The super-acceleration of the world in the 80s; migration and metamorphosis: if you can’t go home again because both you and home have already changed, you can at least remake yourself in the new place although it rejects you. But you’ll be different to your parents, and most likely far from what they wanted you to be. You might feel you have betrayed them, but that the way to return is via religion.
Amongst other things, The Satanic Verses is a celebration of fragmentation, hybridity and breakdown, psychosis by another name. This is a painful mad state which might require the reintroduction of limits. The authorites are called in when there is too much enjoyment; they re-establish order and renunciation over the vortex of obscene enjoyment. One cure they might offer could be the safety of certainty, knowledge of the absolute truth; the certainty of the very religion Rushdie, as an artist, can’t help being sceptical about.
If novelists and the religious are envious and fascinated by one another it is because religions and literature approach the same subject, knowledge of the world and how to live in it as sexual and dying beings. Like literature, religions are a form of myth, a creative function of the human imagination; Mohammed, Jesus and the Virgin Mary can resemble characters in a drama, and we can argue about their virtues and failings as we would with anyone else.
Religions are, among other things, a form of explanation, of story telling and order making. As with literature, these stories are, then, useful delusions. But where religions seek to eradicate conflicts, installing some notion of ultimate harmony, literature sustains conflicts as arguments worth having. The Satanic Verses is concerned with the necessity of doubt in this process, returning religious myths and narratives to man as objects of creativity and of enquiry. All texts, like all lives, are endlessly open to interpretation, satire, slander, idealisation. Religions, like the novel, are mankind’s dream and a high form of useful play. God is man’s greatest creation, as well as his worst. Man is more creative than God.
But if forms of worship are man-made, they can be modified by man; they can be reinvented, according to need. But where literature is critical — Baal in The Satanic Verses states, ‘a poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point out frauds, take sides, start arguments’ — religions, called ‘sacred’, require obedience and often silence. If religion is man at his most creative, it is also him at his most authoritarian. Not that you can under-estimate the pleasures of obedience.
Nietzsche writes, ‘What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake; we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate — and immediately forget we have done so.’ As Fassbinder points out, we fictionalise the immigrant, turning him into the monster of our imagining. At times he is an oppressed or greedy immigrant, and at another a revolutionary fascist, a proto-bomber hating the West, wanting to change it into his own idealised image.
We can frighten ourselves, taking these stories literally. But myths are imperative: nothing is still, migration and metamorphosis are our destiny, a passage to death. We live in fantasy, hallucination and imagination. The self cannot be mastered or contained; parts of it are always liable to sheer off and fly about, looking for a character to inhabit.
Newness in the World: An Introduction to The Black Album
It was in the summer of 2008 that I suggested to Jatinder Verma that we attempt a theatrical dramatisation of my second novel The Black Album.
The Black Album was a novel I had begun to think about in 1991, not long after the publication of my first book, The Buddha of Suburbia. Unlike that story, which I’d been trying to tell in numerous versions since I first decided to become a writer, aged fourteen, The Black Album was more or less contemporary, a ‘state of Britain’ narrative not unlike the ones I’d grown up watching, in the theatre and on TV.
Around the time of its original publication in 1993, and after the BBC film of The Buddha of Suburbia, there had been talk of filming The Black Album. But instead of returning to something I’d just written and was relieved to have done with, it seemed easier to write a new piece, with similar themes. This was a film, My Son the Fanatic starring Rachel Griffiths and Om Puri.
However, as the twentieth anniversary of the fatwa was approaching, and with The Black Album set in 1988/9 and concentrating on a small group of fundamentalists, both Jatinder and I thought that my pre-7/7 novel might shed some light on some of the things which had happened since.
Not that I had read the novel since writing it; and if I felt hesitant — as I did — to see it revived in another form, it was because I was anxious that in the present mood, after the bombings and atrocities, it might, at times, seem a little frivolous. But the young radical Muslims I came to know at the time did appear to me to be both serious and intelligent, as well as naïve, impressionable and half-mad, and my account of their activities and language reflected what I learned in mosques and colleges. The novel records the kind of debates they had. And it wasn’t as though the subject of liberalism and its relation to extreme religion had gone away.
It was debate and ideological confrontation that Jatinder and I had in mind when we sat down to work on the translation from prose to play. The novel, which has a thriller-like structure, is a sprawl of many scenes in numerous locations: pubs, a Further Education College, a mosque, clubs, parties, a boarding house, cafes, Deedee’s house and the street. As it was impossible in the theatre to retain this particular sense of late 80s London, we had to create longer scenes and concentrate on the important and even dangerous arguments between the characters as they interrogated Islam, liberalism, consumer capitalism, as well as the place and meaning of literature and the way in which it might be critical of religion.
The first draft was too much like a film and would have been unwieldly to stage. Jatinder reminded me that we had to be ruthless. He also reminded me, with his persistence and imagination, how much I’ve learned about editing from the film and theatre directors I’ve worked with. If we were to create big parts for actors in scenes set in small rooms, we needed to turn prose into fervent talk, having the conversation carry the piece. We had to ensure the actors had sufficient material to see their parts clearly. Each scene had to be shaped. The piece had to work for those who hadn’t read the book.
It was this we worked on over a number of drafts, and it was the usual business of writing: cutting, condensing, expanding, developing, and trying material in different places until the story moved forward naturally. I was particularly keen to keep the humour and banter of students and their often adolescent attitudes, particularly towards sexuality. This was, after all, one of their most significant terrors: that the excitement the West offered would not only be too much for them, but for everyone.
Nevertheless, the matter was deadly serious. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie in February 1989 had re-ignited my concern about the rise of Islamic radicalism, something I’d first become aware of while in Pakistan in 1982, where I was writing My Beautiful Laundrette. But for me that wasn’t the whole story. Much else of interest was happening around the end of the 80s: the music of Prince; the collapse of communism and the ‘velvet revolution’; the rise of the new dance music along with the use of a revelatory new drug, Ecstasy; Tiananmen Square; Madonna using Catholic imagery in Like a Prayer; and post-modernism, ‘mashups’ and the celebration of hybridity — of exchange and creative contamination — which is partly the subject of The Satanic Verses.