Post-National Voices

Summer 2005

Why did The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie’s novel about self-doubting Muslims in

London and Bombay written almost two decades ago, so resonate continents away in

the corner minimalls and polylingual schools of the City of Angels?

The reason is that it told a story about the conflicts within individuals and

between cultures that result from the immediate juxtaposition in time (mass media,

telecom) and space (migration) of very different worldviews and civilizations. It

exposed the spiritual dislocation of fragmented individuals in a fragmented world

dealing with its plural identities.

The Satanic Verses dramatized the frictions of the global collage that transpire daily

in megacities like Los Angeles which have little identity other than their plurality: LA

is a little bit Seoul, Saigon, Taipei, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Managua, San Salvador

and Tehran.

Indeed, globalization is turning the entire planet into the kind of edge culture

Rushdie’s novel described. Increasingly, ours is a world beyond borders in which nations

are no longer places defined by their history or ethnicity, but plural spaces through

which everything flows from migrants to money, from information to microbes.

Today, societies have evolved far from the pure ideal of “heimat,” or homeland.

Yet, they are also still far from merging into Teilhard de Chardin’s utopian “noos-

phere,” in which the intensive communication enabled by technology ties us all

together in a common global consciousness.

A wired world with roots in the air instead of the soil does not in and of itself add

up to a cosmopolitan culture. Forging such a culture is largely the task of the arts,

especially the new genre of post-national literature of which Rushdie’s The Satanic

Verses was an early expression.

For all the digital images, satellite signals and instant messages swirling around

the vast planetary network, there has so far been precious little advance in the shared

understanding which post-national writing can bring. “What most of the mass

media offer the public about Iran or Afghanistan or even about America,” says the

novelist Azar Nafisi, “is not knowledge; it is just soundbites.”While the media serves

up bits of information or reality TV-type entertainment, only “imaginative knowl-

edge,” in Nafisi’s term, can create awareness. Above all, it can connect still-closed

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SALMAN RUSHDIE

AZAR NAFISI

HANAN AL-SHAYKH

ELIF SHAFAK

TOMAS ELOY MARTINEZ

GAO XINGJIAN

HA JIN

LILLIAN FASCHINGER

RENE GIRARD

PANKAJ MISHRA

SHINTARO ISHIHARA

HOWARD WACHTEL

JIMMY CARTER

SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM

MOHSEN SAZEGARA

JOSE ALBERRO

JORGE CASTANEDA

IAN WILMUT

JOE NYE

societies to the outside and let open societies peer into the soul

of the Other.

“Part of the reason people liked my book, Reading Lolita in

Tehran,” Nafisi told NPQ, “was because they could experience

through reading it what a young girl experienced in a country

called an Islamic Republic. And they realized that her desires

and aspirations were not very different from their own.”

Salman Rushdie similarly makes the urgent case for litera-

ture in a post 9/11 world where “a new darkness and fear” have

descended on America’s vaunted open culture. “Literature can

really help here,” Rushdie says, “because it can take away that

part of the fear which is based on not knowing things.”

Moreover, observed Rushdie, “If you look at the bedrock

where the ideas of a culture are forged, it’s not on television.

The ideas, of course, are afterward discussed and popularized and spread by televi-

sion, but to this day still, without books, without print culture, society would not

have any forum to discuss itself and forge anything new.That is what literature can do.

It can still actually be the place from which new ideas, changing of ideas, subtlety and

re-imagining of the world, derive.”

Albert Einstein famously said that everything had changed in the nuclear age

except the way we think. Until lately, one could also say that globalization has changed

everything but our narrative literature, which remained national.

As exemplified by the writers who appear in this NPQ, that has begun to change.

Post-national literature is a new genre for a new era without boundaries, re-imagin-

ing the world and giving voice to the experience we are all living.

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“The Satanic Verses” dramatized the frictions of the global

collage that transpire daily in megacities like Los Angeles

which have little identity other than their plurality: LA is a

little bit Seoul, Saigon, Taipei, Hong Kong, Mexico City,

Managua, San Salvador and Tehran.