Salman Rushdie: Magical Realist

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Adam Johannes

I want to express my solidarity with the writer Salman Rushdie, in hospital, on a ventilator, unable to speak, nerves in his arm severed, his liver damaged and possibly losing an eye after being stabbed by an extremist.

I hope this action is not used by the media and politicians to incite racism against minorities, immigrants and Muslims.

Once upon a time…life’s journey began with the turning of a page…My journey to reading Rushdie’s writing began as a teenager. I had read a life-changing novel called One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Marquez—who once said he encountered surrealism running through the streets of Latin America and that surrealism was born in Latin American reality—wrote of a world where the eyes saw snow for the first time, a world that seemed to be in suspended animation. , outer time, and yet the outer world in the form of new technology or distant worker massacres seemed to sometimes penetrate the surface, revealing that this world was not isolated from the outside.

After learning that this strange and seductive way of writing fiction was called ‘magical realism’, I started reading all the magical realism novels I could find in my local library.

Mirror and maze

Something very special was happening in these novels. They took place in the real world, but there seemed to be another world within the world.

This world came to light not in the linear stories of Western Europe, but when we plunged into the vortex of stories hidden and buried in popular memory, in popular culture, the conversations of women among themselves and of mothers with their children. , in traditional customs and rituals, in old poetry and song, in the wisdom of indigenous peoples, and in the flashes of history and geographies that existed before colonialism and before the arrival of the white European.

For hours, I read and let my mind wander into the novel’s worlds of mirrors and labyrinths. Impossible things seemed to be happening. Human beings turn into animals.

Enslaved people helped for their freedom from the dead. The ghosts of the past haunting the present and the future.

The present and future haunting the past. History was not a straight line. Time was a kaleidoscope. Different stories can happen at the same time, as in old Renaissance paintings. Sometimes time even turned its gears and moved backwards.

In this world, I couldn’t take anything for granted. Anything can happen.

The new wisdom

I first came to Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer, not through his classic history, The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of Looting a Continent, but through his trilogy Memories of Fire, a magical realist way of writing history as prose. – poem. .

Speaking elsewhere of the Mayans who faced an existential threat from colonialism but gained new wisdom in war, Galeano said they had learned that when it comes to freedom, “time, like a spider, crawls slowly.”

This was Galeano who had called Latin America a woman who spoke in his ear. Asked if he was talking about his mother, he answered in the negative, instead he was talking about the erotic charge of a lover whispering her secrets in the dark.

The trilogy opened its pages with indigenous creation stories and myths. The beginning of time. Earth. People. Birds and beasts and flowers, and dreams and portraits of the coming of men who would wear clothes.

Through a tarot deck full of fragments and episodes of history, folklore and vignettes, we are eventually led from Eden to the dark ages of empire, slavery, genocide and plunder, and resistance and light; class struggles for national independence, social justice, democracy and dignity in the face of local and global forces of oppression.

Edward Said, speaking from his Palestinian experience, once argued that in today’s era, more than in other eras, exiles, refugees and displaced people are the leaven of history.

A hassle-free outfit

From the magical realism of Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, a South Asian immigrant to Britain of Muslim heritage, I began to see that the power of Magical Realism was, through a smooth coating of realistic fiction and magic and fantasy, it was able to it told the truths of peoples who had lived between worlds, or the resistance of people living in worlds brutally defined by the world of the other, or the struggle to create from the old shell, new worlds, new identities, new stories, stories new, new beliefs, new customs and new traditions, that bypassed the world of the master and his stories.

Magic realism was a political weapon of the wretched of the earth.

In an interview, Rushdie would argue that, “The fable, the surreal story, is just another way of getting at the truth, and if it has good, deep roots in the real—the ‘realistic’ part of magical realism—then it can to intensify a reader’s experience of the truth, crystallize it into words and images that stick with one. That is the appeal.”

I was drawn to Rushdie’s writing as I sought to explore my Anglo-Indian heritage that comes from my father’s side of the family. Midnight’s Children tells the story of a child born at the midnight hour of India’s independence from the British Empire and the events following partition and the end of the Raj.

The novel’s protagonist, who has the gift of telepathy, discovers that all children born in the first two hours of the new nation have special magical powers and uses his telepathic power to gather hundreds of children from all four corners of the subcontinent. to find out. the meaning of gifts.

Meanwhile his family suffers wars and displacements, he loses his memory and regains it in a mythological exile in the jungle, he is a political prisoner, all this a noodle to ponder history, society and politics.

It was a terrible tragedy that the controversy in the late 1980s about his next novel, some genuine offense but most of it cynically shot, would lead to a Fatwa and years to live with. hidden.

The life of a ghost

In his last interview before going into hiding, given to the Socialist Worker newspaper in 1989, Rushdie would say, “it is no pleasure for me to be supported by The Sun when it refers to Asians as rats. I’m not siding with The Sun on this one. I’d sooner be with the rats.”

Sadly, but perhaps understandable given the life of a ghost he was forced to live, Rushdie became isolated from the left and the popular anti-racist movements he had then sided with, having faced not only extremist murderers, but also with hypocritical attacks from politicians and the press. The example of Labor MPs like Keith Vaz, who called him one day to offer help, pledging to support him to the end, and almost the next day he was marching with burning books.

The marchers had come from northern cities suffering economic deprivation after bearing the brunt of Thatcher’s class struggle.

Far easier for politicians to side with conservative community leaders and misguided alienation over a scapegoat novelist than to argue for real solutions to racism and economic exploitation and defend writers’ freedom of expression while fighting the racism of the British establishment.

The writer who had once sided with the victims of state and police racism was forced to rely on the state and the police to protect his life.

The writer who wrote “Jaguar Smile” about the Sandinistas, who sided with the Nicaraguan Revolution against American imperialism, was forced to put American leaders on trial to protect his life.

The backlash against a novel that spoke to a migrant experience of British racism was used to fuel racism against migrant communities.

Rushdie would lose his home, his freedom, his marriage and his peace of mind.

Perhaps being at the center of such a storm explains an artistic and political deterioration in later years.

But for me I remember on the teenage bookshelf in my childhood home Salman Rushdie, squeezed between Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Eduardo Galeano and Toni Morrison and those hours of pleasure immersed in new and magical (realistic) worlds.