POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT
A double familiar context (India and, after the Partition, Pakistan), a bicultural education (both oriental and occidental with his establishment in England), and a constant persecution by the fundamentalists after the proclamation of the fatwah, have kept Rushdie in contact with different cultures, religions, languages and ideas for his benefit, but also have made of him an eternal emigrant who, with no other election, is condemned to travel, not looking ahead in search, but looking back in protection of his life.
This position of foreign guest and “cursed” wanderer, has forced him to adopt a political role as representative of his ethnic group and as passionate defender of Freedom.
We could analyse in his political involvement four different “faces” which will help us to understand the principles he is fighting for :
a) RUSHDIE AS A TRAVELLER :
Tim Brennan has defined him as one of the most provocative representatives of the “New Cosmopolitanism”, term with which he refers to a group of intellectuals coming from the Third World who have set up their residence in the ex-metropolis ; inhabiting in this way a kind of cultural limbo between their place of origin and the host country. This has provoked a “ stereoscopic” vision, changing and itinerant, of Reality.
Regarding emigration, Isabel Santoalalla Ramón speaks of “multiple roots”, denying the topic of the uprooting and lost of identity every emigrant suffers, in favour of the acquisition of multiple roots and identities ; this excess has enriched, in this case, Rushdie`s narrative with a great diversity of traditions, myths, topics, characters, landscapes, points of view, etc. nearly exhausting and suffocating for the reader.
Rushdie´s passion for diversity, pluralism and impurity, has led to a personal conception of Multiculturalism, not as “equality”, but as “difference” : << if everything is to be given equal weight and everybody's point of view is to be given equal status, well, then, in the end, how do you make a moral judgement ? how do you decide what's right and what's wrong ?>>. This idea puts at the basis of all his theories the right of disagreement as Santoalalla has pointed out : << everyone tries to create and impose his/her own reality above the rest >> ; but also each one has the duty of accepting the others´ opinion, giving as result an immense field in which every perspective and point of view is allowed.
The great irony will be that this denouncement of intolerance and inflexibility seems to have developed just the opposite effect : to excite the flame of violence and fanatism.
Nevertheless this puzzling Geography he extracts from his travels around Reality and Imagination, will be become true through Fiction ; one of the things that writers can do for readers, is to “provide them with imaginative maps ; and then you can put yourself on the map “ ; not subordinated to dogmas and rules, but “unforeseen” and ludicrous spaces full of linguistic, narrative and thematic surprises ; a net of corridors and labyrinths with no absolute centre in which the reader finds an infinity of roads to explore”( Santoalalla ).
b) RUSHDIE AS A HISTORIAN
Rafael Martínez Bernardo, in his article “Metamorfosis de la realidad y compromiso político”, asserts that Rushdie´s education and his formation in History at Cambridge, have helped him to develop a "personal interpretation" of the historical process expanded in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as of sociological problems such as class fighting, racism and corruption”.
His treatment of History has to do with two different aspects : first, the importance of individual, which submerges his narrative into a metaphorical dimension very personal and subjective ( the history of India since its Independence becomes Salem's own autobiography) ; second, a well-defined political position of criticism and denouncement (basically founded on left-handed ideas), using novel as a weapon to throw away his message of Freedom and anti-dictatorship. In Bertolt Brecht´s words : <> ( Martínez Bernardo ).
In this way, Midnight's Children makes a hard criticism of Indira Gandhi's absolutism ; in Shame, he engages in favour of freedom of speech, woman liberation and individual liberty ; The Satanic Verses claims against Margaret Thatcher, the situation of emigrants and the absolutist values ; etc.
The conclusion Rushdie will reach is that Relativism and Multiplicity are dangerous in a society used to Absolutist and Totalitarism in which just ONE version is possible, just one Truth ; and the UTOPIA he proposes, based on Ambiguity and Mutability, can only be materialised in Fiction.
c) RUSHDIE AS LEADER
Felicity Hand makes in her article << Volar y huir >> an outline of the problems of emigration, as follows :
the emigrant finds himself in an undetermined and half-way position in which it is difficult to feel identified nor convinced.
he can or must set himself up as “mouthpiece” of his ethnic group, and has the moral responsibility to give Occident a fair and balanced image. This duty adds certain obstacles to the function of the writer as an artist, who is not free to choose the topics (racism and discrimination are obliged material in the repertoire), and whose literary values are shadowed by the glittering presence of the content.
the emigrant in his “flight”, executes a double movement : a one hand, a leaving back his past, his roots and his origins ( now, material for homesickness, regret and, in the worst of cases, oblivion) ; on the other hand, a flying towards a new place where he is able to reconstruct a future and deposit his own cultural baggage.
The emigrant, after dying and denying his own identity, has the opportunity to become a GOD - be reborn and at the same time transform the receptionist metropolis-.
the native past can take revenge over the emigrant if he forgets it and attempts to become more British than British citizens themselves, as Rushdie censures in The Satanic Verses. Then, the emigrant can be accursed to wander as an undesirable exile and a marginal hybrid.
The emigrant is forced to act as defender of the emigrant and the disregarded minorities against the colonial forces ; but, how can he do it properly from the elitist position he enjoys as part of the selected collective belonging to the metropolis ? how can he support the no-integration and no-assimilation of the autochthonous culture since he has been educated in its inside and shares not only its habits but also his language and accent ?.
The writer shields himself assuring that its adaptation to the British environment is just a mere adoption of external elements, and his fight against the conservative values of that violent, hostile and lacking of solidarity British society and also against British monolinguism, is more tan evident ( Hand ) .
According to her, the answer of Rushdie to his own debate as and exile, will not be neither disintegration nor going back to the homeland, but once more, to write a hybrid and post-modern novel with which filling up those gaps and cracks of the absolutist believes.
d) RUSHDIE AS AN OFFENDER ? ?
Many times has been Salman Rushdie accused of excess both in his fiction - because of his exploitation of Magic Realism -, and in his messages - supposed to be offensive towards Muslims (The Satanic Verses) and towards Hindus ( The Moor's Last Sigh) -.
Kavita Nandan has emphasised instead, that the excessive and exaggerated reaction the whole world has shown towards his novels, is what really blurs the frontier between Fiction and Reality. Living as a prisoner and escaping away from his potential assassins, Rushdie´s real life seems to have become fiction.
