1Rushdie’s characters often perform westbound journeys across skies and oceans, starting with the famous opening of The Satanic Verses,1 when two characters of Indian origin travelling from Bombay to London survive a plane crash and land on British shore, transformed into a devilish goat and an angel. Similar versions of that scene can be found in more recent novels, The Moor’s Last Sigh2 and The Ground beneath her Feet.3 If spectacular crashes are avoided, a common feature remains: all characters, as soon as they are aboard the westbound planes, experience metamorphoses.

I had never been up in a plane before, and the experience of passing through clouds—I had left Bombay on a rare cloudy day— was so spookily like the images of the After Life in movies, paintings and story books that I got the shivers. Was I travelling to the country of the dead? I half-expected to see a pair of pearly gates standing on the fluffy fields of cumulus outside my window, and a man holding a double-entry account-book of rights and wrongs. Sleep rolled over me... When I awoke, this sensation of having passed through a veil lingered on. (MLS 381)

2Such flights from reality and desires to defy gravity work as rewritings of the Icarus myth but they also conjure up the canonical stories that Rushdie claims as his major influences. Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, with their imaginary journeys to a fantasy otherworld, also suggest boundaries to cross in order to be transported.4 The Ground beneath her Feet reinforces this imagery, where a similar metaphor reads like a ‘transforming membrane in the sky’ (GF 431). This time, an organic frontier recalls both birth and death, reminding readers that the novel of 1999 can also be read as an explicit rewriting of the Orpheus myth.

3Most of Rushdie’s scholarship focuses on the transnational or cosmopolitan quality of his novels, pointing out the free flow advocated by the author between India and the West.5 We shall specify how the recurrent trope of East-West transports frames this free flow. The scene of airplane transport can be read in terms of both an individual and a political coming-of-age for the postcolonial subject. It works as an answer both to the colonial expansion from West to East (and on a literary level, to A Passage to India) and to traditional religious pilgrimages, which The Satanic Verses satirizes in its sections depicting a group of Muslim devotees blindly following a prophetess to their death6. Rushdie gives birth to a supplementary symbolic journey: the repetition of the airplane scenario in several novels calls for a reading in terms of ritual. Each time characters go through such a codified, fixed frame of action, they experience a metamorphosis anthropologists would define as initiation. A rite of passage is a set of symbol-laden actions by means of which one passes through a dangerous zone, negotiating it safely and memorably. It is a process that performs on the psychological level the transportation from an inferior state to a superior state. According to the anthropologist who theorized the rite of passage,7 there exist three stages structuring it: separation, transition and reincorporation. The journeys depicted in Rushdie’s novels fall into this three-stage model: transportation from East to West corresponds to a transformation process performed by the postcolonial subject, when he travels from the postcolonial margins to the postcolonial center. The aircraft’s structure symbolizes the egg from which characters come out forever transformed or renewed. Transport reads like the ritual process of defying death, and transportation means the initiation medium for coming back to life.

1 Separation from Bombay

4First, the ritual scene performed during the plane journey is made possible by the very nature of the aircraft. Once the characters sit on the plane, they are cut from their ancient world. However, they are not yet in the new one. In the plane, travellers are in limbo: there, some transformation is expected. When Rushdie describes what occurs inside the plane, he uses such words as passages through a veil, a membrane, a mirror and a skin, conjuring up an entity (sometimes, organic) calling for transgression and exposure: something wants to be born. Travelling through time and space gives way to a metaphor of rebirth: as a case in point, the narrator of The Ground beneath her Feet refers to Bombay as ‘Wombay’. Then, passing through celestial borders implies crossing the border of one’s identity:

[E] very bone in his body is being irradiated by something pouring through the sky-rip, a mutation is occurring at the level of the cell, of the gene, of the particle. The person who arrives won’t be the one who left, or not quite. He has crossed a time zone, moved from the eternal past of early life into the constant now of adulthood, the tense of presence, which will become a different kind of preterite, the past of absence, when he dies (GF 260).

5The sky plays a critical role in order for the postcolonial subject to perform the search for an identity. The celestial space is particularly prone to exalt ideals of freedom; it does not impose any limits and allows one to distance oneself from reality. In The Satanic Verses, this quality is made literal: ‘Chamcha... had acquired the quality of cloudiness, becoming metamorphic, hybrid’ (SV 6). Gaston Bachelard associates cloudiness with the dreaming state:

Le rêveur a toujours un nuage à transformer. Le nuage nous aide à rêver la transformation... Dans cet amas globuleux, tout roule à souhait, des montagnes glissent, des avalanches s’écroulent puis s’apaisent, les monstres s’enflent puis se dévorent l’un l’autre, tout l’univers se règle sur la volonté et l’imagination du rêveur.8

6This imaginary freedom stands in contrast with the rigidity of earthly cartographies. Rushdie’s readers know how much the creation of Pakistan, as a tearing apart of his beloved India, affected the writer. This disgust is ingrained in some of his characters paralyzed with the possibility of alienation: ‘[This] fear of schizophrenia, of splitting that was buried like an umbilical cord in every Pakistani heart.’9 The geographical act of slicing and dividing includes a risk of contamination of the mind.

7The ritual of the plane then allows a liberating distance with geography and gives birth to a metaphysical definition of the border. This membrane, as an imaginary organism that can stretch out and mutate, becomes a counterpart for terrestrial frontiers, rigid and constraining. In flowing in and out of imaginary borders, the postcolonial subject assumes his role as a translated subject—etymologically, of being ‘borne across’.

2 Transition: Trial and Tribulation

8Rites can be seen as tests: everything happening away from the East puts the traveller through a trial. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, when the hero lands in Spain, he experiences a transitional phase: ‘I was no body from nowhere, like no one, belonging to nothing... All my ties had loosened. I had reached an anti-Jerusalem: not a home, but an away. A place that did not bind but dissolved’ (MLS 388). In the initiation rite, a symbolic death is needed in order to achieve the transportation towards a new, better stage. This also echoes the leitmotiv of The Satanic Verses: ‘To be born again first you have to die.’

9The particulars of this symbolic death take various forms, but all converge towards a political turn. The westbound voyage mimics an invasion in reverse, through which the postcolonial subject performs a reply from the colonized to the colonizer, similar to the ‘voyage in’ Edward Said once described in Culture and Imperialism.10 Said considers, among others, the works of C.L.R. James and Ranajit Guha as paradigmatic examples: they appropriated the language of the colonizer in order to produce a history enriched with their own experience of once colonized subjects. The body of work thus produced is defined as follows:

[T] he work of intellectuals from the colonial or peripheral regions who wrote in an imperial language, who felt themselves organically related to the mass resistance to empire, and who set themselves the revisionist, critical tasks of dealing frontally with the metropolitan culture, using the techniques, discourses, and weapons of scholarship and criticism once reserved exclusively for the European. (Said 1994: 293)

10The voyage in allows to draw the voice of the other within the metropolis: the weapons of criticism are being appropriated by the ex-colonized, bringing to the fore new configurations of power. Rushdie reproduces the ‘voyage in’ at the novelistic, symbolic level. His characters are transformed once they travel west, but they also are made responsible for new power configurations in the place where they finally land.

11Again, The Satanic Verses offers us its most theatrical image: the protagonists, once they fall down to earth, are there to disseminate newness into the world. The act of rebelling within the metropolis shows to be particularly resourceful in one scene. The hero, transformed into a devilish goat, is locked up in a psychiatric institution: there, he encounters a vast number of monsters and hybrid creatures who are literalized metaphors for the racial prejudices they suffer. The inmates of the institution are immigrants having succumbed, literally, to racist descriptions: they turned into goats, snakes, wolves and other non-human creatures. Those monsters are deprived of their identity because they left to the Englishmen the power to describe them. But the immigrants also carry guilt of their own. The hero of The Satanic Verses, Saladin Chamcha, is transformed into a devil-like figure for some other possible reason than the curses he suffered from white people. Before his transformation caused by the plane crash, he was in a deep denial of his Indian origin—denying his very name to make it sound westernized, from ‘Salahuddin’ to ‘Saladin’. Transformation and metamorphosis uncover a dual aspect of guilt—of the metropolis and of the colonized subject.

12Rushdie pushes his characters into transitional stages that require them to create an exit for themselves—otherwise they would be doomed to remain in limbo states where they would have to wear masks indefinitely.

3 The Strange Case of Saladin Chamcha

13One character exemplifies this phenomenon: in The Satanic Verses, Saladin Chamcha struggles against the recurring fear of being betrayed by his own skin. Because he has been overusing masks, Chamcha seems not to be able any longer to know which skin is his:

Once the flight to London had taken off, thanks to his magic trick of crossing two pairs of fingers on each hand and rotating his thumbs, the narrow, fortyish fellow who sat in a non-smoking window seat watching the city of his birth fall away from him like old snakeskin allowed a relieved expression to pass briefly across his face. This face was handsome in a somewhat sour, patrician fashion, with long, thick, downturned lips like those of a disgusted turbot, and thin eyebrows arching sharply over eyes that watched the world with a kind of alert contempt. Mr. Saladin Chamcha had constructed this face with care—it had taken him several years to get it just right—and for many more years now he had thought of it simply as his own—indeed, he had forgotten what he had looked like before it. Furthermore, he had shaped himself a voice to go with the face, a voice whose languid, almost lazy vowels contrasted disconcertingly with the sawn-off abruptness of the consonants. The combination of face and voice was a potent one; but, during his recent visit to his hometown, his first such visit in fifteen years (the exact period, I should observe, of Gibreel Farishta’s film stardom), there had been strange and worrying developments. It was unfortunately the case that his voice (the first to go) and, subsequently, his face itself, had begun to let him down....
I’m not myself, he thought as a faint fluttering feeling began in the vicinity of his heart. But what does that mean, anyway, he added bitterly. After all, ‘les acteurs ne sont pas des gens’, as the great ham Frederick had explained in Les Enfants du Paradis. Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull...
Damn you, India, Saladin Chamcha cursed silently, sinking back into his seat. To hell with you, I escaped your clutches long ago, you won’t get your hooks into me again, you cannot drag me back. (SV 33-5)

14In the plane headed to London, Saladin dreams that a stranger with a glass skin visits him: ‘A man with a glass skin, who rapped his knuckles mournfully against the thin, brittle membrane covering his entire body and begged Saladin to help him, to release him from the prison of his skin’ (SV 33). But when he tries to help him by breaking the glass, an odd phenomenon occurs:

At once a latticework of blood oozed up through the cracked surface of the stranger’s body, and when Chamcha tried to pick off the broken shards the other began to scream, because chunks of his flesh were coming away with the glass (SV 34).

15This glass prison is the very gaol that Saladin has built for himself by being a ‘mimic man’. The fall from the plane does not fundamentally alter his fear. Landed on the frozen earth, he starts to cry: ‘The tears of shock freezing on his face. And all his body cased in a fine skin of ice, smooth as glass, like a bad dream come true’ (SV 131).

16Who has he become? The question faces him throughout the novel, and he is afraid to die because of an inability to moult correctly: ‘ (Chamcha experiences a) nightmare-fear of cracking, of seeing his blood bubbling up from the ice-breaks, of his flesh coming away with the shards’ (SV 131). In the hospital where Saladin is locked, he meets various monsters that figure numberless avatars of his nightmares. One of them is named Glass Bertha and becomes Chamcha’s nemesis: ‘“Her skin turned to glass”, the manticore explained impatiently, not knowing that he was bringing Chamcha’s worst dream of life. “And the bastards smashed it up for her. Now she can’t even walk to the toilet”’. (SV 169)

17Glass skin is a trope constantly revisited: when Saladin, for example, breaks into the house he used to occupy with his wife Pamela Lovelace, he breaks a glass panel which ends up showing him his own reflection:

Standing brightly illuminated by the front door with the glass panel it had smashed in order to turn the knob of the tongue-and-groove lock... was a figure out of a nightmare or a late-night TV movie, a figure covered in mud and ice and blood, the hairiest creature you ever saw, with the shanks and hoofs of a giant goat. (SV 188)

18Such a figure recalls biblical features: the mud covering him is also the clay of the first man of Christianity. Moreover, blood and devilish attributes (goat, hooves, hair) all suggest the fear of origins. Like Defoe’s wandering devil11, this reflection in the mirror is Saladin’s nightmare: hybrid, wandering and deprived of an identity. He is at once the first man and the devil. In a devil’s mirror, the divine creature has been disfigured and replaced by an image without resemblance. Saladin experiences a painful dispossession of himself, which obliges him to perceive his shattered personality in fragments.

19By the end of the novel, Saladin recovers his genuine identity— his genuine skin. The inaugural fall in disgrace is transformed into an elevation, thanks to inner transportation. For instance, his love story with Zeeny is made possible by the progressive peeling of his numerous masks. After the first night spent with her, she tells him: ‘“I’ll tell you what happened to you tonight”, she said. “You could say we cracked your shell”’ (SV 57). The final rejoicing of both lovers reads like a veil being lifted: ‘She had invited him home shyly, as if she were removing a veil after long concealment’ (SV 535). Saladin’s transportation is both transforming and deepening, and suggests an elevation to a well-deserved recovery of identity.

4 Reintegration: Writing Imaginary Homelands

20The last stage of Saladin Chamcha’s journey consists in, very pragmatically, buying a return ticket to India in order to consolidate the transformation: a final eastbound transport achieves closure and entry into adulthood. His phase of reintegration consists in returning to Bombay at his father’s deathbed. There, he can forgive his father, recover his name, and establish peace between himself and his ‘mother’ country.

21Another way to end the initiation consists in the symbolic representation of a journey from oneself to oneself, through the act of writing up one’s story for history’s sake. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, the hero escapes India as a pariah and dies in Spain, but not after writing the story of his life. His piece of writing serves as a testimony and denounces, among other things, the crimes of a regime based on Hindu fundamentalism. In The Ground beneath her Feet, the narrator is ‘the only one who survived to tell the tale’, and as such, accomplishes the very task of integrating the character in their status of accomplished Indian artists:

Ormus Cama in the middle 1960s quits Bombay for England, restored to himself, feeling his true nature flowing back into his veins. As the plane lifts from his native soil, so his heart lifts also, he sheds his old skin without a second thought, crosses that frontier as if it didn’t exist, like a shape-shifter, like a snake.... Ormus’ unleashed personality is unable to contain itself within such demure fictions. His self has taken wing. It overflows its bounds. (GF 257)

22The westbound transport leads to both restoration and integration: as postcolonial subjects, they succeed in finding their footing as free artists on the individual level; they succeed in becoming the actors of their history on the political level.

23The ritual of the journey to the West by air obliges the postcolonial character to accomplish a coming-of-age, both personal and political. The farther the novel is set, the stronger the need for characters to define themselves by imagining their own boundaries and life stories. As a case in point, the heroine of Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie’s new novel, goes through the same process. She needs to fly all the way to Kashmir in order to mourn her mother and perform the act of closure from a former life full of ghosts and secrets:

As the plane crossed the Pir Panjal she felt as if she had passed through a magic portal and all at once, the pain intensified, it clutched at her heart and squeezed hard, and she wondered in sudden terror whether she had come to Kashmir to be reborn or to die.12

24Of course, she does not die there and the trip to Kashmir is enabling, not debilitating. She has found her own way to define herself, thus refusing to be defined by other people.