Homeland Elegies(21)

“No. The Satanic Verses.”

She coughed. She reached for her water and sipped to clear her throat, staring at me, the taut lines on her forehead now crossed and furrowed. “Why are you reading that?”

The Rushdie was the final reading assignment in my ongoing independent study with Mary Moroni, the professor I mentioned earlier (and of whom there will be more said in the pages ahead). “I’ve made you read too many white people,” she’d said to me as we sipped tea in her office one afternoon earlier that spring. I laughed, but it was clear she wasn’t joking. I’d been curious about Rushdie’s book since its publication five years prior. My mother bought a copy during the commotion, tried reading it, and soon gave up. She couldn’t make heads or tails of it was what she said. For more than a year, the book had lain on the side table in our living room, where she’d set it down never again to pick it up, dog-eared some thirty pages in. That copy I’d brought to school, hoping I would get to it at some point.

Mary hadn’t read it, either, and was curious to do so as well.

It took me three days to read Rushdie’s book, three days that remain singular in my reading life. I’d never before encountered so much of myself on the page—my questions, my preoccupations, the smells and sounds and tastes and names of my family—a potent form of self-recognition that bred a new certainty: I existed. There was also the dizzying thrill of formal discovery: I hadn’t read Gárcia Márquez yet or the postmodernists—so The Satanic Verses was my first experience of both magical realism and metafiction. Most thrilling was the book’s unapologetic parody of the Muslim mythology I’d grown up with as a child. To write a book filled with so many unthinkable thoughts, and to do so with such joyous abandon. I didn’t know anyone could do such a thing.

As I sat across from Asma that evening in downtown Providence, I wouldn’t have time to find the words to explain how significant an event Rushdie’s book was in my life. She interrupted my hesitating silence and began her attack: “I never thought I would be saying this about him, after that brilliant first novel, I mean, brilliant—look, I knew he never came up with anything on his own, borrowing everything, and, of course, what crime is there in that? Everyone knows there’s not a new idea to be found anywhere under the sun. Shakespeare stole from everyone. So what’s the issue with Salman doing the same thing? The problem, beta, is that you have to do it well. You have to do it better than the ones you’re stealing from. He’s not. Not anymore. It’s used now. Tired. And worst of all—and this is what really bothers me—it’s the malice.”

“Malice?”

“The sickening, ad hominem attacks on the Prophet, peace be upon him. Picking through that disgusting orientalist history, disgusting tales the Christians told to make the Prophet out as some sex-crazed cult leader, God forbid. I mean, this is what we have to expect? From Salman? From one of us?”

“He says he’s not a Muslim, Auntie.”

She snorted. “Please. I read that idiotic essay. Even more pathetic than how derivative he’s become is his cowardice. He knew what he was doing when he was writing that book. I know for a fact. We have friends in common. He was going around talking about sending the mullahs a message they won’t forget. Well, message received. But guess what? He didn’t like how they received it. So now? It’s not about Islam, he says. I’m not Muslim. How can it be blasphemy if I don’t believe in it? He’s a coward. He’s a coward and a hypocrite.”

To tell her I didn’t agree would have implied that I understood what she was getting at. I didn’t really. I, too, had felt shocked reading the famous dream sections of the book set in the fictional Jahilia, depicting the Prophet as a mostly unremarkable man, maneuvering and money-minded, confused about his calling; I’d experienced shock, but not that of blasphemy. Instead, I’d wondered why it had never occurred to me that the Prophet might just be as mythic a construction as I considered Jesus and Moses to be. I didn’t see anything malicious about Rushdie’s portrayal of the Prophet. I found it brilliant. Terrifyingly so. In fact, the book worried me in a way far more as one who wished to write than as a Muslim: I worried I would never write anything remotely as powerful.

“Does he think any of this is new?” my aunt went on. “Calling him Mahound? Really? That’s been around since the Middle Ages, Salman. We all know what it means.” She stopped, with a sudden thought. “I hope you’re doing your homework, beta. I hope you know what he’s saying when he uses that name. He’s calling the Prophet an impostor at best, a daemon at worst.”

“I know, Auntie. But it’s a dream sequence. And there’s the writer, Salman, in the book, writing it, who—”

“Dream sequence? More creative cowardice if you ask me. Hiding behind dreams. It’s clear as day what he’s doing. He’s trying on his own Nero complex to see how well it fits.” She drank again, this time pleased. “It’s good we waited. Try it now.”

I drank. It tasted bitter to me.

“Wonderful, isn’t it? Such a rich body.”

“What’s a Nero complex, Auntie?” I asked.

“Right. That’s something Albert Memmi talks about in his book The Colonizer and the Colonized. I’ll send it to you. He says that when you come to power through having usurped it, you’re never free of the worry that your claim to power is not legitimate. And this fear of illegitimacy, this sense of being haunted, it causes you to make those from whom you stole power suffer. Fits Richard the Third and Rushdie both to a tee. He thinks he’s one of them now. He’s usurped the place he wanted, and now he’s terrified he doesn’t fit the part. So he puts his own people down just to prove himself. What other reason does he have to bring all this medieval nonsense back? To rub our noses in this filth about the Prophet being a fake and his wives no better than prostitutes? And then you want to pretend it’s not about the Prophet, it’s not about Islam—because it’s some dream sequence? And you go around saying it can’t be blasphemy because you don’t fast and you don’t pray? What is this garbage? He’s the prostitute. He’s the impostor. Not the Prophet. Frankly, it’s surprising a man like that had a book like Midnight’s Children in him. But it goes to show you. Every era has its Boswell.”