It’s no surprise that Salman Rushdie’s two-day visit to Davidson College
last week felt at once miraculous and mundane. His novels, after all, juxtapose
those two qualities, offering delirious deliberations on everything from cultural
assimilation and religious doctrine to advertising jingles and vainglorious
actors. His appearance here represented the typical (an eminent author discoursing
on his art) and the atypical (said eminence being the most influential writer
of the past 25 years).
In 1998, the Iranian government ended the fatwa, or religious edict, which
had been launched against Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini for perceived blasphemous
passages in The Satanic Verses. Since then, Rushdie, 57, has mostly lived
in New York City. Despite the fatwa’s end, Rushdie must live with the knowledge
that, at any given time, a zealot may make good on the long-dead ayatollah’s
order. The saga of the Khomeini fatwa is, sadly, the first thing most people
think of when they think of Rushdie. Even those of us who savor his punning
linguistics and virtuosic satire find it hard to banish the death sentence once
and for all.
Such baggage makes it all the more surprising when Rushdie, in a gray blazer and slacks, makes his way down the stairs of Davidson’s Carnegie Guest House on a sunny, cold winter afternoon. Shorn of his familiar beard, Rushdie looks a bit thinner in the face, but otherwise betrays few signs of being anything other than an upper middle class man with both common joys and sorrows.
When he makes it into a downstairs room stocked with a dozen or so sitting-room chairs and large windows, Rushdie confronts a motley crew of depressingly few local journalists. Two TV news crews, a Davidson student newspaper writer, the book editor from the Charlotte Observer, a writer and photographer from the Statesville Record & Landmark — and me — form the entire press corps for a man who is all but assured a future Nobel Prize in literature.
Reluctant political novelist
If Rushdie is disappointed or uncomfortable
in any way, it’s not evident, as he responds with a smile to a question of why
he would agree to visit Davidson. “Well, why not, really?”
It is emblematic of his reputation — and a lengthy distrust of religious fanaticism running through many of his novels — that the first two questions Rushdie fields are tied to the Middle East and international politics rather than magical realism or plot technique.
Rushdie grew up Muslim in Bombay, but did not come from an especially religious family. Moreover, as Muslims are not the dominant religious group in India, he was surrounded by people of many faiths throughout childhood: Christian, Sikh, Farsi and so on. In each case, feasts and ceremonies were celebrated across all faiths. Or, as Rushdie now explains the cross-pollinating of religious rituals, “It was just more holidays.”
With so much and such varied religion around, Rushdie says it all had an odd secularizing effect. He’s never been very religious, nor is he now. Instead, he preaches what Salon.com once described as “secular humanism.”
Churches and faith worry Rushdie because, he believes, they too often lead to limitation of thought and expression. He is best known for critiquing Islamic fundamentalism, but he lets no one off the hook, including the influential, and rigid, conservative Christian movement in this country.
Iran, he says, is a perfect example of religion run amok. “The sad thing is if there were an election in Iran, there’s no doubt the (ruling religious) regime would be voted out. And there’s no doubt Iran seems to be going the wrong way.”
Despite that nation’s hard-line government, Rushdie sees some cause for optimism in Iran’s swelling youth population, which has nothing invested in the current Islamic government. Sooner or later, he says, Iran’s religious regime will falter, toppled by that younger generation’s mounting disdain.
Lest so much geopolitical talk grow burdensome, the novelist lightens the mood. “I’m not a fan of the Iranian state,” he says. “I’ve had some trouble with it myself.”
Bush league
Although The Satanic Verses is as much, or more, concerned with the plight
of the immigrant and the feeling of otherness, its contempt for fundamentalism
and repressive societies seems especially prescient in the wake of 9/11 and
the current, oft-bungled war on terrorism.
The ayatollah’s subsequent valentine — the fatwa was issued February 14, 1989 — brought terrorism to Rushdie’s door. Fellow Eastern diaspora writer V.S. Naipaul once described Rushdie’s plight as “an extreme form of literary criticism.”
Several years after he moved to New York from London, Rushdie glimpsed terror on an epic scale as the World Trade Center bombings unfolded.
It gave him one of the most unique vantage points for assessing Western fears and, in particular, the reaction of Americans attacked on their own soil for the first time since Pearl Harbor.
“One of the interesting things about the elections was that all the places which were attacked on 9/11 voted strongly against Bush. The fear button can longer be pushed because they’d already seen the worst.”” – Salman Rushdie
“(It was something) I thought a lot about and it did feel to me, in some way, that what happened to me was like the small prologue and this was the main event,” Rushdie says. “What interested me also was those places most directly impacted by 9/11 have dealt with what happened in a not dissimilar way to what happened with me.
“At some point, you have to agree that the world is a dangerous place, set it aside and get on with your day. One of the interesting things to me about the election results was that all the places which were attacked on 9/11 — the Bostons, the New Yorks, Pennsylvania, Washington — voted strongly against Bush. They dealt with it. The fear button can no longer be pushed because they’d already seen the worst.”
While he professes a love of New York and has long admired America, Rushdie is not enamored with the current administration. He points to the Clinton administration, which did much to end the Iranian fatwa against Rushdie, as a reminder of how much America’s capacity to be the leader of the free world has been enervated during the past four years.
In addition, the end of the Cold War altered the landscape, reducing the United States’ ability to set the course for the Western world.
“It’s no longer so easy to tell European governments what to do and have them fall in line,” he says. “Except the British.”
New works
This fall, Rushdie will publish Shalimar the Clown, his first novel since
2001’s wobbly tale of millennial New York, Fury. Three years ago, a collection
of non-fiction pieces, Step Across This Line, closed the book, so to
speak, on the novelist’s life during the death sentence.
The fatwa is no longer an issue Rushdie cares to discuss, save for the occasional quip. During a sold-out speech before 625 people at Davidson, he tells the audience, “I don’t think persecution is good for writers. It should be discouraged.”
Freed of the oppressive Iranian edict, Rushdie now spends much of his time trying to help other writers. As president of American PEN, he has been working on behalf of writers in Cuba, China, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Korea, among others.
PEN, a writer’s group dedicated to promoting freedom of speech as well as the exchange of ideas around the world, recently fought an American federal policy that would have prevented US publishers and writers from working with their counterparts in the Sudan, Cuba, Iran and other troubled nations.
“In a kind of mad reversal of what needs to happen, exactly those writers and voices which Americans would need to hear were going to be proscribed in this country,” Rushdie says. “(The Bush administration) was intransigent. (But) legal action did result in the re-thinking of that position.”
Beyond that, Rushdie is spearheading a PEN campaign to create an annual international literary festival in New York. The inaugural event will be held in April.
With his new novel in final edits, Rushdie is turning his attention to a screenplay based on a New Yorker short story he wrote, “The Firebird’s Nest.” After helping The Royal Shakespeare Company bring one of his earlier works to the stage three years ago, he now wants to write the occasional screenplay but has no interest in adapting any more of his own novels.
Scheherazade’s magic
While Rushdie is best known to the general public for The Satanic Verses,
his most critically acclaimed book is Midnight’s Children, the Booker
Prize-winning tale of Saleem Sinai, a pickle-factory worker who is one of 1,001
children born at the very moment India won its independence from Britain: midnight,
August 15, 1947.
In Midnight’s Children, which was published in 1980, Rushdie found his voice. For many years, he tried, and failed, to write about his native India in the language of English novelists.
What led to his breakthrough was the realization that he could attempt what James Joyce had done in Ireland and what such varied American writers as William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth had done in America: reconstruct the English language to fit their sensibilities and their homelands.
“I could never write a good book until I admitted to myself who I was,” Rushdie says. “I was not English; I was an Indian man.”
He also was, and remains, a ravenous reader. During the course of his talks, Rushdie rattles off favorites from all over the map. Gunter Grass, Carlos Fuentes, Bernard Malamud, Dostoevsky, Melville, Marquez, Samuel Beckett and on and on.
At the end of his lecture, which careens from the lofty idealism of supplanting racism and oppression to humorous asides on masturbation and Toblerone boxes, Rushdie returns to one of his favorite themes: words and stories literally beating back death and offering immortality.
It is this theme from The Arabian Nights, embodied by the masterful storyteller Scheherazade, who staves off death by spinning a never-ending cliff-hanger, that first inspired Rushdie. He also talks of the essential initiation into any family — learning the stories, the mishaps, the pratfalls, the tragedies. Once a child or spouse knows the family canon, then they’re part of the family without doubt.
“When we die,” Rushdie says, “if we are lucky, then we ourselves become part of a story.”
Leave it to Rushdie to give death a better fate.
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2005.
