Before long, as the children grow taller than their fathers and forget their Japanese and will speak only English, as they eat hugely, drink milk, dump ketchup on potatoes, become ashamed of their parents and will not bow to them, the gap widens—“with each passing day they seemed to slip further and further from our grasp.” The children are joining the Others, the white Americans.
But then comes the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Otsuka tells of the months of increasing hostility and suspicion the Japanese Americans lived through, their fear, their incredulity, before they were summarily dispossessed and deported to detention camps as enemy aliens. In its agonised poignancy and restraint, this may be the finest passage of the book.
I am sorry that after it, in the last chapter, she suddenly changes her narrative mode, ceases to follow her group of women. The point of view changes radically, and suddenly “we” are the whites: “The Japanese have disappeared from our town.”
I was twelve when “the Japanese disappeared” from my town, Berkeley. My unawareness, my incomprehension of the event at the time, has troubled and informed my mind for many years. It’s up to me, as a white American, to deal with that ignorance and denial. Julie Otsuka can’t do it for me. I can only wish she had gone all the way with her heroines into the exile from exile, to those bitter desert and mountain prison-towns, where few of “us” went even in imagination, until those who returned began to bear witness.
Salman Rushdie: The Enchantress of Florence
2014
From the sea of stories our master fisherman has brought up two gleaming, intertwining prizes—a tale about three boys from Florence in the age of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and a tale of Akbar, greatest of the Mughal emperors, who established both the wondrous and short-lived city Fatehpur Sikri and a wondrous and short-lived policy of religious tolerance. Both stories are about story itself, the power of history and fable, and why it is that we can seldom be sure which is which.
Fabulous as his life was, Akbar was a historical figure; and one of the young Florentines is Niccolò Machiavelli, our byword for political realism. But Niccolò’s friend Argalia flies on the peacock wings of the novelist’s invention to become the bosom friend of Akbar before returning to fight for a lost cause in Florence. Some characters are the inventions of other characters: Queen Jodha and Qara Köz, the Enchantress, are Akbar’s daydreams of the Perfect Wife and the Perfect Lover, brought into existence by tale-tellers and artists and Akbar’s all-powerful desire and obsession, and accepted by his people, “such occurrences being normal at that time, before the real and the unreal were segregated forever and doomed to live apart under different monarchs and separate legal systems.”
This brilliant, fascinating novel swarms with gorgeous young women both historical and imagined, beautiful queens and irresistible enchantresses, along with some whores and a few quarrelsome old wives—all stock figures, females perceived solely in relation to the male. Women are never treated unkindly by the author, but they have no autonomous being. The Enchantress herself, who makes puppets of everyone, has no real self but exists—literally—by pleasing men. Akbar calls her a “woman who had forged her own life, beyond convention, by the force of her will alone, a woman like a king.” But in fact she does nothing but sell herself to the highest bidder, and her power is an illusion permitted by the man.
In a marvelous scene Akbar’s wife and mother come to show his imaginary wife Jodha how to release him from the Enchantress’s spell, and in so doing are reconciled with Jodha in a moment of hilarious feminine solidarity. But the Enchantress appears, Jodha vanishes, and the women are defeated by the man’s obsession. Indeed, the men in the book are as hormone-besotted as adolescents. All their derring-do, their battling for cities and empires, comes down to little more than a bed with a young woman in it. Machiavelli becomes a disappointed middle-aged lecher whose middle-aged wife “waddles” and “quacks” while he looks at her with loathing. But then, suddenly, for a page or two, we slip into her soul, we feel her anger at his disloyalty, her hurt pride as a woman, her unchanged pride in him and his “dark sceptical genius,” her puzzlement at his failure to see how he lessens himself by scorning what he has that is treasurable and honorable. For that moment I glimpsed a very different book, almost a different author. Then it was back to the dazzling play of fancy and the all-powerful dreams of men.
The swashbuckling Argalia’s adventures, linking the Florentine and the Indian strands of the double tale, are full of Rushdian charm and extravagance but descend too easily into facetiousness (such as four giant albino Swiss mercenaries named Otho, Botho, Clotho, and D’Artagnan). These exploits are less interesting than the misfortunes of Machiavelli or the mind of the Emperor Akbar.
Rushdie’s Akbar is imperious, intelligent, and very likable, a marvelous spokesman for his author. The historic Akbar tried to unite all India, “all races, tribes, clans, faiths, and nations,” a powerful dream indeed, though doomed to perish with him. What winds were blowing in the late fifteenth century to waken that emperor’s syncretic vision, even as Europe began to free itself from the Church’s control of ideas? “If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was.” Goodness might lie not in self-abnegation before an Almighty but in ”the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.” Lord of a theocratic, absolutist society, he glimpses harmony not as the enemy of discord but the result of it: “difference, disobedience, disagreement, irreverence, iconoclasm, impudence, even insolence might be the wellsprings of the good.”
Akbar is the moral center of the book, its center of gravity, and provides its strongest link to the issues which have concerned Salman Rushdie in his works and his life. It all comes down to the question of responsibility. Akbar’s objection to God is “that his existence deprived human beings of the right to form ethical structures by themselves.” The curious notion that without religion we have no morals has seldom been dismissed with such quiet good humor. Rushdie leaves ranting to the fanatics who fear him.
Driven from his magical city when its lake goes dry, Akbar gravely foresees his defeat: “All he had worked to make, his philosophy and way of being, would evaporate like water. The future would not be what he hoped for, but a dry hostile antagonistic place” where people would hate and kill “in the great quarrel he had sought to end forever, the quarrel over God”—the quarrel our fanatics are still so enthusiastically pursuing.
But there is another theme to the book: “Religion could be rethought, reexamined, remade, perhaps even discarded; magic was impervious to such assaults.” Akbar in his splendid city, like the Florentines in theirs, inhabited a world of magic “as passionately as they inhabited the world of tangible materials.” This is the great difference between them and us. We have separated the real and the unreal, put them in different kingdoms with different laws.
Like all serious fantasy, Rushdie’s story erases this division by making us realists inhabit, for the span of our reading, the realm of Imagination, which is controlled by but not limited to observation of fact. This is the land of story, where word makes be: the child’s world, the ancestral, prescientific world, where we are all emperors or enchantresses, making up the rules as we go along. Modern literary fantasy is given a paradoxical intensity, sometimes a tragic dimension, by our consciousness of the other kingdom we inhabit, daily life, where the laws of physics cannot be broken, and whose government was described by Niccolò Machiavelli.
Some boast that science has ousted the incomprehensible, others cry that science has driven magic out of the world and plead for “reenchantment.” But it’s clear that Charles Darwin lived in as wondrous a world, as full of discoveries, amazements, and profound mysteries, as that of any fantasist. The people who disenchant the world are not the scientists, but those who see it as meaningless in itself, a machine operated by a deity. Science and literary fantasy are intellectually incompatible, yet both describe
the world. The imagination functions actively in both modes, seeking meaning, and wins intellectual consent through strict attention to detail and coherence of thought, whether one is describing a beetle or an enchantress. Religion, which prescribes and proscribes, is irreconcilable with both of them, and since it demands belief, must shun their common ground, imagination. So the true believer must condemn both Darwin and Rushdie as “disobedient, irreverent, iconoclastic” dissidents from revealed truth.
The essential compatibility of the realistic and the fantastic imagination may explain the success of Rushdie’s sumptuous, impetuous mixture of history with fable. But in the end, of course, it is the hand of the master artist, past all explanation, that gives this book its glamor and power, its humor and shock, its verve, its glory. It is a wonderful tale, full of follies and enchantments. East meets West with a clash of cymbals and a burst of fireworks. We English speakers have our own Ariosto now, our Tasso, stolen out of India. Aren’t we the lucky ones?
Salman Rushdie: Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights
2015
A “colossal fragmentation of reality” occurred in the twentieth century, Salman Rushdie has said, and his novels enact and display that fragmentation with terror and glee. His new novel, Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights, assures us that reality has been crumbling more colossally than ever lately and is about to come completely unglued. An even worse storm than any last winter will be followed by eschatological lightning strikes and local failures of gravity as the Dark Ifrits begin to take advantage of the weakening of the fabric of the everyday.
The cumbrous title transcribes a certain number of days into years and months, but not the four weeks that should complete it, because the word Nights is needed to suggest the original Thousand and One. Rushdie is our Scheherazade, inexhaustibly enfolding story within story and unfolding tale after tale, with such irrepressible delight in doing so that it comes as a shock to remember that, like her, he has lived the life of a storyteller in immediate peril. Scheherazade told her thousand and one tales to put off a stupid, cruel threat of death; he brought the threat upon himself by telling an unwelcome tale. So far, like her, he has succeeded in escaping. May he continue to do so.
At the idea of trying to summarize the plot, I shriek and fall back fainting upon my seraglio couch. Rushdie has a fractal imagination. Plot buds from plot, endlessly. There are at least a hundred and one stories and substories, and nearly as many characters. All you need to know is that they’re mostly highly entertaining, amusing, and—but I won’t say ingenious, because a good many of the characters are in fact genies.
Genies in English, jinn in their own language. The dilapidation of reality has affected the wall between our world and Peristan, the world of the jinn, leaving slots and slits through which they can slip.
Their existence in Peristan is one of almost ceaseless sexual intercourse in surroundings of total luxury. Still, some of them, finding this as boring as some of us might, have always liked to sneak over here to entertain themselves by meddling with our little mortal lives. The male jinn are creatures of flame, the jinnia of smoke. They have great powers of magic, not so great powers of intellect. Willful, impulsive, and unwise, one of them gets trapped over here every now and then, imprisoned by a spell in a bottle or a lamp.
We haven’t seen any jinn for a while, because their passages into our world were sealed up about a thousand years ago, not long after the greatest jinnia princess, Dunia, had a love affair with the philosopher Ibn Rushd in Andalusia. The outcome was a slew of descendants distinguished by their lobeless ears and the trace in them of fairy blood. For that’s what Peristan is in English—Fairyland.
The main plot—the outermost Chinese box—is constructed around a philosophical feud between the rationalist Ibn Rushd and the pious Ghazali of Iran, who placed the power of God above all earthly causes and effects. Ibn Rushd tried to reconcile reason and humane morality with God and faith, a kindly God and an unfanatic faith. He challenged Ghazali. His reward was disgrace and exile.
I met Salman Rushdie many years ago, long before the fatwa, but I can’t remember if he has lobes to his ears. In any case, certain parallels are clear. This book is a fantasy, a fairy tale—and a brilliant reflection of and a serious meditation on the choices and agonies of our life in this world.
The choices are presented simplistically, comic-book style, as absolute Good and Evil. The agonies are presented, disaster-movie style, as catastrophes so awful that readers who don’t want to think about them can shrug them off. Rushdie is a generous, good-natured writer who’d rather woo and seduce his readers than reduce the truth to gall and brimstone and make them swallow it.
All the same, the frontispiece of the book is the Goya engraving that stands at the very entrance of the modern age: “The sleep of reason engenders monsters.” The monsters here engendered, however playfully imagined, are not imaginary.
The strongest male figure among the many in this book is Mr. Geronimo, a gardener. Physically and emotionally he’s a vivid character, likable for his strength and modesty and his homesickness for the city of his childhood, Bombay (which to him will never be Mumbai). There are strong women in the book, a Mayor, a Lady Philosopher, but they’re pretty much cartoons. The novel’s heroine and protagonist is female, which I think is a first for Rushdie, and I wish I didn’t have a problem with her. It’s not that she isn’t human; you can’t ask a fairy princess to be anything but what she is. But you can ask her not to think like a man.
Bearing children by the litter, seven to nineteen at a time, is certainly a practical engineering approach to leaving a large number of offspring, but not one many women would choose. We don’t see Dunia nursing her babies (it would interesting to know how she did it) or anything of her certainly busy motherhood. When she returns to earth after a thousand years, it is to defend “her children”—but this means her remote descendants, a scattered group of earlobeless people whom she calls the Duniyat, asserting her authorship of a lineage.
The usual name for this authorship is paternity. Its importance to men among the Mediterranean and Arabic peoples is very great. More generally, while women are likely to value their actual children and their status as mother over any abstract idea of lineage, men often consider their children, particularly sons, most valuable as maintaining the paternal bloodline. This gender difference may reflect biological imperatives, male mammals being motivated to reproduce their genes, females to nurture the gene-bearers.
Dunia’s a mammal all right, but her loving heart and her numerous litters can’t keep me from suspecting that—like so many other kickass, weapon-wielding warrior women—she’s a man in drag.
In the terrible period called The Strangeness, beginning about right now, the dark jinn, the great Ifrits, will try to destroy humanity with all their arts of magic and unreason, and Dunia will summon her Duniyat, with their drop of jinn blood, to defend us with the same arts.
So we have the War between Good and Evil, with supervillains and superheroes (my favorite is Natraj Hero, a.k.a. Jimmy Kapoor of Queens, New York), conducted according to the best precedents. According to precedent, and a bit anticlimactically, the Good Guys win. The last of the mighty Dark Ones, Zumurrud, is imprisoned in a blue glass bottle by the Lady Philosopher, the rest of the jinn retire to Peristan, and Dunia closes the passages between the worlds in a final act of supermaternal self-sacrifice.
Towards the end of the book, we find that our descendants of the next millennium have abandoned conflict as a way of life. They peacefully cultivate their gardens rather than their bigotries and hatreds, having found that “in the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged.” But . . . Of course there has to be a but.
Contemporary sophistication declares that peace is boring, moderation is bleh, happy is sappy. Defying sophistry, Rushdie imagines a contented people, but only by depriving them of dreams. No visions, no nightmares. Their sleep is empty darkness.
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The implication is that our human gift of imagining can’t exist without the hatred, anger, and aggressiveness that lead to such human behaviors as warfare, conscious cruelty, and deliberate destruction. To imply that only the dark jinn in us can give us dreams and visions may be one way of admitting the essential balance between the creative and the destructive within us.
But it’s also, I think, a capitulation to the idea, so powerful in twentieth-century literature, that the slow processes of creation are less interesting, less real, than the catastrophic dramas of destruction. And this leaves us right back where we are now. If cultivating our garden stultifies our minds, if using reason prevents our seeing visions, if compassion enfeebles us—what then? Back to conflict as our default solution? Cultivate hatred, anger, violence, reinstate the priests, politicians, and warmakers, and finish destroying the Earth?
I wish we could abandon this false alternative, which neglects the possibility of more imaginative uses of both the light and the darkness in us.
So the very end of the story was, to me, a letdown. But it may not be so to others. And I like to think how many readers are going to admire the courage of this book, revel in its fierce colors, its boisterousness, humor, and tremendous pizzazz, and take delight in its generosity of spirit.
José Saramago: Raised from the Ground
2012
For the last couple of centuries, novels have been written mostly by middle-class writers for middle-class readers. Novels about the very poor, the oppressed, peasants, aren’t generally written by or for the people they are about. Thus they tend to have a distanced, sociological air, while being at the same time terribly depressing—revelatory, grim, unhopeful, and of necessity brutal. The two great American novels of the oppressed, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath, are saved from that minatory coldness by the authors’ passion for justice and their loving respect for their protagonists. The same is true of José Saramago’s early novel Raised from the Ground—with a tremendous bonus: the author is writing about people he grew up with, his own people, his family.
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