‘Intifada of Imagination’ Salman Rushdie

Indian-origin guru of literature, 75 years old Salman Rushdie was seriously injured in a knife attack on 12 August at the Chautauqua Institution (Western New York State). His The attacker was 24-year-old Shia Lebanese Hadi Matro from America, The young man is said to be sympathetic to the Iranian state and his fatwa against Rushdie was announced 33 years ago after the publication of The Satanic Verses.

questioning

We do not know whether Matar has any interest in literature, but we do know that he has an interest in religion. For a pious person, religion certainly matters over literature. Secular literature – a term we can safely use to refer to much of the writing since the advent of Western modernity – bears no attribution to divine commandments. It is a literature that is born and nurtured in the human will and imagination. In other words, secular literature is an idea of ​​writing which is free from the shackles of religious sentiments. It questions not only religion, but also modernist values: literature is ideally a form of free expression where all kinds of dogmas, including the dogmas of modern ideologies and values, are in question. The modern function of literature is to raise questions against everything we are comfortable with: whether it is the idea of ​​God, life, politics or morality. To write is to seek, to seek is to question, to question is to contradict, to refute is to establish the fundamental otherness that exists in the human world. Modern literature is not only for religion but also for the non-religious world. We cannot live in real conditions of freedom, even though we may aspire to it. Only in literature, in the art of writing, do we find the freedom we have always wanted, and which we deny.

Ever since the fatwa was issued against him, Rushdie has been asking questions about literature. In three scathing essays published together in the 1991 Compendium of Essays, the author raised some of the questions that emerged about the relationship between fiction and belief. These questions were not only political in nature, but also aesthetic and moral.

In his reflective essay, In God We Trust, Rushdie uncovered the unconscious roots of modern literature, emphasizing how the “dream room” was occupied by unholy thoughts and beings. Rushdie calls this room of dreams the psychological origin or source of the modern imagination. The difference between belief and its loss is understood from the fact that our dreams are also dictated by divine law or that there is room for deviation.

Rushdie likens our unconscious images of the world that are part of our dreaming, our unconscious, as a “veil, illusion” that allows us to “make things as they really are” (as in Plato’s disguise of reality). like a illusory form of a shadow). Allegory of the Cave’). Dreaming outside the strict “frame,” suggests Rushdie, can enable us to break out of our religious narcissism and accept the other, the world of difference, or the skewed imagery. In this sense, dreaming is not just a state but an act that enables us to register our freedom.

Here, Rushdie wisely cautions us that the freedom to dream can be not only our “gift” but also “our fatal flaw.” The spec can be prone to a fundamental error. We can make mistakes by refusing to submit to the “frame” assigned by religious truth. Dreaming, imagining or writing is uncertain, where truth and error are equally likely. Acting in freedom is not a guarantee of veracity. Writing about Dante’s love in a short work of prose in 1948 titled ‘The Meeting in a Dream’, the Argentine polymath, Jorge Luis Borges, wrote: “To fall in love is to create a religion in which a corrupt God is”. We can extend that pagan definition of love to art and literature: all mortal creations, and what inspires them, are vulnerable.

Refugees of fantasy

Rushdie in his combative essay ‘In Good Faith’ reaffirms his right to fantasize against the decrees of the purists. He declares his existential irresponsibility as the “now ****** child of history”. This audacious sensibility concerns the ‘minor’, or marginalized, subject who seeks to belong to the world (or nation, or community) by questioning his credentials. To consider oneself an illegitimate subject of history is not to find oneself outside history, but to register one’s own contradictory presence, as much as to seek relief and shelter from the sultans of power. The ‘modest’ figure of refugee fits that description in both real and metaphorical terms. All modern writers are refugees of the imagination, looking to use Rushdie’s inventive phrase, the “imaginary homeland.” The most provocative moment in the essay is when Rushdie defines freedom of expression as “freedom of crime.” To whom, in what way and how much? Is it a matter of measure, consideration or responsibility? Or is it a free horse of imagination running wildly in the fields of language?

editorial | Taking responsibility: why should Iran revoke the fatwa against Salman Rushdie?

As Rushdie knows more than anyone else, such imagination has consequences. The audacity of imagination is not without risk. To write is to risk both the language and the world. There is no imagination without friction. We are able to walk because the ground creates friction. We move, think, speak and write within a certain style and structure that enhances and limits our actions. The frictions and limitations we face in language originate within us socially and culturally. The whole point of writing (as much as walking and thinking) is to constantly push these boundaries that hold us back. That’s why freedom is priceless: it makes us realize that we can push the limits of nature.

In a 1994 short article titled ‘Against the Orthodoxy’, part of a compilation of Muslim and Arabic writers in defense of Rushdie, Edward W. Said wrote: “Rushdie is the intifada of the imagination.” Invoking Rushdie’s rebellious gesture against the monopoly of truth by religious conservatism, Said linked it to the spirit of Palestine’s resistance movement. To question what is written, to be free to err against imposed certainties, to walk out of the room where we are guilty of dreaming, is what makes literature an act of rebellion in our times. Cowardly acts by fanatics like Matar keep alive the risks and promises of literature.

Manash Firaq Bhattacharya is the author of ‘Nehru and the Spirit of India’