Faculty Book Review--January 2003
Salaman Rushdie's
The Moor's
Last Sigh
By Richard Beattie
It’s difficult to de-politicize Salman Rushdie. Hard to disassociate the writer from the outlaw upon whom Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini put out a jihadic “hit” in 1989 for Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.. And now, in a post 9/11 West, it’s even more difficult to not see him as a sympathetic victim ally, hard not to say “Any enemy of Islamic fundamentalists is a friend of mine.” As Rushdie has pointed out, he didn’t need Khomeini to make him a celebrated author, he had done that all by himself. And if we refuse to divorce Salman Rushdie from global politics, let’s at least make an effort to see him as a writer, and not just a political celebrity.
Alice Walker has said that when one writes a novel, one puts everything they are into it. It becomes a notion of the author’s collective experience. Rushdie, born a Kashmiri Muslim in Bombay, writes a lot about India and Pakistan and Europe. In The Moor’s Last Sigh (Rushdie’s first novel after Satanic Verses) he offers up not only a sprawling portrait of 20th century India, but a thumbnail sketch of India in the globally oriented “Modern Era”.
It is both epic and reductive. He is dealing, after all, with about 500 years of Indian history here. From Portuguese exploration and exploitation to the Spanish home wrecking, from British dominion to 20th century sea sickness, the result of rocking Indian independence. But what Michener or Dellilo might have written in 1200 pages, Rushdie manages to cover in a third of that. The narrator of The Moor’s Last Sigh is Moraes Zogoiby (one of the Moors of the title), who is born to the dynamic, artistic and difficult Aurora Zogoiby (nee Da Gama), and suffers a club hand and a curious medical condition that causes him to age twice as fast as normal. Though Moraes may serve as narrator, it is the women of the novel that prove to be most impactive; Aurora, her mother Isabella, Abraham’s mother Flory (who may or may not have had an adulterous affair with a Spanish Moor before fleeing Spain for India, just as her descendents might have done in the 15th century after the Spanish fatwa), and, of course, Uma Sarasvati, the ingenious manipulative femme fatale who is ultimately Moraes’s undoing; as well as the undoing of Moraes’s immediate family. Nothing is left in her wake but tragedy, recrimination and regret.
Setting is never forgotten in The Moor’s Last Sigh, for setting is everything in this novel. India as the nexus of modern World History. I’ll provide this one episode. Aurora, product of a wealthy shipping family in Bombay and a nebulous descendent of Vasco Da Gama, is about to marry Abraham Zogoiby, the handsome Jewish Spaniard currently in the employ of the British. A controversial marital union, to say the least. Or, as Moraes puts it “…Abraham, who preferred my mother’s love to God’s. He was prepared to marry her according to the laws of Rome—and O, what a storm that statement conceals!” A storm indeed: A descendent of a Jewish family forced from Southern Spain (along with the Muslims) by the Catholic Ferdinand and Isabella, they themselves inheritors of Spanish and Portuguese successes in the east; agrees to marry an Indian descendent of the Catholic Portuguese Vasco Da Gama in a city rife with Islamic, Hindu and Catholic influence. You get my point. There’s plenty of blood feuding here, both domestic and international. The offspring in Mother India’s fold are an unruly litter, their strings plucked by the pepper of ambition and the heavy clove smoke that seems to cloud their vision. Everything here is too complicated, too much of a melting pot of lineage producing too much heavy baggage. The story evolves into episodic betrayal: Abraham betrays his mother, Aurora betrays Abraham, Moraes betrays Aurora and is, in turn betrayed by Uma.
And what is lost? Near everything: love, spouses, parents, illusions and identities…all casualties of the interminable wars. But, as Rushdie told the NY Times in 1983; “I think it's very difficult for a writer in the 20th century to look at the world and avoid a tragic view."
Critics have said that The Moor’s Last Sigh makes little allowances for the western reader. Most of this has to do with Rushdie’s virtuosity with language. He has said that India speaks a form of English that differs from the form spoken in the West and that he had hoped to give that English form credibility as a literary form. Aside from derivative and disorienting verb forms and other linguistic prestidigitation, the references to geography and establishment are only truly understood by those who have enjoyed an actual Perillo tour of Bombay. I tend to agree with Rushdie’s response to these criticisms which points out that a great many novels force the reader to use imagination in place of concrete awareness. Does any average reader understand everything Faulkner or Beckett write? What Jewish author doesn’t throw in Yiddish words I’m completely oblivious to? (These include some of my favorite authors; e.g. Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow) The point remains obvious. Rushdie may not make allowances for a western reader because he is not writing western literature precisely. In fact, he may throw into question the artistic currency of western literature as a distinct form.
Rushdie, of course, has written since The Moor’s Last Sigh, though this novel, along with Midnight’s Children continue to be considered his “India” novels. Incidentally, he’s also published several collections of essays and some non-fiction work, appeared in Bridget Jones’s Diary and a U2 video. Has celebrity swallowed the artist? I tend to think not. I saw Rushdie speak several weeks ago and found it difficult to determine whether I was listening to a novelist or a Harvard professor of Islamic Studies. I actually find it somewhat of a comfort that in a society that hands out “artistic” awards to ‘N’ Sync and Russell Crowe there’s still some room for a celebrity like Salman Rushdie.