Ever since one of his earliest 'posthumous' novels The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) I have no longer been able to read Rushdie without a bizarre sensation I am reading an impostor, writes Dabashi [Reuters]
In a recent flight, I was sitting a couple of rows behind Salman Rushdie on the British Airways flight 178 from New York to London. It was an eerie experience. On my way to the bathroom, I could see he was playing a video card game on his mobile phone. I was not even tempted to go forward and introduce myself. I can scarcely stand the man. Plus: can you imagine a bearded Iranian man approaching Salman Rushdie on a plane flying at 37,000 feet towards London. The man may freak out and relive the opening gambit of his Satanic Verses. Which one of us would be Gibreel Farishta and which Saladin Chamcha? Nerve-wracking!
I have met Salman Rushdie though, years ago when, in the heydays of the notorious edict (fatwa) against him, the late Edward Said had invited him to visit Columbia. I remember the small gathering Edward had arranged for him was literally behind closed doors and by invitation only. Perhaps a dozen or so Columbia faculty and students had gathered to chat with the author of The Satanic Verses while he was still in hiding.
This haphazard encounter early in October 2017, however, coincided with the publication of Salman Rushdie's most recent book, The Golden House, of which I was entirely unaware until I ran into a celebratory review in the Guardian - in which it was compared to F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.
I dutifully went and purchased a copy of the book and began reading it and, yet again, I could not help feeling I was reading an impostor.
Why an imposter? Allow me to explain.
The birth of an author
I was still a graduate student when Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) appeared. Words fail to describe my joyous fascination in having discovered him. His voice was witty, brilliant, rambunctious, joyous - his prose revelatory, his politics familiar, his imagination trustworthy. I immediately placed him next to and up against VS Naipaul, whom the more I read the more I detested, especially after his horridly racistAmong the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) that had come soon after the Iranian revolution of 1977-1979. Its sheer nasty arrogance could scarce conceal its ignorance of a revolution that had shaken my homeland to its foundations. My love at first read for Rushdie's Midnight's Children was no doubt in part animated by my revulsion against VS Naipaul. But long after my animus for Naipaul disappeared into indifference, my love and admiration for Midnight's Children only increased.
I soon began reading the rest of Rushdie's work - his first novel, Grimus(1975), his other magnificent fiction, Shame (1983), and his travelogue to Nicaragua, The Jaguar Smile (1987), which appeared as I was deep into writing my first book on Iranian revolution, Theology of Discontent (1993). Rushdie's playful politics and his magic realism were palpable to me, happily familiar, a kind of Gabriel Garcia Marquez from my neighbourhood, I always thought. I basked in his nasty, naughty, joyous, playful, giggling, irksome prose.
This happy discovery of a new author continued well into the publication of his Satanic Verses (1988), of which I first read a review, I believe in Times Literary Supplement,upon its British release, which was before its US publication. I was so excited to read this new novel, I asked a friend in London to buy and send it to me to New York and I read it before it was published in the US. I found his Satanic Verses utterly magnificent, and I recall referring to it in a conference on Shia passion play at Hartford Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, citing it as a perfect example of how old stories and even sanctities can be put into urgent contemporary (exilic) fiction.
Ever since one of his earliest 'posthumous' novels, The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), I have no longer been able to read Rushdie without a bizarre sensation I am reading an impostor.
Long after I could no longer stand Rushdie's politics, I continued to include Satanic Verses in my various syllabi on postcolonial literature - marveling at while teaching the ecstasy of his prose - its virtuoso performativity, its bravura theatricals, its happy communion with English language, its bringing the Muslim sacrosanct forward for a rendezvous with a homely life away from home. Never ever (long after that horrid fatwa) did I think the novel an insult to Muslims. Quite to the contrary: it brought their sacrosanct to a renewed rendezvous with their history.
In retrospect, I am happy to have had that first undiluted encounter with Rushdie's last novel before the whole hell broke loose on him and the rest of us who loved and admired his work. To this day, I read Satanic Verses with a fully conscious awareness of reading a great novel before it was sabotaged, verbally abused, narratively assassinated, and forever destroyed by one nasty ayatollah who had no freaking clue what the book was about.
The death of an author
The Guardian's Emma Brockes recently said of Rushdie: "At 70, Rushdie has had more public incarnations than most writers of literary fiction - brilliant novelist, man on the run, subject of tabloid scorn and government dismay, social butterfly, and, in that singularly British designation, man lambasted for being altogether too Up Himself - but it is often overlooked what good company he is."
I wish I could think of Rushdie that way: died and reincarnated multiple times. But alas for me, Rushdie died and never came back. As an author, he was born with that magnificent milestone novel Midnight's Children and died after a blindfolded revolutionary zealot put a price on his head, killed his person, confused his persona, corrupted his politics, and turned what was left into a pestiferous Islamophobe on par and paired with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sam Harris, Bill Maher and the rest of their detestable gang.
If you have "been" with Salman Rushdie as long as I have since his birth as a magnificent writer, and through his ordeal with Khomeini's fatwa and subsequent moral degeneration into a bitter old Islamophobe, it is hard to resist the irrefutable feeling that the old ascetic Iranian Savonarola did, after all, manage to have the great inveterate novelist "assassinated" and what today we know as "Salman Rushdie" is a Picassoesque impostor - all his pieces might be there but the composition is contorted and grotesque.
Ever since one of his earliest "posthumous" novels, The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), I have no longer been able to read Rushdie without a bizarre sensation I am reading an impostor. For that reason, I believe the writer who today goes by the name of "Salman Rushdie" offers literary theorists a unique case of "the death of the author", as we say.
In 1967, Roland Barthes, the eminent French literary theorist, published his highly influential essay on the "Death of the author/La mort de l'auteur" in which he sought to decouple the autonomy of a text from the biography of its author. Though I find much interpretative energy lurking under the skin of Barthes' proposition, I still believe something of the authorial voice remains in the text by way of our imagining an omniscient narrator behind any other narrator who is speaking the story to us when we read or watch or listen to a text. I cannot listen to Wagner or read Heidegger without thinking they were despicable anti-Semites.
My problem with Salman Rushdie's fiction is I can no longer imagine that omniscient ventriloquist crafting a world for me to enter and believe, to possess and behold. I can no longer tell one from the other.
It is not that I don't like Salman Rushdie as a person or that I loathe his politics as much as I do the politics of those who put a price on his head. It is that the words "Salman Rushdie" no longer simply refer to a person, an author, a novelist, for those two words have become an overload of thick and conflicting memories preventing any direct and unmitigated encounter with the novels, memoirs, and essays he writes, as Barthes tells us to do.
The fate of a nation
Salman Rushdie himself (or I should rather say "itself") and that grand ayatollah who put a price on his head, both at each other's throat forever, have become a thick text, standing formidably before the books he writes. Hard as I try, I cannot pass that repellent gate to get to the book he keeps writing.
That fatwa Khomeini issued against Rushdie has a far different tone to it in the ear of an Iranian who cares for the fate of his homeland. As the world attention was distracted by the smokescreen of a death sentence against a well-protected Indo-British author, Khomeini ordered the redrafting of an "Islamic constitution" (a contradiction in terms) into which now almost 80 million human beings are trapped. As European and North American liberals were falling head over shoulder to defend Rushdie's freedom of thought, Iranian en masse were being subjected to a pestiferous theocracy to this day. For millions of Iranians, the downfall of Ayatollah Montazeri as a far more humane successor to Khomeini and the substitution of the vindictive Ayatollah Khamenei is the legacy of that so-called "Rushdie Affair".
The moment I reach that historic cul-de-sac is precisely the instance I suddenly remember the Salman Rushdie I used to read when I first encountered his fiction. A sudden sadness, a moment of mourning nostalgia, then dawns on me remembering an author I once so joyously discovered, so dearly loved reading, and now having so sadly forever lost. Who is this strange man impersonating Salman Rushdie? He is "Salman Rushdie", I then realise - forever condemned into two scare quotes, the signal citation of the fatwa a malignant man once issued against him.
As Salman Rushdie and I and the rest of the passengers on that flight between New York and London deplaned and entered Terminal Five at Heathrow Airport I was walking right behind him. He had put a light blue baseball cap on while walking on a moving sidewalk. At one point, he turned right towards the yellow sign for "Arrival" and I turned left towards the purple sign for "Transit". He had reached his destination in London. I still had a long way to go somewhere else.
Central Queensland, Australia - Farmers and environmentalists in Australia are waging a fierce battle to stop a new mega coal mine planned for the country's northeast from going ahead.
Indian energy giant Adani Group has said it will break ground this month on the project which is expected to become one of the largest coal mines in the world.
The company says the Carmichael mine, which has the backing of the Australian government, will bring jobs and deliver royalties that will benefit Australians.
But those opposing the project believe it could wreak havoc on the environment.
"If that Adani mine goes ahead, it's going to be devastating," farmer Bruce Currie told Al Jazeera's 101 East.
The project was due to be launched on Friday, with Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce due to attend, but the ceremony was cancelled due to rain, according to an Adani spokesman.
"The ground-breaking event has been postponed to a date to be determined," the spokesman told news.com.au.
In the drought-prone region of Central Queensland, farmers fear the project could contaminate the groundwater they rely upon for their cattle.
Coal mining is one of the most water-intensive methods of generating electricity. About 200 litres of freshwater is used for each tonne of coal produced. Farmers fear the water levels could drop and bores could run dry.
Adani has stated it will use 12 billion litres of water annually at the mine.
"The only certainty we get is whatever groundwater they destroy in their mining operations is lost for perpetuity," said Currie, who has fought a long-running legal battle to stop the mine from going ahead.
'Worst thing you can do to the Great Barrier Reef'
There are also concerns about the mine's potential to damage Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
"The decision to go ahead with the Adani mine is just about the most unbelievably negligent decision you can possibly imagine," said Charlie Veron, a leading marine biologist.
"It's the worst thing you can possibly do for the Great Barrier Reef."
He believes the carbon emissions from extracting and burning coal from Adani's mine will inflict further damage on Australia's already threatened reef.
"We lost about half the corals in the Great Barrier Reef in the last two years. In 15 years, it is highly probable there'll be nothing left. It's that serious," said Veron.
Last week's cancellation of the launch came amid growing criticism and opposition to the project.
The mine has been approved by the Australian government, which says it will help boost the country's export revenues and provide much-needed jobs.
The leader of the Australian Greens party, Richard Di Natale, said "many, many thousands" will physically stop the project if the government does not go back on its decision.
"Make no mistake, people right across the country are so motivated to stop this thing that if we can't stop it in the parliament, we will stop it by standing in front of those bulldozers," he told Sky News on Sunday.
"It won't go ahead. I am very confident of that. This is a disaster no matter which way you look at it, and it won't go ahead."
Queensland's unemployment rate is at about 6.4 percent. Adani and the Australian government said the project will provide 10,000 jobs.
Experts estimate that this figure will be much lower and would come at the expense of mining jobs elsewhere in Australia.
Adani's track record in India
Australian senator Matt Canavan said it took seven years for the Adani project to be approved because of Australia's "extremely robust environmental approval system".
"I challenge anyone to claim that this mine has not been subjected to the most stringent environmental controls," said Canavan.
But opponents point to Adani's record in India, where four independent reports commissioned by the government and judiciary in the past decade found the company breached environmental laws by destroying mangroves and blocking creeks to reclaim land.
Al Jazeera's 101 East travelled to the town of Mundra in India's Gujarat state where fishermen accuse the company of dumping sand in local waterways.
A local fisherman, Rahimtullah, said fish stocks have plummeted since Adani built a coal power plant and port nearby.
"They have taken our livelihood away," he said.
In a statement to Al Jazeera, the Adani Group denied all claims it had caused environmental damage in India. The company said it is "an absolute and religiously law-abiding organisation and respects the law of the land".
MOSCOW, Oct. 19 - RIA Novosti . Dogs were able to use the facial expressions of their muzzle in order to convey their emotions and communicate with the host and kinsmen, wrote zoopsychologists in an article published in the journal Scientific Reports.
"Most of the mammals have a mobile face, but historically it is believed that animals do not know how to control their muzzle expression and do not use facial expressions to convey some signals to relatives." We checked to see if this was really the case, watching how Dogs react to human figures and inanimate objects such as food, "write Juliane Kaminski of the University of Portsmouth (UK) and her colleagues.
In recent years, scientists have shown increasing evidence that the typically human features of the intellect and our ability to display complex emotions are characteristic of many other animals, including dogs, primates and even crows.
For example, recently neurophysiologists have found out that dogs are able to understand intonations and the meaning of words that the owners tell them that they communicate with people not for food, but for the sake of receiving attention and positive emotions, and that they are able to recognize emotions on the face of friends and strangers of people. In addition, the dogs were able to memorize "unnecessary" information and use it later when communicating with the owner.
Kaminski and her colleagues discovered that dogs, like humans, know how to mimic their muzzle to show emotions, and have opened expressions equivalent to the sad and surprised face of a man, watching the behavior of two dozen dogs falling into a room they do not know.
In this room was a man who sometimes sat with his back to the dog, and sometimes looked at the dog at the moment when she went into the room. Next to this stranger could be a trough in which there was food, and in other cases it was absent.
When the dog came into this room, the scientists watched her reaction to the new situation and watched how the muscles moved on her face and how her expression changed. Comparing how the expression of the muzzle of dogs changed in these situations, the Kaminski team tried to understand whether pets use facial expressions to communicate with a person or not.
As it turned out, the expression of the muzzle of dogs did not practically change in those cases when the food was present or absent in the room, but their facial expressions were completely different in those cases when the stranger looked at the animal or was turned away from it.
For example, dogs often "rounded" the eyes in those cases when a person looked at them, and often put out the tongue. The first "gesture", according to scientists, is an analogue of the manifestation of sadness in man, and the second - a sign of interest. In addition, dogs barked more often and made other sounds when the participants of the experiments looked at them. Interestingly, the frequency of wagging the tail, which is usually considered a manifestation of friendliness, did not differ in any way in all situations.
MOSCOW, Oct. 19 - RIA Novosti . Small portions of alcohol, as scientists found out, really unleash the language and allow a person to correctly pronounce words and communicate more actively in foreign languages, follows from an article published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
"We have shown that drinking alcohol can help people who have just learned a foreign language, speak foreign words more accurately and faster, which in turn confirms the common belief that small doses of alcohol help bilingual people speak a second language," - said Inge Kersbergen from the University of Liverpool (United Kingdom).
One of the most common and generally accepted ideas about alcohol is that alcohol unleashes language and makes a person talk about what he usually hides, or helps him overcome shyness when dealing with the opposite sex or foreigners.
Kersbergen and her colleagues confirmed that this was actually the case, observing the behavior of about five dozen Germans who had recently learned Dutch and agreed to participate in an experiment conducted by psychologists from Britain, Germany and the Netherlands.
Scientists invited participants in experiments to communicate on a free topic with native speakers of the Dutch language, and before the conversation they offered to drink a serving of "juice." In some cases, the drink was indeed non-alcoholic, while in others it was a tinted and diluted vodka.
Another group of volunteers followed the conversation - they assessed the level of language knowledge among the participants of the conversation, but did not know how and why the experiment was conducted. After the completion of the experiments, the scientists asked the volunteers to independently assess their level of Dutch language proficiency and compared these figures with what they were told by "linguists" from the second group.
The results were extremely curious. People who drank a glass of vodka, on average, received five (out of 100) points more than sober participants in the conversation, and at the same time the Dutch words were pronounced much faster and more correctly.
Interestingly, alcohol did not affect either the self-esteem of the participants in the experiments - both "drinkers" and "non-drinkers" believed that they knew Dutch equally badly - neither for their knowledge of grammar and vocabulary.
As psychologists emphasize, such conclusions do not mean that all people who want to communicate in foreign languages should constantly consume alcohol in large quantities. Participants in the experiments drank only a small amount of vodka, and the increase in dose, as scientists suppose, would lead not to improvement, but to a deterioration in their linguistic abilities.
![Ever since one of his earliest 'posthumous' novels The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) I have no longer been able to read Rushdie without a bizarre sensation I am reading an impostor, writes Dabashi [Reuters]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vkyT76vfz9A438F07cs_XkE8PzSu_ZwC7oEYEsSXw8JZv9hnHjS9GPhH_zgrtQzkR-JkHe2y_pNRqY_FlqnTW1-kQrK_wsGA1m1oVjSXeX0GNJmtI2sCoSngXuehqEXP6juKm3_828l1MKK2Fo58Ao51LkOU99xUQOqLDm2FbtxIybjEI0wyQ05LY0TZNtvKZc6FdOYHcaBoFOWA=s0-d "The life and death of Salman Rushdie, gentleman author")
