Constructing Postcolonial Migrant Identities in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
Constructing Postcolonial Migrant Identities in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

Summary/Abstract: This essay looks at how the identity of the modern postcolonial migrant is articulated across the coordinates of the postcolonial nation, the imperial center and cultural and personal consciousness. The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize the condition of the migrant self, its representations and misrepresentations as thematized by Salman Rushdie‟s The Satanic Verses. It seems that Rushdie proposes a demonic state of the migrant as a man fallen from grace, someone who has willingly severed his ties with the “paradise” of unbroken and unquestioned national identity and has entered a state of “rootlessness”, of not belonging. Therefore, it might be argued that the novel resolves to kill the essence of the pure, “untranslated” self only to reassert it as hybridity and mongrelization. A postmodern novelist like Rushdie is bound to reject as mere fiction the integrity of both the communitarian and the migrant subject. In his view, the self is necessarily fragmented - a construct of bits of ideals, perceptions, desires and beliefs, cultures, histories, and traditions, in one word, a hybrid. Moreover, the novel shows that the migrant, in the very process of moving, of crossing over, redefines the old traditional territorial boundaries, maps and divisions, especially the cultural ones. Therefore, both the location of culture (in Homi Bhabha‟s terms) and the location of the migrant identity are now to be found in the interstitial and the global.

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