"Imaginary Homelands"

Rushdie, Salman. “Imaginary Homelands.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91. London: Granta Books, 1992. 9-21. Print.

In “Imaginary Homelands,” Rushdie theorizes his writing, and that of other Indians and other immigrants, reenforcing Gikandi’s argument that Rushdie intentionally writes in a fragmented way, one which challenges the sanctity of realist English literature and language by putting to use the in-betweeness of his own subjectivity and that of other immigrants. He says that he feels that his present home in England is home, but reveals that when he returned to his past home in India, it also felt like home “albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time” (9). For Rushdie, writing is a way to give colour to one’s past––a past time and place––which becomes foreign to oneself (10). Rushdie argues that because he cannot reclaim what has been lost from his memory, he must create fictions of homeland: “imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind” (10). This reminds me, again, of Butler’s work, her idea that we cannot return to our moment of origin, that we are always in the middle of things.

Rushdie goes on to argue that a writer who writes from outside of his/her place of origin will inevitably give a “broken mirror” or fragmentary version of that place/time (11). This, however, is not necessarily a bad thing because for him, because “the shards of memory acquired a great status, greater resonance” in their afterlife; they have become artifacts or symbols which can be used as tools in the present (12). He argues that we cannot perceive the whole of anything anyway. We always see a pixelated version of the world. So the world can always be reinvented, re-pictured, and “rediscribing a world is the necessary first step in changing it” (14). Artists and politicians both paint pictures of the world, he suggests, but the artist’s job is to envision something risky, to push the limits of social possibility (15).

Although he acknowledges that he cannot speak for all immigrants or all Indians, Rushdie suggests that immigrant writers are well positioned to envision something new because their identity is “both plural and partial”; that is, they live in two worlds and in-between two worlds (15). They may lose some things in translation (writing in English) but they will also gain things by working within both British and home literary traditions.

Immigrant writers can write from a double perspective, and Radclyffe Hall suggests something similar of “inverts” in The Well of Loneliness. Puddle tells Stephen that she will be a good writer because she can write from both a woman’s and a man’s perspective (Hall 208). What other types of hybridity might lend themselves to this fragmented form of writing? What about madness?