The Movement of Migrants through Diaspora, Transformation and Loss

in The Satanic Verses

Since its publication in 1988 The Satanic Verses has stood as a focal point for controversy,

truth and debate. In its pages live characters that migrate to new cultures propelled by what

Tim Cresswell would describe as a driving force for a new life. As the novel unravels,

elements of Creswell’s Politics of Mobility and Lily Cho’s Turn to Diaspora come to light, as

we witness the various shades of diasporic metamorphosis and friction of movement that

emerge in the characters’ various processes of immigration. Cresswell’s notion of ‘mobility

as liberty, mobility as progress’(Cresswell 21) is refracted in differing forms through the

characters of Saladin, Gibreel and Hind, each telling a story that speaks beyond the

‘boundaries and borders… of the past’ that are ‘no longer relevant to the dynamic world of

the 21st century’(Cresswell 18). In Rushdie’s autobiographical book, Joseph Anton: A

Memoir, he refers to immigration as an act that ‘puts into crisis everything about the

migrating individual… everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief’ and that

The Satanic Verses is, first and foremost, ‘a novel about migration’ that answers these

questions and performs ‘the crisis it describes’ (Rushdie 72). In this sense Rushdie’s novel

delves into what Cho would describe as the diasporic ‘scattering of peoples who are

nonetheless connected by a sense of homeland, imaginary or otherwise’ and that the vine of

the novel weaves deep into the consciousness of the contemporary, giving a voice to

diasporic subjects in a frictional state of becoming but who are also ‘turning back upon those

markers of the self’ (Cho 12). As both migration and diaspora are highly politicised concepts

of the contemporary, the fusion of Creswell’s friction of mobility and Cho’s diasporic

‘condition of subjectivity’ work together to further understand the transformation of the

characters in Rushdie’s novel, and how their individual stories hold a mirror up to the

psychological pressures, prejudice and loss experienced by the migrants as they move
through the metropolis, propelled by their search for a rooted stasis and renewed sense of self

(14). Through the lives of the characters in Salman Rushdie’s seminal work The Satanic

Verses, this essay will draw focus from the political theories of Cresswell and Cho to shed

light on the fragmentary experiences of a migrant and the sense of loss that stirs inevitably ‘in

their longing for homes which may not exist’ (Cho 13).

Rushdie’s diasporic migrancy is strongly evoked in the character of Saladin Chamcha,

‘a self-made man’(Rushdie 49) who, upon returning to his home country (Britain) from his

origin country (India) undergoes a grotesque transformation, as his feet turn into two hairy

hooves along with ‘two new, goaty, unarguable horns’(141) it transpires that Saladin had

arrived ‘into some wrongness’(131). His traumatic, full bodied mutation is ridiculed by the

authorities, as they degrade and abuse him for being an outsider, along with racist remarks

from the officers such as, ‘you’re all the same. Can’t expect animals to observe civilised

standards’(159). Despite Saladin’s disbelief that this ‘unwarranted humiliation’(159) is surely

not the standard of ‘the common-sensical land’(158) of England, Cho’s ‘traumatic

dislocation’(Cho 20) is apparent in the prejudiced treatment of a migrant. Even when the

authorities realise that Saladin is indeed a legitimate ‘British citizen first class’(Rushdie 164)

and therefore was wrongfully arrested as an illegal migrant and shamefully abused, their

conclusion that no-one would believe the story of an outsider over the guardians of law and

order deepens the trough of diasporic ‘displacements and genealogies of dispossession’(Cho

11). Moreover, in light of Creswell’s analysis of the kinetic underclass and their

consequential friction of movement being further intensified by abusive treatment, Saladin’s

arrest serves to prove the ‘fixed division and classification’(Cresswell 24) of outsiders and

the ‘hierarchies of mobility’ that debilitates the movements of migrants (26). Although

Rushdie notes in The Satanic Verses that ‘mutations are to be expected’ in immigration, the

shocking depiction of Saladin’s treatment as he returns to Britain gives lucidity as he

highlights the complexities of mobility and the prejudiced magnality of outsiders (Rushdie

133).

The powerlessness of immigrants is driven home by Rushdie when Saladin is taken to

the hospital by the authorities and he encounters other immigrants who have also experienced

grotesque transformation into various animals such as manticores, tigers, water-buffalos and

even ‘businessmen from Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails’ (167). This representation of

migrants as animals, even tourists ‘from Senegal… who turned into slippery snakes’ reveals

the degradation imposed upon migrants, and the determined view that they are less than

human is concisely projected in their dehumanized physical state (168). ‘They describe us…

they have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct’ alludes to

the migrant’s demarcation in their adopted community and how their identities are stripped

away from them until they are no more than the perception forced upon them by the

authorities (168). Kironmoy Chetia aptly addresses the conflict of diaspora in his essay on

Salman Rushdie’s Search for Diasporic Identity, in which he states that ‘the movement of

people across national borders’ result in ‘cultural confrontation and identity crisis’ (Chetia 6).

This can be seen in Saladin’s defeatist analysis of the immigrant collective in the hospital,

who ‘strive for the heights but our natures betray us… clowns in search of crowns’, issuing a

sense of loss from their identities and a lack of confidence in themselves spurred by the

prejudiced dismissal of their host nation (Rushdie 170).

The transformation of the second protagonist in Rushdie’s novel, Gibreel Fashta, who

is seen to grapple desperately with his waning faith after the death of his Mother and his own

illness, serves as a concrete example of an immigrant who has lost his connection to his

cultural identity. The process of Gibreel’s diasporic trauma occurs during a sudden,

catastrophic illness in which his delirious pleas to Allah was answered only with ‘a terrible
emptiness.. as he realised he was talking to thin air’(Rushdie 30). Ensuing this, Gibreel feels

‘nothing’, no faith, no connection and no affiliation to his homeland that were previously the

roots of his culture and identity. As Samantha Joo writes in her essay ‘Off-Centering’ in The

Satanic Verses, the shock of this realisation ‘nudges him into unreality’ and paves the way to

Gibreel’s development of Schizophrenia, as the foundations of his childhood faith and

homeland is taken away (Joo 64). For Joo, ‘Gibreel’s loss of faith becomes a form of

exile’(Joo ) in which his dissipated roots of his homeland and lack of roots in his adopted

country cut him adrift, consumed with what Homi Bhabha would describe as ‘an uncanny

haunting and loss’(qtd. in Cho 19). Gibreel’s psychological deterioration as a response to his

cultural transition is, according to Cho, a focal characteristic of diaspora as she surmises that,

‘to be unhomely is a state of diasporic consciousness’ (Cho 19). Moreover, Gibreel’s attempt

to recover from his cultural upheaval can be seen through his romantic attachment to Alleluia

Cone, ‘climber of mountains, vanquisher of Everest’ who lives in England (Rushdie 30). For

Gibreel, Alleluia represented the possibility of a new home in the sense that ‘the challenge of

her, the newness… the inexorability of an impossible thing that was insisting on its right to

become’, gave Gibreel hope for a new identity in the form of human love, away from his

displaced homeland (30).

Yet this hope of ‘newness’, this hope of transformation and integration into a new

culture, a new faith and Alleluia Cone fails inexorably, and Gibreel’s narrative slips into a

fragmented dream sequence that reflects his troubled search for a homeland (30). Rushdie’s

fusion of reality and unreality in Gibreel’s narrative is effective in relaying Gibreel’s

disconnection from his identity as he migrates to a new life. Towards the end of the novel,

Gibreel ‘moves as if through a dream, because after days of wandering the city… he no

longer recognises the distinction between the waking and dreaming states’, suggesting that

Gibreel’s instability is caused by his inability to settle in his new homeland, and his
rootlessness as a migrant transmutes his reality into a dream-like state (Rushdie 456). His

movements are unsettled and transitory, therein affirming Gibreel’s position within the

diasporic and not, in fact, the transnational. According to Cho the difference between the

latter and the former is the individual being conditioned by ‘the knowledge of loss’ or for the

transnational ‘knowledge of return’, ergo Gibreel’s mental and physical digress into

schizophrenia stands as testament to his diasporic state (Cho 19).

The idea of being reborn as a migrant is first put to the reader by Gibreel Fashta at the

beginning of the novel, as he says to Saladin Chamcha on their fateful plane journey, ‘to be

born again… first you have to die’(Rushdie 31). This conviction, as Vijay Mishra dictates in

relation to the concept of diaspora is ‘very much the world in which one undergoes a

rebirthing’, and in the obvious case of Gibreel and Saladin (who both fall from an exploding

hijacked plane), this notion of dying and relinquishing their past to be born from the ashes

into a new state of mind and culture is intrinsic to the mobility of immigration (Mishra 15).

After Gibreel’s rebirth however he is described to ‘hover’ and ‘watch over’ (Rushdie 123)

London, evidently cut adrift from the land below as he speculates that we ‘are creatures of

air… reborn in flight’ (Rushdie 13), conveying the notion that in movement and migration we

transform into new beings. In terms of Creswell’s mobility however, of ‘an object’ needing

‘to have a force applied to it before it can move’, it would appear that Gibreel’s driving force

is now neither a compulsion nor a choice as he traverses London in a hopeless fashion

seemingly unlikely to establish a root in England. (Cresswell 22). As Joo states, in depicting

the experience of a mentally unstable migrant, or the ‘other’ in a metropolis, Rushdie shines

light on the ‘alienation resulting from the spiritually and physically uprooted state’ of the

protagonist, who struggles to come to terms with his fragmented diasporic consciousness and

ultimately ends his cultural transition in failure (Joo 66).

 An immigration success story, at least externally speaking, is included within the

pages of The Satanic Verses, in the lives of Hind and her husband Mohammad Sufyan, as

they settle into the tapestry of the multi-cultural metropolis. Moving to England as the dutiful

wife of an ‘erudite schoolteacher of Dhaka’, Hind gradually emerges as a prominent

matriarch and presiding breadwinner of the family through her cooking of ‘dosas and

uttapams of South India’ and ‘soft meatballs of Kashmir’ in her Indian restaurant (Rushdie

245). As Kironmoy Chetia observes, in Hind’s oscillation of her cultural roots in her adopted

land, Hind’s diasporic consciousness ‘negotiates with diversity, hybridity and difference,’

therein achieving equanimity between her past and her present (Chetia 7). In doing this, she

also creates a hybrid community within the host nation, as she fuses elements of her cultural

identity into the rapidly transforming London metropolis. To the extent that ‘people came

from all over London to eat her somasas… straight from Paradise’ it can be observed that this

cultural fusion works also to the benefit of the native ‘other’, in the sense that Hind’s

‘outstanding’ cooking serves to open the doors of her native culture to the wider demographic

of the non-native Indian (Rushdie 248).

While it should be noted that Hind still experiences elements of diasporic loss,

particularly with her children’s adaptation to British youth culture and the dissolution of her

Mother tongue, this cultural displacement has, as Chetia observes, created ‘a double identity’

which at the same time is ‘singular, plural and partial’(Chetia 7). In this sense Hind has lost a

part of herself, but has found a new, hybrid creation of the self that has not been entirely

unsuccessful. As Rushdie writes in Imaginary Homelands, to be a migrant is to feel as if ‘we

straddle two cultures, at other times we fall between two stools’, therefore in opening an

Indian restaurant Hind has also extended the retention of cultural memory to the wider

community of Indian migrants, so that they also ‘straddle’ the breadth of two cultures and

ease the experience of diasporic loss (Rushdie 431). The tragedy of this immigration
‘success’ story however, lies in the outcome of her husband Sufyan, who had to resort to

behaving ‘like a servant for all his education’ in order to integrate and survive in his adopted

country(Rushdie 248). The scope of Sufyan’s loss is notably on a greater scale to Hind, as his

contribution as a husband and Father is caged into the category of what an Indian migrant can

do in an alien land (Rushdie 248). The transformation of Hind and her family gives the reader

an understanding of the movement and marginality of migrants, and how, through the roots

they put down, they become inextricably part of the growing metropolis of London. In the

words of Raymond Williams, they become part ‘of the model of the contemporary world’,

and that the diasporic consciousness of Rushdie’s characters each bear the sensations of

becoming, of losing and finding roots, of living between worlds of the past and the present

that emerge as cornerstones in their journey into other cultures (qtd. in Chetia 8).

Conclusively, Rushdie’s rich tapestry of the migrant perspective in The Satanic

Verses stands as a testament to the tumultuous transformation of a migrant imbibed with

diasporic loss and uncertainty. Through the characters of Saladin, Gibreel and Hind, Rushdie

illustrates the complex nature of this transformation and the personal cost that accompanies

the commitment to migrate, as can be seen from the individual fates of his characters. Saladin

is hindered externally by the authorities, Gibreel is hindered internally by his own

uncertainty, and Hind, although settled in the metropolis, is hindered by her husband’s

displacement and loss of language. Creswell’s human force that drives them resounds

through each of the character’s motives, moving differently within the paradigm of

immigration and making sacrifices in their process of cultural transformation. The Satanic

Verses, for all its controversy, is first and foremost a novel about immigration and diasporic

consciousness, the thematic of which is confirmed by Rushdie in Imaginary Homelands who

described its literary scope as ‘a migrant’s-eye view of the world’ that writes about ‘the very

experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis’(Rushdie 394). The Satanic Verses

is the voice of the contemporary diasporic narrative, while at the same time drawing focus to

the notion that these narratives are invariably the catalyst to what Mishra describes as ‘the

radical re-theorising of the diasporic imaginary’ of modern times (Mishra 7). In this sense,

Saladin, Gibreel and Hind depict the migrant condition in a way that creates ‘newness’ and

transcends as a ‘metaphor for all humanity’ (Rushdie 394).

 Bibliography

Adkins, Alexander. "Neoliberalism, Moralism, and Critique in Salman Rushdie’s the Satanic

Verses." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 58.1 (2017): 12-27. Web. Nov 25, 2019.

Biswas, Amrit. "The Colonial Subject and Colonial Discourse: Salman Rushdie's Critique of

Englishness in the Satanic Verses." World Literature Written in English 40.2 (2004): 91-105.

Web. 2nd Dec, 2019.

Campa, De La. "Magical Realism and World Literature: A Genre for the Times?" Revista Canadiense

de Estudios Hispánicos 23.2 (1999): 205-19. Web. 30th Nov, 2019.

Chetia, Kironmoy. "Search for Diasporic Identity in the Novels of Salman Rushdie." IOSR Journal Of

Humanities And Social Science 22.8 (2017) Web. 2nd Dec, 2019.

Cho, Lily. "The Turn to Diaspora." TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 17 (2007): 11-

30. Print.

Cresswell, Tim. "Politics of Mobility." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (2010)

Print.

Guttman, Anna. ""People Set Apart": Representations of Jewishness in the Fiction of Salman

Rushdie." ARIEL 42 (2011): 103+. Literature Resource Center; Gale. Web. 2nd Dec, 2019.

Ho, Janice. ""The Satanic Verses" and the Politics of Extremity." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 44.2

(2011): 208-28. JSTOR. Web. 3rd Dec, 2019.

Jones, Peter. "Rushdie, Race and Religion." Political Studies 38.4 (1990): 687-94. Web. Dec 2nd,

2019.

Joo, Samantha. "'Off-Centering' in the Satanic Verses and the Book of Ezeikel." Journal for the Study

of the Old Testament 39.1 (2014) Web. 30th Nov, 2019.

Kirkland, Paul E. "Nietzsche's Tragic Realism." The Review of Politics 72.1 (2010): 55-

78. JSTOR. Web. 30th Nov, 2019.

Macey, David. "Rethinking Biopolitics, Race and Power in the Wake of Foucalt." SAGE

Journals 26.6 (2009): 186-205. Web. Nov 30th, 2019.

Mishra, Vijay. Literature of the Indian Diaspora : Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. London;

Routledge, 2008. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures; 16 WorldCat.org. Web. Nov

25th, 2019.

Morwood, Nicholas. "From ‘Magic’ to ‘Tragic Realism’." Interventions 19.1 (2017): 91-107. Web.

Nov 25th, 2019.

Renaud, Myriam. "Thirty years on, why 'The Satanic Verses' remains so controversial." The

Conversation. September 24, 2018. Web. Nov 27th, 2019.

Rushdie, Salman. Joseph Anton : A Memoir. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012. WorldCat.org. Web.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands : Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta Books in

association with Penguin Books, 1992. WorldCat.org. Web. 30th Nov, 2019.

---. The Satanic Verses. Kindle Edition. ed. London: Penguin Random House, 1988. Print.

Sharma, Shailja. "Salman Rushdie: The Ambivalence of Migrancy." Twentieth Century Literature 47

(2001) Literature Resource Center; Gale. Web. 1st Dec, 2019.