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.