Haroun and the Sea of Stories portrays the postcolonial concept of landlessness, which is resolved for Haroun and his father, Rashid, through the deployment of postcolonial multiculturalism and self-translation, in that Rashid and Haroun define their own place in society. Their sense of identity within society reflects on the past but interprets that past from the perspective generated from their current condition. The underlying conflict of the novel is the reclamation of Rashid’s identity and the postcolonial conclusion that Haroun has about his father’s identity and his own, which reflects Rushdie’s own reconciliation of his identity from a New Historicism perspective.
Rushdie’s multiculturalism in Haroun provides the setting of the novel. On Kahani, there are two ethnic groups, the Guppees and the Chupwalas, who are in conflict (Rushdie 75). This ethnic conflict composes the main conflict of the plot, and it represents a conflict between cultures that Rushdie’s novel resolves in favor of postcolonial multiculturalism. In the novel, Haroun’s resolution for the conflict is that both societies have “‘sensible days and nights (176).’” This metaphoric use of days and nights in Rushdie’s novel, intends to give equal recognition to both Chup and Gup society.
This equal recognition contends with the idea that “‘we don’t accept that there are many realities. This side only wants this reality, and the other only their own reality. This is one of the reasons we still have this struggle’” (Grass in Teverson 449). This is the very stasis that Rushdie establishes in the beginning of the novel, in that the Guppees initially manipulate Kahani so that the land of Gup is always in the light and the land of Chup in darkness, and in that Khattam Shud as the character in power over the land of Chup wishes to eliminate the Guppees (Rushdie 80). But, the equal and fair recognition of both Chup and Gup society in Haroun’s solution to the conflict is postcolonial multiculturalism. Postcolonialism “claims the right of all people to the same material and cultural well-being” (Young 2). While both of the fictional ethnicities struggle with one another for their own cultural persistence, Haroun’s resolution of the conflict establishes that both cultures have the right to recognition and legitimacy.
This multicultural tenet of postcolonialism connects to the self-translation that Haroun and Rashid seek to create out of their landlessness. Teverson interprets Rushdie’s novel as a “supplementary subversion” that opposes “the liberal dream of multicultural homogeneity.” But this supplementary subversion references the thousand and one nights, “where each night added will transform all the nights that have gone before and all the nights to come” (463). The story as it is told over and over again will revise its own meaning and the perspective it has on the past and the future, and in this idea can be identified a metaphor for the idea of postcolonial self-translation, which is “a way of describing how the individual or the group can be transformed by changing their sense of their own place in society” (Young 29). The storyteller self-translates himself through the narrative, Teverson seems to grasp, but in this self-translation, there is an implicit connection to postcolonial multiculturalism, because the the sense of place as identity is never the same as it was in previous moments due to the redefinition of the novel’s characters each each action in the plot. The supplementary sense of Teverson’s subversion conveys that the minority and marginal cultures in a society add to a culture, which redefines the cultures in terms of one another, creating a multiculturalism in which the cultures become represented in a new way if not as they originally existed before the interaction. Postcolonial multiculturalism and that supplementary subversion are then theoretically the same.
Rushdie’s self-translation connects to multiculturalism in both the Hindustani and the British literature that composed his culture through British colonization of his native region and from his flight to Great Britain during his flight from the Ayatollah (Parker). Rushdie uses the hoopoe bird in Haroun, because “in the old stories the Hoopoe is the bird that leads all other birds through many dangerous places to their ultimate goal” (Rushdie 64). Rushdie uses the hoopoe as a reference to Hindustani epithets and explains the epithet, acknowledging that many of his readers would not otherwise understand this symbolism. In explaining what the hoopoe means, and through Butt the Hoopoe’s fulfillment of that explanation, Rushdie repurposes the traditional Hindustani use because Kahani and Haroun’s ultimate goal are new to the use of the epithet of the hoopoe. The self-translation of the hoopoe from the Hindustani tradition to Rushdie’s cultural context creates a new identity for the hoopoe as a symbol in literature, as well as provides an example of postcolonial self-translation.
Mudra, as the first Chupwala encountered in Haroun, demonstrates the conflict with his own shadow as a metaphor for the conflict of plural identities. The conflict that the group of Guppees, Rashid, and Haroun encountered was “that [Mudra] was actually fighting against his own shadow; which, in turn, was fighting back with equal ferocity, attention and skill (123-4, italics of Rushdie).” The struggle conveys the two identities that exist in the colonized mind as Fanon theorized in the 1960’s: the complete, human identity, and the identity imposed on the subject of colonial forces of oppression. The control Gup has imposed over the rotation of Kahani with its “P2C2E House” demonstrates a colonial control over Chupwalas, which gives the Chupwalas a colonized identity in their shadows (172). Since the shadows struggle “with equal ferocity, attention, and skill,” it must be understood that these colonized identities are real to the Chupwalas and have some influence over them. Khattam Shud seeks to exploit the Chupwalas’ colonized identities in wiping out the Guppees, while the Guppees intend to maintain their control over the moon; both groups strive for their culture to be represented on the moon of Kahani. But the resolution that Haroun makes in the end eliminates those shadow identities, because the dichotomy between Gup and Chup ends, allowing both societies equal footing on Kahani. Chup and Gup change their own sense of self in their society, self-translating both societies and becoming a multicultural, lunar community.
In the beginning of the novel, Haroun and Rashid come from a city that is “so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its own name,” and this idea relates to the postcolonial idea of landlessness (Rushdie 15). Without a name, the sad city is a place that imposes an uncertainty of origin upon Haroun and Rashid. That uncertainty takes away from their sense of identity, and when Haroun repeats Mr. Sengupta’s words to Rashid, the question of identity is intensified. Rashid makes it plain that “storytelling is the only work I know,” but Haroun challenges this “use of stories that aren’t even true” that is part of Rashid’s identity (22). The use of the word “true” suggests a denial of identity. Instead of calling the stories “fantastical,” “absurd,” or “pointless,” Haroun focuses on the untrue nature of the stories. Rashid’s life’s work is based on untrue tales, and Haroun calls into question the validity of that life’s work. It connects to the denial that European colonialism used to drive indigenous peoples from the land they inhabited (Young 45). The imposition of landlessness connects to the sense of lost identity that is laid out before the plot of the novel begins. This is how the connection between the events on Kahani and Rashid’s loss of storytelling metaphorically come together. Haroun’s disposal of the Gup-Chup dichotomy resolves his father’s question of identity through eliminating a colonial repression of identity. The multicultural self-translation that is the solution of the conflict also eliminates the idea that there is no “use of stories that aren’t even true,” permitting Rashid to identify once more with his life’s work of storytelling.
In essence, Haroun is a literary manifesto for the postcolonial conception of identity. The novel has been considered “a triumph of plurality and dialogue over monologic, hegemonic views” (Konig). Haroun tells its audience that even the view that having views is good is hegemonic, through the Guppee colonialism over the Chupwalas. Haroun’s resolution to the identity crisis and the conflict on Kahani embraces the multicultural, self-translational concepts of postcolonialism. It advocates for all identities to be given equal validity and that those identities should be determined by those to whom they pertain, based on what influences the identity of the individual.
Through a New Historicism lens, Haroun becomes a message about postcolonialism that Rushdie is making in a personal and public perspective. Due to the fatwa placed on Rushdie in 1979, before the writing of the novel, he must flee his homeland (Parker). In doing so, he himself becomes landless and comes into closer contact with Western culture in an immersive way such that he acclimates himself to Western narratives. During all of this, Rushdie writes Haroun, and New Historicism emphasizes the simultaneity of phenomena and the occurrence of phenomena as a product of its circumstance (Parker). This suggests that Rushdie’s life events are not irrelevant to the writing of the story, that the events that take place in the author’s contemporary life influence the writing he produces. Rushdie experiences the concept of landlessness and the loss of identity, but the writer translates his native culture, a mix of British colonial culture and Hindustani culture, and the British culture to which he flees for his life into a new identity for himself as a refugee. The manifestation of Haroun is a commentary on the multiculturalism and self-translation Rushdie encounters in his own postcolonial experience. Rashid claims his own right to craft his own identity in what is occurring around him, both in a physical and a cultural connotation, as does Rushdie. The Chupwalas claim the right to identify themselves and their culture as they see fit, much like the colonized subjects that Rushdie found after the Raj. The thought of New Historicism reveals that Haroun and the Sea of Stories advocates for the reclamation of identity for individuals and groups that have lost them through postcolonial processes.
Works Cited
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Konig, Eva. “Between cultural imperialism and the fatwa: colonial echoes and postcolonial dialogue in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” International Fiction Review, vol. 33, no. 1-2, 2006, p. 52+. Literature Resource Center, ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=nclivedc&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA152196024&it=r&asid=19b01aa7eebedc6e38393e7dd10c3e47. Accessed 15 Nov. 2016.
Parker, Alan Michael. “Rushdie and New Historicism.” World Literatures Course, Davidson College, 14 November 2016, Davidson College, Davidson, NC. Lecture.
Parker, Alan Michael. “Salman Rushdie.” World Literatures Course, Davidson College, 7 November 2016, Davidson College, Davidson, NC. Lecture.
Rushdie, Salman. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta Books, 1991. Print.
Teverson, Andrew S. “Fairy Tale Politics: Free Speech and Multiculturalism in Haroun and The Sea of Stories.” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 47.4 (2001): 444-466. MLA International Bibliography, https://ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2002532087&site=ehost-live. Web. Accessed 15 Nov. 2016.
Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.
