Translate... 1 v.t. Bear, convey, or remove from one person,
place, time or condition to another; transfer, transport
(OED)1

1In Salman Rushdie’s Shame, the narrator writes: ‘I, too, am a translated man. I have been borne across. It is generally believed that something is always lost in translation; I cling to the notion... that something can also be gained’.2 In this paper it is Rushdie’s understanding of migration as translation, metaphorically speaking, that I wish to focus on. The author’s fictional universe is peopled with migrants, and in his novels characters who are transported are ubiquitous. They are, in the words of the narrator of Shame, translated.

2As the quote claims, translation is commonly seen as reductive. Something—original meaning, or, with regard to people, perhaps a sense of belonging—is lost in the process of being borne across. Rushdie’s narrator chooses to believe, though, that the metaphorical act of translation that his characters are subjected to can also be seen in a more positive light. Judging from the author’s works on the whole, one can argue that his translated men and women may gain something as a result of their transport. In moving from one place (their place of origin) to another, they neatly illustrate the truism that context is everything. The characters are first decontextualised, displaced, and then recontextualised, in crossing borders. (Bhabha’s notion of a ‘poetics of relocation and reinterpretation’,3 which he discusses with respect to blasphemy in The Satanic Verses, may also apply here.) They interact with not one but multiple sign-systems or, as Sanga writes in her book on Rushdie’s postcolonial metaphors, ‘two different sets of variables, each set containing social, political, cultural and historical aspects’.4 The process of ‘translation’ the characters undergo has the potential of enriching and liberating them.

3What is lost in translation in Rushdie’s novels? What, if anything, is gained in effect? How do the novels illustrate this by means of their migrant characters? In the following I will provide some (necessarily sketchy) answers to these questions, discussing the motifs of displacement and belonging as reflected through the metaphor of translation—the word ‘metaphor’, incidentally, carrying the same original meaning of being borne across, as Rushdie himself notes in Imaginary Homelands.5 Of course, I cannot address all instances of such translation here; I will instead highlight a number of interesting cases.

4Thus I will leave out Grimus, Rushdie’s first published novel, as I wish to focus on those journeys that are set in recognisable versions of our world, which Flapping Eagle’s ascent up Calf Mountain is not. Instead I will focus first and foremost on The Satanic Verses, perhaps the work most concerned with the migrant condition, and then discuss two more metaphysical instances of transport or translation in Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh, namely Saleem Sinai’s phantasmagoric descent into the Sundarbans and Moraes Zogoiby’s final journey to a surreal, deadly Spain. To conclude I wish to discuss Rushdie’s own ‘transport’ to his new home, the United States, and how (if at all) his two post-transport novels The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury reflect this. However, it is too early yet for me to address Rushdie’s latest work, Shalimar the Clown,6 in any great detail.

5The narrator of Shame writes on the subject of migrants: ‘I have a theory that the resentments we mohajirs engender have something to do with our conquest of the force of gravity. We have performed the act of which all men anciently dream, the thing for which we envy the birds; we have flown’ (Rushdie 1983: 86). He elaborates as follows:

I am comparing gravity with belonging.... [T] o explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places. (Ibid.)

6The novel gives this definition: ‘Migration, n., moving, for instance in flight, from one place to another. To fly and to flee: both are ways of seeking freedom’ (ibid.). The two main characters of The Satanic Verses, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, are in flight in a very literal sense at the beginning of the novel, having survived the explosion of the airplane they were travelling on only to find themselves plummeting towards the ground. What is more, they survive by conquering gravity in the most improbable way, by flapping their arms and singing on the way down. In that sense already, Saladin and Gibreel initially are both quintessential migrants along the lines Shame sets up.

7However, even before the novel begins, we are confronted with a different migrant figure in the epigraph by Daniel Defoe: ‘Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without certain abode... [H] e is... without any fixed place or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon’.7 This Satan is a permanently ‘translated’ man, eternally stripped of roots or a sense of belonging, and while his homelessness is the punishment for his pride and rebellion, in Rushdie’s terms it liberates him too. As he does not belong in any one place, he has no fixed identity or meaning and is thus free to construct these for himself. The Satan of the Verses is a protean figure—like Saladin and Gibreel, he is an actor taking on many parts, including, blasphemously, that of God (whose appearance in the novel, perhaps even more blasphemously, would seem to have been modelled on that of its author).

8In the following I will discuss Saladin Chamcha only, as his story relates most to the issue at hand. More than Gibreel, Saladin follows in the Satanic narrator’s footsteps in many ways, which partly explains why he ends up metamorphosing into a more stereotypically devilish shape. He rebels against his father, the seemingly omniscient and omnipresent Changez Chamchawala, who in turn banishes him as ‘a ghoul, a hoosh, a demon up from hell’ (Rushdie 1988: 48). In fleeing his father country, Saladin wishes to remake himself as ‘the thing his father was-not-could-never-be, that is, a goodandproper Englishman’ (Rushdie 1988: 43). He endeavours to negate his past and become a wholly new person. However, his flight (in both senses of the word) ‘from Indianness to Englishness, an immeasurable distance’ (Rushdie 1988: 41) is problematic in that what Saladin attempts is less a translation (which would be a transformation of the original text) than a complete rewriting of himself. He succeeds in mimicking the British he himself tries to become—the narrator explains that Saladin ‘began to act, to find masks that these fellows would recognize, paleface masks, clown-masks, until he fooled them into thinking he was okay, he was people-like-us’ (Rushdie 1988: 43)— but ironically, his neurotic attempt to negate his origins, his roots, leads to his being more than ever defined by them. His first journey and its results thus demonstrate what can be lost in translation: Saladin does not truly fly, he does not conquer the force of gravity. Rather, he gives up his sense of belonging in search of somewhere else to put down roots.

9 At the same time, his reactions when he returns to Bombay years later to star in a play suggest that there is a change. While physically he may travel from his adopted homeland to his place of birth, his journey only serves to highlight the inbetweenness he is loath to accept. On the one hand, his meticulously maintained RP accent already slips on the flight as Saladin ‘found his speech unaccountably metamorphosed into the Bombay lilt he had so diligently (and so long ago) unmade.... He should have known it was a mistake to go home, after so long, how could it be other than a regression; it was an unnatural journey’ (Rushdie 1988: 34). (Saladin’s choice of words—to go home—betrays him as much as his accent.) On the other hand he sees that there can be no unproblematic return to a former self: ‘When you have stepped through the looking-glass you step back at your own peril. The mirror may cut you to shreds’ (Rushdie 1988: 58). What is more, when Saladin’s Indian lover Zeenat Vakil says ‘you look just like a blank.... An empty slate, nobody home’ (Rushdie 1988: 61), this could be turned around: there is nobody home because this translated Saladin no longer has a home.

10Nevertheless, Saladin does not accept his migrancy yet, clinging instead to his self-created myth of belonging, his Englishness. It is only in the transport the novel starts on, Saladin and Gibreel’s miraculous flight from the exploding airplane, and in Saladin’s ensuing translation into a Satanic figure, a literalised representation of the immigrant Other in the eyes of a white racist England, that he slowly comes to realise—and finally accept—his migrant status. It is noteworthy that as Saladin is transformed, so is England—having been changed himself, he experiences an England that is very different from the one he had previously believed in. In his view, the country too has become an in-between thing: ‘Some other place, not England or perhaps not-England, some counterfeit zone, rotten borough, altered state... a transit lounge’ (Rushdie 1988: 152). For its non-white inhabitant and devotee, England has turned from a home into its opposite, a stopover between flights.

11At first, Saladin’s translated existence is a living hell for him, as he is brutally beaten by the immigration police, put in a nightmarish hospital, finds out that his English wife has taken a lover, and is generally stripped of all his certainties. He realises that just as he was unable to return to an actual home in going to Bombay, he cannot revert to his ‘goodandproper Englishman’ existence any more. As Rushdie writes, ‘the inescapability of change, of things-never-the-same, of no-way-back, made him afraid’ (Rushdie 1988: 260), which indicates that while Saladin is scared by this process, he no longer denies it. ‘The sense of belonging no longer comes from the self’s durable bond with one land but through its perpetual negotiation with a fractured and scabrous surface’,8 Ganapathy Dore writes, a description that fits Saladin’s fragmented sense of self.

12So does Saladin only lose in translation? The fact that he is in the end able to return to India to his father and achieve reconciliation with the dying man suggests otherwise. What Saladin learns in his flight and transformation is to make a new home in transports, in borders. As Sanga writes, ‘ [i] n a sense the border is the only reliable, consistent home because [Rushdie (and, I would argue, his protagonists)] can never settle fully on either side’ (Sanga 2001: 17). Saladin learns to accept that his past influences his present but does not need to determine his future, and that he is constantly a migrant, in a state of translation, which his return to England and his metamorphosis highlight: ‘He chose Lucretius over Ovid. The inconstant soul, the mutability of everything... Newness’ (Rushdie 1988: 288). In his final journey to Bombay, he is translated into Salahuddin Chamchawala (his given name), but this Salahuddin is no longer the son longing to escape his overbearing father; he does not represent a return to an original, untranslated self—in having accepted his migrant identity, he gains the freedom to make a new, dynamic home for himself. He finds that he has finally conquered gravity, and his newfound sense of belonging is rooted in himself rather than in a mythical homeland, and thus something he can take with him.

13Saladin’s final, successful translation can be described by the Derridean notion of différance; it ‘exhibits a disruption in the given understanding... of a concept. It signifies the generation of new and alternate meanings without necessarily obliterating the marks of their primary referential meanings’, as Sanga (2001: 49/50) summarises it. In that sense, Shame’s concept of the migrant leaving behind his roots in taking flight would need to be qualified: freedom from one’s origins does not equal the denial of such a point of origin. In fact, those characters that try to bury their past find that it comes back to haunt them. Salahuddin’s journey home is one of reconciliation because only in accepting the past does he free himself from it. By acknowledging earlier versions of himself, he can revise and co-author himself, he can take an active part in his own translation.

14Saleem Sinai, the protagonist and narrator of Rushdie’s first successful novel, also crosses literal borders in his tale as he, the metaphorical twin of independent India, is (in his own words) ‘exiled’9 to Pakistan, the Land of the Pure. In the first of these exiles, the effect that crossing borders has on Saleem is quite profound; his gift of telepathy, which enables him to convene the Midnight’s Children’s Conference, is cut short: ‘I discovered that somehow the existence of a frontier ‘jammed’ my thought-transmissions... [Exiled] from my home, I was also exiled from the gift which was my truest birthright: the gift of the midnight children’ (Rushdie 1981: 284). However, arguably Saleem does not change as such in this voyage. Similarly, when his whole family later moves to Pakistan, this may coincide with the permanent loss of his gift after an operation and the end of his childhood (Rushdie 1981: 309), but the journey itself would seem to be an external marker or a parallel of this change rather than its cause.

15Nevertheless, there is a border crossing and journey in Midnight’s Children that can be seen as a translation of the protagonist, namely the phantasmagoric wartime flight into the Sundarbans. It takes place after Saleem loses his family, his memory, in effect his identity and humanity in the first Indo-Pakistani war, becoming a mine-tracking ‘man-dog’ (Rushdie 1981: 347) in the Pakistani army thanks to his olfactory talent. After witnessing and becoming complicit in the atrocities committed by his fellow soldiers, Saleem (who in these passages has become a third-person singular character in what before was a first-person narrative) takes his men into the Sundarbans:

[T] hey have murdered the hours and forgotten the date, they no longer know if they are chasing after or running from, but whichever it is that pushes them is bringing them closer to the impossible green wall, ‘That way’, the Buddha [i.e. Saleem] insists, and then they are inside it, the jungle which is so thick that history has hardly ever found the way in. (Rushdie 1981: 359)

16In hindsight, the narrator confesses that at the time he was indeed running away ‘into the historyless anonymity of rain-forests’ (Rushdie 1981: 360), yet ironically, in crossing the border into this heart of darkness the four men do not escape their history but are made to face up to it. Even though they may have forgotten who they are, they take themselves along into the Sundarbans, so this is exactly what they encounter in what could psychologically be read as a symbolic representation of their unconscious, metaphysically as a version of Purgatory.

17Especially Saleem is translated in this journey, although it is not the translation of Shame or of the migrant characters in The Satanic Verses. His transformation does tie into the latter novel’s dictum, though: ‘To be born again, ... first you have to die’ (Rushdie 1988: 3). In the historyless jungle, Saleem is bitten by a poisonous snake—an echo of his infancy when snake poison healed him of a nearly fatal fever—which in almost killing him reunites him with his own past (Rushdie 1981: 364). By being joined with his story and the memory of his family, he regains his humanity.

18Similarly to this episode in Midnight’s Children, Moraes Zogoiby’s journey to Spain in The Moor’s Last Sigh is both a real, actual border-crossing and a more metaphysical transport. In looking for the last painting by his dead mother Aurora, presumed stolen by her erstwhile familiar Vasco Miranda, the Moor seeks a reconciliation with Aurora; he seeks a return to a symbolic mother country. Surely it is no coincidence that the Spain he flies to is also the country of his ancestor Boabdil, so Moraes’ journey can be seen as an attempt to return to a mythical home. However, the novel would seem to suggest, such a return is impossible. Moraes seems lost in translation, in being borne across to Europe, not only when he arrives in Spain but already when he is on the plane. The journey does mark a transition to a different state. The narrative becomes markedly more surreal and indeterminate in his flight from Bombay (again, both senses of the word apply). He writes: ‘You will see that I had entered an unfamiliar state of mind. The place, language, people and customs I knew had all been removed from me by the simple act of boarding this flying vehicle; and these, for most of us, are the four anchors of the soul’.10 Rushdie’s earlier notion of defying gravity here is transformed into a nightmare of homelessness; the Moor lacks a quality or ability—perhaps that of taking responsibility for his own life—that would allow him to embrace the potential of this freedom.

19Moraes is translated in this journey, from a man who was strong enough to beat to death the man he has been told is responsible for his mother’s death to a frail, lost, old and frankly ridiculous figure walking with his stuffed dog Jawaharlal the surreal ‘limbo’ (Rushdie 1995: 387) he has arrived in a Spain of the mind rather than an actual, realistic place. In the feelings it evokes in Moraes, this Spain resembles the ‘transit-lounge’ England the transmogrified Saladin landed in: ‘I had reached an anti-Jerusalem: not a home, but an away’ (Rushdie 1995: 388). The hellish transit-lounge image is emphasised by the population of this Benengeli the Moor travels to, made up almost exclusively of expatriates of all different nations. He has come to a place where even the mayor, a native of Benengeli, is in effect a ‘rootless foreigner’ (Rushdie 1995: 392). What is more, the Alhambra Miranda has fashioned for himself is not the imaginary, liminal, unstable but creative home the Moor’s mother had imagined in her paintings, but ‘an ugly, pretentious house’ (Rushdie 1995: 409), a simulacrum mocking what it imitates.

20Ironically, Moraes calls this place of permanent transition ‘Indian country [where n] ot even an Indian was safe’ (Rushdie 1995: 414). He claims that ‘ [i] n Indian country, there was no room for a man who didn’t want to belong to a tribe, who dreamed of moving beyond; of peeling off his skin and revealing his secret identity—the secret, that is, of the identity of all men’ (Rushdie 1995: 414). Arguably, however, Benengeli and Miranda’s gaudy Alhambra are not Indian country, tribal and exclusivist. They are rather the opposite, a place where everyone is a migrant—yet apparently flight here has ceased to liberate, or perhaps these migrants are as incapable of handling their shocking, disorienting freedom as Moraes is. Benengeli is uncanny—‘un-homely’—, it is ‘ [a] place that did not bind, but dissolved’ (Rushdie 1995: 388). As tasteless as Miranda’s flatland mock-Alhambra is, it is at least an attempt at fashioning a home for himself. The Moor lacks this ability, he needs others to provide him even with imaginary homelands; and thus to the end, even in writing his life and nailing it to gateposts, fences and doors, he remains lost in translation.

21 The Moor’s Last Sigh was Rushdie’s first full-length novel published after the fatwa was issued against him on Valentine’s Day 1989. The author spent the years that followed the proclamation of this death sentence in hiding, without certain abode, without fixed space or place allowed him. The novel that followed the Moor’s tale, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, already pointed towards the place where Rushdie, and his fiction, would find a home (at least for the time being): the United States of America. For the first time, the USA played an important role in Rushdie’s novels, and the States became even more central in Fury, published in 2001, with most of its plot set in New York. Especially the latter work represents a change not just in locale but in style, as Rushdie foregoes his trademark use of puns, wordplay and free association for most of the novel. Fury is a more disciplined yet still inventive work (that, incidentally, would deserve more critical attention than it has received so far). However, both novels have been seen as signs of the ‘Americanization of [Rushdie’s] fiction’, as Ganapathy-Dore (2000: 17) writes, a trend clearly continued in Shalimar the Clown. What marks these works as different, I would suggest, is that they represent the US as a potential final destination for the homeless, ever-transported migrants of Rushdie’s fiction.

22The author’s essays and articles published in the wake of 9/11 suggest that he has come to see the fabled multicultural melting pot as a polyphonic counterweight to fundamentalism and oppression. While The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury are not uncritical of some of the darker aspects of America,11 they do represent it as a place where translated people can find a new sort of home. Malik Solanka, the protagonist of Fury, who ‘had conceived... an almost religious belief in the power of flight’, sees it as ‘the land of self-creation’ where he can ‘unwrite’ his life,12 yet he also perceives the country more ominously as ‘a greater deity... all around him: America, in the highest hour of its hybrid, omnivorous power’ (Rushdie 2001: 44). Rai, the narrator of The Ground Beneath Her Feet and yet another migrant character, is less ambivalent, and his romanticising attitude can be discerned throughout the work. For him, the US is the yearned-for home of the homeless: ‘My dream-ocean led to America, my private, my unfound land’,13 Rai writes. As the narrator, he is critical towards the notion of roots throughout, and like Rushdie he opts to leave India (and later England) behind for good. One passage in The Ground Beneath Her Feet suggests that Rai may be voicing at least some of his creator’s views on the matter:

[T] he tie is broken. There are conversations going on every day in India, conversations we’d be dragged into, that we no longer wish to have, that we can’t stomach the thought of repeating even one more time, tired arguments about authenticity, religion, sensitivities, cultural purity and the corrupting effects of foreign travel. (Rushdie 1999: 416)

23The United States in the novels permit Rushdie’s migrant characters to establish new ties that are not based on roots or other myths of origin. They represent the freedom his characters have often sought in transport.

24Thus, while America is idealised, this idealisation is not of the same sort as Saladin’s glorification of England. In the three most recent novels, it is a place for those in translation, those who wish to reimagine themselves. As such, it is a real place as well as an idea realised in the act of transport, and as one character in The Ground Beneath Her Feet states: ‘You get to be an American just by wanting, and by becoming an American you add to the kinds of American it’s possible to be’ (Rushdie 1999: 331). Potentially, it is a place of the mind, the ‘Third Space’ that Bhabha theorised and that Rushdie evokes in a number of his essays. It can be the place ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ he has written about in the BFI volume on The Wizard of Oz,14 or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil as interpreted in his essay on the film: a ‘world of the imagination’ (Rushdie 1991: 122). It is in the same essay that Rushdie writes: ‘To be a migrant is, perhaps, to be the only species of human being free of the shackles of nationalism (to say nothing of its ugly sister, patriotism)’ (Rushdie 1991: 124). Thus, the America his recent novels strive for (and to an extent end up in) is not the ‘Love it or leave it’ superpower (undoubtedly also one aspect of the States) but like Rushdie’s view of Gilliam’s Brazil ‘a land of make-believe of which all of us who have, for whatever reason, lost a country and ended up elsewhere, are the true citizens’ (Rushdie 1991: 125). The characters Rushdie portrays in the US are all in some way ‘people who root themselves in ideas rather than places... who have been obliged to define themselves—because they are so defined by others—by their otherness’ (Rushdie 1991: 124). In being transported to Rushdie’s America of the mind (or of fiction), everyone has the opportunity to find themselves—selves of their own making—in translation.