the satanic verses and the politics of extremity

Novel: A Forum on Fiction 44:2 DOI 10.1215/00295132-1260959 © 2011 by Novel, Inc.

The Satanic Verses and the Politics of Extremity

JaNIce HO

The Satanic Verses is frequently used as a cautionary tale illustrating the perils of extremism, having provoked upon its publication one of the deadliest critical verdicts that any author might expect to garner. The fatwa issued by ayatollah Khomeini and the polarizations that it subsequently effected have to a large extent determined how we broach an issue that is thematized by the novel itself, in the form of the allure of the “pure, stark, [and] extreme” (Satanic 319).1 The hermeneutic framework produced by this turbulent reception, however, has tended to eclipse the specific historical contexts from which The Satanic Verses emerged, since the elements of extremism that the novel portrays are now read as a matter of course through the lenses of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism. as this essay will show, the modes of extremity that The Satanic Verses explores originate less from the timeless paradigm of religion (the text’s interest in such questions notwithstand-ing) and more from a local style of politics that was mobilized by ethnic minorities to combat racism in postwar Britain: such is the historical content that my reading of the novel wishes to restore. In the decades before the publication of The Satanic Verses, ethnic minorities in Britain fashioned what I call a “politics of extremity”—characterized by the languages of war, militancy, rioting, and tropical heat—as a challenge to a tradition of english liberalism that inversely upheld the virtues of moderation and compromise. This oppositional politics sprang from a sense that liberalism, because it relegated cultural and racial differences to the private sphere, had failed to provide minorities with an effective platform for addressing the prob-lem of racial subordination. Salman Rushdie’s novel, I argue, is deeply indebted to this broader cultural discourse of extremism, which it has used to critique an ineffectual liberalism and to herald the birth of a new political force embodied by Britain’s migrants. But, as I further suggest, the novel’s imagination remains conflicted about the implicit violence that such a politics of extremity entails—a tension that the novel attempts to resolve by turning to magical realism as a formal means by which it can efface the material consequences of violence. Thus, even as The Satanic Verses draws attention to the inadequacies of political liberalism, it

I would like to thank my cornell dissertation committee—Walter cohen, James adams, Molly Hite, and Douglas Mao—and the editorial board of Novel for their helpful comments on drafts of this essay. Research for this essay was funded in part by the IMPaRT (Implementation of Multicultural Perspectives and approaches in Research and Teaching) awards Program at the University of colorado at Boulder.

1 For a collection of documents generated out of the “Rushdie affair,” see appignanesi and Mait-land. For some of the most seminal academic interventions into the controversy, see arava-mudan (“Being”); the essays by Jussawalla, Spivak, Taylor, and van der Veer published under the rubric “The Rushdie Debate” in a 1989 issue of Public Culture; Mufti (“Reading”); Brennan (“Rushdie”); and Suleri (“Whither”).

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simultaneously reprises a liberal ethics in the way its representational form seeks to contain and moderate an alternative politics of extremity.

The Temperate and the Tropical

In the fifth section of the novel, “a city Visible but Unseen,” Gibreel Farishta wan-ders for days through the streets of london as the angel of Recitation—a role that, in the equivocal registers of magical realism, may be read as a sign of Gibreel’s schizophrenic delusions, on one hand, or as a fantastical metamorphosis of his human self into the angelic, on the other. as the archangel who must restore to the profane city a sacred knowledge of God, Gibreel concludes his inquisition with a meteorological diagnosis of the “trouble with the english”: “in a word, Gibreel solemnly pronounced, their weather” (Satanic 354). While Gibreel’s conclusion is at one level a facetious nod at a renowned english obsession, at another it pointedly gestures to a complex historical imbrication of geography, politics, and national character. england’s climate and landscape had long provided a powerful met-aphor with which to explain the constitutional moderation and restraint of the nation’s politics and people; indeed, it was seen as an altogether natural determi-nant. “We have no grass locked up in ice so fast,” the speaker of W. H. Davies’s poem “england” declares,

We have not that delirious state of cold. . . . . . . . . . . . .We have no winds that cut down street by street, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .No mountains here to spew their burning hearts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .No earthquakes here, . . . Give me this England now for all my world. (258–59)

The temperateness of english geography, freed from the extremities of heat and cold, from the volatility of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, easily became a barometric index of english political and cultural systems for which extremity was equally anathema. Nikolaus Pevsner could argue in the Reith lectures that the “englishness of english art” lies in its “temperance, smoothness, judiciousness [and] moderation” (79)—adjectives applicable in his eyes to the english portrai-ture of Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, the english countryside, and english politics alike. When editing a volume on The Character of England in 1947, the political scientist ernest Barker observed that the nebulous quality of english skies, “grey, or blue-grey, rather than white,” mirrored the nature of english thought which allowed for “a margin of imprecision where accommodation and compromise are possible” (553).2 These geographical metaphors establish the spirit of moderation as an autochthonic attribute of the english, one permeating the

2 For a more detailed discussion of “climate metaphors” and of how these are employed in dis-courses of english national character, see colls, 207–9.

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nation’s style of politics and safeguarding it from the revolutionary excesses of other countries with less stable national characters (France and america, in partic-ular). Indeed, the bloodless nature of the 1688 Glorious Revolution and england’s escape from the 1848 revolutions across europe were frequently cited as the his-torical confirmations of the unique restraints of the english.

When Gibreel insists on the weather as the real source of “the trouble with the english,” he therefore evokes a long discursive genealogy of meteorologically moderate politics. But Gibreel also turns this discourse on its head by finding intol-erable what has traditionally been a source of national pride. The amorphousness of english skies, the very quality deemed so attractive by Barker and so redolent of the english capacity to compromise, conversely appears to the archangel a sign of unacceptable moral and political confusion, and issues in his desire to administer an equally climatological remedy to the nation’s capital:

“When day is not warmer than night,” he reasoned, “when the light is not brighter than the dark, when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a people will lose the power to make distinctions, and commence to see everything—from political par-ties to sexual partners to religious beliefs—as much-the-same, nothing-to-choose, give-or-take. What folly! For truth is extreme, it is so and not thus, it is him and not her; a partisan matter, not a spectator sport. it is in brief, heated. City,” he cried, and his voice rolled over the metropolis like thunder, “i am going to tropicalize you.” (Satanic 354)

The temperate and the tropical function here as tropological figures for two anti-thetical concepts of the political, the first alluding to a traditionally english politics of moderation, compromise, and “give-or-take”; the second, to a “heated” politics of the “extreme” that insists on an unbending partisanship. But what is at stake in Gibreel’s stated preference here for extremity over compromise? Why does he privilege the polarization of political beliefs over more ideologically balanced posi-tions? and what does it mean to “tropicalize” english politics? Gibreel’s enumera-tion of the changes that will result from transforming london into a tropicopolitan space offers us an initial clue to such questions.3 For alongside the botanical (“new trees under birds”), cultural (“no more British reserve”), gastronomical (“spicier food”), and experiential (“the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of the monsoon”) benefits that he anticipates, the archangel also predicts the emer-gence of “political ferment, [and] the renewal of interest in the intelligentsia” (355). In other words, a heated political sensibility will replace the implied apolitical indifference of a temperate england that views politics as mere “spectator sport.” Seen in this light, the passage above contains a latent critique of the depoliticizing tendencies at work in english liberal politics and a desire for repoliticization that is expressed through the metaphor of tropicalization.

For the tradition of politics represented by the recurring trope of a temperate climate is of course (english) liberalism, with its assumption of a Habermasian

3 I take the term tropicopolitan from Srinivas aravamudan’s Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804.


public space in which a consensus between dissenting groups may be reached after a process of rational deliberation. Gibreel derides such a consensual view of politics, insisting instead that the political is intrinsically “heated” and combative: far from being a question of “give-or-take,” the political is “extreme, it is so and not thus, it is him and not her; a partisan matter.” Gibreel’s formulation of a tropical poli-tics thus parallels carl Schmitt’s “concept of the political” in which the element of radical conflict is also foregrounded: “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy group-ing” (29). although Schmitt has been accused of valorizing a dangerous bellicosity when he defines the political as the absolute distinction between friend and enemy, his focus on “extreme antagonism” nonetheless provides a useful analytical frame-work for understanding how power is constituted through processes of domina-tion and subordination that establish structural asymmetries in the social order.4 By contrast, insofar as liberalism defines politics as a process of negotiation in the public sphere whereby individuals arrive at a reasonable consensus, it mistakenly assumes free and equal access to such a sphere and overlooks the mechanisms of exclusion on which such consensuses may rest. The liberal hypothesis of the universal sovereign individual thus fails to account for the unequal distributions of power that are at the roots of political antagonism. liberalism’s emphasis on the individual further means that it ideologically forecloses and seeks to expel the political by reading structures of oppression as merely private practices: for instance, differential access to the means of production is understood as a function of free competition between individuals, not a systemic phenomenon of economic exploitation. Such a will-to-privatization designates certain spaces as “apolitical” and hence outside the scope of regulation, but this depoliticizing gesture paradoxi-cally remains a political strategy par excellence since it effectively obscures the tactics of power that reinforce existing relations of domination.5

4 This is Michel Foucault’s point in “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Insisting that power is best understood “in terms of conflict, confrontation, and war,” Foucault inverts carl von clausewitz’s famous tenet—“war is the continuation of politics by other means”—to suggest that “politics is the continuation of war by other means” (48). even in a condition of civil peace, contests for and against hegemonic dominance must be interpreted as a continuation of war insofar as these are actions and events that aim to either reinscribe or reverse existing hierarchies and inequities in a polity. as he notes, “law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regu-lar. War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war” (50). For Foucault, then, war is a category of analysis that allows us to see society not as a lockean social contract, voluntarily and consensually founded by sovereign individu-als, but as a perpetual Hobbesian struggle for authority.

5 as Schmitt notes, liberalism seeks to neutralize politics by always moving in the “recurring polarity of two heterogeneous spheres, namely ethics and economics, intellect and trade, edu-cation and property” (70)—spheres which are thought to possess only private (that is, individ-ual) significance. yet a “domination of men based upon pure economics must appear a terrible deception if, by remaining nonpolitical, it thereby evades political responsibility and visibility” (77). In other words, the classification of economic and ethical spaces as “nonpolitical” does not so much eliminate the political as exclude those who are dominated from the possibility of political redress, since their exploitation is no longer codified as such.


Because it illuminates the contests over authority and the circulating econo-mies of power that constitute any body politic, the paradigm of antagonism in Schmitt’s concept of the political (which also informs Gibreel’s “tropicalization” of english politics) offers a theoretical means of grasping The Satanic Verses’s con-cern with the sociopolitical inequities that structured race relations in postwar Britain— inequities that produced racial antagonisms with which a liberal politics, no matter how sympathetic, was ill-equipped to cope, given the assumptions by which it operated. Stuart Hall pinpoints such a limitation when he observes the inadequacies of a liberalism of “good conscience” that treats the problem of racism as a “matter of policy . . . [and] not a matter of politics” (“Racism” 24). liberalism’s tendency to read racism in terms of individual acts of bigotry that can be man-aged through good “policy” overlooks the political and institutional dimensions at work in the production of racial inequality. Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, I propose, highlights the blind spots of a liberal framework through its deployment of the trope of tropicalization, a trope at once historically and geographically specific in that it alludes to the ex-colonies from which the majority of the postwar migrants to Britain originate. The tropicalization of london synthesizes two main issues thematized in the novel: first, as a metaphorical antithesis, it enacts a critique of a long-standing english tradition of “temperate” liberalism and its effects of depo-liticization. Second, the trope signals the emergence of an alternative and heated political presence, a radical black consciousness among the nation’s ethnically marginalized denizens.6 We can turn now to The Satanic Verses to see how such issues play out more specifically within the parameters of the text itself.

The limits of liberal Tolerance

consider the narrative thread responsible for igniting the controversial and violent reactions to The Satanic Verses and continuing, more recently, to do so—that is, the thread concerning Mahound, a thinly veiled guise for the prophet Muhammad.7 While much ink, not to mention blood, has been spilled over the question of Rush-die’s blasphemousness in the context of Islam, few commentators have noted that the resonance of this episode reverberates beyond the fictionalization of Islamic history to also reflect upon the politics of marginality in contemporary england. Mahound is an outsider to Jahilian society, “[e]xcluded by his orphaning from the

6 I use the term black here and throughout the article as a metonymic umbrella for the general migrant experience in Britain; such a usage is not meant to conflate the particular cultural contexts of South asians, east asians, or other migrant populations. Rather, as Stuart Hall has argued, “[There was a] moment when the term ‘black’ was coined as a way of referencing the common experience of racism and marginalization in Britain and came to provide the organiz-ing category of a new politics of resistance, among groups and communities with, in fact, very different histories, traditions and ethnic identities. In this moment, politically speaking, ‘The Black experience,’ as a singular and unifying framework based on the building up of identity across ethnic and cultural difference between the different communities, became ‘hegemonic’ over other ethnic/racial identities . . .” (“New” 163–64).

7 The knighting of Salman Rushdie in June 2007 resulted in large protests and demonstrations against Rushdie and the British government throughout Islamic nation-states.


mercantile elite” and consequently denied a place on the city’s political council in spite of his wealth and success (102). The new religious creed that he preaches appeals immediately to those who are disempowered like him, and his first fol-lowers are a motley crew of “water-carriers, immigrants and slaves” (101). (The city of Jahilia is built on sand, rendering water-carriers the untouchables of society since they carry the very element capable of destroying the city.) The narrative tension of the episode is driven by the conflict between Mahound and his band of marginalized followers, on one hand, and abu Simbel and Hind, the Gran-dee of Jahilia and his wife, on the other—between, in other words, the outsiders of society and its insiders, between those who have been dispossessed of power and those who wield it. Seen in this light, the significance of the novel’s sections on Mahound become clearer, especially when they are juxtaposed with the main storyline of Saladin chamcha’s travails in a xenophobic england where he too has to make a place for himself in a hostile society. Given these correlations of plot, we cannot read the sociopolitical structures of Islam in The Satanic Verses as mere mimetic representations of a historical referent. Instead, Rushdie has grafted these structures onto contemporary versions of social marginality, effecting a bifurca-tion that asks us to draw historical parallels between the persecution of the prophet Muhammad and his followers and the present-day exclusions of immigrant com-munities in white Britain.

In this episode, abu Simbel, the Grandee of Jahilia who views the prophet’s new religion as an economic and political threat to the traditional polytheistic practices of the city, offers him a compromise: in exchange for Mahound’s decree that Jahilia’s three main goddesses—al-lat, Uzza, and Manat—are worthy of worship in the eyes of allah, Mahound will be “elected to the council of Jahilia” and his followers will be “tolerated, even officially recognized” (105). Mahound’s response is ambivalent, first publicly accepting abu Simbel’s offer in a religious recitation that will later be excised from the al-Qur’an, the true recitation, as the blasphemous and apocryphal “satanic verses”; but subsequently recanting on his acceptance, denouncing the goddesses and reaffirming a logic of purity and sin-gularity: “There is no god but God!” (105). How are we to read the implications of his recantation? Is it a sign of an Islamic fundamentalism, so frequently thought to be the novel’s object of critique, which eschews all forms of compromise as the sacrilegious adulteration of religious principles? Is it, as Rushdie himself suggests, an expression of Islamic misogyny, given that Mahound’s retraction is couched in terms that denigrate the possibility of female divinity when he sneeringly asks abu Simbel, “Shall He [allah] have daughters and you sons?” (124).8

To read this episode entirely as a negative portrayal of religious fanaticism is to overlook the tenor of the narrative voice, which describes Mahound’s dilemma in

8 “The rejection of the three goddesses in the novel’s dream-version of the ‘satanic verses’ story is also intended to make other points, for example about the religion’s attitude to women. . . . I thought it was at least worth pointing out that one of the reasons for rejecting these goddesses was that they were female. The rejection has implications that are worth thinking about” (Rush-die, “In Good Faith” 399–400).


terms of a familiar opposition between a politics of temperate compromise and of heated extremity:

Any new idea, Mahound, is asked . . . WhAT KiND OF iDEA ArE YOU? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze?—The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world. (335)

The narrator expresses an implicit preference when he frames the dilemma as a choice between a compromising obsequiousness that “accommodates itself to society” and a visionary intransigence that, by virtue of its “bloody-minded” and “ramrod-backed” extremism, will give birth to a “new idea” that can “change the world.” Furthermore, this passage deliberately echoes an earlier one where the novel’s devilish narrator inquires, “How does newness come into the world?” New-ness, it turns out, is confronted by a predicament that mirrors Mahound’s: “How does it [newness] survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wreck-ing crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?” (8). The narrator figures extrem-ity here as a category of revolutionary possibility, the vehicular means through which newness can emerge, but one always at risk of being tamed by the specters of moderation and compromise.9 Mahound’s refusal to negotiate with abu Simbel, then, is indeed “extreme”; but according to the novel’s representational logic, his actions signify not so much a zealous fanaticism as a radical event from which the new—to wit, the birth of Islam—will materialize.

The novel’s association of extremity with the genesis of newness complicates the pervasive reading of The Satanic Verses as a critique of Islamic fundamentalism, a reading originating in “the Rushdie affair,” which confirmed to most Western intellectuals the dangers of a militant faith. as Sara Suleri has astutely observed, by portraying Rushdie as a “secular voice speaking against the impingement of a monolithic fundamentalism,” critics fall into “a Lord Jim paradigm” in which they recast the author as “one of us,” a Western liberal to be defended against the threateningly medieval ways of an Islamic other (rhetoric 190). To be sure, in the post-fatwa furor, any defense of Rushdie often seemed to entail a near- automated demonizing of Islam. yet it seems to me that the taken-for-granted opposition between a secular Western liberalism that tolerates difference and a religious Islamic extremism that does not is irreconcilable with a careful reading of The Satanic Verses, and not just because of the text’s positive figuration of extremity as a threshold of radical limit. More important, if we refract the “Mahound” episode

9 Indeed, one Oxford English Dictionary definition of extreme locates it at the point that is “outer-most, [and] farthest from the center (of any area)” (“extreme,” def. a.1.a). Such a spatialization suggests that extremity is a term of radical limit which, by virtue of its liminality, is capable of transcending and transforming existing boundaries.


through the prism of Britain’s race relations, we can also see the novel articulating a major critique of liberalism’s superficial negotiations of cultural difference and of the inadequacies of British multiculturalism.

For the Grandee of Jahilia is guided by a political strategy that we have seen coded as quintessentially english, underpinned as it is by the tactics of compro-mise and expediency. “What kind of idea am i?” asks abu Simbel, “I bend. I sway. I calculate the odds, trim my sails, manipulate, survive” (Satanic 102). To “trim [one’s] sails” is a revealing allusion to the well-known eighteenth-century essay “The character of a Trimmer” by George Savile, the first Marquess of Halifax. “Trimming,” a term that refers to the even dispersal of weight throughout a ship, functions as a nautical metaphor for balance and symbolizes the virtues of a “wise Mean” that cannily avoids “barbarous extreams” for the sake of “self- Preservation” (Savile 54)—that avoids, in other words, sinking the ship (always, for Halifax, the Ship of State). Given the specifically english genealogy of abu Simbel’s politics, the compromise that he offers Mahound and his disciples—analogues for Britain’s colored minority, it must be recalled—draws on a word that, far from originating from the annals of Islamic history, is anachronistically freighted with contempo-rary resonances: Mahound and his followers are to be “tolerated, even officially recognized” (Satanic 105; emphasis added).

Tolerance has always been seen as a classic attribute of englishness, a self-understanding rooted in a tradition of english liberalism codified by John locke’s “a letter concerning Toleration,” in which he insists on the rights of all persons to worship according to their conscience without persecution. But locke’s argument depends on a firm distinction between the public sphere, in which the civil rights of all individuals are “inviolably to be preserved,” and the private sphere to which religious beliefs are confined, since it is “not the business of religion” to interfere with issues beyond personal morality (135). The assumption that religious and cultural practices are exercises of individual choice that do not have—in fact, are not allowed to have—any bearing on political life places a specific limit on lib-eral tolerance, which turns out to tolerate only those differences that will remain quiescently private. These were the problematic suppositions under pinning the policy of multiculturalism, defined by Britain’s Home Secretary in 1966 when he insisted that the “integration” of ethnic minorities did not translate into “a flatten-ing process of assimilation” but reflected a state of “equal opportunity, accompa-nied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance” (Jenkins 267). yet as the history of British race relations shows, the injunction to “mutual tolerance” of “cultural diversity,” because it located the redress of socioeconomic inequities within the parameters of individual virtue, could be used just as easily to per-petuate racism as to prevent it. Much of the opposition to the 1965 Race Relations Bill, a bill intended to outlaw discrimination in public spaces, was rooted in the sense that racism should not be dealt with in the courts of law. comments by Peter Griffiths, Member of Parliament for Smethwick, during a reading of the bill are fairly representative: “is it possible to legislate about people’s feelings? . . . It is a problem of people meeting together and learning to live side by side. . . . The step I have most faith in is education” (House of commons). The resistance to


legislative mandates is based on a liberal separation between public and private that deems juridical measures inappropriate correctives of personal behavior. In this way, liberalism turns the political issue of racism, which involves structural asymmetries of power, into a nonpolitical issue of cultural misunderstanding and ignorance, the solution to which can lie only in a plea for more tolerance and edu-cation without any attempt to resolve existing inequalities.

We can return to abu Simbel’s offer to Mahound in light of this fraught history of British tolerance, which paradoxically excludes even as it includes difference into the social body.10 abu Simbel clearly views Islam as a political threat to the polytheism on which Jahilia’s economy depends, given the city’s status as a cen-ter of religious pilgrimage: “This is the world into which Mahound has brought his [monotheistic] message: one one one. amid such multiplicity, it sounds like a dangerous word” (Satanic 103). abu Simbel’s suggested compromise tries to neutralize such a threat by preserving an overarching structure of polytheism—allah’s recognition of the divinity of Jahilia’s three most lucrative goddesses, al-lat, Uzza, and Manat—that will not endanger the city’s economic status quo and his “temple revenues” (121). This is the depoliticizing work of a liberalism that substitutes the promise of “tolerance” for the rectification of sociopolitical dispari-ties. a prima facie consensus—the multicultural vision of different social groups living harmoniously together in “mutual tolerance”—is manufactured to disguise unequal hierarchies of power. Unsurprisingly, then, Salman the Persian (an autho-rial cameo, most critics agree) cautions Mahound against accepting abu Simbel’s offer, explaining that he will “cease to be dangerous” once he does, no longer a political force to be reckoned with (106).

Mahound’s eventual rescission of his agreement with abu Simbel is precipi-tated by an encounter with Hind, who dismisses the bargain as a ploy that has made Mahound “weak.” against the politics of liberal compromise that abu Simbel offers—a compromise that can disguise but not banish contestations of power—Hind reasserts a Schmittian politics of extremity by forcing Mahound to recognize her as an enemy: “If you are for allah, I am for al-lat. . . . The war between us cannot end in truce” (121). Mahound’s final refusal to negotiate with abu Simbel, his retraction of the “satanic verses,” is thus also a refusal to be depo-liticized, a fate that would render his marginalized creed a mere object of tolerance and impose on him a surface consensus that masks deeper mechanisms of oppres-sion. Mahound’s intransigence, I suggest, reflects the strategy of black politiciza-tion that took place in Britain from the 1970s onward, which similarly employed discourses of extremity—particularly of rioting, militancy, and war—to bring to

10 We see the apotheosis of such a paradox in Tony Blair’s speech concerning the future of multi-cultural Britain on 8 December 2006, when he declared: “Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain, Britain. So conform to it; or don’t come here.” Besides evoking a long-standing link between tolerance and national identity, Blair deploys “tolerance” as the new exclusionary principle on which immigration laws are to be based. The insistence on conformity suggests that “tolerance” is the new code word for cultural assimilation, since nowhere in his speech does Blair allow for the possibility that Britishness might itself be remade and redefined by migrant cultures.


light the antagonistic undercurrents endemic in what Stuart Hall has called “soci-eties structured in dominance.” Since these discourses embraced far more adver-sarial modes of politics, they were invariably accompanied by a rhetoric of tropical heat that counterposed itself to the traditional temperance of the english. Such a process of politicization is visible in the sections of The Satanic Verses that portray contemporary Britain.

london’s Burning

If Mahound’s repoliticization is impelled by Hind’s reminder of the irreconcilable war between allah and al-lat, the racial politics of Britain are represented in the novel through similar tropes of combat. Mishal, daughter of the proprietor of the Shandaar café, develops “the habit of talking about [Brickhall] Street as if it were a mythological battleground” (Satanic 283). Brickhall, the fictionalized location of the café, is of course an allusion to Brick lane—the heart of london’s Bangla-deshi community—and a linguistic conflation of the inner-city areas of Brixton and Southall, homes to large populations of West Indians and South asians respectively and the locations of massive riots in 1981, the incident on which the narrative climax of the novel is based. Brickhall’s “mythological battleground,” explains Mishal to a hapless Saladin who has been forced to seek refuge in the café after his inexplicable transmogrification into the Devil, is the scene of violent fights that break out between racists, the police, and the migrant community, fights which Mishal elevates into epic battles between good and evil: “From her cham-cha learned the fables of the new Kurus and Pandavas, the white racists and black ‘self-help’ or vigilante posses starring in this modern Mahabharata. . . . [U]nder the railway bridge, the National Front used to do battle with the fearless radicals of the Socialist Workers Party. . . . Down that alley was where the Brickhall Three were done over by the police.” “you’re not the only casualty [of racist england],” Mishal’s sister bluntly reminds Saladin, pointing to others who have been sub-jected to a similar, albeit less literal, process of demonization (283).

Mishal’s mobilization of a discourse of conflict springs from existing racist dis-courses that depict the “arrival of . . . incomers, even when they [are] protected by their tenure of formal citizenship . . . as an act of invasive warfare” (Gilroy, Postcolonial 101). However, by inhabiting and reversing such a discourse, Mishal transforms it into a mode of political agency, insofar as the categories of war and antagonism challenge the liberal view of society as a contract between purported equals, revealing instead the mechanisms of force through which some remain dispossessed of power. The dominated are thereby provided with a framework for articulating their subjugation and a platform from which they can legitimate acts of resistance. War thus functioned as the central metaphor by which the British migrant community politicized its struggle against racism and codified its oppression, as instantiated in the words of a leading reggae drummer, leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace: “I man haffe start play my music in a militant way so we can relate to de people. cos you can’t play a quiet and peaceful music in war time


yunno” (qtd. in Gilroy, “Steppin’” 301).11 The value of such rhetoric may derive more from its symbolic and affective power and less from the enactment of actual violence against the state, but this is not to imply that political conflict existed only discursively. accounts of police brutality, clashes between fascist and vigilante groups, the riots of 1976 and 1981 all suggest the opposite. In fact, as I show later on, The Satanic Verses walks an uneasy tightrope between affirming the political efficaciousness of these languages of extremism and recognizing the painful ethi-cal costs involved when such extremism migrates from the word into the world.

But the rhetorical power of this politics of antagonism is not reducible to the dis-turbing threat of physical violence that inevitably attends it. Rather, these vocabu-laries of war also functioned as a protest against the state’s hegemonic discourse of legality, employed to delegitimize modes of black politicization by characterizing such modes as “criminal” behavior. Paul Gilroy has shown how myriad images of black lawlessness—“stowaways, drifters, pimps, and drug dealers . . . muggers, illegal immigrants, black extremists and criminal Rastafarians (dreads)”—were deployed by the police to criminalize activities that were “experienced from the other side as battles for black civil rights and liberties” (“Police” 145). The state’s discourse of “law and order” sought to neutralize black resistance by defining these acts not as political struggles but as violations of the law. Mishal, by trop-ing the state as an enemy, challenges such a representation and renders legality itself illegitimate, since it is now seen as an accessory to a repressive state power that must be opposed, and not as an instrument of justice. War, then, is the dis-cursive means by which she reclaims her political authority. When Saladin, the self- fashioned englishman, insists on the necessity of “justice and the rule of law” (Satanic 284), Mishal sarcastically rejoins, “look where all your law abiding got you,” and argues that the state itself is unjust (264). Indeed, The Satanic Verses dra-matizes the full violence of the police in a magical realist episode in which Saladin is mistaken for an illegal immigrant, savagely assaulted, and forced to ingest his own excrement. Unable to reconcile his experience with his image of england, Saladin protests, “This isn’t england” (158), but it is of course—not the england of law and order that is the ideological construct of a liberal discourse, but an england that is a “mythological battleground” with an ongoing racial war; not the “Proper london” revered by Saladin, but “ellowen Deeowen,” Rushdie’s phonetic rendition of the city as a racist dystopia.

a student of the martial arts who is always “practising karate kicks and Wing chun forearm smashes” (282), Mishal sees herself as a soldier in this racial war, declaring: “It’s our turf. . . . let ’em come and get it if they can” (284). The emphasis on territoriality, designed to guard against the encroachment of the police, is simul-taneously an inclusive gesture that speaks of an intimate solidarity with the local ethnic community. Mishal’s policing of the boundaries of Brickhall against authori-tarian incursions asserts a community’s right to autonomy and self-determination;

11 Wallace’s remarks were by no means rare or unique at this time. as the sociologist John Rex observed in the 1970s: “Nearly all the black leaders I have met make references to war and violence and it is not sufficient merely to dismiss them as extremists. . . . these notions do form a central myth for the black communities” (91).


it is she, along with her lover, Hanif—a lawyer who is “in perfect control of the lan-guages that mattered: sociological, socialistic, black-radical, anti-anti-anti-racist, demagogic, oratorical, sermonic: the vocabularies of power” (281)—who represent the novel’s vision of hope at the end. Saladin’s road to recovery in the aftermath of the narrative’s tragic climax—during which a riot erupts, the Shandaar café burns down, and Mishal’s parents are killed—begins at Mishal and Hanif’s wedding, where Saladin tells the bride: “Today feels like a new start for me, too; perhaps for all of us” (516). In locating “a new start” for the general community at the doorstep of their union, Rushdie gestures at a younger generation of ethnic minorities who refuse to be either passive victims of racism or mere objects of liberal tolerance whose presence, by implication, the white majority are forced patiently to suffer; instead, they are political subjects transforming the very terms of British politics.

The race riot of Brickhall, the episode that comprises the narrative climax of The Satanic Verses, transforms from discursive symbol into material event the politics of confrontation that we have been tracing as the basis of black resistance. Rush-die’s representation of the event draws particularly on the april 1981 riots that erupted in Brixton and that the Sunday Times (london), using the same idiom of war, immediately dubbed “The Bloody Battle of Brixton”; but Rushdie also evokes, more generally, the long history of other race riots that took place in england—the Notting Hill riots in 1958 and again in 1976, and the subsequent riots in July 1981 of Toxteth (where tear gas was employed for the first time on mainland Britain) and of Southall. The media’s portrayals of the rioting frequently adopted a vocabulary of tropical heat that implicitly contrasted the migrants’ behavior against a tradi-tional english temperance. For instance, the front page of the Times on 13 april 1981, the third day of the Brixton riots, featured a photograph of a car burning with the caption, “Brixton flare-up: a car blazes during yesterday’s clashes” (clarke). More ominously, a headline on page 12 declared, “echoes of america’s long hot summers,” accompanied by a photograph of troops patrolling “a Negro area” in Washington during the 1968 riots (Heren). The comparison to america, one might add, elevated race over and above other socioeconomic factors as the central cause of these riots. The next day, the newspaper continued with the metaphor of heat by headlining its front page with “Brixton streets boil for the fourth night” (Huckerby et al.). Such coverage was certainly not limited to the case of Brixton, and many subsequent instances of unrest were depicted in a discourse that linked rioting, heat, foreignness, and extremism as corollaries of one another.12 almost uniformly through the media, then, tropes of meteorological extremism were used to accen-tuate the perceived extremism of black politicization.

The Satanic Verses attempts symbolically to recuperate such a discursive history in line with the novel’s goal of “turn[ing] insults into strengths,” the way “whigs, tories, [and] Blacks all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in

12 For instance, after the much more recent disorders at Oldham, Burnley, and Bradford in 2001, the BBc News Online declared a “Summer of Discontent.” The Guardian, not to be outdone, followed suit with an article titled “Blame It on the Sunshine,” which pointed out that “many of the riots in British history have occurred at the height of summer” and provided the average temperatures of each of these incidents (Brockes and Burkeman).


scorn” (93). The heat associated with the riots, concretized by the flares of petrol bombs and relentlessly captured by the horrified gaze of the media’s eye, trans-forms into a means of political mobilization in the novel. We see this in Rushdie’s portrayal of a nightclub in Brickhall, suggestively named Hot Wax and filled with waxwork figures from an elided black history: “See, here is Mary Seacole . . . and, over there!, one abdul Karim, aka The Munshi, whom Queen Victoria sought to promote, but who was done down by colour-barring ministers . . . the black clown Septimus Severus, to the right. . . . The migrants of the past” (292). as a Madame Tussaud’s of the colonized, Hot Wax functions as a site of archaeological reclama-tion whereby a whitewashed British history is challenged and rewritten: far from being recent postwar intrusions onto the national scene, those who are racially other are inseparably bound up with Britain’s imperial past. More significantly, the nightclub is so named because it also contains “in a different part of the crowded room, bathed in evil green light, wax villains [who] cower and grimace: Mosley, Powell, edward long.”13 each night, the dancers at Hot Wax demand for a “melt-down” to the rhythmic rapping of the club’s deejay, Pinkwalla—“So-it-meltdown-time-when-de-men-of-crime-gonna-get-in-line-for-some-hell-fire-fryin”—and, out of the “tableau of hate-figures,” the revelers choose one to be melted in a microwave oven, “complete with Hot Seat” (292–93). By referring to meltdowns and hell fires and hot seats, Rushdie repeats—indeed, fantastically exaggerates—the same images of heat that we have seen the media associate with the riotous protests of london’s inner-city boroughs. But far from the mindless violence that such heat traditionally connotes, the literal burning that goes on in Hot Wax is carefully directed at spe-cific, historical figures of oppression and is carried out alongside an excavation of a colonial history that a hegemonic discourse has put under erasure. In other words, heat functions here as a deliberate manifestation of political will and symbolizes a political subjectivity that looks back, not to the temperate tradition of an english liberalism, but to its contrapuntal history of colonial force and subjugation.

This brings us back full circle, of course, to the trope of tropicalization with which we began, and to the tropical politics that we have seen Gibreel wanting to institute against a customary english temperance: “‘city,’ he cried, and his voice rolled over the metropolis like thunder, ‘I am going to tropicalize you’” (Satanic 354). His archangelic fiat effects a climate change reminiscent of the “long hot summers” in Britain’s history of riots: “The temperature continued to rise . . . the heatwave reached its highest point, and stayed up there so long that the whole city, its edifices, its waterways, its inhabitants, came perilously close to the boil” (420). alongside the simmering heat, “violent incidents began to occur more fre-quently: attacks on black families on council estates, harassment of black school-children. . . . Stories of police brutality. . . . Self-defence patrols of young Sikh, Ben-

13 Oswald Mosley was the founder of the British Union of Fascists in 1932. enoch Powell was the conservative MP who delivered his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech on immigration in 1968, in which he prophesized a future of racial violence that could be avoided only if the British government implemented a policy of repatriating its colored immigrants. edward long was a British colonial administrator in Jamaica and the author of the popular history of Jamaica (1774), in which he defended the practices of slavery by arguing for the racial inferiority of blacks.


gali and afro-caribbean males—described by their political opponents as vigilante groups—began to roam the borough” (451).

The riot that finally erupts in Brickhall “one unseasonally humid night” is the narrative culmination of the process of tropicalization that Gibreel begins. On this riotous night, the archangel decides to visit the wrath of God on the blasphemous city by cleansing it through fire. armed with a trumpet of divine retribution that expels streams of fire, Gibreel looks upon a low-cost high-rise on which the indel-ible marks of British racism are writ large: “Nigger eat white man’s shit, suggest the unoriginal walls.” The building speaks of “derelict kitchen units, deflated bicycle tyres, shards of broken doors . . . shattered job prospects, abandoned hopes, lost illusions, expended angers, accumulated bitterness” (461)—in short, of the material deprivation and psychic wounds that racism has inflicted on the migrant commu-nity. It is on this architectural manifestation of racial abuse and systemic inequal-ity that Gibreel decides to wreak his vengeance; Rushdie’s representation of the building’s fiery destruction is worth reproducing in full for its reworking of the discourse of heat that attends such rioting:

he [Gibreel] raises his trumpet to his lips and begins to play.Little buds of flame spring up on the concrete, fuelled by the discarded heaps of

possessions and dreams. There is a little, rotting pile of envy: it burns greenly in the night. The fires are every colour of the rainbow, and not all of them need fuel. he blows the little fire-flowers out of his horn and they dance upon the concrete, need-ing neither combustible materials nor roots. here, a pink one! There, what would be nice?, i know: a silver rose.—And now the buds are blossoming into bushes, they are climbing like creepers up the sides of the towers, they reach out towards their neigh-bours, forming hedges of multicoloured flame. it is like watching a luminous garden, its growth accelerated many thousands of times, a garden blossoming, flourishing, becoming overgrown, tangled, becoming impenetrable, a garden of dense intertwined chimeras, rivaling in its own incandescent fashion the thornwood that sprang up around the palace of the sleeping beauty in another fairy-tale, long ago. (461–62)

The passage is striking for its aestheticization of the rioting fires. Gibreel, by decid-ing where to direct his flames (“what would be nice?”), takes on the role of an artist whose medium is fire and whose canvas is the building that stands as a material symbol of racial injustices. The fires themselves are compared to flowers—“little buds of flames”—that blossom and grow into a supernatural “thornwood” out of a “fairy-tale.” In imagining the flames as a flourishing magical garden, Rushdie gestures at a new beginning, a new platform for race relations that is made pos-sible in spite of—indeed, because of—the destruction that has been wrought. The fire acts as a symbolic purification of racial tensions and as a rite-of-passage toward a distinctively ethnic political subjectivity: out of these redemptive fires, Rushdie suggests, “hedges of multicoloured flame” can emerge; the pun on “multicultural” should here be evident. Whereas the mainstream media’s representation of rioting zooms in on the extreme violence unleashed by such disorders, on blazing cars and properties engulfed in flames, Rushdie implies once again that such heated


extremity is necessary for the passage toward newness, since the fires herald the potential birth of a genuinely multicultural Britain wherein ethnic minorities are significant political forces capable of reshaping, rather than being merely assimi-lated into, the fabric of the nation.

On Political Violence

The Satanic Verses thus deliberately refashions a governing discourse that simplis-tically associates heat with political extremism and mindless violence. Rushdie suggests that extremity—both in its discursive form of a language of war and in its material form of rioting—functions rather as a basis from which the mar-ginalized can politicize their resistance to racism. yet the novel, I want to argue, remains deeply torn about the modes of violence that a radicalized politics may unleash. For although the text represents the Brickhall riots in affirmative terms that gesture at the emergence of a new social formation, it simultaneously sug-gests that such political extremism comes with a price that may be all too high. Hind and Muhammad Sufyan, the proprietors of the Shandaar café who have afforded Saladin his refuge; Saladin’s estranged wife, Pamela lovelace, and her unborn child; and Jumpy Joshi, Pamela’s lover—all of them become casualties of the rioting night, their futures aborted by the very same flames that, in the preced-ing passage, seemed to bespeak a multicultural future for the nation. “extremity” swiftly shifts here from that which can transform existing limits to that which, as the Oxford English Dictionary also reminds us, “terminates the body” (“extreme,” def. c.2.a).

The novel’s ambivalence toward rioting and conflict is an ambivalence that crit-ics of the novel are, perhaps symptomatically, prone to replicate. Ian Baucom’s fine reading of the riot scene in The Satanic Verses, for instance, affirms its political nature by locating it within a genealogy of english working-class protests that such riots recall but also translate anew into an idiom of migrant politics. The riot, suggests Baucom, is “an insistence that black Britons must be recognized to occupy spaces within the island’s towns and cities and a legitimate place within the geog-raphy of citizenship.” yet he also cautions against a “reading of riot that attends [only] to its redemptive grounds of possibility,” for rioting “is an exceptional event whose slender victories may never counterpoise its violence” (213, 216). The central problem confronting both the novel and its critics, then, is the violence that a radi-cal politics seems ineluctably to require; or, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, it is the problem of accomplishing the “political suspension of the Ethical,” of which the Machiavellian acceptance of violence as the necessary means to the ends of political action is the apotheosis. The ethical dilemma presented by violence, notes Žižek, signifies the absolute “limit of that which even the most ‘tolerant’ liberal stance is unable to trespass” (223, 244).

It might be possible, then, to propose a reading of The Satanic Verses in which Rushdie remains enmeshed in the suppositions of a liberalism that sees real vio-lence as wholly unjustifiable on any grounds, even as he critiques liberalism for its depoliticization of racism and employs the discourses of militancy with ease


in the narrative.14 yet the novel’s take on violence is more complicated and cannot be reduced to simple, moralistic aversion. Rushdie himself refuses such easy con-clusions: his review of Richard attenborough’s Gandhi, for instance, criticizes the film for indulging in “the liberal-conservative political desire to hear it said that revolutions can, and should be made purely by submission, and self-sacrifice, and non-violence alone.” The notion that “the best way to gain your freedom is to line up, unarmed, and march toward your oppressors and permit them to club you to the ground” is, Rushdie continues, “dangerous nonsense,” since no principle of political action can be elevated into an axiomatic law but must remain specific to its circumstance; Gandhi’s tenet of non-violence would not have worked in a different context (“attenborough’s” 102, 105). Rushdie here seems to acknowledge that the political imperatives of violence may override its ethical undesirability in certain instances.

It is ultimately neither possible nor useful, in my view, to argue that The Satanic Verses either endorses or rejects political violence, as if the novel were simply par-ticipating in an after-dinner debate in which it had to choose sides, rather than being the complex and contradictory aesthetic object that it is. But this is not simply to maintain, in the hermeneutic equivalent of having one’s cake and eating it, that both positions are necessarily generated out of the novel’s textual indetermina-cies, even if this is often true. Rather, I want to argue that the ethical conundrum of political violence is a problem that the novel explicitly stages but also one that it evades by reverting to the registers of magical realism in its representation of violence. We can take the earlier description of the rioting fires as an example: “It is like watching a luminous garden, its growth accelerated many thousands of times, a garden blossoming, flourishing, becoming overgrown, tangled, becoming impenetrable, a garden of dense intertwined chimeras, rivaling in its own incan-descent fashion the thornwood that sprang up around the palace of the sleeping beauty in another fairy-tale, long ago” (Satanic 462). The passage, as we previously noted, by imagining the flames as a flourishing garden, reworks a governing idiom that associates heat with negative excess, and it suggests instead the construction that can emerge out of destruction. Such revolutionary optimism is made possible only through the formal means of magical realism. The rioting fires, far from pro-ducing the material effects of violence, of burning corpses or collapsing buildings, are transformed into mythical “chimeras” and etherealized into “incandescence.” The end of the passage in which the fires come to resemble the “thornwood” from the “fairy-tale” of “sleeping beauty” turns self-referential, gesturing at its own magical realism by recalling the closely related genre of the fantastic. The hal-lucinatory register of the passage enables the attenuation, even the erasure, of the sheer violence of the rioting fires, of the bodily wounds and physical suffering that they can inflict. The ethical problem of violence, then, is resolved in The Satanic

14 The problem with the liberal view on violence, needless to say, is that it focuses its critique on obvious manifestations of violence, whereas state violence, by virtue of its legitimization by the state, is rendered invisible. In other words, the refusal to countenance violence does not translate into its actual elimination; rather, violence simply becomes the sole prerogative of the state.


Verses through its elision as the novel converts the concrete consequences of vio-lence into the fabulous world of the rich and strange, thereby generating an affect that is altogether different.

Nowhere is such an evasion more evident than in the novel’s representation of the apotheosis of the politics of extremity: a terrorist hijacking of the plane, the Bostan, by Sikh separatists—a seemingly peripheral event at the beginning of the novel but one that condenses the issues of political violence that we have been exploring and whose literally explosive outcome will launch the novel’s two protagonists, Gibreel and Saladin, into a magical realist freefall from the heights of the sky into the depths of the english channel, as the novel’s opening sequence so memorably describes. The Bostan is taken over by three men and a woman, Tav-leen, who, as the narrator makes clear, is made of a different mettle from the others. Whereas the men “would find it difficult to kill,” wanting only “to behave the way they have seen hijackers behaving in the movies,” Tavleen’s deadly seriousness is inscribed on her body, strapped as it is with “grenades like extra breasts nestling in her cleavage, [and] the gelignite taped around her thighs” (Satanic 78, 81). In lacan-ian terms, if the male hijackers inhabit a purely symbolic order, their actions a spectacle mediated through the fantasy of representation, Tavleen’s bodily arsenal dislocates us from the virtual spaces of simulacra into the visceral “desert of the Real.” What is particularly striking about the novel’s portrayal of the hijackers is its disdain for the posturing men, as discernible in Rushdie’s description of them as “reality aping a crude image of itself,” as “worms swallowing their tails.” By contrast, Tavleen, “insensible to her own beauty, which made her the most dan-gerous of the four,” is represented as someone who “knows” (78). The refusal to specify Tavleen’s object of knowledge works to enhance her mystique as a reposi-tory of a greater, ineffable wisdom, and her portrayal draws on a long tradition of the femme fatale, since her allure is inextricable from the threat that she poses as the only one willing to kill. The mélange of violence and desirability that she embodies also suggests the desirability of violence itself. For Tavleen’s ontological status as “the real thing,” of which her co-hijackers are mere semblances, implies that violence (or, at least, the capacity to commit it) is the authenticating mark, the acid test, which distinguishes any genuine political act from its simulacrum. The deep-seated attraction to violence that the novel here exhibits is symptomatic of its own postmodern condition, wherein nothing except a radically violent act appears capable of rupturing a depthless society in which the ubiquity of the image seems to have fully supplanted reality.15

Despite the novel’s privileging of violence as that which authenticates revolu-tion, any actual violence that results from the explosion of the plane is completely elided—in fact, denied—in the episode’s end:

15 Witness Jean Baudrillard’s comments concerning the attacks on the World Trade center on 11 September 2001: “In the present case [of the attacks], we thought we had seen (perhaps with a certain relief) a resurgence of the real, and of the violence of the real, in an allegedly virtual universe. ‘There’s an end to all your talk about the virtual—this is something real!’” (28). Baudrillard goes on to argue against such a position, maintaining that the terror of the attacks derived primarily from their symbolic valence as spectacle, despite having clearly acknowl-edged the prevailing assumption that violence is somehow inherently tied to the real.


[S]he was holding in her hand the wire that connected all the pins of all the grenades beneath her gown, all those fatal breasts, and although at that moment Buta and Dara [two male hijackers] rushed at her she pulled the wire anyway, and the walls came tumbling down.

No, not death: birth. (87)

The passage refuses the physical deaths that are the actual consequences of a plane explosion in favor of a wholly symbolic reading that, in terms which should now be familiar to us, sees birth emerging from death and newness from violence. The final sentence encapsulates my argument: the novel’s affirmation of the redemptive possibilities of a politics of extremism is concurrently dependent on the negation of its physical costs. To be sure, the aftermath of the bombing is not represented solely by this laconic four-word conclusion, for the end of the episode returns us to the beginning of the novel, which, in a circular structure, commences at the point of the plane’s explosion and proleptically elaborates on subsequent events:

The aircraft cracked in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mys-tery. Two actors, prancing Gibreel and buttony, pursed Mr Saladin Chamcha, fell like tidbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar. Above, behind, below them in the void there hung reclining seats, stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys, motion discomfort receptacles, disembarkation cards, duty-free video games, braided caps, paper cups, blankets, oxygen masks. Also—for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job-officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands’ geni-talia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its ever-reasonable doubts—mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home. (4)

The passage performs a noticeable movement from the concrete to the abstract. although it begins with a random catalogue of the tangible, if inanimate, objects from the plane that have been catapulted into midair (“stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys,” etc.), it shifts to the realm of the immaterial at the point at which it must confront the living passengers on board the plane—migrants on the way to Britain, their wives, and children—who have likewise been launched into space. Instead of continuing with a material, if admittedly gruesome, catalogue of scorched flesh, ruptured lungs, and imploded brains, Rushdie moves into the far more abstract dimension of “the debris of the soul,” through which the aircraft’s split is symbolically transmuted into a postcolonial schism that produces “broken memories, [and] sloughed-off selves.” The commingling of the material and the immaterial, of the real and the magical, so that the ontological status of both is no longer certain, is a hallmark of magical realism; in this instance, it works to miti-gate the effects of violence by supplanting the physical concreteness of the body with the intangibility of the psychical. and it is precisely magical realism that


will save the two protagonists, by turning what should be a plummet to certain death into the means of their metamorphic rebirth on english soil—a miraculous escape enacted by formal mechanisms that allow Gibreel to declare in the novel’s opening sentence, “To be born again . . . first you have to die” (3). even as the text gravitates toward violence as an event of the Real which can escape the prison-house of language, as that which can penetrate the all-pervasive virtuality of the image, its own representation of violence returns us to the realm of the symbolic, evinced by the passage’s focal shift toward the purely linguistic at the end, to “sev-ered mother-tongues . . . untranslatable jokes . . . the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words.” What the novel stages as an authentic political act, emerging out of Tavleen’s uncompromisingly radical agenda, turns out to be yet another simula-crum as the violence of the explosion is transformed into the mere image of it.

In The Satanic Verses, the hijacking of the Bostan provokes fear but no real hostil-ity among the hostages toward their captors; the narrator observes that “many of the passengers [of the Bostan] came to sympathize with them [the hijackers], even though they were under constant threat of execution.” “If you live in the twentieth century,” reflects the narrator, “you do not find it hard to see yourself in those, more desperate than yourself, who seek to shape it to their will” (79). The passen-gers’ ambivalent response to the hijackers reflects the novel’s ambivalent relation to a politics of extremity that is reproduced in The Satanic Verses and simultane-ously disavowed. The novel’s sympathy toward such a politics mobilized by the ethnic communities of Britain is born of the awareness that a tradition of temperate english liberalism does not supply adequate modes of political action for redress-ing issues of racial and cultural subordination. The migrants’ turn to a discourse of the tropics with all its corresponding evocations of heat, war, violence, and riot-ing is, like the return of the repressed, a reinstatement of the realm of the political that a liberal depoliticization has foreclosed. When such a discourse spills over into physical acts of violence, the novel’s deployment of magical realism displaces these consequences and translates them into an extended metaphor of rebirth that finds redemption within ruin. The novel’s tropicalization of english politics, then, rewrites a liberal englishness in order to repoliticize it, but also dreams of a radical politics that can retain its radicalism without recourse to violence.

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the satanic verses and the politics of extremity

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