Contemporary Fiction

Intercultural communication

Said, Edward W. Imperialism and Culture.

New York: Vintage Books, p. 336

No one today is purely one thing. Labels like

Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American
are not more than starting-points, which if
followed into actual experience for only a
moment are quickly left behind.

Imperialism consolidated the mixture of

cultures and identities on a global scale.
But its worst and most paradoxical gift was
to allow people to believe that they were
only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black,
or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human
beings make their own history, they also
make their cultures and ethnic identities.

No one can deny the persisting continuities

of long traditions, sustained habitations,
national languages, and cultural
geographies, but there seems to be no
reason except fear and prejudice to keep
insisting on their separation and
distinctiveness, as if that was all human
life was about.

Survival in fact is about the connections

between things, in Eliots phrase, reality
cannot be deprived of the other echoes
[that] inhabit the garden.

It is more rewarding and more difficult to think

concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally,
about others than only about us. But this also
means not trying to rule others, not trying to
classify them or put them in hierarchies, above
all, not constantly reiterating how our culture or
country is number one (or not number one, for
that matter). For the intellectual there is quite
enough of value to do without that.

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas in A Room of Ones

Own/ Three Guineas, Penguin Books, 1993
It is now that the first difficulty of communication between
us appears. Let us rapidly indicate the reason. We both
come of what, in this hybrid age when, though birth is
mixed, classes still remain fixed, it is convenient to call
the educated class. But those three dots mark a
precipice, a gulf so deeply cut between us that for three
years and more I have been sitting on my side of it
wondering whether it is any use to try to speak across it.
[] And the result is that though we look at the same
things, we see them differently. (118-119)

What then [] is this patriotism? Let the Lord Chief Justice of

England interpret it for us:
Englishmen are proud of England. For those who have been
trained in English schools and universities, and who have done the
work of their lives in England, there are few loves stronger than the
love we have for our country. When we consider other nations,
when we judge the merits of the policy of this country or of that, it is
the standard of our own country that we apply Liberty has made
her abode in England. England is the home of democratic
institutions It is in our midst there are many enemies of liberty
some of them, perhaps, in rather unexpected quarters. But we are
standing firm. It has been said that an Englishmans Home is his
Castle. The home of Liberty is in England. And it is a castle indeed
a castle that will be defended to the last Yes, we are greatly
blessed, we Englishmen.

I am certain I voice the opinion of thousands of young

men when I say that if men were doing the work that
thousands of women are now doing the men would be
able to keep those women in decent homes. Homes are
the real places of the women who are now compelling
men to be idle. It is time the Government insisted upon
employers giving work to more men, thus enabling them
to marry the women they cannot now approach. (Daily
Telegraph, January 22nd, 1936)

There are two worlds in the life of the

nation, the world of men and the world of
women. Nature has done well to entrust
the man with the care of his family and the
nation. The womans world is her family,
her husband, her children, and her home.

(Adolf Hitler, Sunday Times, 13 September 1936).

One is written in English, the other in

German. But where is the difference? Are
they not both the voices of Dictators,
whether they speak English or German,
and are we not all agreed that the dictator
when we meet him abroad is a very
dangerous as well as a very ugly animal?

For, the outsider will say, in fact, as a woman,

I have no country. As a woman I want no
country. As a woman my country is the whole
world.
[I]n our age of innumerable labels, of multicoloured labels, we have become suspicious of
labels; they kill and constrict.
[T]he capacity of the human spirit to overflow
boundaries and make unity out of multiplicity.

Rushdie, Salman. Step Across This Line.

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values,
Yale, 2002. Step Across This Line.
Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002. London:
Vintage, 2002. 405-42.

The frontier is an elusive line, visible and

invisible, physical and metaphorical,
amoral and moral. [] He [Arthur] will fight
his share of frontier wars, and he will also
find that there are frontiers which, being
invisible, are more dangerous to cross
than the physical kind.(411)

Our own births mirror the first crossing of

the frontier between the elements. As we
emerge from amniotic fluid, from the liquid
universe of the womb, we, too, discover
that we can breathe; we, too, leave behind
a kind of waterworld to become denizens
of earth and air.(408)

In all quests the voyager is confronted by

terrifying guardians of territory, an ogre here, a
dragon there. So far and no further, the guardian
commands. But the voyager must refuse the
others definition of the boundary, must
transgress against the limits of what fear
prescribes. He steps across that line. The defeat
of the ogre is an opening in the self, an increase
in what it is possible for the voyager to be. []
(409) The journey creates us. We become the
frontiers we cross. [] The Grail is a chimera.
The quest for the Grail is the Grail. (410)

The frontier is a wake-up call. At the

frontier we cant avoid the truth; the
comforting layers of the quotidian, which
insulate us against the worlds harsher
realities, are stripped away, and, wideeyed in the harsh fluorescent light of the
frontiers windowless halls, we see things
as they are. The frontier is the physical
proof of the human races divided self [].
(412)

[T]he migrant, the man without frontiers, is

the archetypal figure of our age. [] As a
migrant myself, I have always tried to
stress the creative aspects of such cultural
commingling. The migrant, severed from
his roots, often transplanted into a new
language, always obliged to learn the ways
of a new community, is forced to face the
great questions of change and adaptation;

but many migrants, faced with the sheer

existential difficulty of making such
changes, and also, often, with the sheer
alienness and defensive hostility of the
peoples amongst whom they find
themselves, retreat from such questions
behind the walls of the old culture they
have brought along and left behind.

Here is the worst-case scenario of the

frontier of the future: the Iron Curtain was
designed to keep people in. Now we who
live in the wealthiest and most desirable
corners of the world are building walls to
keep people out. (415)

The crossing of borders, of language,

geography and culture; the examination of
the permeable frontier between the universe
of things and deeds and the universe of
imagination; the lowering of the intolerable
frontiers created by the worlds many different
kinds of thought policemen: these matters
have been at the heart of the literary project
that was given to me by the circumstance of
my life, rather than chosen by me for
intellectual or artistic reasons. (434)

Born into one language, Urdu, Ive made

my life and work in another. Anyone who
has crossed a language frontier will readily
understand that such a journey involves a
form of shape-shifting or self-translation.
The change of language changes us. All
languages permit slightly varying forms of
thought, imagination and play. [] (434)

The problem of limits is made awkward for

artists and writers, including myself, by our
own adherence to, and insistence upon, a
no-limits position in our own work. The
frontierlessness of art has been and
remains our heady ideology. The concept
of transgressive art is so widely accepted
[] as to constitute, in the eyes of
conservative critics, a new orthodoxy.
(440)

The freedoms of art and the intellect are

closely related to the general freedoms of
society as a whole. (442)