Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  Nevertheless, Phillips has yet to essay a truly large fiction. His first two books were indeed novels as the term is generally understood – prose narratives of a certain length with a single main plot – but since then he has preferred to assemble between the same covers three or four short narratives which may either be closely linked, as in Cambridge, or may have only glancing contact with each other, as in Higher Ground, Crossing the River, and The Nature of Blood.

  One’s first inclination is to take the last three books as collections of thematically linked novellas. However, Phillips has made vigorous gestures toward claiming a more integrated status for them. He subtitles Higher Ground ‘a novel in three parts’; in Crossing the River the component narratives are framed by an authorial voice gathering them together as utterances of’my lost children’ (p. 2) (in an interview Phillips goes on to call Crossing the River ‘a novel . . . fragmentary in form and structure, polyphonic in its voices’);14 while the prefatory material to The Nature of Blood refers explicitly to the book as a novel.

  At a formal level these claims will hardly stand up. But they do point to the way in which Phillips wants his fictions to be read: as imaginative forays into a single body of history, the history of persecution and victimisation in the West. Even the early and rather skimpy A State of Independence (1986), set entirely on a Caribbean island and deploying only West Indian characters, is at its heart an exploration of the residue of slavery embedded in states of dependency that have remained constant in the transition from British colonialism to American neocolonialism. Despite the generic and historical diversity of Phillips’s fictions, they constitute a project with a single aim: remembering what the West would like to forget.

  16 Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh

  I

  THE NOTION OF personal identity has dramatically narrowed in our times. Identity has become in the first place a matter of group identification: of claiming membership of a group, or being claimed by a group. Identity in this sense has hovered as a problem over Salman Rushdie’s head for most of his life. India is where his imagination lives. Yet as a British citizen of Muslim ancestry and, since Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, of indeterminate residence, it has become less and less easy for him to assert, when he writes about India, the country of his birth, that he writes as an insider.

  No wonder, then, that the hero of Midnight’s Children (1981), the book which revolutionised the Indian English novel and brought Rushdie fame, cries out (prophetically, as it emerged): ‘Why, alone of all the more-than-five-hundred-million, should I have to bear the burden of history?’1 ‘I [want] to be Clark Kent, not any kind of Superman,’ laments the hero of The Moor’s Last Sigh in similar vein.2 Or if not Clark Kent, then simply his own, essential, naked self.

  The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) is a novel about India and the world, India in the world. Its hero is a young man from Bombay named Moraes Zogoiby, nicknamed by his mother ‘the Moor’. But the famous sigh to which the title refers was breathed five centuries ago, in 1492, when Muhammad XI, last Sultan of Andalusia, bade farewell to his kingdom, bringing to an end Arab-Islamic hegemony in Iberia. 1492 was also the year when the Jews of Spain were offered the choice of baptism or expulsion; and when Columbus, financed by the royal conquerors of the Moor, Ferdinand and Isabella, sailed west to discover a new route to the east. A pivotal date, then, for three great religions; for commerce between Europe and the East; and for the Americas.

  From Sultan Muhammad, Rushdie creates a line of descent, partly historical, partly fabulous, which leads forward to Moraes, who is destined to return from the east in 1992 to rediscover Andalusia and bring the circle to a close. The first third of this dynastic opus is devoted to Moraes’s nearer forebears, starting with his great-grandparents the Da Gamas, wealthy spice exporters based in Cochin in what is now Kerala State. The great-grandfather, a progressive and a nationalist, soon disappears from the stage (Rushdie gives short shrift to characters whose usefulness has ended), but his wife, a devotee of ‘England, God, philistinism, the old ways’, survives to trouble succeeding generations and to utter the curse that will blight the life of the as yet unborn hero. (p. 18)

  Their son Camoens, after flirting with Communism, becomes a Nehru man, dreaming of an independent, unitary India, which will be ‘above religion because secular, above class because socialist, above caste because enlightened’. (p. 51) He dies in 1939, though not before he has had a premonition of the violent, conflict-riven India that will in fact emerge.

  Camoens’s daughter Aurora falls in love with a humble Jewish clerk, Abraham Zogoiby. Neither Jewish nor Christian authorities will solemnise their marriage, so their son Moraes is raised an undefined mixture, ‘a jewholic anonymous’. (p. 104) Abandoning the declining Jewish community of Cochin, Abraham transfers the family business to Bombay and settles in a fashionable suburb, where he branches out into more lucrative activities: supplying girls to the city’s brothels, smuggling heroin, speculating in property, trafficking in arms and eventually in nuclear weapons.

  Abraham is little more than a comic-book villain. His wife Aurora is a more complex character, however, and in many ways the emotional centre of the book. A painter of genius but a distracted mother, she suffers intermittent remorse for not loving her children enough, but prefers finally to see them through the lens of her art. Thus Moraes is worked into a series of paintings of ‘Mooristan’, a place where (in Aurora’s free and easy Indo-Joycean English) ‘worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away . . . One universe, one dimension, one country, one dream, bumpo’ing into another, or being under, or on top of. Call it Palimpstine.’ In these paintings, with increasing desperation, she tries to paint old, tolerant Moorish Spain over India, overlaying or palimpsesting the ugly reality of the present with ‘a romantic myth of a plural, hybrid nation’. (pp. 226, 227) Aurora’s paintings give a clear hint of what Rushdie is up to in his own ‘Palimpstine’ project: not overpainting India in the sense of blotting it out with a fantasy alternative, but laying an alternative, promised-land text or texturation over it like gauze.

  Besides palimpsesting, Rushdie also experiments with ekphrasis, the conduct of narration through the description of imaginary works of art. (Among well-known instances of ekphrasis in Western literature are the descriptions of shield of Achilles in the Iliad and of the frieze on Keats’s Grecian urn.) In Rushdie’s hands ekphrasis becomes a handy device for recalling the past and foreshadowing the future. The magical tiles in the Cochin synagogue not only tell the story of the Jews in India but foretell the atom bomb. Aurora’s paintings project her son into the past as Boabdil; the entire history of India, from mythic times to the present, is absorbed into a great phantasmagoria on the wall of her bedroom. Scanning it, her father marvels that she has captured ‘the great swarm of being itself’, but then notes one major lacuna: ‘God was absent.’ Through paintings whose only existence, paradoxically, is in words, the darkly prophetic historical imagination of Aurora, her ‘Cassandran fears for the nation’, dominate the book. Her last painting, which gives the book its title, shows her son ‘lost in limbo like a wandering shade: a portrait of a soul in Hell’. (pp. 59, 60, 236, 315–16).

  II

  Moraes labours under the curse of two witch-grandmothers, so it is no surprise that he is born a freak, with a clublike right hand and an accelerated metabolism that dooms him to grow and to age ‘double-quick’, twice as fast as ordinary mortals. (p. 143) Kept apart from other children, he receives his sexual initiation at the hands of an attractive governess and discovers he is a born storyteller: telling stories gives him an erection.

  When he ventures into the world, he is soon caught in the toils of the beautiful but evil rival artist Uma Sarasvati. A pawn in the war between this demon mistress and his mother, Moraes first finds himself expelled from his parental home and then – after some complicated stage business – in jail accused of Uma’s murder. Released, he joins the Bombay underworld as a strikebreaker and en
forcer in the pay of one Raman Fielding, boss of a Hindu paramilitary group whose offduty evenings sound like Brownshirt get-togethers in Munich, with ‘arm-wrestling and mat-wrestling . . . [until] lubricated by beer and rum, the assembled company would arrive at a point of sweaty, brawling, raucous, and finally exhausted nakedness’. (p. 300)

  Moraes’s grandfather Camoens had believed in Nehru but not in Gandhi. In the village India to which Gandhi appealed, Camoens saw forces brewing that spelled trouble for India’s minorities: ‘In the city we are for secular India but the village is for Ram . . . In the end I am afraid the villagers will march on the cities and people like us will have to lock our doors and there will come a Battering Ram.’ (pp. 55–6). His prophecy begins to fulfil itself in Moraes’s lifetime when the doors of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya are battered down by a crowd of fanatical Hindus.

  Camoens is prescient but ineffectual. Aurora, an activist as well as an artist, is the only Da Gama with the strength to confront the dark, intolerant forces of village India. When the festival procession of the elephant-headed god Ganesha, an annual show of Hindu-fundamentalist triumphalism, passes by their home, she dances in view of the celebrants, dancing against the god, though, alas, her dance is read by them as part of the spectacle (Hinduism notoriously absorbs its rivals). Every year she dances on the hillside; dancing at the age of sixty-three, she slips and falls to her death.

  Raman Fielding, rising star of the Hindu movement, is a caricature of Bal Thackeray, Bombay leader of the fundamentalist Shiv Shena Party. Closely linked with Bombay’s criminal underworld, Fielding is ‘against unions . . . against working women, in favour of sati, against poverty and in favour of wealth . . . against “immigrants” to the city . . . against the corruption of the Congress [Party] and for “direct action”. by which he meant paramilitary activity in support of his political aims’. (pp. 298–9) He looks forward to a theocracy in which his particular variant of Hinduism will predominate.

  If Rushdie’s Satanic Verses outraged the dour literalists within Islam, then The Moor’s Last Sigh is aimed at the fascist-populist element within the Hindu political movement. On Raman Fielding Rushdie lavishes some of his most stinging satirical prose: ‘In his low cane chair with his great belly slung across his knees like a burglar’s sack, with his frog’s croak of a voice bursting through his fat frog’s lips and his little dart of a tongue licking at the edges of his mouth, with his hooded froggy eyes gazing greedily down upon the little beedi-rolls of money with which his quaking petitioners sought to pacify him . . . he was indeed a Frog King.’ (p. 232)

  (The microscopic scrutiny given by commentators to the text of The Satanic Verses, particularly to its offending passages, and the wealth of religious and cultural reference thereby uncovered, has alerted us to how superficial a non-Muslim reading of that book must be. Similarly, when it comes to political infighting in India, or to the Bombay social and cultural scene, the non-Indian reader of The Moor’s Last Sigh can have at most an overhearing role: jokes are being made, satiric barbs being cast, which only an insider will appreciate.)

  The underworld struggle between Fielding and Moraes’s father culminates in the murder of Fielding and the destruction of half of Bombay. Sick of this new barbarism, Moraes retreats to Andalusia, there to confront another monster of evil, Vasco Miranda. Miranda is a Goan painter (another Indo-Iberian connection) who has made a fortune selling kitsch to Westerners. Obsessively jealous of Aurora, he has stolen her Moor paintings; to reclaim them, Moraes has to find his way into Miranda’s Daliesque fortress. Here Miranda captures him, imprisons him and allows him to live only as long as (shades of Sheherazade) he keeps writing the story of his life.

  Locked up with Moraes is a beautiful Japanese picture restorer named Aoi Uë (her name all vowels, as the Moor’s in Arabic is all consonants: would that they had found each other earlier, he thinks). Aoi perishes; Moraes, with Miranda’s blood on his hands, escapes. It is 1993, he is thirty-six years old, but his inner clock says he is seventy-two and ready to die.

  III

  The final chapters of the book, and the opening chapter, to which they loop back, are packed (or palimpsested) with historical allusions. Moraes is not only Muhammad XI (Abu-’Abd-Allah, or Boabdil, in the Spanish corruption of his name): he is Dante in an infernal maze of tourists, and also Martin Luther, looking for doors on which to nail the pages of his life-story, as well as Jesus on the Mount of Olives, waiting for his persecutors to arrive. It is hard to avoid the impression that all the left-over analogues of the Moor fable from Rushdie’s notebooks have been poured into these chapters, which are as a result frantic and overwritten. Some of the historical parallels fall flat (Moraes is no Luther: the hounds on his trail are the Spanish police, who suspect a homicide, not the bishops of Hindu orthodoxy, who couldn’t care less what he gets up to in Spain), while elementary rules of the novelist’s craft, like not introducing new characters in the last pages, are ignored (Aoi is the case in point).

  Nor is this the worst. As if unsure that the import of the Boabdil/Moraes parallel has come across, Rushdie, in what sounds very much like propria persona, glosses it as follows: Granada, in particular the Alhambra, is a ‘monument to a lost possibility’, a ‘testament . . . to that most profound of our needs . . . for putting an end to frontiers, for the dropping of boundaries of the self’. (p. 433) With all respect due to the author, one must demur. The palimpsesting of Moraes over Boabdil supports a less trite, more provocative thesis: that the Arab penetration of Iberia, like the later Iberian penetration of India, led to a creative mingling of peoples and cultures; that the victory of Christian intolerance in Spain was a tragic turn in history; and that Hindu intolerance in India bodes as ill for the world as did the sixteenth-century Inquisition in Spain. (Fleshing out the thesis in this way depends, however, on ignoring the fact that the historical Boabdil was a timorous and indecisive man, dominated by his mother and duped by Ferdinand.)

  Rushdie pursues palimpsesting with considerable vigour as a novelistic, historiographical and autobiographical device. Thus Granada, Boabdil’s lost capital, is also Bombay, ‘inexhaustible Bombay of excess’, the sighed-for home of Moraes as well as of the author over whose person he is written. (p. 193) Both are cities from which a regenerative cross-fertilisation of cultures might have taken place, but for ethnic/religious intolerance. But occasionally palimpsesting descends to mere postmodernist frivolousness: ‘Had I accidentally slipped from one page, one book of life on to another,’ Moraes wonders, unable to believe he is in jail. (p. 285) Yet at other moments Moraes expresses a hunger for the real: ‘How,’ he asks himself, looking back in bafflement, ‘trapped as we were . . . in the fancy-dress, weeping-Arab kitsch of the superficial, could we have penetrated to the full sensual truth of the lost mother below? How could we have lived authentic lives?’ (pp. 184–5)

  Here Moraes articulates a passionate but fearful attachment to his mother – whom he elsewhere calls ‘my Nemesis, my foe beyond the grave’ – and through her to a ‘Mother India who loved and betrayed and ate and destroyed and again loved her children, and with whom the children’s passionate conjoining and eternal quarrel stretched long beyond the grave’. (pp. 45, 60–1) The conflicted attachment touched on here is the saddest note in the book, but remains a submerged, barely explored element of Moraes’s makeup.

  Moraes’s yearning for authenticity expresses itself most clearly in his dream of peeling off his skin and going into the world naked ‘like an anatomy illustration from Encyclopaedia Britannica . . . set free from the otherwise inescapable jails of colour, race and clan’. (p. 136) Alas, he proceeds, in a complex joke that conflates Indian Indians, whom Columbus set off to find, with American Indians, the Indians he in fact found, ‘in Indian country there was no room for a man who didn’t want to belong to a tribe, who dreamed . . . of peeling off his skin and revealing his secret identity – the secret, that is, of the identity of all men – of standing before the war-painted braves to unveil the flay
ed and naked unity of the flesh.’ (p. 414)

  If this does not mark a crisis in Rushdie’s thinking – a longing for the pages of history to stop turning, or at least no longer to turn ‘double-quick’, for the ultimate self to emerge from the parade of fictional identities, fictions of the self – then at least it marks a crisis for the Moor persona, the prince in exile, no longer young, confronting the overriding truth uniting mankind: we are all going to die.

  IV

  Like Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses (1989), The Moor’s Last Sigh is a novel with large ambitions composed on a large scale. Its structure is, however, anything but sturdy. Aside from the dynastic prelude set in Cochin and the last fifty pages set in Spain, the body of the book belongs to Moraes’s life in Bombay. But instead of the interwoven development of character, theme and action characteristic of the middle section of what we may call the classic novel, we find in the middle section of Rushdie’s novel only fitful and episodic progress. New actors are introduced with enough inventiveness and wealth of detail to justify major roles; yet all too often their contribution to the action turns out to be slight, and they slip (or are slipped) out of the picture almost whimsically.

  To complaints of this kind – which have been voiced in respect of the earlier novels as well – defenders of Rushdie have responded by arguing that he operates, and should therefore be read, within a double narrative tradition: of the Western novel (with its sub-genre the anti-novel à la Tristram Shandy), and of Eastern story-cycles like the Panchatantra, with their chainlike linking of self-contained shorter narratives. To such critics, Rushdie is a multi-cultural writer not merely in the weak sense of having roots in more than one culture, but in the strong sense of using one literary tradition to renew another.