Imaginary Homelands of Writers in Exile: Salman Rushdie, Bharati ...

While making the stereotype “Other”—the black man is not I, he is different—it is actually a means to tame alterity: The black man is what he is, he can be no “Other.”

This is precisely why the black (and all the exile represents) poses such a problem to any notion of naturalized colonial discourse—and it is exactly this discomfort that we see played out again and again, particularly in Jasmine, The Mimic Men, and The Satanic Verses. For the exile stands at what Bhabha has called “the crossroads”⁷ of the two cultures of which she or he has no part. The act that the exile engages in—the act of taking part in the host culture, trying to become a member of the culture of which the exile is not a “native”—is an act of mimicry. That act is seen as treacherous by nationalists (for example, Saladin’s father in The Satanic Verses ), while Bhabha considers it an act of defiance and destabilization for the host country. For it is within the act of mimicry and behind that act, the exile, that colonial discourse is forced to see the possibility of the “Other’s” closeness to the “I,” and is forced to recognize the difference that it attempted to stifle in the image of the foreigner as stereotype. The hybridism of the exile means that the oppressive discourse of colonialism can no longer concentrate on the difference between cultures and people—them and us, English and Indian, colonizer and colonized, self and “Other”—but must instead concentrate on “a hybridism, a difference ‘within’ a subject that inhabits the rim of an inbetween reality.”⁸

The process of mimicking sets the subjectivity of the exile onto a trajectory of formation and dissolution, a making, re-making, fracturing, in a contrapuntal rhythm of deferral and difference. The subjectivity of the exile is one of motion, of becoming but never reaching the certainty of having become. That is why so many of the novels by these authors take the form of a journey or a pilgrimage. The narratives stand as allegorical representations that double as both the road the individual travels on and an image of the passage of the individual caught in the ceaseless transformation of the self. We see the young narrator of V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival journey from his native country to England, and it is this movement from a homeland to a land he considers more suited to him, England, that defines and constructs his being. Yet, it is precisely this movement that brings into question his notion of who he is, the writer he wants to be, and the existence he is leaving behind.