Rushdie, Salman;
The satanic verses
Viking, 1989, 546 pages
ISBN 0670825379, 9780670825370
topics: | fiction | india | uk | english
Salman Rushdie on the SV: The Satanic Verses is a committedly secular text that deals in part with the material of religious faith. For the religious fundamentalist, especially, at present, the Islamic fundamentalist, the adjective `secular' is the dirtiest of dirty words.
Following are a set of quotations from the Satanic Verses, followed by [my comments]. Page numbers (from the Viking hardbound edition) appear after each extract. EXTRACTS: `To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, `first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh?' (p.1) Baba, if you want to get born again ...' Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English channel, without the benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky. 'I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you,' and thusly and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry cross the night, 'To the devil with your tunes,' the words hanging crystalline in the iced white night, 'in the movies you only mimed to playback singers, to spare me these infernal noises now.' 'Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. 'Ohé, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What-ho, old Chumcha.' At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's face. 'Hey, Spoono,' Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, 'Proper London, bhai! Her we come! Those bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightening or vengeance of God. Out of this air, baby. Dharrraaammm! Wham, na? What an entrance, yaar. I swear: splat.' Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time ... the jumbo jet Bostan, Flight AI-420, blew apart without any warning, high above the great, rotting, beautiful, snow-white, illuminated city, Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville. But Gibreel has already named it, I mustn't interfere: Proper London, capital of Vilayet, winked blinked nodded in the night. While at Himalayan height a brief and premature sun burst into powdery January air, a blip vanished from radar screens, and the thin air was full of bodies, descending from the Everest of the catastrophe to the milky paleness of the sea. Who am I? Who else is there? The aircraft cracked in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery. Two actors, Gibreel and buttony, pursed mr. Saladin Chamcha, fell like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar. Above, behind, below them in the void there hung reclining seats, stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys, motion discomfort receptacles, disembarkation cards, duty-free video games, braided caps, paper cups, blankets, oxygen masks. --- A man who sets out to make himself up is taking on the Creator's role, according to one way of seeing things; he's unnatural, a blasphemer, an abomination of abominations. From another angle, you could see pathos in him, heroism in his struggle, in his willingness to risk: not all mutants survive. Or, consider him sociopolitically: most migrants learn, and can become disguises. Our own false descriptions to counter the falsehoods invented about us, concealing for reasons of security our secret lives. A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him, to prove he's managed it. ... Love. (p.49) --- The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises. [Its citizens] have learned the art of transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts, - the very stuff of inconstancy, - the quintessence of unsettlement shifting, treachery, lack-of-form, - and have turned it, by alchemy, into the fabric of their newly invented permanence. (p.93) --- What kind of an idea am I? I bend. I sway. I calculate the odds, trim my sails, manipulate, survive. That is why I won't accuse Hind of adultery. (thoughts of Abu Simbel, the Grandee of Jahilia, p.102) --- Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternatives, and I'm just some idiot actor having a bhaenchud nightmare, what the fuck do I know, yaar, what to tell you, help. Help. (Gibreel, p.109) --- Not my voice I’d never know such words I’m no classy speaker never was never will be but this isn’t my voice it’s a Voice. Mahound’s eyes open wide, he’s seeing some kind of vision, staring at it, oh, that’s right, Gibreel remembers, me. He’s seeing me. My lips moving, being moved by. What, whom? Don’t know, can’t say. Nevertheless, here they are, coming out of my mouth, up my throat, past my teeth: the Words. (Gibreel, as he is uttering the "satanic verses", p.112) “Have you thought upon Lat, Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other? . . . They are the exhalted birds, and their intercession is desired indeed” (p. 114). [This concession to Abu Simbel, the Grandee of Jahila, violates the major tenant of Islam: “There is no god but Allah”] --- tilk-al-gharaniq al-'ula wa inna shafa'ata-hunna la- turtaja. These are the exalted females whose intercession is to be desired. [Lines that were inspired by Satan when Muhammad agreed to accept three goddesses - Al-Lat, Al- Manat, and Al-Uzza, as daughters of Al-lah into the islam religion. This forms the central story of one of Gibreel's many extended dreams]. (p.340) He stands in front of the statues of the Three and announces the abrogation of the verses which Shaitan whispered in his ear. These verses are banished from the true recitation, al qur'an. New verses are thundered in their place. `Shall He have daughters and you sons?' Mahound recites. `That would be a fine division! These are but names you have dreamed of, and your fathers. Allah vests no authority on them.' [This argument of sons versus daughters appears repeatedly in the Koran.] (p.124) --- Khalid the water-carrier hangs back.. Awkwardly, he says: `Messenger, I doubted you. First we said, Mahound will never compromise, and you compromised. Then we said, Mahound has betrayed us, but you were bringing us a deeper truth. You brought us the devil himself, so that we could witness the workings of the Evil One, and his overthrow by the Right. You have enriched our faith. I am sorry for what I thought.' Mahound moves away from the sunlight falling through the window. `Yes.' Bitterness, cynicism. `It was a wonderful thing I did. Deeper truth. Bringing you the devil. Yes, that sounds like me.' (p.125) --- Any new idea, Mahound, is asked two questions. The first is asked when its weak: WHAT KIND OF AN IDEA ARE YOU? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the 100th time, will change the world. `What's the second question?' Gibreel asked aloud. Answer the first one first. (p.335) --- Such is the miraculous fate of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations. (The Imam's dream, p.209) --- The moon is heating up, beginning to bubble like cheese under a grill. Gibreel sees pieces falling off from time to time, moon-drips that hiss and bubble on the sizzling griddle of the sky. (p.212) --- In those years Mahound - or should one say the Archangel Gibreel? - should one say Al-Lah? - became obsessed by the law. Amid the palm trees of the oasis Gibreel appeared to the prophet and found himself sprouting rules, rules, rules, until the faithful could scarcely bear the prospect of any more revelation, Salman said, rules about every damn thing, if a man farts let him turn his face to the wind, a rule about which hand to use for the purpose of cleaning one's behind. It was as if no aspect of human existence was to be left unregulated, free. The revelation - the recitation - told the faithful how much to eat, how deeply they should sleep, and which sexual positions had received divine sanction, so that they learned that sodomy and the missionary position were approved of by the archangel, whereas the forbidden postures included all those in which the female was on top. Gibreel further listed the permitted and forbidden subjects of conversation, and earmarked the parts of the body which could not be scratched no matter how unbearably they may itch. He vetoed the consumption of prawns, those bizarre other-worldly creatures that no member of the faithful had ever seen, and required animals to be killed slowly, by bleeding, so that by experiencing their deaths to the full they might arrive at an understanding of the meaning of their lives.. (364). ... Salman the Persian got the wondering what manner of God this was that sounded so much like a business man .. he recalled that Mahound himself had been a business man, and a damned succesful one at that, a person to whom organization and rules came naturally, so how excessively convenient it was that he should come up with such a very businesslike archangel, who handed down the management decisions of this highly corporate, if non-corporeal, God. After that Salman began to notice how useful and well- timed the angel's revelations tended to be. (363-4) [Subsequently, Salman the scribe, begins to alter a few of the words - the revealed words of God himself - small at first, and gradually larger, until he feels Mahound nod but with a little doubt] [This section is one of the most direct attacks on the religious traditions of Islam. According to some Muslims (Hou Post), Islam forbids sodomy, and no other positions are forbidden; animals must be slaughtered with a sharp knife as quickly as possible so that the animal does not suffer. Time and again, it is clear that Rushdie has used the facts more as an artist than a historian; Muhammad's sojourn to Yathrib is thus twenty-five years instead of the historically correct ten (622-632 A.D., the first ten years of the Hejira), Mecca is the magic city of Jahilia, but the name Yathrib is correct, since the city became known as Medina (city of the Nabi or prophet) only after Muhammad, and was the mostly Jewish oasis of Yathrib previously. The problem for the reader is to discern which is fact and which is not. Clearly, as a lyric novelist, Rushdie can alter the script as he wishes, but Muslims are also correct in claiming that to most ill-informed or partially-informed (non-Islamic) readers, many of the details will appear familiar and tend to reinforce the impression of truth. Historical incidents include the initial scorn of Mecca's populace for Muhammad's disciples, many of them slaves; flight to Yathrib and the triumphal return against a spineless Mecca; the Ka'aba stone that predates Islam; Muhammad's business acumen and his wives Khadija, and, later, Ayesha, and many others; and also correct are many of the rituals of Islam. According to one Islamic reviewer, this section, by weaving in the true with the patently false, constitutes a virulent and "untruthful" attack against Islam and serves to excite the divisive forces. To me, the borderline between truth/fiction in this story remains largely unknown, but it does arouse my interest in determining more about the Islam in general and the Koran in particular, which should be a desirable objective for Islam. For example, I would like to find the section where Moses sends Muhammad back to God so that he can negotiate the number of daily prayers down to five from forty (the current number is indeed five). I would also like to know more about the traditions of animal butchery in Islam, etc]. --- Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives whom you have granted dowries ... This privilege is yours alone, being granted to no one else. (Koran 33:50) [This is one of the examples from the Koran that Rushdie sites as "convenience driven".] --- [Eventually Salman is captured]. Salman swears renewed loyalty, begs some more, and then, with a gleam of desperate hope, makes an offer. `I can show you where your true enemies are.' This earns him a few seconds. The Prophet inclines his head... And Salman says a name. Mahound sinks deep into his cushions as memory returns. `Baal,' he says, and repeats, twice: `Baal, Baal.' Much to Khalid's disappointment, Salman the Persian is not sentenced to death. Bilal intercedes for him, and the Prophet, his mind elsewhere, concedes: yes,yes, let the wretched fellow live. (375) [Is this to be the fate of the writer Salman also? How prophetic indeed!! Is this the end that Rushdie perceived, perhaps? This passage at least seems to hint that Rushdie had some notion of the hornet's nest he was stirring. Note that the reprieve for Salman comes from mere indifference and not from any rational perceptions of justice. Will the real life Salman plead "renewed loyalty"?] --- [Most of the book is really about other issues. Here is one of the bitter invectives describing the immigrant's rage against the British authorities. Club Hot Wax (291-292) where effigies of the day's villains are melted in an oven.. ] the one most selected, if truth be told; at least three times a week. Her permawaved coiffure, her pearls, her suit of blue. Maggie-maggie- maggie, bays the crowd. Burn-burn-burn. The doll, - the guy, - is strapped into the Hot seat. Pinkwalla throws the switch. And O how prettily she melts, from the inside out, crumpling into formlessness. Then she is a puddle, and the crowd sighs its ecstasy: done. Music regains the night. [293] [If anything the attacks against the British - and especially the British immigration system - are more direct and more virulent than those against Islam] --- The death of Dr. Uhuru Simba, formerly Sylvester Roberts, while in custody awaiting trial, was described by the Brickhall constabulary's community liaison officer, a certain Inspector Stephen Kinch, as `a million-to-one-shot'. It appeared that Dr. Simba had been experiencing a nightmare so terrifying that it had caused him to scream piercingly in his sleep, attracting the immediate attention of the two duty officers. These gentlemen, rushing to his cell, arrived in time to see the still-sleeping form of the gigantic man literally lift off its bunk under the malign influence of the dream and plunge to the floor. A loud snap was heard by both officers; it was the sound of Dr. Uhuru Simba's neck breaking. Death had been instantaneous.... Hanif Johnson, as Uhuru Simba's solicitor, added his own clarification, pointing out that his client's alleged fatal plunge had been from the lower of the two bunks in his cell; that in an age of extreme overcrowding in the country's lock-ups it was unusual, to say the least, that the other bunk should have been unoccupied, ensuring that there were no witnesses to the death except for prison officers; and that a nightmare was not the only possible explanation for the screams of a black man in the hands of custodial authorities. (449-50) --- [Pamela Chamcha tries to expose witches in the constabulary. At this point, Pamela was pregnant.] ...when Pamela admitted to being nervous at possessing the only copy of the explosive documents in the plastic briefcase, Jumpy once again insisted on accompanying her to the Brickhall community relations council's offices, where she planned to make photocopies to distribute to a number of trusted friends and colleagues. So it was that at ten-fifteen they were in Pamela's beloved MG, heading east across the city, into the gathering storm. An old, blue Mercedes van followed them ... without being noticed. (453) --- The building occupied by the Brickhall community center ... was not an easy building to enter ... There was also a burglar alarm. This alarm, it afterwards transpired, had been switched off, probably by the two persons, one male, one female, who had effected an entry with the assistance of a key... The reasons for the crime remained obscure, and as the miscreants had perished in the blaze, it was unlikely that they would ever come to light. A tragic affair; the dead woman had been heavily pregnant. (464) --- Names, once they are in common use quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being brushed aside like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit. --- the narrator of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses never explicitly reveals his identity. Most of the novel is narrated in a multiple third-person style, in which the narrator follows various different characters, and has access to all of their thoughts and everything they perceive. However, the narrator periodically inserts himself into the story, in a series of very short passages that are written in the first person. In these passages, the narrator not-so-subtly hints that he is the devil himself, Satan. This changes the tone of the entire novel. The devil is the complete opposite of an objective narrator; traditionally, he cannot be trusted. In the New Testament, he even goes so far as to tempt Jesus, the son of God, to suicide: "Then the devil took him to the holy city, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, 'If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down...'" --- The Grandee, vaguely, nods. "You like the taste of blood," he says. The boy shrugs. "A poet's work," he answers. "To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep." And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him. He is the satirist. Baal. [p. 97, Grandee fo Jahila, Abu Samil, talking to Baal] "Things are ending," he told her. "This civilisation; things are closing in on it. It has been quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian, the glory of the world. We should celebrate it while we can; until night falls." 'I know you,' Baal said. 'Yes.' 'The way you speak. You're a foreigner.' ' "A revolution of water-carriers, immigrants and slaves,"' the stranger quoted. 'Your words.' 'You're the immigrant,' Baal remembered. 'The Persian. Sulaiman.' The Persian smiled his crooked smile. 'Salman,' he corrected. 'Not wise, but peaceful.' 'You were one of the closest to him,' Baal said, perplexed. 'The closer you are to a conjurer,' Salman bitterly replied, 'the easier to spot the trick.'
[the new novel would be about] “angels and devils and about how it’s very difficult to establish ideas of morality in a world which has become so uncertain that it is difficult to even agree on what is happening. When one can’t agree on a description of reality, it is very hard to agree on whether that reality is good or evil, right or wrong. Angels and devils are becoming confused ideas… What is supposed to be angelic often has disastrous results, and what is supposed to be demonic is quite often something with which one must have sympathy. It (the novel) is an attempt to come to grips with a sense of the crumbling moral fabric or at least for the reconstruction of old simplicities. It is also about the attempt of somebody like myself, who is basically a person without a formal religion, to make some kind of accommodation with the renewed force of religion in the world; what it means, what the religious experience is.” - interview to Salil Tripathi and Dina Vakil, Indian Post 1987
review by AG Mojtabai of U. Tulsa One of the most vivid of these [spinoff narratives] concerns an epileptic woman, a seer, who leads a pilgrimage to Mecca, a tale evoking the Sufi theme of the immolation of the moth, the Exodus account (with the promise of the Arabian Sea parting for the pilgrims), the Pied Piper, Jonestown and other more recent religio-political movements in which the faithful follow a charismatic leader into the depths of destruction. There are many magical embellishments: The pilgrims follow a cloud of butterflies by day; their leader is literally clothed in butterflies, and feeds upon them for her sustenance. Her name is Ayesha, which is - but only coincidentally here, I think - the name of the youngest and favorite wife of the prophet Mohammed. Which brings us to the controversial part of the book - the tales of Mahound and Jahilia that embroider upon the life of Mohammed and the founding of Islam. Indeed, the title ''The Satanic Verses'' refers to an incident in the life of Mohammed, recorded by two early Arab historians (al-Waqidi, A.D. 747-823, and at-Tabari, A.D. c. 839-923), discredited by later commentators on the Koran, but taken up in Western accounts as the ''lapse of Mohammed'' or his ''compromise with idolatry.'' The story goes like this: confronted by the resistance of the leading merchants of Mecca to his monotheism, Mohammmed is reported to have accepted three local deities - al-Lat, al-Uzzah and Manat - as intercessory beings (or angels - ''daughters of Allah''). This would have been a shrewd diplomatic concession, at least in the short run, since Mecca depended upon the income from the pilgrimage trade to the shrines of these deities. But Mohammed soon withdrew the verse of acceptance, saying that Satan had placed the words of concession upon his tongue. In the Koran, Mohammed concludes: ''Have you thought on al-Lat and al-Uzzah, and thirdly on Manat? Is He [ Allah ] to have daughters and you sons? This is indeed an unfair distinction! ''They are but names which you and your fathers have invented.'' Mr. Rushdie's revival of this story, the duplicitous Gibreel/Satan agonizing over his role in the incident, compounded by the story of a scribe who deliberately placed erroneous words into his transcription of the Koran, was bound to touch an angry nerve in the world of Islam, where the Koran (''al-qu'ran'' means ''the recitation'') is believed to be the word of God, transmitted without error. And, to be sure, ''The Satanic Verses'' has sparked bitter controversy among Muslims in South Africa, where the author was prevented from appearing at a book fair by arson and death threats against all concerned with the event. Last fall the importation of the British edition of the book was banned in India as a precautionary measure against religious leaders using it to incite their followers to sectarian violence. Recently, the publisher's New York office has received several bomb threats and many angry letters. ==Homi Bhaba on the Satanic verses: Nationality and Language== If the experience of the Turkish Gastarbeiter represents the radical incommensurability of translation, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses attempts to redefine the boundaries of the Western nation, so that the 'foreignness of languages' becomes the inescapable cultural condition for the enunciation of the mother-tongue. In the 'Rosa Diamond' section of The Satanic Verses Rushdie seems to suggest that it is only through the process of dissemiNation - of meaning, time, peoples, cultural boundaries and historical traditions - that the radical alterity of the national culture will create new forms of living and writing: 'The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they do do don't know what it means.' S. S. Sisodia the soak - known also as Whisky Sisodia - stutters these words as part of his litany of 'what's wrong with the English'. The spirit of his words fleshes out the argument of this chapter. I have suggested that the tavistic national past and its language of archaic belonging marginalize the present of the 'modernity' of the national culture, rather like suggesting that history happens 'outside' the centre and core. More specifically I have argued that appeals to the national past must also be seen as the anterior space of signification that 'singularizes' the nation's cultural totality. It introduces a form of alterity of address that Rushdie embodies in the double narrative figures of Gibreel Farishta/Saladin Chamcha, or Gibreel Farishta/Sir Henry Diamond, which suggests that the national narrative is the site of an ambivalent identification; a margin of the uncertainty of cultural meaning that may become the space for an agonistic minority position. In the midst of life's fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living. Gifted with phantom sight, Rosa Diamond, for whom repetition had become a comfort in her antiquity, represents the English Heim or homeland. The pageant of 900-year-old history passes through her frail translucent body and inscribes itself, in a strange splitting of her language, 'the well-worn phrases, unfinished business, grandstand view, made her feel solid, unchanging, sempiternal, instead of the creature of cracks and absences she knew herself to be.' Constructed from the well-worn pedagogies and pedigrees of national unity - her vision of the Battle of Hastings is the anchor of her being - and, at the same time, patched and fractured in the incommensurable perplexity of the nation's living, Rosa Diamond's green and pleasant garden is the spot where Gibreel Farishta lands when he falls out from the belly of the Boeing over sodden, southern England. Gibreel masquerades in the clothes of Rosa's dead husband, Sir Henry Diamond, ex-colonial landowner, and through his postcolonial mimicry, exacerbates the discursive split between the image of a continuist national history and the 'cracks and absences' that she knew herself to be. What emerges, at one level, is a popular tale of secret, adulterous Argentinian amours, passion in the pampas with Martin de la Cruz. What is more significant and in tension with the exoticism, is the emergence of a hybrid national narrative that turns the nostalgic past into the disruptive 'anterior' and displaces the historical present - opens it up to other histories and incommensurable narrative subjects. The cut or Split in enunciation emerges with its iterative temporality to reinscribe the figure of Rosa Diamond in a new and terrifying avatar. Gibreel, the Migrant hybrid in masquerade, as Sir Henry Diamond, mimics the collaborative colonial ideologies of patriotism and patriarchy, depriving those narratives of their imperial authority. Gibreel's returning gaze crosses out the synchronous history of England, the essentialist memories of William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings. In the middle of an account of her punctual domestic routine with Sir Henry - sherry always at six - Rosa Diamond is overtaken by another time and memory of narration and through the 'grandstand view' of imperial history you can hear its cracks and absences speak with another voice: Then she began without bothering with once upon a time and whether it was all true or false he could see the fierce energy that was going into the telling ... this memory jumbled rag-bag of material was in fact the very heart of her, her self-portrait.... So that it was not possible to distinguish memories from wishes, guilty reconstructions from confessional truths, because even on her deathbed Rosa Diamond did not know how to look her history in the eye. And what of Gibreel Farishta? Well, he is the mote in the eye of history, its blind spot that will not let the nationalist gaze settle centrally. His mimicry of colonial masculinity and mimesis allows the absences of national history to speak in the ambivalent, rag-bag narrative. But it is precisely this 'narrative sorcery' that established Gibreel's own reentry into contemporary England. As the belated postcolonial he marginalizes and singularizes the totality of national culture. He is the history that happened elsewhere, overseas; his postcolonial, migrant presence does not evoke a harmonious patchwork of cultures, but articulates the narrative of cultural difference which can never let the national history look at itself narcissistically in the eye. For the liminality of the Western nation is the shadow of its own finitude: the colonial space played out in the imaginative geography of the metropolitan space; the repetition or return of the postcolonial migrant to alienate the holism of history. The postcolonial space is now 'supplementary' to the metropolitan centre; it stands in a subaltern, adjunct relation that doesn't aggrandize the presence of the West but redraws its frontiers in the menacing, agonistic boundary of cultural difference that never quite adds up, always less than one nation and double. From this splitting of time and narrative emerges a strange, empowering knowledge for the migrant that is at once schizoid and subversive. In his guise as the Archangel Gibreel he sees the bleak history of the metropolis: 'the angry present of masks and parodies, stifled and twisted by the insupportable, unrejected burden of its past, staring into the bleakness of its impoverished future'. From Rosa Diamond's decentred narrative 'without bothering with once upon a time' Gibreel becomes - however insanely - the principle of avenging repetition: These powerless English! - Did they not think that their history would return to haunt them? - 'The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor' (Fanon).... He would make this land anew. He was the Archangel, Gibreel - And I'm back. If the lesson of Rosa's narrative is that the national memory is always the site of the hybridity of histories and the displacement of narratives, then through Gibreel, the avenging migrant, we learn the ambivalence of cultural difference: it is the articulation through incommensurability that structures all narratives of identification, and all acts of cultural translation. He was joined to the adversary, their arms locked around one another's bodies, mouth to mouth, head to tail.... No more of these England induced ambiguities: those Biblical-satanic confusions ... Quran 18:50 there it was as plain as the day... How much more practical, down to earth comprehensible.... Iblis/Shaitan standing for darkness; Gibreel for the light.... 0 most devilish and slippery of cities.... Well then the trouble with the English was their, Their - In a word Gibreel solemnly pronounces, that most naturalised sign of cultural difference.... The trouble with the English was their ... in a word ... their weather.