Salman Rushdie

Abstract

In Step Across This Line, Salman Rushdie admits to a shift in attitude toward the question of belonging: “There was always a tug-of-war in me between ‘there’ and ‘here,’ the pull of roots and of the road. In that struggle of insiders and outsiders, I used to feel simultaneously on both sides. Now I’ve come down on the side of those who by preference, nature, or circumstance simply do not belong. This unbelonging—I think of it as disorientation, loss of the East—is my artistic country now” (SATL, 266), Due to statements like this, Rushdie has come to epitomize the migrant writer par excellence. In his essays he frequently proclaims migration to be the defining concept of the twentieth century, in regard to both sociology broadly speaking, and literary history in particular, where it proves important as a thematic and formal stratagem. However, Rushdie’s own biography of “unbelonging,” his preference for route over root, which has taken him from India to England to Pakistan to England to the United States, but also from a public life into a life in hiding, is another reason for the epitomization. ¹

The migrant’s sense of being rootless, of living between worlds, between a lost past and a non-integrated present, is perhaps the most fitting metaphor of this (post)modern condition.

—Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity