Harold Washington Library, Winter Garden Room, March 14
Columbia College’s annual Story Week culminated with this Salman Rushdie reading that drew a crowd of 250-plus, and as the president of the college introduced Rushdie, he described him as an ambitious author who made his readers see a new world; “His stories wake us up again and make us ask questions about love, sex, death, and human nature.”
This prolific writer, known for his stories that often mix reality and fantasy, has published over a dozen novels and books of essays, including Midnight’s Children, East, West; and Shalimar the Clown, the book he read from for the Columbia event. But Bombay-born Rushdie is also largely known for the 1988 book Satanic Verses that brought a fatwa to Rushdie’s name by the spiritual leader of Iran at the time (because it was said that he was blaspheming the prophet Muhammad). For years, Rushdie hid under the protection of Scotland Yard, until the fatwa was finally discontinued in 1998.
Rushdie spoke at length about his relationship to language and how the fact that he speaks five of them encouraged his sense of linguistic playfulness. Growing up in this environment, he wanted the language of his books to reflect that sense of “play”, a playfulness that, he says, not many people associate with him.
For instance, when Rushdie was in grade school, there was a limerick assignment and other kids had trouble coming up with 1-2 limericks, but he came up with 37, which made the teacher think that he was cheating and he didn’t get credit for the assignment, something that he “still has a sense of injustice about.”
Then there’s his prose, which is intensely humorous, a surprising fact to many. “Because of Satanic Verses people came to think of me as a very serious writer… They think, ‘Since such serious things have happened to you, you must be a serious person,’ and I’m not at all. Then they read one of my books and are shocked. They say ‘It’s funny,’ but it always was funny!… Comedy pisses people off.”
His early work was inspired by his first viewing of the Wizard of Oz and growing up in Bombay; “We all have a world we imagine for ourselves and so it’s not right to say that reality and dreams are separate. The place where you grow up and come to know the world has an enchanting power and the stories that we learn as children come out of that and so I had this vast Eastern realm to draw from that Arabian Nights is a part of.”
He talked about magic realism and how the problem with the perception of it; “People hear magic but they don’t hear realism. The project with magic realism is that you don’t limit yourself to what is documentary fact… There are suburban novels about people wife-swapping in Jersey which seems to turn away from the interesting things of the world, while magical realism turns towards it.”
Shalimar the Clown comes out of Kashmir and Rushdie read a passage where a woman meets an American ambassador, who she ran away with to America, until it inevitably “goes bad.” “The moonstruck American ambassador watches her dance and her eyes met his and their future was decided.” Later, when she attempts to return to her village in India she is treated, literally as “a dead woman,” and her husband eventually picks up a gun to join the insurgency because, as Rushdie noted, “a broken heart can make people do all sorts of things.”
The Q and A afterwards included questions to Rushdie about the moral struggles inherent in his work and Hindi cosmology. Another thanked Rushdie for his work because it offered them a world that was not their own but became their own through reading.
And naturally, someone asked him the requisite question about his “process.” Rushdie explained that the process changes for each book, but he always feels like “the actor writing the book. It always felt more like listening than creating. The process involved for me is “What do the characters want to say today?”
He went on. “The stories you make up in a book did not happen—they are made up. Once you accept that, all kinds of shit can happen. This is important because “you’re making it up in order to stumble onto some kind of truth like, ‘Yes, people are like that,’ ‘Yes, life is like that.’”
Readings, Rated
