All our dream-worlds may come true. Fairy lands are fearsome too.

As I wander far from view Read, and bring me home to you.

Postcolonialism in Salman Rushdies Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Postcolonialism in Salman Rushdies Haroun and the Sea of Stories

The term postcolonialism is problematic; possible to define only in relation to the colonialism matter, is the moment after the colonialism. The broad definition states: adj. Of, relating to, or being the time following the establishment of independence in a colony: postcolonial economics. In terms of action, it is cultural, political, intelectual and literary movements of the XX and XXI century, characterised by the representaiton and analysis of colonial power experiences and subjectivity of victims, individuals and nations of colonial power. (in Petrar, Special seminar in the British Novel) First being restricted to the fields of political science and economy, it expanded to the more wideranging field of cultural analysis. In fact, postcolonialism involves a studied engagement with the experience of colonialism and its past and present effects, both at the local level of ex-colonial societies as well as at the level of more general global developments thought to be the after-effects of empire. Postcolonialism often also involves the discussion of experiences of various kinds, such as those of slavery, migration, supression and resistance, difference, race, gender, place, and the responses to the discourses of imperial Europe such as history, philosophy, anthropology and linguistics.[] (it is) about the conditions under imperialism and colonialism proper as about conditions coming after the historical end of colonialism. [] (It) allows for a wide range of applications, designating a constant interplay and slippage between the sense of a historical transition, a socio-cultural location and an epochal configuration.(Qayson,A. 1993: 2) However, the term gained territory along with Postmodernism, therefore after the 1960s. Postmodernism, with its globalization, identity politics- race, gender, nation, recontextualization, fragmentation, intertextuality, magic realism, deconstruction, parody and pastiche. (S. Berce, English Literature- Modernism Postmodernism- Course) is what favoured the appearance of postcolonialism. Everything is attached the label post- from colonialism to modernism, reinterpreted, recontextualized, reinvented. The present time makes culture a product, as any other, waiting to be sold, in need of customers, influenced by salespersons, it is the period of culture as a mass product. It brings the problem of control; whoever controls the masses, is in power. Therefore, culture cannot be separated from industry, commercialism, politics, and certainly not from people- are a diverse and dispersed set of alliances constantly formed and reformed among the formations of the subordiatne. [] The basic power of the dominant in capitalism may be economic, but economic power is both underpinned and exceeded by semiotic powerm i.e. the power to make meanings.(Radu 2001: 19) On this background, the problem of other and otherness has been given the shape of postcolonialism. Is there such thing as one world, or is it worlds? Do they blend? Should they? The postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like the ones Dick Higgins calls post-cognitive: Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it? [] What is a world? What kind of worlds are there, how are they constitued, and how do they differ? ; What happens when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated? (Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 1987: 10). 2

The issue is that people belonging to the former colonies of the European empires stated their difference and emerged as important figures of the cultural context, and accepted their otherness in relation to the true-born citizens. Purity of race was placed at the top of the colonial world, but is no longer praised. The impure groups that produced alternatives to the discourse of the dominant group claimed their right to self-determination. This is the problem that arose, that of changing inner expressions of belonging to a goup, of acceptance and of change. The savage, uneducated, stranger found by the colonialists, as in Jonathan Swifts work, are now important figures of the academic life in Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge or Princeton, famous academic centres. The equality is placed at the basis of the postcolonial society, as perceived by the others; yet the drawback may be the perception of this equality by the residents,thetrueborn, as stated by George Orwell in his visionary novel 1984: All men are equal, but some are more equal than the others. The attempt to make acceptance possible may prove to be a difficult process, marked by intense emotional experiences shaped by anxiety, alienation, resentment, and a detachment from others.(S. Berce, English Literature- Modernism Postmodernism- Course) It is a way of back and forth, not a straight line towards goals, a way of ups and downs, of reversed identities and negotiation. The imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (both in the sense of labor and of culturally organized practice)and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility. (Qayson,A. 1993: 17) The centre is deconstructed, the boundaries are erased, the categorization savage/trueborn is no longer valid, the world is accepted as a multitude of worlds, unique, different, problematic and colourful. As colourful as India, the former jewel of the Victorian British Crown. As cheerful, as intense, as visible as an exotic homeland. Diversity struggles to be integrated, to belong; the melting pot of the universal nations is out there, waiting for recognition and incorporation. I come from Bombay, and from a Muslim family, too, My India has always been based on ideas of multiplicity, pluralism, hybrydity: ideas to which the communalists are diametrically opposed.To my mind, the defining image of India is the crowd, and a crowd is by its very nature superabundant, heterogenous, many things at once. But the India of the communalists is none of these things. (S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 1991) In the present context of globalization, the way the individual relates to THE SELF and THE OTHER is still influenced by cultural ideas and ideals, by stereotypes and fragmentation. The othernessis celebrated, as an acknowledgement of the becoming of a multi-cultural society, a development into an open-minded culture. The consumption culture and consumerism favour a re-evaluation of the axiological and a continous re-birth. By now Commonwealth literature was sounding very unlikeable indeed. Not only was it a getto, but it was actually an exclusive getto. And the effect of creating such a getto was, is, to change the meaning of the far broader term English literature- which Id always taken to mean simply the literature of the English language- into something far narrower; something topographical, nationalistic, possibly even racially segregationist.[] the creation of a false category can and does lead to excessively narrow, and sometimes misleading readings of some of the artists; [] and again, the existence, -or putative existence- of the beast distracts attention from what is actually worth looking at, what is actually going on [] As for myself, I dont think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial- or is it post-colonial?- cudgels against English. What seems to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the LANGUAGE are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed

about the way they use it- assisted by the English languages enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers. The postmodern period is based on 3 principles: assimilation, contamination and inversion. The real is assimilated, imaginary contaminates the reality, creating a photographic image of the real and inversed, it is the world as if not what it is, but what seems to be, the world of would have been.(Sanda Berce, English Literature- Modernism Postmodernism- Course) Postmodernism doesnt exclude, it encompasses all and everything.The theoretician of postmodernsim, Venturi, states in his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture(1966), that: I like elements which are hybryd rather than pure, compromising rather than clean, distorted rather than straightforward, ambiguous rather than articulated, perverse as well as impersonal,boring as well as interesting, conventional rather then designed, accomodating rather than excluding, redundant rathert than simple, vestigial as well as inovating, inconssitent and equivocal, rather thandirect and clear. I am for messy vitality rather than obvious unity.(in S. Berce, English Literature- Modernism Postmodernism- Course) It is a tendancy towards a Dionysian attitude, rather than an Apollinic one, the supremacy of imperfection over harmony of shape and appearance, as defined by Nietzsche. ART was perfection, harmony, rule, homogenity, knowledge. ART is now playfulness, rejection of order, details, detoxification and ambiguity. Postmodern art (and thought) favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentaiton and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject. (in Petrar, Special seminar in the British Novel) It also favors attitudes like postcolonialism, a break and renewal. Deconstruction and construction. One of the representatives of the postcolonial movement is Salman Rushdie, the famous Indian writer, controversial, sentenced to death because of the greatest unread novel, The Satanic Verses, struggling to bring acceptance, to find the home, no matter how far He is the symbol of Indias independence, deconstruction and reconstruction; Rushdie was born in 1947, in the city of Bombay (currently Mumbai) the year his country was given independence. He is the man who travelled and settled on 3 continents: the colonised land, India, evolves into the racially isolating system of the coloniser, England and into the neo-imperial power, USA. This route is much similar to the one of his character, Malik Solanka, in Fury (2002). The attempt to integrate into a larger culture,one that seems to be insensitive to diversity, is stressed by Salman Rushdie in his works; he represents the postcolonial trend in literature, being one of the outsiders that try to be accepted and integrate into this Empire. His creed emphasizes the existence of an Empire within- The problem with integration is that it often means assimilation within a host culture that is insensitive to cultural diversity, and many novelists have been concerned by this new, internal from of cultural imperialism. Salman Rushdie in any essay from 1982, alerts us to the ingrained problems of understanding race in Britain, where, [] he discovers the last colony of the British Empire .The problem of this new, internal British empire is its failure to stop seeking, whether implicitly or explicitly to colonize or demonize aspects of racial difference.Rushdie is concerned about the failure of Britain to embrace the inevitable fact of its postcolonial future, and sees this as a crisis of the whole culture, of the societys entire sense of itself. (D. Head, 2002: 161) The attitude is that of looking back, but not looking back in anger, but with an open-mindedness, with a clear mind, decided to bring a change, to be the change. Although change is difficult, a step by step change is definitely possible to acceptand implement. The identification of cultural differences does not necessarily entail the attempt to understand or embrace it: the reverse process of making exotic may equally result. What

Rushdiee essay implicitly requires is an approach to ethnic diversity that is situated between a glib multiculturalism and a flat assimilation. He is defining the space of the hybridized culture of the postcolonial migrant, of crucial significance to all inhabitants of the new emerging culture. (D. Head, 2002: 161) What is, in this context, the tendency of the writers, of the artists? How do they react? The British contemporary novel turns to breaking the conventions that exist between LANGUAGE and REALITY? While some interpret this as a beginning of the literature of silence, a literature without words- or to be more precise, a literature that disdains all but the most primitve and magical use of language(Hassan,1986), attacking the Western culture dualistic habit of thought, right/wrong, truth/fiction, reality/imitation, others emphasize on the very concept of Real, which has been undermined, the shift of focus being placed on ontological level. The problem that arises is therefore that of the plurality of Worlds/or of world versions.(in Sanda Berce,English Literature- Modernism Postmodernism- Course) The boundaries of my language are the boundaries of my world, which defines REALITY as a man-made game with language. Thus, the relation between MIND and REALITY is negotiated by the laws and bounds imposed by the mind itself. [...](Therefore)TRUTH is nothing but a linguistic artefact, and as such, cannot be regarded any more in terms of correspondence to an assumed outside reality. <Any description of the world can be true or false. The world on its own unaided by the describing activities of human beings cannot>. The consequence: the crisis of representation, a loss of faith in humans reshaping of the real and the need to subject the concept or reality to serious reconsiderations. (Rorty, W. Iser in Sanda Berce, English Literature-Modernism PostmodernismCourse) The individual finds it hard to define the real, as opposed to the imaginary.Is there a real real or something that the individual accepts as being real? The 1999 film Matrix discusses this problem: If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. Therefore, the real is that which one defines as such. Reality can no loger be divided from the activity of the human mind, which strives continously to re-shape the <real> . Fiction, defined as falsehood, lye by Dr. Johnson in 1755, was perceived as the opposite of real. The present moment does not use this distinction anymore; fiction may complete the real, may adjust and adapt to what would have been. It is its product, the literary work that takes the next step, overstepping what is or boundary-crossing: the lie oversteps the truth, and the literary work oversteps the real world which it incorporates.(Sanda Berce, English Literature-Modernism Postmodernism- Course) The same film insists on the difference between these two concepts; Have you ever had a dream,, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? Salman Rushdies Haroun and the Sea of Stories, perceived as a childrens book, is actually a political allegory. Published shortly after the fatwa, death sentence for having criticised the Islam, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) is the first novel placed under the sign of fear and hatred. Seen as a sort of literary exorcism, Rushdie admits to have written Haroun and the Sea of Stories simply as a consequence of his childs request.His son, Zafar, asked for a novel that children could read too.So, a few months after having been sentenced to death, Rushdie began writing such a novel. Haroun and the Sea of Stories was born. This pattern is very much similar to the one of Peter Pan or Alices Adventures in Wonderland, dedicated and written for children, yet possibly interesting for adults too.

It gives the possibility to both children and grown-ups to read it and understand it, each one in a different way, as Rushdie admits in an interview. The story is that of Haroun, whose father, Rashid Khalifa, is a well-known storyteller, confronted with the painful departure of a mother who doesnt appreciate the husbands occupation. What's the use of stories that aren't even true?, she suggests. The flee of the mother affects the child profoundly so that he ends up questioning himself the use of storytelling. Rashid Khalif awas so busy making up and telling stories tha the didnt notice that Soraya no longer sang; which probably made things worse. But then Rashid was a busy man, in constant demand, he was the Ocean of Notions, the famous Shah of Blah.[...] Rashid was so often on stage that he lost track of what was going on in his own home. (Rushdie 1990: 16) Storytelling was found responsible for the destruction of a family, because the attention was not directed towards it, but to the magic world of stories. The magic is what defines the world in Rushdies novels... whether a return to a primordial state of happiness, or a form of escapism, or simply a story. It is the magical realism, as defined by writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Jorge Luis Borges, representatives of the Latin American School of Magic Realism. It was defined as what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something 'too strange to believe. It is the disruption of the real as it is accepted, and the appearance of elements that seem to be misplaced, meant to undermine the notion of the omniscient authorial narrator.(S.Berce, English Literature-Modernism Postmodernism-Course) Rushdies variant is presented as disappearance of borders between these two categories. I was completely fascinated by the nature of this revelation tha tthe world is both magic and real and I wonder how we can imagine the world in such a way that both these ways exist? (Rushdie 1992) So the magic finds its way in the story and mixes and enters every layer, whether in the form of a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad it had forgotten its name, or places, such as Valley of K or the Dull Lake or the Moody Land, or in the use of the number 11, important in the Muslim culture, or in the construction of characters, as Butt the Hoopoe or Iff or Khattam-Shud or the Walrus.The father, Rashid Khalifa, is the magician: Haroun often thought of his father as a Juggler, because his stories were really lots of different tales juggled together, and Rashid kept them going in a sot of dizzy whirl, and never made a mistake. (Rushdie 1990:16) Happiness comes out of storytelling- You will tell happy stories, praising stories, and the people will believe you, and be happy, and vote for me. (Rushdie 1990:47) But being imposed to do it, the magician loses the gift and is endagered. But the cause of these misfortunes seems to be losing its strength. I started all this off. What's the use of stories that aren't even true?I asked that question and it broke my fathers heart.So its up to me to put things right. Something has to be done. (Rushdie 1990:27) In this respect, Rushdie says: Children blame themselves for the misfortunes that befall the adults in their lives. It is a place to write from. A terrible thing happens to a father, the child blames himself and wishes to rescue the father. And in the novel not just the Father, but the whole world, while hes doing it, and why not? (S. Rushdie, Keeping Up) So the heroic quest begins; Haroun feels guilty and feels the need to set things right, so because the magics gone, gone for ever, he tries to restore it and bring order to his world, or at least the world as he perceives it. Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a revolt against censorship, against the dictatorship imposed by leaders, as in the case of Islam, whose rules are spirit-crushing, mind-numbing and

limit the freedom of the individual to such an extent that they become robot-like, fanatic, serving purposes that are not theirs, nor can they be. In the shadow of the fatwa, the novel tends to be seen as the author's plea for the unfettered expression of the imagination. Even though it presents happenings in such a colurful way, Haroun and the Sea of Stories seems to be drawn in shades of black and white. The black, dark side is Chup, quiet, silenced, territory of Silence, as opposed to Gup, the sunlit half of the moon Kahani, inhabited by talkative, happy and free individuals. This distinction is that of good/evil, war/peace, repression/freedom, Word/Silence... The dark side plans on taking control, reducing to silence all beings, and therefore the stories, by poisoning the Ocean of Stories, source of culture, literature, creativity and freedom of speech. The dialogue between the two sides is necessary, not a dominance of one over the other, but a blending and a triumph of theWord, not on Silence, but on imposed Silence.. Neither the sunlit side, the home of the Word, interpreted as being theWestern world, is right, nor the Silence area, it is both that have something to gain from, there should be a cooperation, a negotiation. Therefore, neither the Western world is considered to be perfect, nor the Eastern; both have advantages and drawbacks, misery and happiness, its the aspect of censorship that costs lives that is not regarded as acceptable for a democratic world. The two populations, living on different sides of the same moon, or story, share fascination for the other, and share a misconception that has been imposed by higher authorities, not coming from an experience that resulted in such misconceptions. The end is the proof of the process of de-construction and re-construction, specific to the postmodernist period, a shattering of rules, of oppositions, of misconceptions and stereotypes. It seems to announce the beginning of a new era, an era of construction on the ground where there were before is and was, starting from level zero. Neglecting their own past, they ended up not being able to avoid the mistakes of the past. Living an amnezic present made the Western world, so good at it, incapable of being happy. On the linguistic level, too, the narrative undermines the neat binary oppositions that the allegory seemingly sets up. The very words in the phonetic minimal pair Gup and Chup sound very much alike to English-speaking readers. This underlines the essential similarity of the two cultures and points to the fact that the perceived differences between the worlds they signify are only arbitrary. Moreover, the suffixes attached to them to form nouns (Gupp-ee and Chup-wala) appear to refer to a colonizer-colonized situation. In English, the suffix--ee forms nouns to denote relation, whereas in Hindi, the suffix--wala (or vala) is used for this purpose. It is not thus an opposition, but an exploration of the present in search of a past that allows a free future. The East and the West are not in a state of complete opposition, but in a state of negotiation...of meaning, of purpose, of goals, of attitudes. Of the ability to change. One side is not better than the other.On the one hand, Gup is the home of the Chattterbox or of Blabbermouth, or of Princess Batcheat and Prince Bolo, upside down images of heroic figures. On the other, Chup has Khattam-Shud and Bezaban or Mudra, villains or rebels, promoters of silence. Its not a clear process of categorization, of distributing labels. The postmodern attitude is about destruction of canon, a dissolution of the centre. The contemporary avant-garde. The story's oppositions are in keeping with the colonizer's traditional rhetoric. As Abdul JanMohammed explains, "the colonial mentality is dominated by a Manichean allegory of white and black, good and evil, salvation and damnation, civilization and savagery, superiority and inferiority, intelligence and emotion, self and other, subject and object." Thus the darkness can

also be interpreted symbolically as the dark-skinned and therefore ugly colonized Other whose customs were considered dark, savage, and dangerous by Europeans. As postcolonial critic Edward Said remarks: "the emblematic Black['s] 'ugliness, idleness, rebellion' are doomed forever to subhuman status." Taken together, these allusions in the novel show that the two sides of Kahani are eerily reminiscent of Britain and her colonies. In complete agreement with the postmodern view, I is characerised by fluidity; it is a mobile instrument necessary to the postmodern experimention [...] I produces erosion of itsown boundries, therefore the dissolution of identity i.e. the erosion of the boundaries the different social roles , clearly defined , such as : the Woman, the Man, the Child, the Madman, the Savage, the Civilised. Here, I becomes a floating space with no landmarks or borderlines. It is a new way of looking the world-The 'Empire writes back' to the imperial 'centre' ... by questioning the bases of European and British metaphysics, challenging the world-view that can polarize centre and periphery ... as an essential way of ordering reality. The road is not smooth, it is a search of oneself, deep inside; the search for home, no matter how far... It just goes back and forth. There were moments in my life when I thought maybe I've written too much about India and should write about something else, and then, the next book I think of has a very strong Indian component. I think it will always be a kind of journey back and forth for me. I do think there are things I want to write about which are purely western and have nothing to do with India and I do have two such ideas right now. But India has been an enormous inspiration to me and I go back all the time and I never know what's going to happen to me. But usually, when I go to India I come back full of stories. The answer is I quite like having the two possibilities, sometimes the west, sometimes the east. Usually, the two encounter each other somehow.

Bibliography:
Berce, S.; Course in English Literature- Modernism Postmodernism, U.B.B. Faculty of Letters, 2008 Petrar P.; Special seminar in the British Novel, U.B.B. Faculty of Letters, 2008\ Quayson A.; Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice Or Process, 1999 Radu A.; The Literatures of Identity in Contemporary Britian,Napoca Star, Cluj-Napoca, 2001 Rushdie S.; Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Granta Books, Penguin Books; London, 1990 Interview with Salman Rushdie in Dilemateca, nr. 42, noiembrie 2009 Interview with Salman Rushdie in Jurnalul Naional, 25/11/2009 Nietsche in Vod, P. ; Artistul i moartea sau despre arta de a muri; diploma paper,ClujNapoca, 2008

Internet resources:
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-5827122/Between-cultural-imperialism-andthe.html 1.02.2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_realism 1.02.2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haroun_and_the_Sea_of_Stories 1.02.2010 1.02.2010 http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Academy-Awards-Crime-Films/Colonialismand-Postcolonialism-DEFINITION-OF-TERMS.html 1.02.2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/aug/29/religion.books 1.02.2010