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the colonial subject to a situation outside his control. If Saleem believes that he is the one determining the course of the new nation (in itself a contentious concept throughout the narrative), it is because he displays a compulsion to repeat unpleasant events (mostly historical ones) in order to gain control over them after they have already happened. Saleem is acting out historical trauma while, in the process of writing, the author is working through transgenerational trauma.
Besides pointing out the latent trauma caused by two centuries of colonial oppression and an erasure of cultural identity, I analyze a scene of extreme physical violence, quite similar to the massacre of the striking banana workers in One Hundred Years of Solitude. However, unlike García Márquez’s third-person narrator, Rushdie’s first-person storyteller, Saleem, deliberately uses exact historical dates in order to deceive readers by giving his narrative an air of authenticity. The killing in Rushdie’s novel takes place on April 13, 1919, twenty-eight years before Saleem’s birth, when Brigadier R. E. Dyer, the Martial Law Commander of Amritsar, orders his troops to open fire on peaceful, unarmed demonstrators. Saleem recounts the event by using the point of view of his grandfather, the primary witness. The language of the scene shows the same attention to detail as in García Márquez and a similar recovery of an original trauma. Rushdie’s best magical realist scenes involve the 581 midnight’s children born on the same night as Saleem and the activities in which they use their supernatural powers. Magical images come to underscore postcolonial traumatization and Saleem’s unstable hybrid identity.
Rushdie and García Márquez try to heal historical wounds by rewriting history itself. Whether their myths are called India or Macondo, the authors take on colonial (and postcolonial) traumata by having their characters start anew with a clean slate. Both novels serve as warnings that a human community, whether an entire nation or a village, may have a future only after it has given meaning to its past.
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The chapter dedicated to the most horrific chronotope in human history, the Nazi genocide, analyzes Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon