a justifiable critique become an orientalist rant? Has Rushdie, whose career is based on his postcolonial representations, his scathing criticisms of xenophobia and racism in the

West, and his celebration of the oppressed and marginalized, become the thing he used to critique?

Edward Said describes orientalism as, “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said,

Orientalism 3). Even as Said qualifies orientalism as mainly a western process for controlling the East, he also careful to address the role of the eastern or hybrid intellectual in describing the Orient for western audiences. He is very critical, for example, of V.S.

38 In 2005 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a collection of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in order to highlight the recent debate about Islam and freedom of expression. The publication was peacefully protested in Denmark, but sparked several other protests and riots around the world. 39 The Rushdie-narrator in Shame suggests Pakistanis should substitute “liberty; equality; fraternity” for the myth of theocracy (267). 88

Naipual’s “contribution to literature, that the victims of empire wail on while their country goes to the dogs” (Said, Orientalism xxii). Instead, he wants “those of us who by force of circumstance actually live the pluri-cultural life as it entails Islam and the West

[…] to complicate and/or dismantle the reductive formulae and the abstract but potent kind of thought that leads the mind away from concrete human history and experience”

(xxiii). Said notes that it is not criticism of the orient itself that is problematic, but criticism without context. Authors who occupy a “pluri-cultural” position like Rushdie have a responsibility: “This is not to say that we cannot speak about issues of injustice and suffering, but that we need to do so always within a context that is amply situated in history, culture, and socioeconomic reality” (Said, xxiii).

Some point to Rushdie’s friendship with the late Said as evidence that he is not, in fact, an orientalist. 40 It is true that Said initially defended Rushdie during the fatwa years, stating that the issue with The Satanic Verses was largely a misunderstanding and one that needed to be contextualized in order to escape an orientalist interpretation: “That it dealt with Islam in English for what was believed to be largely Western audience was its main offense” (Said, Culture 306). Said was one of Rushdie’s most vocal supporters, emphasizing the impact his work has had on the larger discourses of orientalism and postcolonial studies: “The conscious effort to enter into the discourse of Europe and the

West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories is of particular interest in Rushdie’s work, and in an earlier generation of resistance writing” (216). Questioned later about Rushdie’s stance on the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars, Said admitted that there was a “greater” disconnect between Rushdie’s

40 See Chris Rollason’s “Hitchens, Rushdie, and Said: A Tangled Triad.” 89 works and his politics from the 1980s (Waheed). In 1996, Said wrote a new introduction to his 1981 book Covering Islam How the Media and Experts Determine How We See the

Rest of the World in which he contends that the western world was invoking orientalist rhetoric to describe Islam and perpetuate Islamophobia. More than ten years after Said’s death in 2003, Rushdie has spoken and written about how Islamophobia is merely a “new word […] created to help the blind remain blind” ( Joseph 345). Writing post-9/11, Said is highly critical of this kind of rhetoric as it pertains to Islam and Muslim communities:

There has been so massive and calculatedly aggressive an attack on the

contemporary societies of the Arab and Muslims for their backwardness,

lack of democracy, and abrogation of women’s rights that we simply

forget that such notions as modernity, enlightenment, and democracy are

by no means simple and agreed-upon concepts that one either does or does

not find (xix).

Given that contemporary orientalism includes this kind of simplistic, hyper-critical rhetoric about Islam, the question remains, are Rushdie’s often critical representations of

Islam nuanced and critical or generalized and orientalist? What would Said think of

Rushdie’s most recent work and political opinions were he still alive today?

Some scholars trace an orientalist impulse back through Rushdie’s early works.41

For example, Anshuman Mondal argues about The Satanic Verses : "far from challenging hegemonic machineries of representation, as far as its portrayal of Islam and its Prophet was concerned, the novel in fact subscribes to and reinforces them” (112). In his keynote

41 Gayatri Spivak in “Reading the Satanic Verses” discusses how the Rushdie Affair is often described (and framed by Rushdie) as “Freedom of Speech versus Terrorism” (95). She argues that only by acknowledging our own complicity in the belief of so-called post-Enlightenment western values like freedom of speech can we “recode the conflict as Racism versus Fundamentalism." 90 speech during the “Salman Rushdie in the 21 st Century” conference, Vijay Mishra said,

“Rushdie is as much an orientalist as a postcolonial scholar” and went on to challenge

Rushdie’s view that there is no “western” tradition of commentary and annotations in

Islam. 42 Other scholars posit that authors like Rushdie do, in fact, traffic in orientalist stereotypes and the othering of “orientals,” but only as a strategy to challenge the historically reductive representations of the orient or to critique western modernity. 43

They suggest that while Rushdie is implicated in the western literary marketplace and, as a result, uses orientalist stereotypes to appeal to a western readership, he is actually using

"a strategic exoticism, designed to trap the unwary reader into complicity with the

Orientalisms of which the novel so hauntingly relates" (Huggan 77). While scholars acknowledge the risk in this gesture, 44 most of them agree that Rushdie largely succeeds in challenging his western audience’s expectations for a tale about the so-called Orient.

Lisa Lau in her article “Re-Orientalism: The Perpetuation and Development of

Orientalism by Orientals” disagrees, noting that re-orientalism “is the same relationship of the powerful speaking for and representing the other, who is all but consigned to subalternism” (572). Lau attributes this also to the position of oriental diasporic writers in the western literary marketplace where they have a relative monopoly on depictions of the Orient to the West. While some of her logic relies problematically on the notion that there is an “authentic” version of the Orient that is being overshadowed by “inauthentic” versions in diasporic writing, she highlights an important element in this debate: who

42 In his opinion editorial “The Right Time for an Islamic Reformation,” Rushdie argues that Muslims need to subject the Qur’an to the same study that other religions have done; to read it within its specific historical context in order to bring it forward into the 21 st century. 43 See Ana Mendes’s Salman Rushdie and the Cultural Marketplace , The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins by Graham Huggan, and “Re-Orientalism: The Perpetration and Development of Orientalism by Orientals” by Lisa Lau for full discussions of how various postcolonial authors use orientalist depictions as part of their marketing strategies. 44 In Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace , Ana Mendes writes that Rushdie’s attempt to utilize exotic stereotypes is risky, but, "by encouraging metatextual awareness in their readers, re-orientalist works reinstate agency and foster empowerment in the face of an engulfing global literary marketplace. Rushdie both and slyly reroutes orientalism, opening the way for a re-examination of the expectations of his metropolitan readership" (171). 91 exactly has “the power of description” (Rushdie, The Satanic 175), an important factor that Rushdie himself has criticized at length over the course of his career.

For Rushdie, Islam has become unrecognizable to him: “What happened to the

Islam I knew? No coercion, no without adult espousal, no deification of prophet” (Rushdie, “Folder”). In spite of what critics say, Rushdie maintains that it is

Islam which has changed and not his politics: “It was Islam that had changed, not people like himself, it was Islam that had become phobic of a very wide range of ideas, behaviors, and things” ( Joseph Anton 345), and he no longer recognizes it as “the faith of his grandfather” (356). How does this sentiment shape the politics of representation in his novels? Specifically, does his critique of contemporary Islam and Mulims generate problematic othering of Muslims that perpetuate orientalist stereotypes and present his largely western audience with a homogeneous version of Islamic culture? To attempt to answer these questions, we must consider the issues of historical and cultural context, authority, and access. Because there is speculation about a shift in Rushdie’s politics of representation from his early works to his later works, this chapter will review works from both periods of his writing career. First, I re-evaluate Midnight’s Children, Shame , and The Satanic Verses , the three novels which helped to establish Rushdie’s reputation as a South Asian author, challenging orientalist stereotypes of the East which are so pervasive in western thought. In a close reading of these novels, I analyze Rushdie’s attempts to undermine orientalist stereotypes of the people and cultures of the subcontinent and how he is successful as well as how his project is compromised by his position as a western-educated, diasporic, male author. I also compare his politics of representation in his early works with his more recent publications, Shalimar the Clown ,

92

Enchantress of Florence , and Joseph Anton to examine some of the shifts in his representations of Isalm and Muslim communities and how his increasingly critical stance on religion in general and Islam in particular shape his depictions of the “orient.”

Midnight’s Children

Much of the existing literary criticism of Midnight’s Children reflects on the author’s celebration of hybridity, his challenge to the dominant euro-centric history of the subcontinent, and his linguistic as well as overtly political critique of western perceptions of the East. 45 For many, it holds an important position signaling the inclusion of

“periphery” literature and marginalized writers in the mainstream. Because of Midnight’s

Children , Rushdie became the “voice of the subcontinent,” 46 placing the history of partition into context for western readers and articulating shared experiences for his fellow South Asians. The novel also became a cornerstone of postcolonial studies, often acting as a benchmark to other narratives of the subcontinent suffering from orientalist perspectives. Said, for example, praises Rushdie as an author "whose daring new formal achievements are in effect a re-appropriation of the historical experience of colonialism, revitalized and transformed into a new aesthetic of sharing and often transcendent re- formulation" ( Orientalism 351). Many scholars have praised Rushdie’s use of language to address the orientalist representations of South Asia and to empower postcolonial populations to challenge the established legacies of colonialism. 47 For example,

Midnight’s Children is perceived as an “answer” to Rudyard Kipling’s orientalist novel,

45 For example, “‘The Empire Writes Back’: Language and History in ‘Shame’ and ‘Midnight’s Children’in Postcolonialism and Postmodernism” by Srivastava and Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors: Migrations, Translation, Hybridity, , and Globalization by Jaina Sanga. 46 A common description for Rushdie based on the New York Times article “A Novel of India’s Coming of Age” Clark Blaise published in 1981. 47 See Neil Ten Kortenaar. “Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnights’s Children.’” Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2004, Wimal Dissanayake. “Cultural Studies and Discursive Constructions of World Englishes,” Ed. Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru and Cecil L. Nelson The Handbook of World Englishes . Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 552–53, and Michael Gorra, After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie . Chicago: Chicago UP, 1997. 93

Kim , both in terms of its language and in terms of the representation of South Asian culture. While there is some recent debate about the effectiveness of Rushdie’s

Midnight’s Children as a linguistic and cultural rebuttal to Kipling’s Indian novel, 48 most still see Rushdie’s early works as a testimony to the postcolonial canon.

Said cautions scholars to avoid criticizing work for its “authenticity” of representation, an object which is arguably impossible to locate or at least reductive.

Instead, critics should focus on how the representations are crafted through literary technique and "not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original" (Said Orientalism 21). After the publication of Midnight’s Children, Rushdie responded to critics concerning his own authority and authenticity, claiming in the first place that his unique position as a diasporic author gives him what he terms a “double perspective” ( Imaginary 19) based on his status as both an insider and outsider of South

Asian culture, and, in the second place, that many of his readers from the subcontinent read the book as a history of partition instead of a fiction. 49 With his first point he suggests that being an insider gives him the kind of authority on these subjects that we would expect, but by also being an outsider, he can lend the subjects even more authenticity because he has the necessary physical (and perhaps emotional) distance that being a migrant offers. With point two, he suggests that Midnight’s Children reads as so authentic that even natives of South Asia read it as if it were a real history of the subcontinent. Even though he relies on these two points of authenticity, he also dismisses them by insisting that his story is just “one version” (10) and excusing any errors of representing the history and culture of South Asia with the note that Saleem is an

48 See Vijay Mishra’s “Rushdie-Wushdie: Salman Rushdie’s Hobson-Jobson.” New Literary History 40.2(2009): 385-410. Print. 49 Rushdie penned an entire essay on the ‘errata’ in Midnight’s Children to address the frequent messages he received regarding the accuracy of certain plot points from readers eager to read the book as a “reference book or encyclopaedia” (Imaginary 25). 94

“unreliable narrator” (22). Rushdie’s anxiety over his authority manifests in his second novel Shame through the objections that the narrator imagines readers having about his version of history: “Poacher! Pirate! We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign language wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about us in your forked tongue, what can you tell but lies? ” (22). However, he is again careful to explain the way in which his novel is fictional and not a true history of Pakistan: “The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space” (22). He does this also with The Satanic

Verses , noting that the Prophet Muhammad character has a “dream-name” of Mahound and the city of his revelation is entirely fictional. These gestures release him from the demand of strict realism, but still allow him to explore and be critical of the historical details of Pakistan and early Islam in the narratives.

One of the ways orientalism manifests itself in narrative is through nostalgia for former colonial rule;50 a concept with which Rushdie is very familiar. In his essay

“Outside the Whale,” Rushdie criticizes the rampant nostalgia that he observed for the

British Raj in 1980s British popular culture. He argues that popular culture glamorized the former empire with films such as Jewel in the Crown and Gandhi, eliding both the past atrocities of colonialism and the racial discrimination of the 1980s as seen in the white-washing of these films. Using Said’s work as a critical framework, Rushdie writes

“that the purpose of such false portraits was to provide moral, cultural and artistic justification for imperialism and for its underpinning ideology, that of the racial superiority of the Caucasian over the Asiatic” (89). Rushdie explores the logical extreme

50 Said notes in Culture and Imperialism that “Many people in England probably feel a certain remorse or regret about their nation’s Indian experience, but there are also many people who miss the good old days, even though the value of those days, the reason they ended, and their own attitudes toward native nationalism are all unresolved, still volatile issues” (17). 95 of colonial nostalgia in Midnight’s Children through the character of William Methwold who sells his mansion to the Sinai family on the condition that the “houses be bought complete with every last thing in them” and that “the entire contents be retained by the new owners” (105). Until the transfer, which he stipulates must be the same date as the official departure of the British government, the inhabitants of his homes must keep everything in the homes exactly as it is and to adopt the habits of the “departing colonial”

(105). Methwold does not attempt to hide that his conditions are a game, and though he attempts to explain it as a gesture to his ancestor (who “founded” the city of Bombay), the reader becomes aware that it is really a final attempt to assert British culture, specifically the culture of the Raj, on those who are left behind. Rushdie’s representation of this nostalgia demonstrates his critical awareness of how western orientalism asserts itself in problematic ways.

Some of Rushdie’s early critics accused Midnight’s Children of reinforcing negative orientalist stereotypes. 51 However, others view his inclusion of “stock” characters and “exotic” details as a critical commentary on the West’s problematic expectations of the East and its historical patterns of “oriental” consumption. For example, Ana Mendes in Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace tackles the issue of

Rushdie’s orientalist depictions, arguing that he is being strategic about it. She suggests that, in Midnight’s Children , he "uses meta-exoticism, that is, a strategic redeployment of the exotic: it plays on re-orientalist representations of India as the exotic other and hence repoliticizes identifiable orientalist imagery" (28). For example, the centuries-old association of India with spices is explored in the narrator Saleem who is in charge of

51 See Ali, Tariq “Rev of Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.” New Left Review 1.136 (1982): 87-95 and Timothy Brennan’s Salman Rushdie and the Third World (1989). 96 creating the pickling recipes at the end of the novel. Whereas Rushdie provides readers with exotic descriptions of “Koli women with their saris hitched up between their legs”

(Midnight’s 530) and “the intricacies of turmeric and cumin, the subtlety of fenugreek”

(531), the larger point of the pickling is to preserve and disseminate memory; in other words, to facilitate his postcolonial project that “the world may taste the pickles of history” and know the truth.

Shame

Published in 1983, Shame follows the political and cultural development of

Pakistan after partition through the characters Sufiya Zinobia, a young, mentally challenged woman filled with shame, and Omar Shakil, a shameless doctor. Their relationship illustrates the heavy burden of the “honor and shame” (Rushdie, Shame 117) culture that pervades Pakistan. Even though Pakistan is the center of Rushdie’s imaginative critique, he also addresses the way in which Pakistan’s history is tied to its colonial past and postcolonial present. For example, Sufiya’s rage is based on two incidences concerning South Asian young women in the West: an anonymous girl beaten by white youths on a train for no reason (supposedly based on Rushdie’s own sister) and a Pakistani girl murdered by her father in London for dating a “white boy” (117). By including these two references, Rushdie turns the critique back to western institutionalized racism and the orientalist assumption that such violence is the exclusive reality of the East.

Rushdie’s attack of Islam is not as much an indictment of that religion as it a treatise against dictatorship based on religious rhetoric: “So-called Islamic

‘fundamentalism’ does not spring from the people. It is imposed on them from above.

97

Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith, because people respect that language, are reluctant to oppose it. This is how religions shore up dictators” (266).

This is supported by General Zia’s policies after assuming power. He finds himself torn between listening to the ghost of his defeated rival, Iskander Harappa, who quotes lines from Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, and listening to the ghost of Maulana Dawood, a fundamentalist mullah, who tells him “that God and socialism were incompatible, so that the doctrine of Islamic Socialism on which the Popular Front had based its appeal was the worst kind of blasphemy imaginable” (262). Thus Rushdie depicts Islam (and its socialist potential) as hijacked by a dictator who uses religion as a crutch to justify his tyranny over the populace and shore up his authority to rule. This is significant because Rushdie makes it clear that Islam is not inherently prone to facilitating the abuse of power:

It needs to be said repeatedly in the West that Islam is not more

monolithically cruel, no more an ‘evil empire,’ than Christianity,

capitalism or communism. The medieval, misogynistic, stultifying

ideology which Zia imposed on Pakistan in his ‘Islamization’ programme

was the ugliest possible face of the faith, and one by which most Pakistani

Muslims were, I believe, disturbed and frightened. To be a believer is not

by any means to be a zealot ( Imaginary 54).

Rushdie also implicates the U.S. in the tyranny of Zia’s seizure of power: his views on the incompatibility of socialism and Islam, “made Raza very popular with the Americans, who were of the same opinion, even though the God concerned was different” (Rushdie,

Shame 262). Rushdie even explores the possibility that Islam has the potential to be a force of political and cultural unity, stating that “Islam might well have proved an

98 effective unifying force in post- Pakistan, if people hadn’t tried to make it into such an almighty big deal. Maybe Sindhis, Baluchis, Punjabis and Pathans, not to mention the immigrants, would have sunk their differences for the sake of their common faith” (266). This clear distinction between the religion Islam and the practice of it by various communities, and specifically the atrocities done in its name, is an important feature of Rushdie’s treatment of Islam in his early works.

The Satanic Verses

One cannot discuss Rushdie’s representations of Islam in The Satanic Verses without discussing the Rushdie Affair. After its publication in 1988, the Ayatollah

Khomeini issued a fatwa, condemning Rushdie for his blasphemy. He spent the next decade in hiding under the protection of the British secret service. The Satanic Verses traces the lives of two Indian men, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta after they plummet to the earth from a terrorist attack on an airplane. Through their disparate experiences upon arrival in London, the novel explores both the racial tensions of 1980s

Britain and a controversial history of a religion based on Islam. This book has been alternately accused of the worst forms of orientalism and lauded as a celebration of diversity with much of both the praise and criticism tied to the political situation surrounding the book instead of its literary themes. 52

In preparing this book for publication, Rushdie anticipated some measure of dissatisfaction with it. No stranger to controversy over his work at that point, 53 Rushdie gave his manuscript to Said for feedback, and Said asked him if he was concerned about

52 Daniel Pipes in The Rushdie Affair: the Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West examines many of the early reactions to The Satanic Verses, critically comparing those which came before and after the fatwa. Looking at the collection of interviews in Conversations with Rushdie also reveals many of the shifts in the novel’s critical reception after the fatwa. 53 Indira Gandhi sued Rushdie for libel over a passage in Midnight’s Children in 1984 and Shame was banned in Pakistan following its publication in 1983. 99 his overt critique of the “radical mullahs” (Rushdie, “Interview by Jack”). Rushdie thought it ridiculous that any of these mullahs would even see his long book written in

English let alone read it and did not suspect that his critical view of the “history” of Islam would motivate thousands of displaced and marginalized Muslims to protest that view.

Despite his reservations, Said went on to praise Rushdie’s novel for its sympathetic yet critical exploration of Islam and migrant Muslims and to defend the writer during the fatwa years. In writing on the controversy in Culture and Imperialism , Said argues, “that it dealt with Islam in English for what was believed to be a largely Western audience was its main offense” (306) because is resulted in two things: 1) An uninformed critique of

Islam by western critics and 2) No effort to learn about the Islamic world beyond

Rushdie’s version of it.

Despite the backlash that Rushdie received for The Satanic Verses from a number of Muslim communities, his novel is a powerful indictment of the overt racism experienced by many non-white British citizens in the 1980s. For example, Rushdie uses the character Saladin and his metamorphosis into a satyr to examine the outrageous experiences of immigrants in Britain at that time: “‘There’s a woman over that way,’ it said, ‘who is now mostly water-buffalo. There are businessmen from Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails. There is a group of holidaymakers from Senegal who were doing no more than changing planes when they were turned into slippery snakes […] We’re going to bust out of here before they turn us into anything worse’” (Rushdie, The Satanic 173).

Essentially, agents of the British government are responsible for turning innocent immigrants into animals simply by having the power to describe them (174). Saladin’s violent treatment at the hands of the police until they realize he is a “British Citizen first

100 class” (169) is held up as further evidence of the pervasive racism that haunted 1980s

Britain.

Rushdie’s portrayal of Islam in The Satanic Verses is the central reason his book faced so much opposition; however it is arguably one of Rushdie’s most sympathetic and beautiful depictions of that faith and its devotees. While it is not without its criticisms of, for example, the many regulations handed down by the prophet-character, Rushdie allows for the triumph of belief in a manner that is almost completely absent from his other novels. To begin with, he is careful to note that this episode of Islamic history is framed as Gibreel’s dream (and a testimony to the moral dilemmas plaguing him throughout the novel). Additionally, the prophet-character is not the Prophet Muhammad of history or faith, but Mahound (the Devil). Read in the context of the story, this apparent renaming of the central figure to Islam is not meant to demonize him, but to illustrate his position as a marginal figure: “he adopted, instead, the demon-tag the farangis hung around his neck. To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn” (95). Even as Rushdie distances his story from “actually existing Islam” (Rushdie, Joseph 345) with these layers, it is meant to be read as a story about doubt within the context of faith as well as a creative commentary on the history of

Islam.

While a full analysis of Rushdie’s depiction of Islam in the novel has been done by others 54 and is outside the scope of this overview, I want to note two ways in which his episodes concerning Islam actually advance his postcolonial project instead of compromising it. The first is simply demonstrating Islam as an Abrahamic religion

54 Such as Rushdie, Islam, and Postcolonial Criticism by Tim Brennan, From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Aftermath by K Malik, and Fiction After the Fatwa: Salman Rushdie and the Charm of Catastrophe by Madelena Gonzalez. 101 through his sympathetic portrait of . Hagar bore the biblical Abraham’s son, Ismail, when his wife was unable to bear a child. Rushdie writes, “Here, in this waterless wilderness, he abandoned her. She asked him, can this be God’s will? He replied, it is.

And left, the bastard” (97). For a western reader, this is not only a way to align his/her sympathies with the matriarch of Islam (the Prophet Muhammad is thought to descend from Ismail), but also a way to educate him/her about Islam’s connection with the other

Abrahamic religions. The second religious episode is in the story of Ayesha and her pilgrims. Ayesha claims that the archangel Gibreel commanded her to take the villagers and walk to Mecca in order to cure her adopted mother’s cancer. Along the way, Ayesha loses some of her followers who begin to suspect that she is a fraud. However, when they reach and Ayesha enters the water with her remaining pilgrims, the doubters independently confirm that they saw the “parting of the Arabian sea” (Rushdie, The

Satanic 518). Later, as the sole surviving member of Ayesha’s Haj is being consumed in flames, he sees Ayesha who commands him to open: “His body split apart from his adam’s-apple to his groin, so that she could reach deep within him, and now she was open, they all were, and at the moment of their opening the waters parted, and they walked to Mecca across the bed of the Arabian Sea” (521). This episode leaves the truth of what happened open to the reader’s interpretation. Although the “official” narrative states that the pilgrims die, the text challenges that narrative and acknowledges the possibility for transcendence through faith. Rushdie’s inclusion of this storyline acts as a counter-point to the doubting and challenging taking place in Gibreel’s dream sequences where the potential “fallacy” of the Qur’an is debated. Ayesha’s story suggests that while

Rushdie is critical of religious dogma, he sees the transformative potential for true faith

102 in the human experience. These two stories exploring the origin of Islam challenge predominant western attitudes about the same and demonstrate Rushdie’s appreciation for the religion even as he maintains a critical stance.

Shalimar the Clown

Shalimar the Clown is at once a story about interfaith romance and globalized conflict. Boonyi, a Hindu, and Shalimar, a Muslim, are united in the valley of Kashmir despite their religious differences. Their union is seen as evidence of the communal harmony and “ Kashmiriyat , Kashmiriniess, the belief that at the heart of Kashmiri culture there was a common bond that transcended all other differences” (Rushdie, Shalimar

110). The arrival of the U.S. ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, however, disrupts the love match and sends Shalimar down a path of vengeance that turns him into an international terrorist. After killing both Boonyi and Max, Shalimar is finally killed by their daughter,

India/Kashmira. At the same time, Rushdie tells the story of post-partition Kashmir and the devastation wrought by nation-states during that conflict. The narrator is careful to contextualize the for a western audience, by structurally aligning

Kashmiri activists and resistance fighters in World War 2:

The resistance, which we think of as heroic, was what we would now call

an insurgency in a time of occupation. Now we live in a time when there

are other insurgencies that we don’t call heroic—that we call terrorist. I

didn’t want to make moral judgments. I wanted to say: That happened

then, this is happening now, this story includes both those things, just look

how they sit together (Rushdie, “Interview by Jack”).

103

Thus, the novel creatively explores the often elided perspectives of local Kashmiri citizens by putting it in dialogue with other moments of historical conflict and their discursive narrativization.

For Rushdie, Kashmir is an ancient paradise, but one that has been blighted by the decades-long conflict between India and Pakistan. In Shalimar , it is clear that Rushdie thinks lovingly and longingly for the still-beautiful region. His descriptions of the valley and the culture of the Kashmiris are not limited to the well-known stereotype of the blue- eyed descendents of Alexander the Great (although he does reference this connection); rather, he explores the unique facets of Kashmir, specifically the citizens of Pachigam, including their expertise in cuisine and theatre. By painting a detailed and intimate picture of the people and their long history in this region, Rushdie challenges prevalent western views of the Kashmir conflict, 55 humanizing the feud and illustrating the diverse viewpoints of the people trapped by the conflict. He is critical of both Pakistan and India, noting the atrocities sanctioned by the Indian army and the damage done to the culture of interfaith tolerance in Kashmir by Pakistani-sponsored mullahs spreading a fundamentalist version of Islam.

One of the reader’s first encounters with India/Kashmira presents us with an interesting commentary on orientalist stereotypes. At the beginning of the novel, India contemplates how her name is “exoticist, colonial,” especially because it seems as though only certain countries become children’s names. Her assessment is not incorrect, given that her forced adoption by her European stepmother and subsequent renaming as “India” is framed as a neo-colonial gesture. At the same time, however, she lists the ways that she

55 The U.S. perceives the valley as majority Muslim, and while maintaining an ostensibly “neutral” stance on the issue, tends to favor its alliance with Pakistan for strategic purposes such as intelligence of terrorist networks (Behera) 104 is not “India” because “She didn’t want to be vast or subcontinental or excessive or vulgar or explosive or crowded or ancient or noisy or mystical or in any way Third

World” (5-6). She claims to be “quite the reverse” in that she is “disciplined, groomed, nuanced, inward, irreligious, understated, calm” (6). Despite what appears to be a problematic dichotomy between eastern and western characteristics here, India/Kashmira ultimately comes to embrace her Kashmiri identity as evidenced by her name change at the end of the novel. India/Kashmira’s initial views on what constitutes “India” echo some of the issues with describing the East as noted by Said in Orientalism .56 However

India/Kashmira’s “western” identity is largely based on the trauma of her youth, and though her attitude is associated in the text with strength, she realizes the limitations of her western perspective during her trip to Kashmir.

Just as Rushdie is concerned with exposing the complicity of both India and

Pakistan in the destruction of Kashmiri society, he also wants western readers to be aware of the way in which American imperialist policies are implicated in the violence and conflict that has historically consumed the valley. One of the ways he explores this is through Max’s affair with Boonyi. Even though Boonyi wants to leave Pachigam and her husband, she quickly becomes discontented with being Max’s mistress. From his perspective, he is helping her, but her isolation and his lust-masquerading-as-love makes her abuse food and narcotics to the detriment of her health. After his affair and news of her pregnancy becomes known, members of the Indian government and the press chastise his audacity to call them the “oppressors” of the Kashmiris and use it to justify their claim on the valley: “A Kashmiri girl ruined and destroyed by a powerful American gave

56 For example, "the absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant, undeveloped, inferior" (Said, Orientalism 300) 105 the Indian government an opportunity to look like it would stand up and defend

Kashmiris against marauders of all types—to defend the honor of Kashmir as stoutly as it would defend that of any other integral part of India” (206). By depicting the role of the

U.S. in the conflict over time, Rushdie challenges the “production of violence that is ultimately named terrorist, ethnic, religious, or fundamentalist” (Daiya 204).

The limitations of this project manifest in his depictions of Islam, beginning first with an idealistic description of pre-conflict Kashmir. His descriptions of pre-partition

Kashmir largely read like an orientalist fantasy: “beneath the whispering chinars and the gossiping poplar trees and in the silent eternal presence of the uncaring mountains, who were preoccupied by the gigantic effort of very slowly pushing themselves higher and higher into the virginal sky” (Rushdie, Shalimar 76). Kashmir is ancient, mystical, beautiful, and exotic as evidenced by the Shalimar garden with its “verdant liquid terraces” and “shining lake” (14). The communal harmony of the valley, before partition and the subsequent Indian-Pakistan conflict, is represented as not only the way they have lived for centuries, but also essential to their definition of their region identity:

“Kashmiriyat , Kashmiriness, the belief that at the heart of Kashmiri culture there was a common bond that transcended all other differences” (11). Much of this cultural harmony depends on compromising on traditions. For example, the pandits eat meat and the

Muslims worship “at the shrines of the valley’s many local saints, its pirs” (83). They

“eat the same dishes” (71) and the women do not veil themselves. After partition and the aggressions of the Indian Army and Pakistani-backed groups in the region, the beauty and communal harmony of the valley is blighted: “The ruins of the old village were still visible, the charred foundations of the wooden houses, the blighted orchards, the broken

106 street, and around and in between these ghosts new dwellings had spring up, ramshackle hovels of sticks and earth and moss thrown together without any evidence of care or thought” (362). The fear pervading the valley is evidenced by the fact that all women are now veiled. Rushdie’s idealized pre-conflict picture of communal harmony is more about highlighting his criticism of the atrocities done in the name of sectarian violence (based on religious difference) than representing a complex and historicized version of pre- partition Kashmir.

One of Rushdie’s reasons for writing Shalimar the Clown was to work through the reasons someone might become a terrorist. 57 As I discuss above, he explores the national, political, and cultural factors that contribute to the development and sustenance of terrorist networks. In the character of Shalimar, however, he looks into the personal motivations that could turn a clown into an international terrorist. Shalimar begins life with the viewpoint that Hindu and Muslim are “merely descriptions, not divisions […]

When he told himself these things he believed them with all his heart” (57). Later, he attempts to revise his perspective:

Ideology was primary. The infidel, obsessed with possessions and wealth,

did not grasp this, and believed that men were primarily motivated by

social and material self-interest. This was the mistake of all infidels, and

also their weakness, which made it possible for them to be defeated. The

true warrior was not primarily motivated by worldly desires, but by what

he believed to be true. Economics was not primary. Ideology was primary

(265).

57 In his interview with Steve Inskeep, Rushdie said “Well, it was part of the challenge of the book, and I mean although it may seem false to say this, I wasn't really thinking about myself. I was thinking about trying to understand how a human being can change from being a gentle young man to a ruthless grownup murderer.” 107

Despite Shalimar’s determination to subsume himself and his desires, he remains aware of his true motivation which is not to fight a war for god, but to avenge his honor and kill his wife and her former lover. One of Shalimar’s fellow fighters, a Filipino Muslim, acknowledges the rarity of a person who is both a “man of god” and “man of war” like the Iron Mullah. Whereas the Filipino is fighting because the U.S. backed the Catholics of Mindanao who were responsible for keeping the Muslim population in poverty,

Shalimar’s only true motivation is to murder the American ambassador for sleeping with his wife. By contrasting Shalimar’s motivations with the iron mullah’s philosophy and the Filipino’s reason for fighting, Rushdie seeks to reveal how many terrorists are neither fighting for a people or a faith, but for “very trivial reasons” (Rushdie, “Interview with

Steve”). This assessment offers little in the way of a historicized understanding of terrorist motivations which address the geopolitical factors that shape emergent conflicts.

Even though he acknowledges how nation-states are complicit in the development of international terrorist networks, the novel’s focus on Shalimar’s revenge, elides a more complex understanding of both violence and “fundamentalist Islam.”

Rushdie further explores this in the courtroom scene in which Shalimar is on trial for murdering the American ambassador. Even though the prosecution is trying to emphasize the personal reasons why Shalimar killed the ambassador, the defense argues that it was, in fact, Shalimar’s traumatic past and subsequent brainwashing by terrorist training camps that lead to the murder of the ambassador. The jury, caught up in the fear of brain-washed terrorists walking around the U.S., gravitates to the narrative of

Shalimar’s trauma:

108

his village was destroyed by the Indian army. Razed to the ground, every

structure destroyed. The dead body of his brother was thrown at his

mother’s feet with the hands severed. Then his mother was raped and

killed and his father was also slain. And then they killed his wife, his

beloved wife […] This is exactly the kind of person the terrorist puppet

masters seek out, this is the kind of mind that responds to their sorcery

(385).

Rushdie is attempting to caution his reading public from excusing the violence of many

Islamic terrorists with their dire circumstances (whether or not caused by U.S. military and political interference). In this passage, Rushdie depicts the so-called western liberal viewpoint that Shalimar could have any true accountability for his actions because terrorists are usually just brainwashed by people who replace a “picture of the world that has been broken” with a new one “painted for him, brushstroke by brushstroke” (385).

Ultimately Shalimar is set free because of the jury’s supposed preconceptions about and general fear of terrorism, suggesting that there are no legitimate circumstances in which a western jury could feel justified sympathy for an Islamic terrorist. This implicit warning to Americans to realize the personal, and in this case patriarchal, misogynist, motivations for terrorism elides the many social, cultural, and political factors that enable jihadists to recruit followers.

Enchantress of Florence

The premise for Enchantress of Florence is an imaginary encounter between the

East and West in the time of the Great, Mughal Emperor of the from 1556 until 1605; an encounter facilitated by a fictional half-Mughal

109 half-Italian emissary named Mogor dell’Amore. Mogor weaves an incredible tale to trace his supposed relationship to the Mughal royal court through the beautiful, but forgotten, enchantress named Qara Koz. Rushdie, in fact, takes the true history of the deliverance of letters of trade sent by Queen Elizabeth I to Akbar in 1585 as a point of departure. What follows is an interesting look at the similarities between the so-called East and West at this time and the often absent perspective of the “Orient.” Drawing on an impressive body of research as evidenced by the book’s bibliography, Rushdie inverts the familiar euro-centric history of that time and challenges the mythos of the superiority of

Renaissance Europe to the decadent backwardness of the Orient.

In Enchantress, the western gaze is reversed and the reader not only experiences history from the perspective of the Mughal court, but also how the west appears ridiculous through the eyes of the emperor. For example, Akbar’s imaginary consort

Jodha “laughed at the foreigners’ paltry approximations of natural beauty, their vaals and aalps, half-words to describe half-things,” noting, “Their kings were savages, and they had nailed their god to a tree. What did she want with people as ridiculous as that?”

(Rushdie, Enchantress 47). On more than one occasion, Akbar seeks not only to impress his western visitor with the largess and sophistication of his kingdom (“He had invited

Mogor dell’Amore to accompany him to the Tent so that he could show off his new invention, impress upon the newcomer the splendid originality and progressiveness of the

Mughal court” 78), but also to challenge the prevailing biases of the West as described in the Mogor’s stories. He points out, for example, the hypocrisy of calling his people worshippers of “strange gods” when Christianity has “‘three gods, a carpenter, a father, and a ghost’” (138). When the Mogor tells him “about the new, heliocentric model of the

110 universe, speaking in a low voice, because it was a concept which could still get a man burned at the stake for ,” the emperor laughs, saying that they have known this for years: ‘How backward your reborn Europe seems to be, like a baby throwing a rattle out its bassinet because it doesn’t want the rattle to make a noise” (153). The inclusion of these moments challenges the dominant narrative of the progressive, culturally-superior

West at the time of the High Renaissance and turn the gaze back on western, Christian

Europe in a powerful way.

Enchantress also explores how the East and West are similar to usurp the orientalist rhetoric of the differences that shore up European superiority. For example, the

Florentine Argalia, after learning that the Ottoman navy operates by the rule that the end justifying the means, asks “‘If that is correct’ […] ‘then are they truly our enemies? Is our proper adversary not our antithesis? Can the face we see in a mirror be our foe?’” (170).

Even their criteria for what makes a woman pleasing to a man becomes a point of connection: “‘Ah, but the courtesan,’ said Mogor, ‘she fulfills all your ideals, except, possibly, for the business about stained glass’” (154). In exploring the sameness of the two cultures, Rushdie replaces the narrative of difference that was perpetuated by western explorers and historians. He presses the connection further by suggesting that wherever there are systems of absolute power, the sameness will prevail: “Florence was everywhere and everywhere was Florence. Everywhere in the world there were omnipotent princes, Medici who ran things because they had always run things, and who could make the truth what they wanted it to be merely by decreeing it to be so” (265). By this standard, emperor Akbar’s struggle between asserting his will and allowing for

111 dissent is progressive. In this way, Rushdie illustrates the relatively progressive politics of the well-known Mughal ruler.

Just as Akbar attempts to impress his foreign guest with his progressiveness and culture, so Rushdie is trying to impress his western readers with the details of Akbar’s progressive reign. In doing so, he illustrates a moment in the history of Islam which is, by his definition, “modern” and thus more palatable than Islam in the 21 st century.

Underlying Rushdie’s enthusiasm for Akbar and his mission to show this history of Islam to modern Muslims is arguably an orientalist move as defined by Said: “Faced with the obvious decrepitude and political impotence of the modern Oriental, the European

Orientalist found it his duty to rescue some portion of a lost, past classical Oriental grandeur in order to ‘facilitate ameliorations’ in the present Orient” ( Orientalism 79).

Rushdie explores both the factual elements of the historical Akbar’s impressive leadership decisions and the fictional imaginings of Akbar’s thoughts on sovereignty of the self and the problems with religion. For example, in an effort to atone for the beheading of the Rana of Cooch Naheen, Akbar builds a Temple of New Worship, “a debating chamber in which the adoration of the divine was reimagined as an intellectual wrestling match in which no holds were barred” (Rushdie, Enchantress 78). Akbar sees this development as evidence of “the splendid originality and progressiveness of the

Mughal court” (78). At the same time, Rushdie follows Akbar’s interior thoughts on a number of controversial, ostensibly “progressive” ideas like : “ Maybe there was no true religion . Yes, he had allowed himself to think this. He wanted to be able to tell someone of his suspicion that men had made their gods and not the other way around. He wanted to be able to say, it is man at the center of things, not God” (81). By exploring

112 these “modern” concepts of freedom of expression and atheism, Rushdie offers readers an example of a period when “Indian Islam developed its much more open, multiple, pluralistic philosophy which embraced and was affected by the other older belief systems of India” (Rushdie, “Interview by Naresh”).

By contrast, modern Islam lacks the tolerance for dissent and alternate belief systems that Rushdie locates in Akbar. Although Rushdie is critical of Hindu and

Christian extremists as well, he argues that the “‘overwhelming weight of the problem lies in the world of Islam’” (Singh). Rushdie argues that for Islam, “‘modernity itself is the enemy, modernity with its language of liberty, for women as well as men, with its insistence of legitimacy in government rather than tyranny, and with its strong inclination towards secularism and away from religion’” (Singh). Depicting Akbar and his progressive ideas and policies is Rushdie’s answer to what Rushdie calls “Islamists” calling for the return of the Caliphate. Perhaps anticipating accusations that this version of Akbar, a beloved historical figure in the Islamic world, and his progressive policies and attitudes is entirely fabricated, Rushdie provides a lengthy bibliography at the end of the novel—a gesture absent from his previous works. More likely he includes it to bolster his own authority on Akbar’s reign and the religious debates within the Islamic world at that time.

In November, 2001, Rushdie published a column with the title “Yes, This Is

About Islam” 58 in which he points out that the terrorist events of 2001 are about Islam and not the many excuses that world leaders had for the violence. Exploring a progressive, tolerant version of Islam in the distant past (through the characters of Akbar

58 Later re-titled “Not About Islam?” in his published collection of essays, Step Across This Line. 113 in Enchantress ) coupled with his repeated criticisms of “Actually Existing Islam”

(Rushdie, Joseph 345) suggests that Rushdie is incapable of imagining or acknowledging strands of 21 st century Islamic communities that are compatible with “the secularist- humanist principles on which the modern is based” (Rushdie, Step Across 341).

Enchantress becomes a way for Rushdie to explore some of the cultural similarities between the East as defined by Akbar’s court and the West as defined by Florence during the High Renaissance. This comparison allows him to return the western gaze, to critically examine the conditions of obtaining and maintaining power, and to creatively explore aspects of Akbar’s reign that might be unfamiliar to many readers. These moves are strategic within a postcolonial literary discourse, and yet Rushdie’s shadow-intention, to show contemporary Islam its past (and potential future), is indicative of Rushdie’s larger issues with religion, and specifically Islam, in the modern world.

Joseph Anton: Memoir

Joseph Anton is Rushdie’s memoir covering the years during the fatwa (1989-

2002) and dipping into other parts of his past as well. The title refers to his code name used by the British secret service during his years in hiding. Rushdie’s purpose in writing his memoir is made clear in the Prologue when he describes what happened after the fatwa was issued: “How easy it was to erase a man’s past and to construct a new version of him, an overwhelming version, against which it seemed impossible to fight” ( Joseph

5). This memoir is an attempt to address the public narrative surrounding his experience with the fatwa and years in hiding under protection. Following the fatwa and then his years in hiding, Rushdie sought to distance himself from the incident and to pull criticism of his work away from the emphasis on politics and Islam toward a focus on the literary

114 merits of his published works. 59 With the publication of this memoir, Rushdie has reignited interest in his fatwa years and in his work as controversial within the discourse of Islam and the West. It is no coincidence that the publication of his memoir followed the development of his official archive which is housed in the Manuscripts Archives Rare

Books Library at Emory University. He attributes his ability to write the memoir to the necessity of going through his files for the archive (Williams). In opening his archive to researchers, Rushdie must have seen how his materials might be interpreted by others. To address the “truth” of what happened, he decided to write the story himself and provide the intimate details of his time in hiding that journalists have for so long wanted to know.

More than any of his previously published works, the memoir highlights the limitations of his postcolonial project when it comes to the issue of Islam. One of the most significant issues with his memoir is the changes Rushdie made to the narrative of the Rushdie Affair. Zoe Heller’s “The Salman Rushdie Case” points out a number of inconsistencies, including the “case that Rushdie seems to be making for fiction’s immunity from political or religious anger.” Throughout his career, Rushdie has oscillated between his view that “description is itself a political act” ( Imaginary 13) and his assertion that “literature, properly understood, cannot offend” (Heller).

Of all the retrenchments and narrowings of viewpoint that are on display

in Joseph Anton , the saddest, perhaps, is his altered attitude toward Islam.

Throughout the fatwa, Rushdie carefully resisted the temptation to make

Islam itself the enemy […] But his tolerance for this sort of distinction has

59 One example is the video interview “Salman Rushdie: On Storytelling” Rushdie attempts to repel the interviewer’s intentions to bring up the fatwa and his current work’s potential references to Islam. 115

since waned. Now he regards any efforts to separate reactionary forms of

Islam from Islam itself as dishonest and wrong (Heller).

The several alterations to his known history are deliberate gestures to reframe his past to make it align with his present beliefs and to emphasize the way in which his experience represents what western readers need to understand about contemporary Islam. What emerges is a narrative that casts a shadow on his own celebrated history as a champion of the marginalized and critic of the xenophobia that has often plagued western politics of representation. It also closes off the potential for contemporary Islam to be represented outside of a terrorist discourse.

Joseph Anton opens with a metaphor of the Hitchcock film The Birds . Rushdie uses the metaphor to situate his experience with the fatwa within the contemporary experience of militant Islam. The fatwa he received for writing The Satanic Verses in

1989 was, in his view, “the first blackbird” which is “individual, particular, specific”

(Rushdie, Joseph 4). Later, he argues, the first blackbird will be viewed as a “harbinger.”

The attack of the birds culminates in the events of 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in London among other incidences dealing with Islamic extremism. This metaphor frames his entire memoir and presents the reader with a problematic teleology that offers his experience as an originary event that prophetically signals what was to come. The first issue with this frame for his memoir is the suggestion that his experience with the fatwa is the first incident of terrorism committed in the name of Islamic values (the “first bird” in his metaphor) which is hardly the case. The second is how his metaphor suggests a direct line or connection between his experience with the fatwa and the terrorist acts that followed which elides important contextual knowledge concerning everything from post-

116 revolutionary Iran and life in Thatcherite Britain to the politics and rhetoric surrounding

Islam and terrorism in the 21 st century. While Rushdie may be correct that people ended up perceiving his experience as the “harbinger” of the events that followed his years in hiding, using this frame to start his memoir illuminates some of the problems with the politics of representation that he uses to depict himself and contemporary Islam.

One of the inconsistencies in his memoir is his description of his public declaration of his Muslim faith following the fatwa. He reframes this declaration as a pact made with Islamic religious leaders and a cruel trick wherein his decision-making was impaired: “He was lost inside a whirlwind, dizzy, blinded by what he had done, and had no idea where the tornado was taking him. He heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing”

(275). He claims that while he did give interviews relating to his public declaration of faith, that he does not recall anything that he said in those interviews. However, he did, in fact, publish “Why I Have Embraced Islam” in the hardback edition of Imaginary

Homelands before omitting it in the paperback edition. His declaration depicts a very different encounter with the Islamic religious leaders than the one in Joseph Anton :

Well, I'm now inside the family, and now Muslims can talk to Muslims

and continue the process of reconciliation that began with my Christmas

Eve meeting with six Muslim scholars. This meeting, which has been

described in some sections of the Western press as a defeat, was in fact a

victory for compassion, understanding and tolerance […] “We want to

reclaim you for ourselves," one of the scholars said, and I replied that I,

too, wished to reclaim them. The mood of the meeting was generous and

even affectionate, and it moved me greatly. (Rushdie, “Now I Can Say”)

117

Additionally, in an interview with Akbar Ahmed for The Guardian , Rushdie confirmed that he had not declared his faith in Islam “out of duress” and detailed his journey of faith for the interviewer (“Interview by Akbar” 142). He describes Islam as “a culture of tolerance and compassion and forgiveness and love” and hopes westerners will “adopt a more complex view of Islam and not simply to create these stereotypical black and white oppositions which have embarrassed me in the last two years when they have been used to defend me” (144). The issue of whether or not he truly identified with being a Muslim is not my focus here, but rather his conflicting depictions of the incident in light of his extreme in recent years. While there is no doubt that Rushdie rescinded his declaration of faith after the promised forgiveness never materialized, Rushdie’s final version arguably does more to shore up his current political and religious views than it does to illustrate what actually happened.

In “Why I Embraced Islam” Rushdie suggests that The Satanic Verses is a reflection of his own spiritual journey, but in Joseph Anton , Rushdie explains the origin of his idea for The Satanic Verses as an exploration of a faith grounded in recorded history. While at Cambridge, Rushdie took a course titled “Muhammad, the rise of Islam and the Early Caliphate” with medievalist Arthur Hibbert in 1967, and this course sparked his early ideas for the novel. He writes that it was in this course he learned about the faith with which he was casually brought up as “analytically, judiciously, properly ”

(Rushdie, Joseph 40; his emphasis). Here Rushdie draws a distinction between the “right” way to learn about religion (academically) and the “wrong” way (religiously). He notes that he “was a historian by training” (55), lending authenticity to his fictional representations of Islam. By emphasizing how his knowledge of Islam is based on

118 historical study, Rushdie sets himself up as the diametric opposite of Islamic fundamentalists: “The rising tide of Islamic radicalism was described by its own ideologues as a ‘revolt against history.’ History, the forward progress of peoples through time, was itself the enemy, more than any mere infidels or blasphemers. But the new, which was history’s supposedly despised creation, could be employed to revive the power of the old” (131). In fact, Rushdie’s study of the history of Islam and the significance of The Satanic Verses is shaped by 1960s historiography. Had he studied this history later on, "it is possible that a very different fable of Enlightenment might have been woven into the saga of the fatwa: a fable far more akin to Rushdie's early celebration of 'mongrelisation' than to the essentialist West-and-Rest discourse that has come to mark his recent writings" (Perchard 8).

Rushdie’s use of language to describe contemporary Islam in Joseph Anton problematically echoes the orientalists of the past. Islam is frequently characterized as ancient, antique, or medieval: “the modern was being turned against itself by the medieval, in the service of a worldview that disliked modernity itself—rational, reasonable, innovative, secular, skeptical, challenging, creative modernity, the antithesis of mystical, static, intolerant, stultifying faith” (Rushdie, Joseph 131). The grand sheikh

Gad el-Haq Ali Gad el-Haq “sounded almost impossibly antiquated to him, an Arabian

Nights name belonging to the age of flying carpets and wonderful lamps” (123). These descriptions problematically characterize Islam as “static, frozen, fixed eternally” and

“The very possibility of development, transformation, human movement […] is denied the Orient and the Oriental” (Said, Orientalism 208). Additionally, the negative allusion

119 to the Arabian Nights exoticizes Islam. 60 For Rushdie, Islam is further associated with backwardness: “The arrival of the new was not always linked to progress. Men found new ways of oppressing one another, too, new ways of unmaking their best achievements and sliding back toward that primal ooze” ( Joseph 343) and to disease: “He know, as surely as he knew anything, that the fanatical cancer spreading through Muslim communities would, in the end, explode into the wider world beyond Islam.” (346).

While Rushdie is known for his use of “Islamist” to describe a fundamentalist

Muslim, he makes it clear in Joseph Anton that his real issue is with Islam itself: “That thing needed to be fought and to fight it one had to name it and the only name that fit was

Islam ” (356). Whereas in his previous works and interviews Rushdie makes a distinction between the fundamentalist, extremist jihadists who use Islam to justify their violence, here he suggests that it is, in fact, the religion itself that is to blame: “Actually Existing

Islam, could not be exonerated from the crimes done in its name” (438). Anticipating objections from various academics to his claim, Rushdie uses the fall of Communism and the rise of Revolutionary Islam as evidence that the dialectical materialism of Marxism is flawed: “in the dialectics of the world beyond the Communism-capitalism confrontation, it would be made clear that culture could be primary too […] And ideology, as Ayatollah

Khomeini and his cohorts were insisting, could certainly be primary” (110). It is not, he contends about any number of issues invoked by western academics to explain the rise of fundamentalist Islam such as race and class; “The wars of ideology and culture were moving to the center of the stage” (110). According to Rushdie, it is not even about power. In response to Jacques Derrida’s argument that the “‘rage of Islam’ was driven

60 Said’s Orientalism notes that the Orient is often associated with “the exotic, the mysterious, the profound” (51). 120 not by Islam but by the misdeeds of the West. Ideology had nothing to do with it. It was a question of power” (438), Rushdie states flatly that they will never agree on anything.

Conclusion

On January 7, 2015, the staff of the satirical French publication Charlie Hebdo was attacked by two individuals claiming to be members of the Yemen branch of Al-Qaeda.

Later that year, PEN International awarded the publication its 2015 PEN/Toni and James

C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award to honor the publication's sacrifice in pursuit of freedom of expression. Rushdie whole-heartedly condemned the attack and supported the award. When several well-known authors declared that they would boycott the award ceremony because they did not agree that Charlie Hebdo , which they viewed as a racist, Islamaphobic publication, should be honored in this manner, Rushdie called them out on Twitter with a scathing remark on their lack of character. From the moment he learned about the attack, Rushdie rushed to defend the publication, noting that "This issue has nothing to do with an oppressed and disadvantaged minority. It has everything to do with the battle against fanatical Islam" ("Courage"). In the past, Rushdie would not have excused the violence against the publication by any means, but he might have also addressed the current ramifications of France’s colonial history, 61 the country’s often intense xenophobia, and its recent politically-charged debates over restricting religious freedoms for Muslims in the public sphere (“European”) as context for the attack.

Writing in a post-9/11 world in his 2003 preface to Orientalism, Said makes it clear that those who “live the pluri-cultural life,” like Rushdie, are obliged to “complicate

61 Nabila Ramdani in the article “French-Algerians are still second-class citizens” details the many ways in which the formerly colonized Algerians are de facto second class citizens within contemporary France. 121 and/or dismantle the reductive formulae and the abstract but potent kind of thought that leads the mind away from concrete human history and experience and into the realms of ideological fiction, metaphysical confrontation, and collective passion” (xxiii). It is not that we cannot be critical of “issues of injustice and suffering, but that we need to do so always within a context that is amply situated in history, culture, and socioeconomic reality.” He cautions against the kind of elitist humanism that touts the superiority of western enlightenment liberalism and its incompatibility with concepts like religion, noting that it has not facilitated genuine understanding and compassion, and, in fact, this

“well-organized sense that these people over there were not like ‘us’ and didn’t appreciate ‘our’ values” has lead to devastating atrocities in our time. As Daiya notes in

“The World After Empire; or Wither Postcoloniality?", “our contemporary moment--shot through with unceasing wars, environmental destruction, and mass displacements-- demands from us a new postcolonial critique of imperialist discourses of Western freedom in whose name the violence continues" (153-154).

If Said were still alive today, he might be dismayed to learn that Rushdie’s views on

Islam, and religion in general, have become increasingly critical and less nuanced. While

Rushdie can hardly be accused of orientalism in his early works, his later published works and interviews are deeply marked by colonialist tropes and essentializing modes of discussing non-Western religions, especially Islam. Rushdie squarely identifies himself as a humanist, 62 but not the kind that Homi Bhabha advocates—"a new humanism that breaks free from the collectivity of nationalism. This humanism, because it is animated by energies of Third Worldism, can be strategic, activist, and aspirational—instead of

62 See The Humanist’s podcast titled “Salman Rushdie and Cultural Humanism.” 122 universalist, hegemonic, and essentialist" (Daiya, “The World” 153). Rushdie’s fierce adherence to western liberal humanism and refusal to imagine, for example, a world in which devout Muslims can also be modern, highlights the blind spot that limits his relevance as a postcolonial critic. 63 While his fiction sheds important critical light on western globalization and the experience of Postcolonialism, his framing of Islam and

Muslim communities in his more recent work is grounded in an orientalist discourse of east vs. west and fails to narrate Islam and Muslims in a complex, historicized, nuanced manner.

63 See Gayatri Spivak in The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues which addresses representation and self- representation in relation to postcolonial criticism. 123

Chapter 4

The Man Who Would Be Popular: An Analysis of Rushdie’s Twitter and Facebook

Feeds

Few contemporary authors can claim the complex and varied relationship to celebrity that Salman Rushdie has had since his first successful novel Midnight’s

Children . In the past thirty-five years, Rushdie has been publicly heralded as responsible for putting contemporary South Asian literature on the map of western readership, chastised for causing world-wide controversy with the publication of The Satanic Verses , and admired for his ability to land supermodel Padma Lakshmi as his fourth wife.

Throughout this series of often intense media scrutiny, Rushdie has alternately shunned and embraced the spotlight. More recently it seems he is not only embracing his role as a celebrity author, but also taking on a more active approach to cultivating his public persona. One of the ways he cultivates a public persona is through his social media presence. While others have discussed Rushdie’s celebrity more broadly, 64 this chapter focuses on his celebrity and self-representation through two social media platforms:

Facebook and Twitter. Read in connection with the recent publication of his memoir

Joseph Anton and the opening of his official archive at Emory University in 2010,

Rushdie’s use of these social media platforms evidence the author’s investment in crafting his public persona and establishing his legacy.

In addition to allowing scholars to analyze how Rushdie attempts to shape his public image, the patterns that emerge from a study of his social media usage

64 See Joel Kuortti’s “Losing One’s Illusions: Affective Sense-Making in Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton and the Popular Media” and Ana Mendes Salman Rushdie and the Cultural Marketplace for broad discussions of Rushdie’s celebrity status. 124 demonstrate the politics of his self-representation. Early on in his career, Rushdie sought to clarify and normalize his identity as a South Asian to his western public, noting with frustration the frequent mispronunciation of his name by English-speaking people and criticizing the many racial and cultural slurs he endured as a young man. He connected this concern about the way in which he was perceived to the broader issue of how South

Asians, or “brown people” in general, were represented by western media. After the fatwa, Rushdie struggled with his identification as a non-practicing Muslim as well as the continued association of his work with the fatwa and his years in hiding. Against his many remarks in interviews and published works about himself and his identity surged the numerous press pieces and opinion editorials that sought to depict him, at different points, as a victim, a reckless villain, a symbol, and a charlatan. After he emerged from hiding, Rushdie embraced the celebrity spotlight and even sought additional ways in which to engage with the public through social media. It is in these social media spaces that some of Rushdie’s most interesting public engagements occur. As this chapter will demonstrate, his social media presence acts as a valuable opportunity to analyze his various modes of self-representation. Additionally it traces the expansion and evolution of Rushdie’s role as both a public intellectual and as an author in a digital world.

The following chapter examines Rushdie’s social media usage to illustrate the patterns in his modes of self-representation in these digital spaces. Although Rushdie has additional social media accounts, this study focuses solely on Facebook and Twitter because they are the platforms on which he is most active and they are open to the public for viewing. This study looks at Twitter posts between September 2011 and November

2016 and Facebook posts between January 2008 and November 2016. These dates were

125 selected based on the dates he joined each platform. Due to the large number of Tweets covered in this study, I apply discourse analysis to demonstrate patterns in his Twitter use and to analyze these patterns. By contrast, I apply close readings to several example

Facebook posts to analyze his Facebook usage because he posts less frequently on

Facebook than on Twitter and because he relies more heavily on images for his posts on

Facebook.

Rushdie as a Public Intellectual

In “Salman Rushdie as Public Intellectual” Chris Rollason argues that Rushdie was and remains a Saidian intellectual who belongs everywhere and nowhere at once.

Furthermore, he suggests that Rushdie is a public intellectual:

a commentator and analyst not only within his specialist field but also with regard

to public events and issues in general. The public intellectual may be defined as a

figure consecrated in a given area of knowledge or creation who writes in the

press, appears on audiovisual media or, today, blogs or tweets on the internet on a

variety of subjects of public interest and whose opinions are listened to, dissected

and syndicated as an important contribution to debate (Rollason, 1).

He is, however, critical of Rushdie’s most recent forays into the public intellectual realm, suggesting that he has “been less eloquent politically and culturally as he might have been” since “Twitter is a poor substitute for a New York Times column” (Rollason, 7).

And perhaps the same could be said of his frequent television interviews. However even if we look closely at Rushdie’s appearances on the Bill Maher Show or Charlie Rose

Show, his persona in those televised public mediums is still vastly different than his persona on Twitter. Rollason is perhaps correct in his assertion that Rushdie’s Twitter

126 feed makes him appear less eloquent. Although Rushdie can be pointed, abrupt, and argumentative on TV, his behaviour on Twitter is in many ways petty, irrational, and rarely resembles anything like the reasoned discourse in his published essays. Of course much of this behaviour is a result of the unique nature of Twitter. While Twitter has occasionally been compared to more traditional archival materials like letters, news releases, or journals (it is after all a microblogging tool), it is in reality unlike any traditional author archival material because of its public nature, its character limit, and its immediate response function. 65 At the same time, Twitter offers valuable insight into an author’s thinking about a wide variety of topics much like more traditional archival materials. In many ways it is becoming the archive of the future. 66 For the study of a contemporary author, an active Twitter feed is a veritable gold mine of information not just about what he says, but also what is said about him (via hashtags), responses to what he says (via reply tweets), and the speed and frequency with which his words get disseminated (via retweets).

Significantly for this study, Rushdie’s social media feeds allow us to see patterns relating to his role as a celebrity author. Rushdie has a long and varied relationship with the global press and reader responses. Prior to the publication of The Satanic Verses ,

Rushdie received a fair amount of press because of his novel Midnight’s Children which won its first of three Booker prizes in 1981. After the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa in 1989 in response to the publication of The Satanic Verses , Rushdie went into hiding and became regular head-line news. English novelist and one of Rushdie’s closest friends Martin Amis described Rushdie’s sudden fame in Vanity Fair : “Salman had

65 Marwick and Danah (2010:3-4) detail the specific parameters of the Twitter tool and how that compares to other types of mediums for expression. 66 Stone (2010). In April 2010, Twitter agreed to donate its archive to the Library of Congress for “preservation and research.” 127 disappeared into the world of block caps. He had vanished into the front page.” Amis further describes Rushdie as “disturbed” by the “sudden promiscuity of his fame.” For years after emerging from hiding, Rushdie embarked on the largely unsuccessful campaign of trying to wrestle his work back from the clutches of the fatwa and sought to emphasize the literary merit of his work over its position as a subject of controversy. 67

Rushdie’s marriage to American fashion model Padma Lakshmi seemed to signal a new status of modern celebrity authorship. 68 Since that period, Rushdie has embraced the

American celebrity spotlight, and with the publication of his memoir Joseph Anton in

2012, Rushdie has risked another decade of fatwa-related interview questions in an attempt to set the record straight.

While Rushdie is subject to often intense media scrutiny, he is far from a passive author caught up in an unstoppable American celebrity machine. Ana Mendes in her seminal work on Rushdie’s position within the literary marketplace writes of his

“strategic negotiation of his celebrity status” and “his practice as a writer in exposing, intervening, and manipulating the machinery of celebrity to meet his own ends (for example, to open up a space in the global literary market for diasporic South Asian artists)” (65). One of the ways he does this is to shape his fame in the academy. In 2006

Rushdie placed his archive at the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory

University. Between 2006 and 2011 when the archive opened to the public, Rushdie became a distinguished writer-in-residence at Emory and spent many hours going through his archive with library archivists. Although the library archivists note that he is

67 Rushdie (2010). In the video interview “Salman Rushdie: On Storytelling” Rushdie attempts to repel the interviewer’s intentions to bring up the fatwa and his current work’s potential references to Islam. 68 Kuortti and Valovirta (2013) in their conference presentation “Losing One’s Illusion: Affective Sense-Making in Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton and Popular Media” discussed news media coverage of Rushdie’s relationship with Padma Lakshmi and the implications of that moment for his current role as a celebrity author. 128 free with items relating to his work and creative process, evidence of Rushdie’s influence on the available material in the archive is significant. Saltzman discusses some examples of redacted correspondence and paper files within the MARBL archive and suggests, “the hidden data makes it clear how thin the line is between Rushdie's literary legacy and private thoughts, particularly because he's an author who is still living.” This is supported by my own archival research at the MARBL Rushdie Archive. I noted that family photographs, personal correspondence, some private journals, and legal documents are closed to researchers. Rushdie also returns to the archive at least once a year (Farr) and has promised to pass along “all his subsequent digital effects” including, perhaps, his tweets and Instagram photos (Rockmore). In an interview at the Woodruff Library,

Rushdie stated that going through the archive “‘allowed [him] to write the memoir’”

(Williams). Both the curation of the archive and the publication of the memoir are legacy-shaping gestures that attempt to both craft and control access to and understanding of Rushdie’s past. 69

This concerted effort is arguably the result of Rushdie’s feelings of being misunderstood and doomed in the postmodern media cycle, continually reduced to popular misconceptions and viral rumours. The role of his ego is central to his self- fashioning here and evident, for example, in his commentary on the similarities between himself and Niccolo Machiavelli. In Enchantress , Rushdie sets out to rectify what he calls a serious historical injustice: the modern reputation of Machiavelli who is now associated exclusively with the controversial politics of his book The Prince . Rushdie confirmed that there was a parallel between his interest in Machiavelli and his own

69 Gopal (2013) Keynote address at Salman Rushdie in the 21 st Century: Swallowing a World. Gopal discussed the ways Rushdie has reshaped his own history with the fatwa; first by deleting his essay “Why I Have Embraced Islam” from the paperback edition of Imaginary Homelands and then by changing the incident significantly in his memoir Joseph Anton . 129 experiences of being misrepresented: “I came across [this history of Machiavelli] before I was myself the target of falsifications […] this demonization process happened to me”

(Krasny). According to Rushdie, Machiavelli is just one of many historical figures who, in his view, have become “abstract, ahistorical, postmodern […] a free floating concept, a part of the available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reinvented, to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth” (“Gandhi”). He goes on to say in the interview that he hopes that hundreds of years from now, someone would take up the cause of redeeming him from the abuses of history likewise. While Rushdie has long made strategic decisions to establish himself as a canonical author, his recent actions to open his archive, write his memoir, and engage with social media suggest he is anxious that letting his work speak for itself will not be enough to secure his legacy.

Rushdie and Social Media

Rushdie’s entry into the world of social media was immediately fraught with issues of identity. In September 2011, Rushdie joined the social network Twitter, but initially had to use the handle @salmanrushdie1 since @salmanrushdie was already established, but inactive. After appealing to Twitter, Rushdie was ultimately successful in acquiring his desired handle. He also faced some issues with his Facebook account in the fall of 2011. His account was suspended because Facebook representatives did not believe he was the real Salman Rushdie. Once he cleared up the matter of his identity, they still refused to allow him to use “Salman Rushdie” as his Facebook name since the name on his passport is “Ahmed Rushdie.” After a series of complaints directed at

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Facebook executive using his Twitter account, Rushdie was finally able to reactivate his Facebook account with his chosen name.

When he initially joined Twitter, his idea for its use was to tweet a short story he was developing called “A Globe of Heaven” 140 characters at a time. Although he abandoned this idea, it was clear from the outset that Rushdie’s interest in Twitter was significant. In the first month he attempted to demonstrate his total mastery of the site, utilizing popular hashtags, advising others on direct messaging, and limiting his tweets to

120 characters to enable retweeting. Rushdie then proceeded to spend his first weeks on

Twitter amassing followers and enduring targeted questions by fans to determine whether or not he was who he claimed to be. Early on, Rushdie described his interest in Twitter as

“more of a one-night stand right now; it’s not a marriage” (Pauker). Despite this initial scepticism, he has since tweeted 3,500 tweets over the course of five years. In addition to a Facebook page and Twitter feed, Rushdie also has a Tumblr site and Instagram account.

He is arguably one of the most “plugged-in” authors of his generation, and more famous as a result of this type of public engagement.

All of these social media experiments offer the literary scholar unique opportunities to examine discursive patterns and significant insights into an author’s process, identity-formation, and political, as well as cultural priorities. Kirschenbaum in

“What is an @uthor?” suggests the “threshold of critical responsibility” has shifted in the digital age. A responsible literary scholar should not view these digital paratexts as simply “intentional fallacies” or “mere ephemera.” Instead he argues that the social media landscape has altered the very notion of authorship. Are these paratexts, like

Nietzsche’s laundry list, a text of some voyeuristic value but essentially worthless in the

131 study of an author’s body of work? Sergio Tavares in “What is an Author in Social

Media?” argues that an author’s Twitter feed is another kind of authorial product more than worthy of our attention. In the past, the development of an author persona, engagement with fans, and management of public relations was the purview of publishers, public relations specialists, and authorized fan clubs. However, now in “new media, the trivial and the personal blends with authorial content, and it is meant to be that way” (Tavares, 3). Tavares provides tweet categories similar to the ones designated for this study, focusing on three major areas: curation tweets, personal remark tweets, and public relations tweets. The first set involve the dissemination of information and include retweets that the author feels his followers should consider and are new methods of performing within the role of a public intellectual. The third set, tweets dealing with matters of public relations, signal two important shifts in our conceptualization of the author persona: a new “degree of transparency” and a new “level of frailty” (8). That the author uses the Twitter platform to promote his own work challenges the myth of the artist and his work as separate from the promotion and sale of the product. Rushdie certainly devotes a significant number of tweets to the promotion of his saleable products, but the vast majority of his tweets serve ultimately to cultivate a specific authorial image.

He might tweet about an upcoming charity event to ostensibly promote the charity, but often it is an event featuring himself and/or his work; thus the tweet works to present him as a philanthropist donating his creative talents in the service of a good cause.

After abandoning Twitter as a solely creative space in which to craft 140- character stories, Rushdie posted a series of blog posts in Tumblr building up to a finished short story after which his use of the platform fizzled. However after the death of

132 his good friend Christopher Hitchens, Rushdie again returned to his Tumblr site to post his response to Hitchens’s death even though it had already been published by Vanity

Fair . This use of Tumblr, like his wider use of Twitter, speaks to his awareness of and desire for a wider readership. Up until the advent and popularity of these sites, Rushdie’s readership was largely limited to the select readers of publications like and Vanity Fair (largely liberal, educated, and middle-to-upper class). Now, however,

Rushdie seems to be interested in the idea of reaching new readers outside of that matrix, resulting in a more global, diverse, and youthful audience who would be more likely to watch a book trailer, listen to an audio story, or see a film adaptation of his work. 70 His use of social media spaces to craft narrative and engage with readers is an extension of his long interest in transmedia projects, suggesting continuity as well as innovation. As

Tavares notes, the unique circumstances of social media platforms (content, space, and publicity) ultimately result in “a meltdown of concepts, borders and authorial functions that may constitute of a new idea of what is an author” (9).

Twitter

What initially began as an experiment to tweet a narrative in 140 characters became an intensely dynamic platform for engaging with the public and cultivating an authorial persona for the well-known author. Rushdie now has nearly one million Twitter followers and regularly appears in news media for his Twitter content. Using the popular platform, Rushdie has engaged his hundreds of followers in debates and conversations about a wide range of issues from the 2012 presidential campaign to gun control. More than just an interesting glimpse into Rushdie’s everyday thoughts, his Twitter feed is a

70 Ravy (2014). In my article “‘Parallel Realities:’ Salman Rushdie’s Experiment with Transmedia Narratives” I discuss Rushdie’s interest in creating blended projects that rely on a variety of different media. 133 valuable paratext and digital archive of Rushdie’s work processes, political views, personal interactions, and public persona. 71

Methodology

Although various efforts to archive internet content exist and continue to evolve to meet the demands of growing internet content archives, Twitter has only recently been considered as worth archiving for future reference.72 The staff at the Gelman Library at

The George Washington University developed the Social Feed Manager which connects to Twitter’s approved public APIs to collect data on specific Twitter users. The data not only includes date-stamps and tweet content, but also several columns of analytics including how many followers he had when he tweeted each tweet, how many times the tweet was retweeted, and other relevant information. This study considers tweets between

September 15, 2011 (when Rushdie first started tweeting) and November 18 th , 2016, totalling 2,925 tweets.

I used the grounded theory approach to discourse analysis as explored by Glaser and Strauss. This approach enabled me to mine Rushdie’s Twitter feed for discursive patterns relating to his larger literary and political concerns as well as discover trends in his usage of the platform over time. After an initial review of his feed, I developed the following categories: Self-Promotion, Activism, Death Threat, Games, Follower Critique,

Follower Correction, and Commentary. The characteristics of each category are catalogued as follows:

71 Gerard Genette (1997) defines paratext: "More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold." It is "a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that […] is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it" (1- 2). 72 Both the Library of Congress (2010) which is archiving public tweets and Google (Casey, 2010) which now enables users to replay what was happening on Twitter using a cross-search function see Twitter as a significant resource. 134

1. Self-Promotion . Tweets that were intended to promote his work, his public

schedule, or projects relating to his work;

2. Activism . Tweets relating to various social and activist causes;

3. Death Threat . Tweets in which Rushdie retweets a death threat received via

Twitter or via other mediums;

4. Games . Tweets designed to host a public game on Twitter for Twitter followers to

play;

5. Follower Critique . Tweets which respond to followers in a critical or negative

manner;

6. Follower Correction . Tweets which seek to correct his followers either to clarify

something about himself (or his work) or to respond to misinformation, rumours,

impersonator accounts, and so on;

7. Commentary . Tweets which comment on abstract topics or current events.

After coding the tweets using these categories, I tallied the number of each type of tweet and calculated the percentage for each category. Only 942 (32%) of the 2,925 tweets selected for this study fell into one or more of these categories. The results below are based on this sample.

Analysis

One of my goals was to determine overall trends in Rushdie’s Twitter usage.

Though my results are based on a relatively small percentage of his total tweets to date, they represent an accurate reflection of Rushdie’s tweeting behaviour and general approach to using the platform. Many of the tweets which were left uncoded comprised vague replies to other Twitter users and lacked appropriate context to determine their

135 content or function. After considering the tweets which were coded, three major trends emerge: Self-Promotion, Games, and Commentary.

The largest majority of coded tweets (25%) were those relating to Self-Promotion.

This is perhaps not surprising considering the general trends in Twitter usage for Twitter users both celebrity and not (Marwick and Danah, 2010). However I noticed that his Self-

Promotion tweets included not only general updates on his forthcoming work or public readings, but also specific information designed to promote unique aspects of his celebrity persona. For example, while Rushdie is very interested in promoting himself as a literary celebrity, he seems equally interested in promoting himself as a Social Media celebrity, tweeting links to lists which include him like “From Pen to Camera, Authors on

Instagram.” In response to his inclusion in the “Must-Follow Media Personality” Award list hosted by Mashable , Rushdie tweeted the link to followers to vote for him and the comment, “Ridiculously pleased by #MashableAwards @Mashsocialmedia nom… means I may not be making a total ass of self in this new 140 world” (@salmanrushdie).

Rushdie also appears to be aware that celebrity associations are integral to one’s own celebrity status. Rushdie only occasionally, but still significantly, tweets comments designed to promote his association with other well-known celebrities. These “Celebrity

Association” tweets are often short welcome messages, shared inside jokes, and so on. intended for the celebrities themselves to see, but by placing a period in front of the tweet, Rushdie signals his desire for all of his followers to view the exchange. His memoir Joseph Anton has been famously critiqued for also being a perfuse collection of well-known names. 73 Though this is perhaps unremarkable for someone whose legitimate

73 Zoe Heller’s (2012) “Hatchet Job of the Year” review of Rushdie’s Joseph Anton criticized Rushdie’s version of himself and the events surrounding the fatwa. 136 friends are celebrities, this public cultivation of his status as a celebrity associated with other celebrities is part of his larger investment in shaping his celebrity author persona.

The second significant trend is based on the category of Games (19% of coded tweets). Early on in his use of the Twitter platform, Rushdie mainly used the space to play with words and to garner more followers. While Rushdie quickly learned the basic

Twitter strategies to cultivate interest in his feed, his conceptualization of the literary games designed for Twitter was important in building up his follower base. Most of his

Twitter games are literary such as #Literarysmackdown (in which he pits two well-known authors against one another in a contest), but some are more simply based on linguistic playfulness such as “Name that #diety” (in which he asks followers to come up with diet- based deity names). The clever aspect of these games is the way in which it prompts followers to engage with the celebrity author and other followers. The linguistic games like #diety and the #kardashian limerick (which was prompted entirely by one Twitter user’s suggestion that Rushdie quit tweeting about literature and art and instead focus on the gossip surrounding the Kim Kardashian’s divorce) both reinforce Rushdie’s reputation as a wordsmith and cultivate his image as comical, trendy, and accessible.

The third significant category is Commentary which comprised 16% of the coded tweets. These tweets often offer a brief statement on current events and very often result in a flurry of Twitter user comments as well as traditional press coverage. While Rushdie is no stranger to offering up commentary on contemporary events, Twitter has become ground zero for this public intellectual to enter an ongoing debate and to start debates as

137 well. 74 Whereas Rollason has suggested this type of commentary is hardly worthy of a

Saidian public intellectual like Rushdie, I argue that engaging in commentary on this platform is part of a larger strategy to reinforce his position as a public intellectual.

Rushdie still uses traditional media outlets to disseminate his views. He has appeared regularly on Bill Maher’s television segment since 2009 to comment mainly on issues relating to free speech and Islam. He interviews with other public intellectuals on the

Charlie Rose Show. 75 He issues formal, written statements in response to controversial events. However he also engages the public on these topics with sometimes purposely provocative statements on Twitter and spends a good deal of his personal time debating with followers. For example, his comment on the Sandy Hook School shooting provoked thousands of responses: “Next time babies. Well done American gun zealots. Keep up the good work” (@salmanrushdie). In other examples the debate can extend over days or even months as in the case of Rushdie’s comments on the Charlie Hebdo incident. While some of his comments are not substantiated in any meaningful way, he supplements many of his debate points with research, links to his longer published words on the subject, and/or taped interviews in which he elaborates more fully on his positions. His

Tweets appear in the news and his appearance in the news ends up in his Twitter feed; this cross-media strategy for commenting on the news of the day perpetuates Rushdie as a celebrity figure and go-to commentator/consultant on a variety of newsworthy topics.

Three additional trends also emerged as important for further analysis: Follower

Correction, Follower Critique, and Death Threats. Though each of these categories

74 Rushdie has published two collections of essays Imaginary Homelands (1991) and Step Across This Line (2002) most of which offer commentary on contemporary events. Additionally he regularly appears on televised news stations to comment on contemporary events relating to the Middle East and South Asia (Ravy, 2015).

75 For example, he appeared on the Charlie Rose Show in 2012 with Martin Amis, , and Ian McEwan to discuss the death and legacy of Christopher Hitchens. 138 concerned only a small number of tweets (11%, 9%, and 1% of coded tweets respectively), they are significant because of the amount of traction they receive and what they demonstrate about Rushdie’s author persona. The first two categories reflect

Rushdie’s tweets (20% of the coded tweets) criticizing and correcting his followers. The

“Correction” tweets typically have a neutral tone because he is usually just conveying information and only sometimes demonstrating frustration with a repeated question or incorrect rumour. These specific corrections are often made with exasperation not only because they happen frequently, but also because I suspect he is more than usually annoyed when someone or something interferes with his carefully crafted image. In 2011,

Rushdie received messages regarding the account @RushdieExplainsIndia which was created to comment on culture and politics in India while both paying homage to and mocking Rushdie’s affectation. Although he tweeted that @RushdieExplainsIndia account is “funny” and that he “enjoy[s] reading it” (@salmanrushdie), Rushdie has also taken care to correct followers with tweets such as “You do know that

@RushdieExplainsIndia is a parody site and not written by me?” (@salmanrushdie). This kind of correction, among many other kinds relating to incorrect quotations of his work, incorrect spellings of his name, and misinformation about his published works, signifies

Rushdie’s intense desire to control the information about himself on Twitter and within the wider public as well.

Further evidence of this is found in the Follower Critique tweets which are typically hostile, rash, and sarcastic. For example during the height of the Occupy Wall

Street campaign, Rushdie was criticized by D. G. Myers at the Commentary Magazine for signing a statement of support for the campaign. Rushdie tweeted a sarcastic comment

139 and link to the scathing article in which he was labelled as one of many left-wing

American writers whose positions on capitalism are at odds with concepts of freedom:

“Hurray! I’m an Idiot Who Hates Freedom! @Commentary says so, so it's true! #OWS A

Useful List of Useful Idiots: http://t.co/9cYUyccr” (@salmanrushdie). One of his Twitter followers replied by asking him if he knew the history of the term “useful idiot”, and

Rushdie replied, “@KevinSiekierski @Commentary No, we useful idiots don't know any history, even if we studied it at Cambridge (hotbed of useful Red idiots)” (2011: n.p.).

The reply to what may or may not be a critical question (the follower’s tone or intention is not clear) about the history of “useful idiots” demonstrates a significant pattern of behaviour when engaging with potentially hostile follower comments: sarcasm and a purposeful reminder of his credentials and/or experience. Other Follower Critique tweets focus on the follower’s ill usage of grammar or an attempt to diminish the follower with snide comments on his/her age, profession, belief system, and so on. While these critiques, especially when they are meant for all his followers to see, could be considered unflattering to the author and his wider persona, I would argue that Rushdie views these interactions as indicative of his capacity for witty commentary and that in order to ensure that his life and work are not misrepresented and his authorial legacy remains intact, he has to frequently enter the fray.

One of Rushdie’s more curious Twitter trends is retweeting and/or publicly replying to death threats that are sent to him. Although this behaviour only comprises 1% of the coded tweets, it is significant in the larger context of Rushdie’s celebrity.

Essentially, these occasional death threat tweets demonstrate his continued position as a persecuted writer. While this position offers a lot of traction in a wide variety of contexts,

140 it can also be exploited as Rushdie discovered in 2012 when his appearance at the Jaipur

Literary Festival in India was cancelled due to a threat made on his life. Rushdie tweeted about the threat and his initial disappointment, but quickly became angry and defensive when he found out that the local authorities in Jaipur lied about the threat to prevent him from participating in the festival. Following the initial news of the threat, Rushdie replied to a series of hate-tweets (as he calls them) initiated by ostensibly Muslim Twitter users and offered the following commentary on them: “The hate tweets dribble on. Moronic thinking + bad grammar: good combo. Keep 'em coming, if you want to make your faith look ugly & fascist” (@salmanrushdie). In fact, Rushdie often uses the opportunity of

Twitter death threats to illustrate specific viewpoints he has on freedom of expression or the discourse about Islam: “‘@iali4576: @joshglancy @salmanrushdie say that again and you too will be on somebody's hit list.’ The voice of the religion of peace”

(@salmanrushdie). Even though the threat against his life was discovered to be fake, he made sure his Twitter followers were aware of the circumstances leading to the incident and the significant threat this fact poses to freedom of expression; namely, the potential for violence from a Muslim group in response to his scheduled appearance. This pattern of Twitter usage illustrates both Rushdie’s purposeful use of the medium to remind readers of his position as a persecuted author and as a jumping off point to discourse on two major topics which have consumed his public life in recent years: freedom of expression and the deteriorating status of Islam in the 21 st century.

Facebook Analysis

Rushdie first joined Facebook in 2008, but his Facebook posts were infrequent until his account suspension in 2011. Rushdie’s Facebook account settings have changed

141 over the years, and at one point he had removed the “add friend” button from his profile, limiting his friends to only those who connected with him previously. Even though he has since enabled the “add friend button” again and allows his profile to be viewable by the public, he has restricted personal information and post comments to his friends only. A non-friend user can “share” his posts with others, but non-friends cannot “like” or comment on any of his posts. Additionally, non-friend users can send him messages via

Facebook, but it is made clear that these will go into an “other folder” since non-friend users are not linked to him. These limitations suggest a desire to make his Facebook content widely accessible and shareable, but not open to debate or comment outside of his approved friends and family. Whereas he uses Twitter to actively engage with followers, debating and posting commentary, his Facebook profile is updated less frequently and largely consists of image posts. It is also more personal, featuring photos of his family, vacations, and throwback photos of his past. This simultaneous gesture of exerting control over who can engage on the platform and sharing content that is more personal allows us insight into the management of his celebrity. The fact that most of his

Facebook posts are photos with few if any accompanying words is also provocative for a man who largely relies on words to tell his story.

Methodology

As a result of the restrictions to his profile, this section of my study relies on close readings of a selection of Facebook posts to establish patterns in his Facebook usage and examine how he cultivates his social media presence. The selection of Facebook posts included in this study range from one of his earliest posts in January 2010 to posts shared in November 2016. Each post in this study was chosen to illustrate a larger pattern of

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Rushdie’s Facebook usage and is close-read to examine how he uses photos, links, and text to cultivate his Facebook persona.

Analysis

Figure 1. Photo of villa in Breach Candy, Bombay. (2010)

Rushdie made his Facebook debut with a posted photo of Jantar Mantar, Jaipur; however he did not respond to any of the 53 comments or 316 likes he received on that post and did not post again (at least publicly) until 2010. At that time he posted a photo of a villa in Breach Candy, Bombay (Figure 1), taking care to correct one commenter’s assumption about the location. Just as with his tweets, Rushdie is careful to correct errors or assumptions posted to his photos; however, on Facebook, he is less likely to reply to other types of comments or to provide a lot of written context for his image posts.

Instead, recognizing the image’s location or its connection to one of his novels becomes a kind of intellectual game for his friends and a challenge to see who will discover the connection first. On the photo of the villa (Figure 1), Rushdie also responded to a commenter who acknowledged the connection of the house to the Methwold Estate in

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Midnight’s Children , writing “Sadly, the clock-tower, which was next to the villa, was demolished sometime in the 1990s by someone with no interest in literary history.” His reference to “literary history” is of course a reference to the fame of his own novel

Midnight’s Children and a nod to his place in the canon. This type of post is one example of many posts in which he exposes his friends/followers to a visual representation of the subcontinent. Other examples include art from the Mughal Empire, landscape scenes of

India, and various architectural features from the subcontinent. These posts function both to educate friends/followers about South Asia and to serve as illustrations of his fiction, offering a visual paratext that extends the experience of the story beyond the page as well as grounds his fiction in reality. For an “insider” (a friend/follower who is familiar with the details of his work) the posts are bonus transmedia experiences that build off his stories; for “outsiders,” they are educational, and for everyone, especially sceptics, they lend his representations of the subcontinent an element of authority. Posts like these are designed to inspire engagement, educate his friends/followers, and to expand his work into the realm of visual media, however briefly.

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Figure 2. Facebook Post of Christopher Hitchens, Voltaire Bust, and Salman Rushdie

(2012)

In 2012, following the death of his good friend Christopher Hitchens, Rushdie posted a photo of himself and Hitchens with a bust of the French philosopher Voltaire, writing, “This was the last time I saw him. Houston, Texas, on his birthday last year, at the home of Michael and Nina Zilkha” (Figure 2). This photo is significant because it is connected to Rushdie’s publication of his piece in Vanity Fair (and reposted on

Rushdie’s own Tumblr blog) “Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011,” featuring the same photo. This post is both personal, demonstrating Rushdie’s grief over the loss of his close friend, but also political, pointedly showcasing their fierce support of secular politics as signified by the bust of Voltaire. The viewer is meant to drawn an association between the two men and the great philosopher. This association between them and the esteemed philosopher elevates Rushdie and Hitchens’s controversial views on religion and politics.

Even though Rushdie is clearly grieving over the loss of his friend, by choosing this particular photo to post, he is also drawing attention to their shared views on atheism and secular politics and framing those views within the larger history of secular thought. This post is also a prime example of the kind of personal/political posting that Rushdie often does in social media spaces. As I discussed in the Twitter analysis, he does not just post message of grief and support for the victims of the Sandy Hook shootings; instead he both grieves and angrily highlights the shooting’s connection to the political debate surrounding firearms in America. Posts like Figure 2 allow us to analyze Rushdie’s self- representation through his association with other public intellectuals and through his use of the personal to explore the political. Finally it functions as an example of the way in

145 which Rushdie often uses historical figures with similar political views or experiences with persecution to shape his own legacy.

Figure 3. Facebook Post of Los Angeles Review of Books (November 4, 2012)

In the wake of publishing Joseph Anton , Rushdie posted on Facebook a series of early reviews of the book, interviews that he gave about the memoir, and status updates on its position on the bestseller list. One of them was a link to a review of Joseph Anton by Henry Giardina in the Los Angeles Review of Books on November 4, 2012. This post is notable because of his commentary on the review: “This may be the most intelligent review my memoir has received” (Rushdie, Figure 3). In fact, Rushdie received a number of heavily critical reviews of his memoir, most notably the “hatchet job of the year” review written by Zoe Heller in the New York Review of Books . Giardina’s review, however, reframed one of the main objections to the memoir by Heller and other reviewers which was Rushdie’s peculiar use of the third person. Giardina’s review suggests this use of the third person is one of the ways Rushdie depicts the trauma of his

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“splintered” self throughout his years in hiding. By posting this review of his book,

Rushdie subtly “answers” the many critiques he received about his use of the third person. Sharing this particular review is also indicative of his attempt to control the narrative surrounding his work. He uses the opportunity that the social media platform provides him to both praise a review that he likes and, at the same time, diminish the value of other reviews which are presumably not “intelligent” by comparison. Posting this link and the accompanying commentary is a strategic way to funnel readers to specific reviews of his work and to criticize his negative reviews indirectly.

Figure 4. Facebook Post of Satanic Verses Book Page (February 14, 2014)

While Rushdie regularly posts links to published excerpts of his works, the post above is unique because it is an actual photo taken by him of a page from The Satanic

Verses (Figure 4). The passage indicated by the black line in the photo begins:

The revelation - the recitation - told the faithful how much to eat, how

deeply they should sleep, and which sexual positions had received divine

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sanction, so that they learned that sodomy and the missionary positions

were approved of by the archangel, whereas forbidden postures included

all those in which the female was on top. Gibreel further listed the

permitted and forbidden subjects of conversation, and earmarked the parts

of the body which could not be scratched no matter how unbearably they

might itch. He vetoed the consumption of prawns, those bizarre other-

worldly creatures which no member of the faithful had ever seen, and

required animals to be killed slowly, by bleeding, so that by experiencing

their deaths to the full they might arrive at an understanding of the

meaning of their lives, for it is only at the moment of death that living

creatures understand that life has been real, and not a sort of dream. And

Gibreel the archangel specified the manner in which a man should be

buried, and how his property should be divided, so that Salman the Persian

got to wondering what manner of God this was that sounded so much like

a businessman. This was when he had the idea that destroyed his faith,

because he recalled that of course Mahound himself had been a

businessman, and a damned successful one at that, a person to whom

organization and rules came naturally, so how excessively convenient it

was that he should have come up with such a very businesslike archangel,

who handed down the management decisions of this highly corporate, if

non-corporeal, God.

The post is not accompanied by any commentary, suggesting Rushdie is confident that the photographed passage speaks for itself. It is one of the most controversial pages

148 in the novel because it explores how the scribe character Salman the Persian casts doubt on the divine nature of Mahound’s (the Prophet Muhammad character). Instead Salman the Persian posits that Mahound is simply issuing rules himself and lying about their source. The passage is also notable for the long and seemingly absurd list of rules governing the faithful which are laid out by the archangel. Instead of a neutral list of rules, Rushdie highlights the absurdity of the rules with specific language. He notes that all the sexual positions which have the “woman on top” are banned. He notes also that certain parts of the body cannot be itched even when the itch is unbearable. Finally he notes that animals must be “killed slowly” to experience their deaths. Choosing to post this controversial passage signals his unapologetic attitude about his work and his critique of Islam. With this passage, Rushdie highlights the supposed incompatibility of Islam, and arguably religion in general, with modern life. This singular view of Islam and religion relies on the problematic binary he presents us with: western liberalism versus religious dogma.

Rushdie posted this photo on the 25 th anniversary of the fatwa which was issued on February 14, 1989 in response to the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988. This pointed commemoration of the fatwa illustrates post-fatwa stance on his right to publish

The Satanic Verses and his more recent highly critical stance on Islam and religion in general. While he does not gesture to his views on Islam and his continued status as a persecuted author on Facebook as much as he does on Twitter, this post is an example of several in which he is purposely provocative. For Rushdie, this post addresses both the way in which Islam is represented through his work and how he is represented through his experience with the fatwa. He uses the social media platform to reinforce his status as

149 a defiant, brave individual who triumphed over the tyranny of the Ayatollah and his detractors. He is also using the platform to highlight very specific aspects of his literary representation of Islam in The Satanic Verses ; namely that it is absurdly restrictive and that it is not based on divine revelation, but rather the desires of the prophet.

Figure 5. Facebook Post of Salman Rushdie Day Certificate Issued by City of Tulsa

(September 28, 2015)

Similar to his Twitter posts, Rushdie often uses Facebook to showcase his celebrity status. For example, Rushdie shared a picture of a certificate he received from the City of Tulsa naming September 28, 2015 as “Salman Rushdie Day” and noting that he was “flattered” (Figure 5). In response to one commenter who said “Crickey your taking over the world!” Rushdie wrote, “Trying Angela Mccluskey – trying. Move over

Putin.” Rushdie shared the certificate to ostensibly thank Tulsa, but he also highlights his own notoriety with posts such as this one. Here he is managing his public persona as a famous author, showing his followers and friends that he is famous enough to have his own calendar day. Other posts illustrating his celebrity sometimes focus on the intense

150 press attention that he receives as well as his running in various literary prize contests.

For example, he regularly posts on both Twitter and Facebook support for his work to be considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature. As Jim English argues in The Economy of

Prestige , literary prizes function as “capital” in the literary marketplace, adding monetary value and cultural significance to the work—what English calls the “economics of prestige” (4). Posting photos, links, and status updates related to his literary fame allows

Rushdie to add capital to himself and his work. This type of celebrity management is also an example of the expanded role of the author in the social media age. By posting evidence of his fame and notes about his upcoming appearances and publications,

Rushdie is acting as his own marketing director and public relations specialist. While many celebrities hire social media management teams to run their accounts, Rushdie is the primary manager of his platforms and would be unlikely to give up control over their contents. Instead he strategically posts updates that are intended to shape his public persona, emphasize his fame, and explore his potential legacy.

Figure 6. Facebook Post of a Photo of Milan and Zafar Rushdie (August 9, 2014)

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The final example of posting included in this study concerns how he represents his family and his personal life in the social media sphere. Whereas Rushdie is very guarded about his family in his archived housed at Emory University’s Manuscripts,

Archives, and Rare Books Library and on his other social media platforms, he is more open about his family, in particular his sons, on Facebook. For example, Figure 6 is one of many photos he has posted of his sons on various occasions. This photo features both his sons, Milan and Zafar, eating ice cream. Rushdie commented on the photo, saying

“Milan and Zafar, East Hampton, August 14, outside Scoop du Jour with their scoops.”

This example is notable because it gives a lot of personal information at once, suggesting

Rushdie’s now casual attitude about being traceable compared to the caution he had to employ during the fatwa years. The comments on this photo are also revealing, with several readers remarking on the handsome looks of the two boys. For Rushdie, this type of post functions to both personalize his feeds, giving his friends and followers a voyeuristic look into his personal life, and to showcase his other, non-literary, legacy as a parent of his two children. While his Twitter feed remains largely concerned with politics, promotion, and engagement, his Facebook page is notably more personal. In addition to posts about his children, Rushdie has also posted pictures of himself weathering hurricane Sandy, visiting museums, and taking vacations over the years. In comparison to the many ways in which he engages with the public in an official or provocative manner, these posts give friends/followers a more personal, intimate view of

Rushdie and his family. Through personal posts, Rushdie navigates the politics of representing himself to his public, seeking to connect with his audience (in a limited way) through the representation of him as a regular family man living life. Like other

152

“celebrity sightings” these posts enable his audience to connect with him in a way that has been hard in the past (thanks to his post-fatwa guardedness) and remains hard in the present because he is a larger-than-life persona.

While Twitter and Facebook have reputations for being a great source of news or superficial networking tools, this study demonstrates their vast potential for scholars. By focusing on trends in Rushdie’s social media usage, we can draw conclusions about his public engagement, his political and cultural interests, and his authorial persona. These patterns in his Twitter and Facebook content not only offer a view into Rushdie’s state of mind, but also illuminate his literary choices in his creative work. For example, when read in concert with his Death Threat tweets, his use of The Birds metaphor in Joseph

Anton to explain his view of the events succeeding his experience with the fatwa serves to reinforce the urgency of his cause to educate the public of the growing threat of religious fundamentalism (and more specifically Islamic extremism).

Studying how Rushdie uses social media platforms allows us to not only analyze his self representations, but also how those representations connect with his literary representations. Scholars can no longer write about Rushdie’s views on freedom of expression without addressing the month-long debate over the Charlie Hebdo incident which he hosted on Twitter or the Facebook fight he had with after her walk-out of the PEN event honouring the Charlie Hebdo staff. What becomes clear from an analysis of Rushdie’s social media posts is how the politics of his self-representation are linked to how he represents others, such as Muslims, for example. Within the spaces of social media, Rushdie articulates his parameters for representation, allowing scholars

153 to read his work against his claims and within the context of how he manages his public identity.

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Conclusion: Tracing the Trajectories of Rushdie’s Politics of Representation

Though this study endeavors to trace patterns in Rushdie’s politics of representation, it is naturally limited to specific works in his oeuvre and does not include every book, short story, or article that Rushdie has ever written. For this project I have attempted to include the works which demonstrate the politics of representation covered here most clearly and which have had the largest impact on scholarship and the widest reach to Rushdie’s audiences. My selection of the various modes of representation included in this dissertation is also limited to four types. While Rushdie’s representations extend beyond what is analyzed in my work, I based the decision to explore disability, gender, Islam, and self-representation on Rushdie’s own publicly stated investments in these modes of representation. He has apologized for his problematic representations of disability, he has firmly stated that he is a feminist, he has declared that “Yes, It is About

Islam,” and he has invested a significant amount of time and energy engaging with social media to shape his public persona.

Using this recent posturing as a point of entry for each chapter, I first reevaluated existing scholarship on each of the different modes of representation. These literature reviews are designed to not only show the ongoing discussions surrounding Rushdie’s work, but also how they have potentially impacted the ways in Rushdie describes himself and his work. For example, as I discuss in chapter 4, following the publication of The

Satanic Verses , Rushdie’s critique of Islam largely shifted from focusing on corrupt nation-states using religion for gain to the religion itself. Secondly I attempt to trace a trajectory of representation in each of these areas over the course of Rushdie’s writing career in order to gain insights into changes in his politics over time and how he chooses

155 to frame and reframe his previous works and opinions within the context of his present interests. His representation of differently-abled Luka with his left-handedness in Luka and the Fire of Life , for instance, is markedly different than the Moor’s lame hand in The

Moor’s Last Sigh . The third task that I tackle in each chapter is to analyze his past and present politics of representation within the context of his celebrity and the authority granted to him by western media to represent and commentate on the East. As I note in my introduction, Rushdie’s immense celebrity status and frequent appearances on television and radio to comment on recent events begs scrutiny due to the potential impact he has on shaping western attitudes about the East.

Although I cite Rushdie's position on the Emory University disability panel as the jumping off point for analyzing his representations of disability, novels like Midnight's

Children , The Satanic Verses , and The Moor's Last Sigh have a clear investment in representing third-world contexts for disability. Even though Rushdie's depictions of physical and mental disability are often tied up with magical realism and are thereby problematically transformed into "superpowers," he also critically explores the social, political, and economic discourses that surround the notion of the "disabled." For example, he represents how women carry the blame for producing disabled children, and how social stigmas generate problematic narratives of disability. He further explores disability in third-world, colonial and postcolonial contexts such as the Royal Indian

Navy strike of 1946 in The Moor’s Last Sigh and the child beggar gangs of Bombay, whose livelihood depends on having various physical disabilities, in Midnight’s Children .

As I discussed in chapter 2, Rushdie's treatment of gender is one of the most hotly debated topics in Rushdie scholarship. The early analyses of the ways women are

156 depicted in Shame from scholars like Aijaz Ahmad, Gayatri Spivak, and Inderpal Grewal all criticized Rushdie's reductive representations of Pakistani women operating in a strict shame/honor culture. These critiques prompted Rushdie to more clearly articulate his views on women and feminism and specifically on the abuses women suffer in eastern cultures. My reevaluation of this early scholarship as well as his later novels demonstrates Rushdie's accomplished representations of desiring, agentive women as well as the limitations of his imagination when it comes to the potential of his female characters to function outside of patriarchal norms and to exploring the many, varied ways women can be feminist outside of a western, liberal framework.

I chose to address Rushdie's representations of Islam and Muslims in chapter 3 because this mode of representation dominates his post-fatwa novels. I aligned it with a discussion of orientalism both because Rushdie has been praised for his anti-orientalist writing, especially in Midnight's Children , and because Said in both Orientalism and

Culture and Imperialism devotes a considerable amount of his research to the way Islam has been and continues to be represented in the West. I wanted to analyze how Rushdie is decidedly not an orientalist as Said describes them, but also how his representations of

Islam have become increasingly problematic in the years since the fatwa. We can perhaps forgive Rushdie for his criticism of Islam after his experience; however, his inability to imagine a way in which devout Muslims can coexist peacefully with modern, western, secular society is indicative of a larger trend suggesting his uncompromising and potentially damaging views of Islam. What I hoped to show with my analysis is a nuanced look at Rushdie's views on Islam, how they have changed over time, and why

157 they matter to contemporary discussions of Rushdie's work and his position as an authority on the East for western audiences.

I finished my exploration of Rushdie's politics of representation with a discussion of his self-representation through two social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook, in chapter 4. Because these platforms are so new and their significance as archives is a recent development, I sought to showcase some means and methods for both capturing this data for research purposes and evaluating the data as potential paratexts and archival material. This chapter demonstrates the potential for social media analysis for literary scholars of contemporary authors who utilize social media platforms. By analyzing patterns in Rushdie's Twitter posts, I was able to posit several ways in which Rushdie attempts to engage with his followers and to cultivate his public persona. By isolating example posts from his Facebook feed and close-reading them, I was able to present an analysis of his Facebook persona based largely on images—a unique method of self- representation for a man who usually prefers to communicate with as many words as possible. These conclusions allowed me to examine the strategy behind Rushdie's self- representation in the sphere of social media and more generally in the public eye. I will note that my approach is one of many that scholars could take to analyze social media feeds as paratexts and archives. As technology changes, new tools are developed daily to capture data on social media that will very likely make my methods obsolete in the coming years. My hope, however, is that this study inspires other humanities scholars to consider social media spaces as potentially rich avenues for research. Finally I want to acknowledge the significance of the digital humanities to my project. As we continue to

158 do work in and about the digital age, my hope is that the interdisciplinary approach of the digital humanities will become an essential tool for literary scholars.

As I write this conclusion, Rushdie has published another novel The Golden

House (2017) which the early reviews suggest is largely based on the 2016 U.S. presidential race between and Donald Trump. While Rushdie has been a frequent commentator on U.S. politics for many years, the 2016 presidential election was the first one in which Rushdie cast a vote as a U.S. citizen. It is perhaps significant to note that immediately following Donald Trump's election to the Office of the President,

Rushdie ceased all activity on Twitter. Perhaps Rushdie was just taking a respite from social media while he finished his book, but it also might be because of his deeply critical stance on President Donald Trump who is a frequent Twitter user. Since the 2016 election, Twitter has experienced an unprecedented surge of interest and attention as we examine its viability as an official record and as a platform of communication for the highest office in the land. Even if Rushdie remains silent on the platform, it is unlikely that he will have nothing to say about the politics of representation going on in that space.

159

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