Rushdie’s abracadabra

Shelley Walia

the fanciful and capricious world of the jinn pervades Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights where the world of humans collides with that of the jinns: ‘The point of any kind of imagined world’ explains Rushdie, ‘is that it has to be coherent in its own terms. It must not just be whimsical. If anything can happen, then nothing matters.’ 

In Rushdie’s new novel, reason and unreason, religion and blasphemy, jostle against each other, creating the ‘high fabulism’ of modernist intertwining of fairyland with New York, and the jinn world with mortals like Isaac Newton, Mother Teresa and Harry Potter. The literary and cultural baggage that Rushdie has carried all his life comes full circle in the extraordinary craft of storytelling that he has mastered from his native folklore, from The Arabian Nights, from the magic realism of Garcia Marquez, mixing myth with history, memory with desire and reason with unreason. Indeed, literature has no boundaries, no conclusive determinations. 

The title of the novel interestingly has allusion to The Arabian Nights, evident from the number of days that add up to 1001. It is no surprise, therefore, that the novel is structured around the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd, who lived in 12th century Spain and from whom Rushdie’s father adopted their surname, if only for his dissident proclivities. His story resounds with overtones of free exchange of ideas put across in a wildly funny and unusually scintillating liveliness of the word play and the bizarre strangeness alternating with punning.

The fable begins in the year 1195 when Rushd, the Qadi of Seville is exiled for his radical views on Aristotle and religion that are unacceptable to the Berber fanatics of Spain. He cohabits with a jinn named Dunia and for 1001 days they make love, punctuated by Rushd telling her stories from his past to distract her from her ravenous drive for sex. He acquires the reverse role of Scheherazade by spinning narratives that instead of prolonging life would bring death if revealed. However, the storyteller and the listener are within their creative rights to subvert established harmonies within social and religious affairs by entering the space of freedom. 

Rushd’s provocative account of his disagreement with the philosophy of the Persian scholar Ghazali leads to the burning of his book, The Incoherence of the Incoherence that based itself on reason, logic and science. Rushdie is indirectly asking the question: Can burning of books or their banning be legitimised through the argument of preserving a pure and pristine religious thinking? Moreover, why should we ‘put religious belief in cotton wool?’ However, Rushd is finally vindicated and returns to his land leaving behind Dunia and her innumerable children labelled ‘Duniazdt’, a new race spread across the globe.

Dunia disappears into her ‘Peristan’ only to resurface in New York after 800 years to avenge her long lost lover by waging a fight lasting 1001 days against the followers of Ghazali with the help of her children. The atmosphere is replete with apparitions of calm and sudden disruptions with towers disappearing.  Though it creates an environment of jinns and comedy, it is paradoxically a serious concern with an attack on the city, bringing many upheavals challenging religious beliefs or acts of silence considered now to be a disease.

Dunia falls in love with the gardener, Geronimo, who belongs to her tribe of Duniazdt. They tend to be unscrupulous, devious, shameless, power-hungry and ungodly in a world of comedy and poignancy that Salman Rushdie conjures. The novel ends on the ominous note of Dunia returning to her fairyland, resulting in the birth of reason. With ‘meanings jostling in the streets, rubbing shoulders with other meanings, the friction birthing new meanings,’ the world finally gets sealed off from the fairyland of fancy and imagination. The ability to dream in a futuristic world meets its sad end. The nights of spectacular sex and storytelling are over but sometimes a wish lingers that we could ‘long for nightmares’. In such a world ‘those slits and holes were closed so tightly… not even the drips of fairy magic, the heaven dew, which according to legend fell into our sleeping eyes and allowed us our nocturnal fantasies.’

The book’s epitaph of Goya’s engraving, The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters draws attention to its caption as well as the thematic content of the novel that ‘Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters, united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels’ compelling Rushdie to remark: ‘I thought, how would one dramatise a world in which the rules no longer applied?’ Many of us are indeed, at a loss to realise the veracity of our situation and our strait-jacketing environment, where the world of reason stands accountable for slaying our dreams and imagination.