'Post'-9/11 South Asian Diasporic Fiction

Uncanny Terror

P. Liao

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137297372
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

While much of the critical discussion about the emerging genre of 9/11 fiction has centred on the trauma of 9/11 and on novels by EuroAmerican writers, this book draws attention to the diversity of what might be meant by "post" -9/11 by exploring the themes of uncanny terror through a close reading of four "post" -9/11 South Asian diasporic fictions.

1

The Uncanny Violence of Strangers:¹ Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown

[S]he heard the voice on the tape its death’s-head ugliness, which was somehow both familiar and alien. (Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown 3)

In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler suggests the significance of the uncanny as a psychoanalytical and aesthetic response to violence and trauma. Citing examples from the modernist avant-gardes’ use of defamiliarization, Vidler states, ‘Estrangement and unhomeliness have emerged as the intellectual watchwords of our century, given periodic material and political force by the resurgence of homelessness itself, a homelessness generated sometimes by war, sometimes by the unequal distribution of wealth’ (9). Indeed, as Vidler has noted, after both 1919 and 1945, the uncanny has re-emerged ‘as an aesthetic sensibility’ to rethink the two post-war periods. In the same way, the aesthetics of the uncanny in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, which opens with the epigraph I quoted, provides a way to respond to and to reflect on the terror of several global and local wars and of the terrorist attacks over the past few decades. Published in 2005, Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie’s ninth novel and one of the finalists for the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award, depicts a world full of terror and the transformation of a Muslim clown into a terrorist.² The story begins in early 1990s Los Angeles with the assassination of the American counterterrorism chief, Max Ophuls, who is murdered by his Muslim driver Noman Sher Noman, nicknamed ‘Shalimar the clown’.³ Shalimar used to be a comic acrobat and, after the assassination, is identified as a professional terrorist from Kashmir. Further investigation, however, reveals that the assassination is in fact personal revenge rather than a terrorist attack. The narrative is then brought back to Kashmir in 1965 when Max serves as the American ambassador to India right after the Indo-Pakistan War. When Max comes to Kashmir, Shalimar’s beloved Hindu wife, Boonyi, performs for him with other dancers from Pachigam, although at that time political violence and ethno-religious conflicts are severely afflicting Kashmiris. Boonyi senses that Max is attracted to her and decides to grab her chance to run away from her little village. Boonyi thus becomes Max’s lover until the Vietnam War is at its height, although by then Max has already lost interest in her. Their scandalous affair is uncovered with the consequence of Max’s being deprived of ambassadorship and returning to the US. Boonyi returns to Pachigam alone, as her newborn baby girl, Kashmira, is taken away by Max’s wife to the UK and is renamed India. Back home waiting for Boonyi is dishonoured Shalimar, who vows to kill Boonyi, Max, and their illegitimate daughter. In the end, having taken part in Kashmir’s liberation front for more than a decade, Shalimar becomes a professional terrorist. Ironically, he receives military training and support during the Cold War from US secret allies – Afghanistan and Pakistan. He returns home to find his village exterminated by Indian troops. With his family, honour, and manhood damaged, he finally kills his wife before he heads towards Los Angeles to kill Max.

Since its publication, more than a few reviewers have claimed that the novel is set against the backdrop of the 11 September attacks. In ‘From Here to Kashmir’, for example, the Observer reviewer Jason Cowley states that our post-9/11 world is vividly explored in Shalimar the Clown, in which Rushdie ‘grapple[s] imaginatively with the shock of 11 September 2001 and the wars that have followed’. In ‘There were Collisions and Explosions: The World was No Longer Calm’, Stephen Morton argues that Rushdie foregrounds the prevalent post-9/11 anti-terrorist discourse. He thus opens his article:

Salman Rushdie’s ninth novel Shalimar the Clown (2005) embeds a story about the militarization of Kashmir in a broader narrative of neoliberal globalization and US foreign policy in South Asia from the Bretton Woods Agreement to the US-led war in Afghanistan following the attacks on America of September 11, 2001. (337)

Similarly, in ‘The Political is Personal’, Peter Heinegg asserts that Rushdie’s novel is ‘enthralling’, for it ‘flashes back and forth from pre-World War II Strasbourg to present-day Los Angeles, [and] touches [...] on every major world crisis from the Holocaust to 9/11’ (23).

The aforementioned reviewers appear to have a compulsion to repeat ‘9/11’ in their articles. Yet a close reading of Shalimar the Clown reveals that 9/11 in fact exists in the novel almost without really existing. Instead of being set in the post-9/11 era, Rushdie’s novel is set in the aftermath of the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, which, as the narrator’s historical reality foretells, ‘eight years later [...] would be remembered as the first bombing’ (377). Even elsewhere in the novel when Mr Tillerman, the lawyer, defends Shalimar in court by attributing the crime of assassination to sorcery and strikes terror into the public with the terrifying possibility that ‘the Twin Towers bombers, the suicidists of Palestine, and now [...] mind-controlled human automata were walking amongst us, ready to commit murder’ (384), the narrator makes clear that the trial takes place in 1993. The story then proceeds with Shalimar being sentenced to move to the California state prison at San Quentin, where he waits on death row. At the end of the novel, as ‘[t]he century was ending, badly’ (395), Shalimar breaks out of jail and enters the house of Kashmira, both ready to kill each other. Clearly, the novel already comes to its end before the 11 September attacks take place.

Why then do Rushdie’s reviewers continue to read Shalimar the Clown as a post-9/11 novel? In fact, in the aftermath of 11 September, people are often apt to repeat compulsively the date ‘9/11’. Yet, as Jacques Derrida argues in ‘Autoimmunity’, it is essential to attend to ‘what this compulsion signifies, translates, or betrays’ in order to ‘try to understand what is going on precisely beyond language and what is pushing us to repeat endlessly and without knowing what we are talking about, precisely there where language and the concept came up against their limits: “September 11, September 11, le 11 septembre, 9/11”’ (87–8). How then do we make sense of the reviewers’ repetition compulsion? Firstly, Rushdie’s life experience and his strong opinions on Islamic extremism after the 11 September attacks may account for the reviewers’ reading of Shalimar the Clown as a post-9/11 novel. Before the publication of Shalimar the Clown in 2005, the themes and concerns of terror, terrorism, and the terrorist had already appeared time and again in Rushdie’s writings and personal life. In his personal life, Rushdie is not unfamiliar with terror and terrorism. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, caused immediate controversy in the Islamic world and was condemned as ‘blasphemous’ by the then spiritual leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who issued a fatwa in 1989 requiring Rushdie’s death. Ever since then, violence has been perpetrated around the world in the name of the fatwa: books being burned, bookstores fire-bombed, and several people associated with translating or publishing the novel being attacked, injured, and even killed.⁴ Rushdie himself had been in hiding for almost a decade until 1998 when the Iranian government formed an agreement with Britain not to uphold the fatwa, although in early 2005 the Iranian spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, delivered a message to revive Khomeini’s fatwa. It is not surprising that following the suicide bombings in London on 7 July 2005 (also called the 7/7 bombings, as uncanny a double number as 9/11), Rushdie published an article, ‘The Right Time for an Islamic Reformation’, in the Washington Post. In the article, Rushdie called for ‘a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age’ so as ‘to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists’ (B7). The intention to warn against ‘the age of jihad’, as Annabella Pitkin suggests, has justly appeared in Shalimar the Clown, which came out three weeks after Rushdie’s Washington Post article (Pitkin 257).⁵

Secondly, it may be because the pre-9/11 world represented in the novel resembles the post-9/11 world to such an extent that the reviewers have mistaken the 1993 bombing for 9/11. However, if they had acknowledged their similarity, they should have known the existence of the 1993 bombing as a precedent for 9/11. The real problem with the reviewers’ misinterpretation is that they actually do not take note of the previous bombing. To quote Yuvraj from the novel, these reviewers simply ‘[put] the past into the present tense’ (392). In the novel, Yuvraj, Kashmira’s boyfriend, says these words in the context in which Shalimar, having being imprisoned for six years at San Quentin, writes to Kashmira: ‘Everything I am your mother makes me [...] Every blow I suffer your father deals [...] Your father deserves to die, and your mother is a whore’ (392). By commenting on Shalimar’s wrong use of the verb tense and saying ‘“Too bad he hasn’t improved his English in San Quentin,”’ Yuvraj attempts to make Kashmira laugh, ‘to dismiss the ugly words, [and] to rob them of their power’ (392), although Shalimar’s use of the present tense to describe past events suggests the uncanniness of the spectre of the past haunting his present. In the case of the reviewers, however, what holds true is the other way round. It is the present that supplements the past. In terms of their mis/readings, ‘supplement’ can be understood in its double meanings: ‘addition’ and ‘substitute’.⁶ That is, 9/11 is not only added onto the previous experience of the terrorist attack but in place of it. Referring to a past that never was, the uncanny feeling of déjà vu is ironically aroused when the reviewers supplement the 1993 bombing with 9/11. They seem to suggest to the reader, ‘You may feel sure that you have witnessed or experienced the terrorist bombing before, but it is after all your false memory,’ despite the fact that it is more of the reviewers’ amnesia than the reader’s paramnesia.

The reviewers’ forgetting is plausible if we take into account how, in the wake of 9/11, the mass media and mainstream politics frame the attacks on 9/11 as a major world event and make people believe that the attacks mark a new page in history (see Introduction). Under the circumstances, even Borradori, a specialist of the philosophy of terrorism, admits in her interview with Derrida her feeling that ‘September 11 (Le 11 septembre) gave us the impression of being a major event’ (Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity’ 85). She regards 9/11 as ‘one of the most important historical events we will witness in our life, especially for those of us who never lived through a world war’ (85). Echoing the reviewers’ misreading of Shalimar the Clown, Borradori’s ‘impression’ fails to consider the previous bombing in 1993 and several massive terror strikes against the US abroad, whose repeated occurrence had issued warnings of catastrophic international terrorism before 9/11.⁷ As a challenge to such first-time, history-marking impressions of 9/11, Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown returns to the pre-9/11 world to rethink terrorism in historical context and to attend to the uncanny aspects of the 11 September terrorist attacks.

Historical (de)construction of terrorism and the terrorist

As a ‘post’-9/11 uncanny novel that is set in the pre-9/11 world, Shalimar the Clown thinks not only beyond but before 9/11 as a major world event. It deconstructs the post-9/11 predominant conception of terrorism and the terrorist and juxtaposes terrorist violence with other conflicts in both the West and the East. In particular, it underlines the repetition of terrorist attacks in history, the autoimmunitary terror of 9/11 in the Cold War, and the subtle connection of 9/11 with the Holocaust and the post-Partition conflicts in Kashmir.

No matter whether in Rushdie’s novel or in our reality, the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 is déjà raconté, ‘the already recounted’ or ‘But I’ve told you that already’ (Freud, ‘Fausse Reconnaissance’ 201; Royle 172–86). It has already recounted a particular memory and story, but people do not listen, or they do not remember. Even if people have not forgotten its occurrence, they may not have remembered its proper meaning. Examples can be taken from those who have the impression of the 11 September attacks as an unforeseeable and unprecedented event and those who immediately take the World Trade Center bombing in Shalimar the Clown as 9/11. Commenting on this amnesia-like phenomenon in ‘1993: World Trade Center Bomb Terrorises New York’, the BBC journalist states: ‘The bombing of the World Trade Center has been totally eclipsed by the events of 11 September 2001 which saw thousands killed, the collapse of both Twin Towers and an all out “war on terror” declared by the Western world.’ Remembering the 1993 bombing, we need to ask what proper meaning it has. What has it, as a traumatic reminder, already told us? Is there a proper meaning without perceptual and moral judgement?

In Shalimar the Clown, the narrator wants us to remember the 1993 bombing as ‘the first bombing’ (377).⁸ As the ‘first’, it warns against an upcoming apocalyptic terrorist destruction in eight years and fundamentally unsettles the ‘first-time’ experience of ‘9/11’. The repetition of terrorist attacks in the same place is dreadful, and so is the doubling of the responses in the aftermath. The recurrent fear of US national security being violated by foreign forces arouses the feeling of the uncanny. In Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie shows how fear of Islamic terrorists is felt nationwide in the US after the assassination of the counterterrorism chief and the 1993 bombing. In the beginning, although the prime suspect, Shalimar, is still at large and his motivation remains unclear, US police officials are convinced that the assassination is political. They have to take into serious consideration the affiliation of the assassin with international terrorist organizations for the reason of ‘the consequences of U.S. policy choices in South Asia, and their echoes in the labyrinthine chambers of the paranoiac jihadi mind’ (338). Consequently, the elite Special Forces officers are sent to investigate the case, and Max’s daughter, India, is warned to hide in a secure location, for the professional killers do not respect ‘a code-of-honour thing’ and may make war on women and children (331). Tributes have poured in from all over the world for the famous ambassador, including from the French government, India, the White House, and the US intelligence community.

Max’s death makes a big story in political circles as well as in the mass media. Even after the crime, which at first looks political, turns out to be a personal matter, the thought of having terrorists walking among them terrifies most Americans. The fact that the purely personal affair is turned into a political issue produces uncanny terror, too, for Shalimar, who is hunted as a terror suspect and finds himself unhomed. The names of the assassin and the victims are circulated worldwide in the airwaves of, for example, CNN. The TV audience also put pressure on the police officers and the media. In the novel, the American people’s extreme sense of insecurity and fear is reflected in their strong demand for the success of the manhunt and in their aggressive and sometimes bloodthirsty violence against the terrorist assassin. They ‘wanted the pictures right away, a shoot-out, preferably, or a car chase with helicoptered cameras, or at the very least a good, close-up look at the captured murderer, manacled, shaggy haired, and in orange or green or blue prison fatigues, pleading to be put to death by lethal injection or cyanide gas because he didn’t deserve to live’ (339).

In Rushdie’s depiction, responses against terror suspects like Shalimar become even more hysterical after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Waiting for his trial in prison, Shalimar expresses to his lawyer his fear for his safety: ‘Even in his maximum-security, solitary-confinement wing, it was a dangerous time in prison for a Muslim man accused by the state of being a professional terrorist’ (377). Six months later when his case comes to trial, the atmosphere has already been heightened because of the events in Lower Manhattan. Therefore, the security arrangements for Shalimar are ‘unprecedented’, and the scale, as the fictional New York police chief explains to the press, is compared to what the police can do for Arafat, the internationally well-known and controversial Palestine leader (378).

Rushdie’s fictional narrative of nationwide fear following the 1993 bombing, the desire to arrest the enemies, and the backlash against Islam and terrorists may seem too cruel to be true. Nevertheless, at the same time, it sounds familiar to us post-9/11 readers. In the immediate aftermath of the 11 September attacks, most Americans are traumatized by the acts of terror. According to the statistics from a survey conducted by the Gallup Organization, on 11 September, 58 per cent of Americans expressed fear of more and worse terrorism (qtd in Nacos 50). Provoking fear is precisely what terrorists intend. In a videotaped message, for example, Osama bin Laden proclaims, ‘There is America, full of fear from north to south, from west to east. Thank God for that.’⁹ Moreover, there is also a strong demand for hunting down the enemies, as Stanley Brunn points out, ‘[T]he “search” for enemies, old or new, became part of this post-11 September world’ (3). Immediately after the attacks, President Bush addressed the US Congress and the American people: ‘Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.’ In the same Joint Congress address, President Bush specifically identified ‘terrorist organizations known as al Qaeda’ as the prime suspects for the attacks on 11 September, claiming that ‘Al Qaeda is to terror what the Mafia is to crime.’ On 7 October 2001, the War on Terror was declared against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and another war has been waged in Iraq since March 2003. In American society, the public, informed by politicians and the mass media, ‘quickly acquired an entirely new lexicon, which included Al Qaeda cells, the war on terrorism, bioterrorism, homeland surveillance, state-sponsored terrorism and the Axis of Evil’ (Brunn 4). In the post-9/11 era, some Americans even go as far as to link terrorism and al-Qaeda with ordinary Muslims and thus justify their acts of racist violence (see Introduction and Chapter 4). When fiction becomes reality, the consequences can be unbelievable without exaggeration.

The confusion that Rushdie creates between the past and the present, and that between fiction and reality, provoke from the reader the sense of the uncanny. It is because, as previously discussed, by making the 1993 bombing the double of the 9/11 attacks, Rushdie reminds the reader of the catastrophic violence of terrorism, the terrifying consequences of how people turn from mourning into violence against others, and most importantly, of the repetition of history. Also, in the novel, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Uncanny Terror and the ‘Post’-9/11
• 1 The Uncanny Violence of Strangers: Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown
• 2 Crossing the Borders of the Body Politic after 9/11: The Virus Metaphor and Autoimmunity in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission
• 3 Home-land Insecurity: Unhomely Homes in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
• 4 The Post-9/11 ‘Return Home’ Novel: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
• Conclusion: The Precarious Life of the Other
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index