Dr.Paul Pimomo
Fellow Kukers, I had an unusually hectic first month of the year and didn’t get the chance to write a column. So in place of a column, let me share with you, for what it’s worth, my introduction of Salman Rushdie to the Central Washington University community when he came to deliver a public lecture on January 23, 2008. If nothing else, what I say here about this university and Rushdie shows that we do live in a global society, where even small cities -- and some individuals like Rushdie -- have come to merge the local and the global spheres into microcosms of the world.
Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends and Colleagues:
Welcome to Mr. Salman Rushdie’s talk, “The Role of the Writer in the 21st Century,” and to the inaugural event of Central Washington University’s “Symposium Without Boundaries,” which is dedicated to engaging “the most critical and transformative ideas of our time.” There are very few people in the world today who can help us engage these kinds of ideas the way this evening’s speaker can. It is therefore a real pleasure and an honor for me to introduce Mr. Rushdie to the community, and us to him.
In India, Mr. Rushdie, as you well know, given the one billion plus population, a group of hundred people can be dismissed as nobody especially if they are a rowdy lot asking for trouble because you wrote a book they haven’t read. Despite all that, we know Bombay/Mumbai and New York are the two cities in the world you feel most at home in. We are therefore not competing for third place. But the whole city of Ellensburg would have turned out to listen to you if we had the space. Without being too dramatic about this, I’d like to tell you that your audience this evening pretty much represents the world: Northwest Americans and Americans from every region; people from many parts of Europe, Russia, China, Africa, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, Canada, and all places in between; from India and Bangladesh to the Middle East and Mexico and Central and South America; in short, people from as remote a place as Nagaland to Serbia and Croatia, the land of Slavoj Zizek and our own Djordje Popovic!
And, ladies and gentlemen, we are here to listen to a man in whom much of the world resides – in his person and in his creative and imaginative reach as a writer. Salman Rushdie has lived and worked in three continents -- and in hiding. He is a multinational writer – English, Indian, Pakistani, American. As a writer, eighteenth-century English literature is his Bombay, but his writing crosses centuries, reaching back to the ancient worlds -- East and West -- and the ages of Empire, to our world and time of violent fundamentalisms and neo-imperialism. Whatever he touches, Salman Rushdie brings new and probing angles to enter the realities on hand. He has clearly been the leader of a new kind of post-World War II writers in the world.
Mr. Rushdie has an essay titled “’Commonwealth Literature’ does not exist.” He’s probably right, but the same may be said of World Literature. World Literature is a scholarly invention, which is not to suggest that writers of creative fiction should condemn scholarly invention. It’s simply to say that World Literature is not a body of literature proper, in that all good writers are the same. They write about what they know, or want to know, because they have deep connections with the world they encounter, and usually that world is local. Most good writers are therefore, by definition, writers of place. It is scholars who take local writers, place them within the centuries they wrote/write in, coral them within certain geographical and political boundaries on the map called countries, and bind them together inside multi-volume books called World Literature.
Another thing good writers know well is language, and again they usually create their work in one language. Given the fact then that one cannot live in and know many places well enough in a lifetime to write well about them, and given the difficulty of writing complexly and creatively in multiple languages, not to mention the many other physical and logistical impediments, we might say that there were no world writers as such before the age of jet travel, the worldwide internet, instant communication, global capitalism, postcolonial migrations, and the globalization of English, all of which have recently provided writers of cross-cultural identity at once with microcosms of the world in the form of metropolitan cities like Bombay and New York on the one hand, and on the other, a global language – namely, English.
The point I wish to make is that a hundred years from now, literary historians, looking back and examining the literary map of the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, may recognize Salman Rushdie as the father of World Literature in English, and this time there will be a body of World Literature proper, and this time fiction writers will be able to depend on the services of a global team of liveried scholarly chaprasees wherever they go.
The scope of Rushdie’s writing, and the recognition he has received for them, are truly global in their number and variety. He is the author of 19 books of fiction and nonfiction. His second novel, Midnight’s Children, was awarded the Booker Prize in Fiction in 1981. And in 1993, it became the Booker of Bookers for the first 25 years of the Award’s existence. It also received the English Speaking Union Award. Shame, published in 1983, received the French Best Foreign Book Award. His next novel, The Satanic Verses, came out in 1988 and got the Whitbread Novel Award; in the following year, Rushdie received the German Author of the Year Award for the same book. Haroun and the Sea, which came out in 1990, was given the Writers’ Guild Award. In 1995, for The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie received the British Book Awards Author of the Year as well as the Whitbread Novel Award.
In addition to all these, Rushdie has been the recipient of prestigious national literary awards from Austria, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Sweden, and Switzerland, as well as the Commonwealth Writers Prize, suggesting that Commonwealth Literature might actually exist. He is also Honorary Professor in the Humanities at MIT; Writer in Residence at Emory; and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and he was elected to American PEN in 2002.
Garan Holcombe, in an overview essay on Rushdie’s literary life for the British Council Authors Series in 2004, concludes with the remark that “Whatever Rushdie does next will be a literary event; it could not be anything else.” The Enchantress of Florence, his latest novel is due in June, and is already being forecast as the literary event of the year. It promises to take us places, again, this time from Renaissance Italy to Mughal India.
Many commentators have referred to Salman Rushdie as a “martyr for free speech,” and they are right, for he has suffered immensely for free speech. But I’m not sure if Rushdie cares to be a martyr for anything, if he can help it. He enjoys living like all of us. So it is a good thing he has defied the staggering odds and reached his 60th year in royal fashion, knighted last year by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my singular pleasure to welcome to the stage Sir Salman Rushdie. . . . .
Rushdie’s talk turned out to be a freewheeling, highly entertaining, yet serious commentary on the role of the writer in our world. Summarizing a Rushdie talk does injustice to him because, with him, the manner of delivery is an integral part of his message. But I’m afraid a gist is all I can give you here.
He started out by reminding the audience that all of us are parts of stories, without which we are nobody. We belong to stories of our families and communities at a given time and place. “We are the only creature on Earth that tells stories.” In the past, even the best creative writers could steer clear of the public events during their time and stay within their local community and their own inner lives, like Jane Austen did; or if they wrote about the larger events, as a few of the best nineteenth-century novelists including Leo Tolstoy did, they did so not as journalistic reporters, but as visionary reshapers of history.
In the 21st century, however, with the public sphere’s instant and persistent intrusion into people’s lives at the global level, which directly affects our sense of reality, it has become nearly impossible for the writer who wishes to stay relevant to avoid writing about the public side of life. Art and literature have the responsibility of “opening the universe,” said Rushdie, the more urgently because there are powerful forces in the world today who don’t think it is a good idea to open up the world for better possibilities. There’s no question, then, that a serious and responsible writer in the 21st-century needs to make the world events shaping our lives part of his or her imagined community; there’s no question too that good “books can change the world one reader at a time.” The question is how? How does a writer integrate the outer life of public events with the private creative world of fiction? And on this subject, Rushdie parted with none of his professional secrets, except to say, generally, that “A novelist is a poet, a shaman, a wise guy, a thinker, a prostitute.”
(Dr. Pimomo, born in Nagaland, is Professor of English at Central Washington University, USA. The writer is also a columnist for Kuknalim.com).
