A counterpoint to history. The feminine in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh

1There seems to be no term more marked than the word “feminine” from the etymological, grammatical and connotational points of view. Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clément point out that femina in Latin means one who has less faith1. Yet I have chosen to deal with the feminine in The Moor’s Last Sigh because Rushdie himself gives the clue and in French to read his pirate map of a novel in order to find the treasure of his self in page no. 352. “Find the femme.” Indeed his self-confessed vulnerability to women is a theme that has been announced in his source novel, Midnight’s Children and fully developed in The Moor’s Last Sigh after the controversial problematization of the confrontation between the masculine and the feminine in The Satanic Verses. Even if his protagonists are fathered by history, they are engendered and sustained by women. In this paper, I propose to first study the feminine as a focal point of genesis, in other words, the feminine as a synonym tor origin, whether it is biological, territorial or national and then the typology of women portrayed by Rushdie. Rushdie being the master of ambivalence, the feminine is never separate from the masculine in his novels. I shall, therefore devote, some attention to the masculine in women and the feminine in man and the union of the two as seen by Rushdie. Finally I shall discuss the specificity of the language of the novel’s women characters before concluding on the significance of the representation of the feminine in it.

2The mystery of our origin and the meaning of life are eternal topics for philosophic speculation. Rushdie has from the beginning accustomed us to a pragmatic stand. “The womb has been lost for ever. We can make as noisy a complaint about the world as it is humanly possible2.” If birth itself is considered as an exile by Rushdie, his several novels can be seen as attempts at self-affirmation and self-aggrandizement. No wonder a retrospection of the mother figure seems to be vital for the self-mythologizing and exilic hero of The Moor’s Last Sigh. “Mine is the story of… my banishment from what I had every right to think of as my natural life by my mother Aurora3.” Before un wielding the mother figure who bears the name of the goddess of dawn, the narrator introduces us to his great grand mother Epifania and his maternal grandmother, Belle, as if to prevent the reader’s eyes from being blinded by the luminosity of this stellar figure. The placing of Aurora in this lineage enables him also to focus on the personality of Aurora who combines a sharp tongue with great beauty. Aurora is a talented artist. Her protégé cum admirer Vasco Miranda paints a portrait of pregnant Aurora4 which no sooner done is covered with his own self-portrait because Aurora’s husband finds it obscene. Her own painting entitled “The Moor’s Last Sigh” is which she has encrypted the image of her future assassin is stolen by Vasco. To recover this painting Moraes Zogoiby (means unlucky in Arabic) undertakes a perilous transglobal journey to Spain where he confronts Vasco and discovers to his horror that his mother had been murdered by his own father. The oedipal undertones of this episode are obvious. What is interesting to note is the difficulty that the son has in forming an image of his mother and fixing it and the not too negligible role paid by the father in adding to these difficulties (p. 330). Moraes is constantly tormented by the question – Was she a saint or a whore5 ? We encounter the same problem in Midnight’s Children where Saleem Sinai gives the reader a whole gamut of mother figures – the biological mother Vanita, the unknowing and adoptive mother Amina, the ayah Mar y Pereira, Aunt Pia who plays the surrogate mother for the adolescent Saleem until he gets reintegrated into the family fold, not to mention the ubiquitous Mother India and her inevitable double Indira. The multiplication of mother figures ma y paradoxically underscore the importance of the son, for the prophets of all religions have at least two mothers – Krishna was brought forth into the world by Devaki and brought up by Yasodha ; Moses had to be abandoned by his natural mother and adopted by the Pharoah’s daughter. Christ is very often represented with not only his mother Mary but also with his grand-mother Ann as in Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting in Louvre ; similarly, the prophet Mohammed’s biological mother was Amina but he was tended by Halima. Rushdie’s ploy, however, reveals the narrator’s unwillingness to portray his origin as single, linear and pure. Fethi Ben Slama in his book Une fiction troublante has theorized this stand as one of divided origin6. As in Midnights’s Children again, the narrator casts doubts about his origin in this novel – is he his own father’s son or the offspring of his mother’s illicit tryst with Jawaharlal Nehru ? A Freudian interpretation of this interrogation would be that it translates the individual’s search of the father of his prehistory, i. e., the true object of his mother’s love.

3One way of finding the truth would be to recreate what Freud calls the primal scene. The narrators tries his hand at this delicate task. He only succeeds in suggesting the act through the rhythm rather than describing the unnameable through words. As the narrator himself explains, “it is holy ground” (p. 88). Yet the whole narrative seems to be a desperate attempt to reach this mythical location, call it Benengeli, Mooristan, Moorusalem, Palimpstine. His ambivalent feelings towards his mother are epitomized in his appellative, “my immortal mother, my Nemesis, my foe beyond the grave” (p. 45). In fact he attributes his peculiar capacity for accelerated growth to his mother’s impatience. Caught between her artistic urges and her maternal instinct, his mother wills it. Nevertheless, she chooses to breast feed him unlike her three daughters who have had to make do with feeding bottles. In the different sketches and portraits she draws of him, he is sometimes her child, sometimes her lover, sometimes her father. These paintings are for the narrator a means to prove the existence of mutual mother-child longings. As luck would have it, Moraes falls in love with a Hindu woman and an art student, Uma Saraswati. On Uma’s advice, he refuses to pose naked for his mother, which is a way of speaking. Aurora feels betrayed and her jealousy knows no bounds and paints “Mother-Naked Moor Watches Chimène’s Arrival” (p. 246). The felicitous Rushdian coinage “mother-naked” serves to reinforce the image of maternal love enveloping the son as a second skin. Uma retorts by carving a prize winning sculpture on “Alternations in/Reclamation of the Essence of Motherhood in Postsecularist Epoch” (p. 262). The power struggle between the mother and his beloved is equated by the narrator to the cold war between America and Russia or the clash between the white queen and the black queen in a chess game. At a crucial point in life when he has to grow up by replacing the mother as the loved object through a truly objectal relationship, he is not lucky enough to meet the right person. His name contains his fortune after all, for Uma cheats him and tries to murder him before she falls into her own trap and dies.

4The multilayered structure of the narrative also allows Moraes to contrast his mother with other archetypal mothers – The Jewish7, the Muslim, the Christian and the Hindu8 mothers. Moraes Zogoiby’s father is a Jew. Though there is illustrious Arab blood in the family, that is to say, that of the last Sultan of Grenada, Boabdil, his paternal grandmother Flory Zogoiby is a die-hard with regard to religion and makes her son who has married a Christian heiress execute a bond Shylock style that in return for the money she lends him to bail him out of his business mishaps, he will offer his son to her to be brought up as a Jew. Her own husband runs away from her dominating presence. Eventually she becomes mad and dies in a bizarre fire accident. But her ghost comes to protect her son from dying in a heart attack during a family outing in the Elephanta caves. In contrast to her overwhelming presence, we have the figure of the sneering Muslim mother personified by the Sultan’s mother, Ayexa who curses him “may you weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man” (p. 80). Muslim mothers do not seem to tolerate weakness in men. They take over and take charge, so to say, of family as well as business responsibilities. While both the Jewish and Muslim mothers seem to be the “equal and opposite” of the powerful fathers, the Christian mother is a purer and more merciful figure as the allusion to Pieta represents a Virgin turned mother undergoing the most painful of experiences – of watching her son die in her arms. Then, comes, of course, the Hindu mother embodied in the avenging figure of Kali (p. 61). The narrator echoes the analysis by Sudhir Kakar of the “image of an aggressive, treacherous, annihilating mother who haunts the fantasy life of Indian males” (p. 139)9. Aurora seems to be a composite of all these, in spite of her commitment to secularism. She is possessive and protective about her son. Her disdain for the masculine gender is attested by her remark that the expression “weak man” is a tautology (p. 169). Yet she is merciful towards her son, dismissing his handicap as a mere nothing. At the same time, Moraes perceives her as a cruel and devouring mother, comparing her rearing of her four children to eating a four course meal (p. 126) and holds her responsible for the damaging of his sisters. Bombay born Rushdie was sent to a public school in Rubgy by his Kashmiri parents who were anglophiles. Young Rushdie seems to have missed his mother a lot. In a characteristic denial of this fact, in the novel it is Aurora who is portrayed as motherless. This is a fact that brings him closer to Kipling who was born in Bombay too and was sent away by his English parents to Southsea for what was to be a miserable experience. Besides, Rushdie’s mother is no more and The Moor’s Last Sigh is his way of mourning her demise and paying a final tribute to her.

5However, an informed reader should resist the temptation to confuse the narrator with the author. Rushdie himself warns us against this pitfall by joking on the fictional nature of biographies. Besides, we must not forget that in Rushdie, each figure has its literal, symbolic and allegorical dimensions. Let us now explore the symbolic and allegorical meaning of Aurora. The energetic Aurora symbolizes secular and independent India just as the matriarchal Epifania, the dying empire. What makes Aurora special is that she is Aurora bombayalis (p. 123). She is the incarnation of the cosmopolitan and polymorphous spirit of Bombay. The triumphal dance of Aurora in her cheap floral print skirt (p. 123) competing with the Ganesh Chaturdi revellers is an affirmation of the secular and artistic spirit of Bombay which has now fallen under the administration of the Hindu fundamentalist Shiv Shena party. However, Rushdie’s depiction of her as a dancing figure shows that his picture is contaminated by the Hindu way of representing the feminine as a dynamic force. Rushdie most certainl y is a child of Bombay10 and its narrator. He sings a paean to Bombay :

Bombay was central, had been from the moment of its creation : the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all India met and merged. In Bombay too, all India met what was not India, what came across the black waters to flow into our veins. To the East la y India’s East and to the west, the world’s West. Bombay was central ; all rivers flowed into its human sea. (p. 350)

6Rushdie deliberately constructs a mongrel Bombay as an anti-Benares. Bombay is also the bitch city, for Aurora seems to have had a liaison with the cartoonist Raman Fielding, Rushdie’s caricature of the cartoonist turned Hindu fundamentalist politician, Bal Thackeray who has got Bombay renamed Mumbai after the local goddess.

7Aurora bombayalis is also a contrapuntal figure of Mother India. India was personified by the peasants in the anthropomorphic figure of Bharat Mata which Nehru found unpalatable11, though Lady Liberty in the US and Marianne in France are women figures too. The Muslim socialist Mehboob Khan made a movie in 1957 called Mother India played by the famous actress Nargis in which Bharat Mata was personified in the figure of a suffering peasant woman who murders her own son who has swayed away from the right path. The image of the nation as a mother figure is so entrenched in the Indian psyche that not even the mega bollywood industry was not able to erase it and install a Father India. All that it could invent was a Mr. India, a made-in-India imitation Bond (p. 168). What Rushdie tries to do is to subvert this mother figure by making her educated and urban and provocatively calling the subaltern ayah, Jaya Hé, borrowing an expression from the national anthem composed by Tagore and which means “Glory be to thee”. Rushdie time and again underscores the fact that the seventy per cent of Indians who live in villages favour a hinduised national state and that it is the city dwellers who are more tolerant towards India’s Muslim minority. That’s why the new political orientation of Bombay revolts him so much.

8 The Moor’s Last Sigh conjugates the feminine in all its subtleties. First of all women are attentive listeners and as such participate in the writing of the novel. The narrator addresses them directly more often than his male readers. The Midnight’s Children also presents a woman character, Padma, who is the first reader without whose interference the narrative will not move forward. Other recurring and stylized12 women characters in The Last Moor’s Sigh include the adulteress wife, the constellation of three sisters and the fiancée who does not like her would-be. Women here are initiators such as Dilly Ormuz and lovers like Uma. They can also be closest friends or friendliest rivals like Carmen or intimate strangers like Aoi Uë. They are divine like Mary and regal like Queen Isabella of Spain. They are beauty queens like Nadia Wadia and stars like Sri Devi. They are artists like Amrita Sher Gil or political leaders like Indira Gandhi. They are saints like Sister Floreas or prostitutes like the temple girls that Abraham supplies the Bombay underworld. They are militants like Philomena and art critics like Zeenat Vakil. While, they are Man’s “other self, his equal, his empress and his slave”, they can be dangerous to him because they tempt him in the form of houris (p. 383) or haunt him as phantoms, at least, of memory. In this list of their negative qualities, one can add that they can be ugly and barren like Carmen, foolish and sick like Ina, deceitful like Uma or vampires like the lesbian Larios sisters. Even if they are life givers, they are death-wishers too. Compared to this galaxy of feminine figures, the portraits of men are relatively few in the novel. Besides, they really do not match the brilliance and the variety of traits displayed by women. They are henpecked like Francisco, cuckolded like Abraham, manipulated like Moraes, cowardly like Boabdil, corrupt like Raman Fielding, deranged like Vasco or terrorists like Hazaré. It is the women characters who are representative of the culture of Bombay which combines high vitality with linguistic verve and a cosmopolitan excitement.

9However, pitting the feminine against the masculine does not seem to be the narrator’s purpose who has a very Indian sense of synthesis. Thus one of the narrator’s relatives, Aurora’s uncle Airish is a homosexual who likes to dress in women’s clothes. Aurora’s own mother Belle dresses in men’s trousers, takes over the family fortunes when her father is in jail and husbands them like a man. Her propensity to be a man does not seem to be circumstantial but innate, for sexuall y she is a hunter. In her dying bed she compares herself not to Chimène whose name is one of her first names, but to Cid. Belle is not the first woman transformed into man that we come across in Rushdie. Rushdie projects this peculiar power of gender swapping as one of the gifts of the midnight’s children. Arjumand Harappa, a daughter-who-should-have-been-a-son modelled on Benazir Bhutto in Shame is called by the narrator as Virgin Iron Pants. Having been warned by her father that it is a male’s world, she tries to rise above her gender in order to make a mark in politics. In fact, in the mystic tradition of Islam, a perfect woman is called the Man of God13. Vasco is a symbol of the masculine in women and the feminine in man for he is a genuine fifty-fifty bisexual (p. 150). The adjective fifty-fifty sends us back to Hindu mythology where Shiva is represented in his hermaphrodite Ardhanariswara form as a half-female and half male body. In order to meet Vasco in Benengeli, the narrator is obliged to disguise himself as a Spanish woman. Besides the exchange of roles, another way of ending the gender war is, of course, love. The narrator offers a theory of the heterogeneous love between men and women as the basis of all democracies. For him, love is the perfect symbol for the blending of spirits, the mélange (p. 289). For an Indian reader, this point of view which exalts the couple seems to be very close to that of Tantric buddhism which represents its defenders of the faith ( y i – d a m ) always in union with their shakti. Rushdie’s own novel is described in the cover blurb as a love song to the vanishing hybrid world. The title itself, from what we can gather from the allusions strewn in the text, is a hybrid product of the Renaissance and the modern periods, as it takes the term “moor” from Shakespeare’s Othello, “last” from Da Vinci’s Last Supper and fusing them with the title of Luis Bunuel’s autobiography, Mon dernier soupir.

10The characters in the novel, especially women do not, however speak the courtly language of Hispano-Arabic poetry. Their language struck me as being coarse even bordering on the vulgar. Both Aurora and Uma speak the Bombay variety of Indian English. Aurora’s speech splutters with plosives, affricates and fricatives. For example, this remark about Uma “She will fryofy you in ghee with ginger-garlic, mirch-masala, cumin seed and may be some potato chips on the side” (p. 246). It also reminds us of the splashing of waves on the shores of Bombay, for elsewhere Rushdie personifies the ocean as mother (p. 67). Uma too speaks a younger and more fashionable version of Bombay English. “Your mummyji, I revere ; she-tho doesn’t like me. No darling boy, she doesn’t. Bulkul not” (p. 252). Above all, the women are prone to curse. I have already mentioned Ayexa’s curse on the moor. Flory Zagoiby too hurls a curse on all the moors (p. 72). Epifania curses her own daughter-in-law “May your house be forever divided”. Aurora too curses heavily. The only male who lays a curse on the narrator is the cab driver in Spain “May you never find what you seek” (p. 432), which is a feeble echo of another curse uttered in Spain by another mother. On the one hand, cursing helps women to vent out their rage. On the other, women seem to compensate for the lack of the power of the fist (Moraes is, for instance, gets trained as a wrestler by the watchman) with the power of their sharp tongue. Moraes compares his mother’s verbal bite to a scorpion sting (p. 215). By being able to curse, it is as if women alone have the ability to invoke an occult power which will intervene on their behalf. It is interesting to note here that in the Indian epic Mahabharata whose narrative techniques are perceptible in Rushdie’s novels ends with Gandhari, the mother of the vanquished Kauravas, cursing the godly figure of Krishna. In the novel, the matron Epifania counters anybody’s authority by poo-pooing it with her Indian English echo words – “pudding-shudding”, “art-shart”. The only and welcome contrast to these strong women’s speech is the soft and sweet name of the Japanese art restorer Aoi Uë which contains no consonants and seems to embody an ineffable pain. The verbal war between men and women is a Shakespearean theme to which Rushdie often returns. An act of war is almost always an act of love in Rushdie.

11What does Rushdie aim at with this representation of the feminine ? In an essay written in earlier and entitled “In God we trust”, he underscores the importance of mental representations. “Waking as well as sleeping, our response to the world is essentially imaginative : that is picture making… We come to equate the picture with the world, so that, in certain circumstances, we will even go to war because we find some one else’s picture less pleasing than our own14.” On the personal level, the novel describes the clash between the unconscious images of each other that both its male and female protagonists preserve and which shatters the integrity of their self. On the ideological level, it tries to put forward what Rushdie calls a secular definition of transcendence. In other words, it advocates art as the third principle that mediates between the material and spiritual worlds. The contemporary world’s devotion to religion and money translates its fear of the feminine and death. Rushdie debunks all decorum and talks about Aurora’s period pains and her post partum blues. He seems to say that heaven and hell are not out there, but within us. Depending on how men and women relate to each other, earth can be a paradise or pandemonium. For some people like him, it tends to be Edenicinfernal.