Hulpe Rafila Roxana

Romana Engleza

The concept of memory in Salman Rushdie`s work

In my essay I would talk about the concept of memory in Salman Rushdie`s work
Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, I will talk about two elements with
which Saman Rushdie explains the process of memory, I will talk about language as a way of
remembering a forgotten place and about the endles fight between politics and literature.

Salman Rushdie wrote his essay to illustrate the titanic work of remembering a
homeland. When he was young he left India, his native country, and went to London to study.
After an absence of almost half of his life, Salman Rushdie sees a photograph of his house
and went to visit his home. The picture is a metaphor and it illustrates the past, that is why,
Salman Rushdie says that at first his memories of his home were in black and white, and only
after seeing the house colour filled his memory. When the pictures from the past are coloured,
and not monochromatic, as Salman Rushdie refers “ faded grays”, then it means that one did
not forget the past entirely.

Another concept used by Salman Rushdie to exemplify his search for the true past is
the broken mirror. He uses this concept to explain that people who emigrate can describe
better the country they have left than people that still live there. And that is because people
who are distant are objective, and are capable of “thinking outside the box”. He says “ The
broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed” by
which he implies that the broken mirror is him, because he remembers India through scattered
pieces, and the unflawed mirror are those people which write from India and think that they
are right and their truth is more important. To exemplify even more, he uses the cinema
screen, in which he says that when a person stays closer to the screen the images appear huge

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and deformed, it is exactly like the people from India, the closer they are to the country, the
more deformed the ideas are.

An easy way of remembering a country is the language, Salman Rushdie being in

London, speaking English had little contact with India and its language. Salman Rushdie says
that once people emigrate they are forced to speak a certain language, and that is hard. A
nationality is defined by language, so those who emigrate are caught between two
nationalities, the old one, in which they grew and the new one which is forced upon them. He
says that it would be different for their children, they will be born in that community and will
speak that language from the beginning.

Another concept that Salman Rushdie mentions is that of the fight between politics
and language. The most important fact about memory is that it has to be true, and politics and
literature are both seeking the truth, but both in a different way. Politics search for an easy
truth, one that is credible, that people would believe easily, meanwhile, literature searches for
another kind of truth, one that is closer to reality, it gives reality another perception. India
might look for the simple, credible truth, and the people of India might like it better, but
Salman Rushdie, being objective, and through literature might give another perception to the
people, the other truth.

Memory will never be as real as the present, and certainty “foreign”, but, nevertheless,
it is ours and we must try to know it, to understand it, and only then we could learn from it.
Through these concepts, photograph, broken mirror, Salman Rushdie explains why the past is
important, even though is hard to retrieve it.

Bibliography:

1. Salman Rushdie Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

2. http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth87