The Columbia History of the American Novel

have serious ideological underpinnings even as one concedes that the British may need to look back upon their often inglorious work in colonies like India, and they may need to absolve their own relentless guilt about their imperialist adventures. However, from the colonized peoples' point of view, these projects once again make us, as Salman Rushdie puts it, 'bit-players in [our] own history.' If such shows as 'the blackface minstrel-show of The Far Pavilions…and the grotesquely overpraised Jewel in the Crown' were anomalous productions, the situation would not be so serious. As such, they are 'only the latest,' notes Rushdie, 'in a very long line of fake portraits inflicted by the West on the East.' The situation is much more serious now than in the early part of the century, given the power of electronic media. -658-

Within a predominantly capitalist postcolonial world that remains, after 'flag independences,' stifled in poverty and dependence, extreme economic conditions often necessitate migrations. Further back, migrations of peoples of color from Africa and Asia into Britain were rooted within a colonial past that spanned nearly three centuries. More recently, colonized peoples, after fighting on the British side in World War II, were 'invited' into the 'M/Other Country.' These migrants became part of a new working class in Britain, and as they struggle to make Britain their 'home' they face new forms of racism, such as immigration policies, Paki-bashing, and other forms of harassment.

For writers in particular, such a history of migrations and of new racisms throws into relief issues of location and origin — where one lives and works, and where one may be transported without choice, as a child. This history presents new configurations to the mediated notions of identity and belonging, of audience and constituency. For Salman Rushdie, Indo-Pakistani-Britisher, for instance, one cannot simply assert that his audience is 'Western' since there are 1.5 million Muslims who live in Britain itself. Or, for Hanif Kureishi, racially mixed (Pakistani father and English mother), who grew up in Britain culturally British and within a racist society, and who can be identified as a 'Paki,' the parameters of identity and belonging are extremely complex. What it means in the 1980s and 1990s to be a Black Britisher, living in Britain, and, equally significantly, what it means to be an indigenous, native Britisher are matters fraught with contradictions. Is citizenship one aspect of this troubled notion of identity? Is citizenship sentimental, symbolic, and also somewhat expedient, as Rushdie's continued protection by the British government testifies?

Migration and expatriation have given new meanings to the notion of 'identity,' which remains important within the field of postcolonial literature. Despite the tyranny of certain aspects of deconstruction and poststructuralism that cannot tolerate 'old-fashioned' notions of identity and reality, I think that it is crucial to restore these terms, much in the spirit of recovering our own subjugated and subaltern histories. Of course, one is not asserting any single, monolithic notion of identity; rather, racial and cultural differences are themselves mediated along new parameters of language and geography. -659-

Fearful of an old-fashioned identity issue being replaced by 'subjectpositions,' one does not need to assume new and somewhat fashionable stances of 'cosmopolitanism' and 'internationalism.' Rushdie's novels, for instance, are interpreted as 'transnational' since they carry modernist and postmodernist echoes, playing with levels of fantasy and reality, fragmenting history, dis-placing so-called significant events in history by presenting various contesting versions. Does 'transnational' somehow remove the disturbing vestiges of an oldfashioned nationalism? The term assumes more than what it can accomplish; moreover, it mystifies the really dangerous elements of nationalism, such as state fundamentalism, by pretending that they have somehow been trans-cended. State and religious fundamentalisms can call for the death of an author like Rushdie because his novel has 'offended'; examples of fundamentalism proliferate, almost grotesquely, in so many parts of the world.

The novelistic representations of a mediated personal identity for writers like Rushdie amalgamate various worlds. In his novels, Rushdie returns to the source, so to speak, through memory, through historical re-creation of a time and place, such as India's independence in Midnight's Children (1980), Pakistan's military rulers in Shame (1983), and through an incorporation of the South Asian and British locales and transformations of identities necessitated by locales and by one's level of comfort and discomfort within a racist society in The Satanic Verses (1988). Rushdie's voice as a writer is significantly a part of this historical process in which 'third world' peoples struggle for self-determination as Black British citizens. And amid the furor surrounding The Satanic Verses we might unfortunately fail to recognize how creatively Rushdie illuminates these shifting lines of allegiance determined along racial, class, gender, and ethnic lines, and how these issues create contradictory, often painful situations for his characters, and for himself as a writer.

As in his other novels, Rushdie explores these threads of identities — what happens to human beings when they are transported, transplanted, by choice or otherwise, into alien environments — even more openly in The Satanic Verses. The first line of the novel presents a kind of migration/reincarnation/ metamorphosis — the birth of a new self that must necessarily adapt to a new environment, and the death of an old self that belongs to a -660- different world: ''To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'' And a few pages into the novel, the narrator asks, 'Is birth always a fall?'

Connected to the necessity of forming new identities is the need to assume a new voice, a new language. Saladin Chamcha (Chamcha, in Hindi, indicates a fawning attitude) is 'The Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voice. If you wanted to know how your ketchup bottle should talk in its television commercial…he was your very man. He made carpets speak in warehouse advertisements, he did celebrity impersonations, baked beans, frozen peas…. Once in a radio play for thirty-seven voices, he interpreted every single part under a variety of pseudonyms and nobody ever worked it out.' When Saladin visits India, Zeenat tells him, 'They pay you to imitate them, as long as they don't have to look at you…. You goddamn lettuce brain.' The visit home disconcerts Saladin; he almost loses his acquired British 'voice/identity,' slips into distressing Indianisms, and decides to rush back to Britain. As John Leonard, reviewing the novel in The Nation, puts it: 'History is out of control, and metamorphosis too. We've left home once too often. No more avatars of Vishnu. Instead of rising out of the ashes like a phoenix or resurrecting like a Christ, we are reborn, devolved into parody, bloody farce, false consciousness, bad faith…. Like Chamcha, we are on the run.'

With the recent publication of Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), it is heartening to find that Rushdie has not been silenced. Living in hiding, he has created an enchanting tale, veiled as a children's story, but replete with dark echoes of silencing forces that constantly threaten Rashid Khalifa, the storyteller. In the land of 'Guppees [storytellers] and Chupwallas [silence-enforcers],' Haroun, the son, tries to keep his father's storytelling talents alive. Although this seems like a thinly veiled allegory of Rushdie's personal life, wider resonances of different types of silence-imposing forces, selfand state-imposed, are evoked.

Hanif Kureishi belongs to the contemporary generation of Black Britishers. In an autobiographical essay, 'The Rainbow Sign,' he discusses his own origin and chronicles the racism he experienced growing up in London. His personal story is set within a broader context; for instance, he notes that '[he] was afraid to watch TV' because of the portrayal of Pakistanis as comics. Such images sanc-661- tioned 'the enjoyed reduction of racial hatred to a joke…a celebration of contempt in millions of living rooms in England.' Kureishi discusses a phenomenon like Enoch Powell, 'a figurehead for racists, [one who] helped create racism in Britain.' Kureishi felt 'racially abused' since he was five, located in a socially enforced self-loathing: 'Pakis…these loathed aliens. I found it impossible to answer questions about where I came from. The word 'Pakistani' had been made into an insult. It was a word I didn't want to use about myself. I couldn't tolerate being myself.'

From the start I tried to deny my Pakistani self. I was ashamed. It was a curse and I wanted to be rid of it. I wanted to be like everyone else. I read with understanding a story in a newspaper about a black boy who, when he noticed that burnt skin turned white, jumped into a bath of boiling water.

At school, one teacher always spoke to me in a ' Peter Sellers' Indian accent. Another refused to call me by my name, calling me Pakistani Pete instead. So I refused to call the teacher by his name and used his nickname instead. This led to trouble; arguments, detentions, escapes from school over hedges, and eventually suspension.

Kureishi records his feelings of violence embedded in anger and fear that are documented commonly in racial situations. He discovers James Baldwin, the Panthers, identifies with race politics, with the working class, and through the African American parallel, Kureishi recognizes the futility of the myth of a return to Africa, or wherever one comes from. As an adolescent, he records rejecting Islam as a route to identity and he does not visit Pakistan until he is an adult.

In his father's home, Pakistan, he cannot identify with the class of 'English-speaking international bourgeoisie…. Strangely, antiBritish remarks made [him] feel patriotic.' His identity as a playwright means little in