Celebrate Writing

I arrived at my first Salman Rushdie book, Shame, rather late, but my lateness wasn’t the book’s fault: it had been in my home for years. In common with many other diasporic families, mine had a considerable Rushdie collection nestled among Rushdie’s precursors (V.S. Naipaul) contemporaries (Anita Desai) and successors (Jhumpa Lahiri), writers entangled in the same broad category of immigrant lit written by people of South Asian descent. When I actually read the books, I found that the best of these writers had different concerns and wrote utterly unlike each other, which made perfect sense: their individuality, their stylistic distinction, caused them to become pillars in a genre that was gradually becoming a category designation for critics and readers.

Before opening that copy of Shame, I’d encountered Rushdie through the news and my parents’ dinner table conversation, in the wake of The Satanic Verses. We had a copy of that book, too, and a belief in the correctness of writing, reading, publishing, and discussing books like Verses as ideas, as artworks, and as essential, irrepressible pieces of a complex culture. Admittedly, I didn’t quite have a grasp on all of these convictions in 1989, as I was seven years old, but the presence of Rushdie’s books on our shelves and in our conversations was an evolving reminder of what mattered, of what had value.

Rushdie’s fame and his place as a major pillar of a movement in literature has a side-effect: it can make his oeuvre intimidating, and it can make a potential reader forget that every good book is its own specific world, not just a producer of influence. Great writers aren’t like that monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, pushing the culture and literature to another level by dint of their existence. The work writers produce has a meaning, beauty and fun that’s intrinsic, that’s in the text itself: and this is more important than any influence they have on a genre. Shame, the title in enormous gold-edged red letters on the Jonathan Cape edition, reminded me of that when I finally read Rushdie for the first time in my early twenties—a great writer’s books are better than his or her influence, and more important than his or her fame.

Shame is absorbingly intense, bringing the reader into confrontation with anger and violence on a personal and national scale. Rushdie’s language, his grasp of the mechanics of fantasy, convinces readers—this one, at least—that naturalism isn’t the best tool for capturing the high emotions and bloody power games of political reality and its human consequences. Opening that first Rushdie book has meant I’ve had to open and read the rest of them, following an evolving style that finds and creates meaning in the great, messy, world-political now with humour, magic, and a perceptive understanding of reality in this most unpredictable and unrealistic of worlds.

Naben Ruthnum is a member of PEN, a Journey Prize winner, and the author of the book-length essay Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race, forthcoming from Coach House Books.

Salman Rushdie was honoured by PEN Canada at the 2017 fundraising gala.