No Ordinary Joe

Salman Rushdie and Scheherazade: two storytellers of destiny, two conjurors of enchantment.  Or, as he discovers with The Satanic Verses, offense.  Little does he expect the extent of displeasure to take the form of explicit, religiously sanctioned assassination.  Yet, given the rise of Islamic extremism across the world in the late eighties, is Rushdie’s claim of ingenuous, irreverent critique really defensible?  And what exactly is being defended here: a man, a way of thinking, a foundational tenet of artistic freedom?  The right to be a serious shit disturber?

In early 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini becomes the poster boy for Islamic fundamentalism by proclaiming a fatwa (religious edict) calling for the death of the author of The Satanic Verses. For nearly a decade until its lifting in 1998, Rushdie becomes a virtual prisoner, existing in a half-light of constantly enforced vigilance and relentless oversight.   Initial effects include a numbing sense of helplessness coupled with a heightened sense of vulnerability.  Not just Rushdie personally, but those around him—immediate family, his publishers, literary networks, friends and sympathizers—are viable targets.  Randomness and chance, previously benign features of everyday life, are recast in sinister shades.  Case in point: having established a regular call-in time with his son, Rushdie is driven wild with anguish after repeated failure to reach him at the appointed hour.  His paranoia triggered, Rushdie’s distress and anxiety grow to the point where police are dispatched to his ex-wife’s house.  Initial reports of an open door and house lights on goad Rushdie’s worst fears.  The result is an unfortunate series of coincidences— school play runs overtime, explanatory phone call gets missed, cops mistake one house for another—that cohere into anguish.   No one of these events in themselves is particularly remarkable or even especially sinister; but in the overheated atmosphere of murderous intent, nothing can be left to chance. 

And so it goes for Rushdie for many more years.  Nearly ten years, far longer than officialdom ever expects, never mind the unwitting fugitive at its centre.

How does Rushdie survive his prison without walls?  Does he find a way through everyday wretchedness and inevitable betrayals?  Enduring—eventually outliving the fatwa’s dead hand—becomes its own act of heroic defiance, even as Rushdie experiences shame at having to duck and hide, of conspiring in his own erasure. 

The practical necessity of an alias comes as a lifeline. He needs an alter ego to be able to conduct ordinary transactions, as much as his protectors need a safe handle for their shape shifter.   Trying on different combinations of favorite authors, Rushdie settles on Joseph Anton, pairing the chronicler of outsider shame with the observer of hapless despair. 

The “end” of the fatwa may have come in 1998, but its effects—the righteous rage and hatred it focused and sanctioned—do not magically evaporate.  By this time Rushdie is used to warily testing liberty by degrees.  Though not entirely silenced by its ordeal, Rushdie’s output as a novelist is unquestionably curtailed.  The simple—or elaborate—habits and routines a writer develops in order to write, the necessary twitches and flights of fancy (or foot) going wherever and whenever they lead—are blown away, reduced to a singular imperative: safety.

The threat of danger as everyday possibility—not literary mood or polarity to be engaged with—changes the game of fiction.  Taking on the guise of Joseph Anton might at first have seemed a quixotic gesture in the face of humorless gravity.  But over time, living through fiction—and more important—recounting its twists and turns as creative nonfiction—must have offered Rushdie some consolations of irony and absurdity.  He would have been able to exert—at least in retrospect, by arrangement and design—control over the narrative.  Through his fictional counterpart, he could approach once again speaking in his own voice.

Small comfort, maybe.  But therein lies a tale.  And a writer after all must write—a storyteller must speak a tale into being.   And Joseph Anton's tale of literary hijacking by means of fatwa is no less absorbing for being "based on a true story" than any fictional thriller.  Yet often his account—like all such necessary expiations, however expertly conjured and stylishly rendered—feels just this side of narcissistic.  The conceit of Joseph Anton as fictional anti-hero never develops beyond simple alias.  Rushdie recounts events at a third person remove to sate his confessional need and desire for justification.  But the character of Joseph Anton, for all the narrator’s confidences and humbling admissions, doesn’t fly.  It's a tricky feat to pull off: writing a memoir in the guise of fiction to tell a true story where the facts are both known and subjectively recalled.  

(David Carr, a writer with a different backstory of oblivion, draws on fact-checking journalistic tics to construct his memoir of crack-induced abasement and recovery, The Night of the Gun. Unlike Rushdie, his ordeal was lived out in relative obscurity, at his own expense.) 

Perhaps it is too much to ask Rushdie—the "I" of the storm (of his own making if not design)—to be more than subjective in his account and recall.   The fatwa’s impact on Rushdie’s career—the nagging question of being associated only with a controversy rather than a text—haunts Joseph Anton  Being notorious for all the wrong reasons brings its own bitter deserts.

True to form, Joseph Anton is rife with contradiction.  By turns, thoughtful, self-deprecatory, witty, self-absorbed, myopic, combative, engaging, inert.

It may take complete outsiders—a band of curiosity-seekers and bold fantasists—to evoke the contrarian struggle at the heart of the story.  And what characters, what flavours. Who could not see Philip Seymour Hoffman as Christopher Hitchens, Roshan Seth as Joseph, Catherine Keener as Marianne Wiggins? 

Are you there John Malkhovich?

Nowhere special

Some places get under your skin, exerting allure whatever their come-hither attractions, or spectacular lack of same.  Paris.  London.  New York.  Bombay.  Rome.  Destinations celebrated for revelry, eye candy, plunder and so much more. 

Swindon?  It's mention as must-see stop in southwest England begs the inevitable question: why?

Not so much off the beaten path as off the guidebook radar.  No quaint history, no monument of note, no picturesque setting to entice casual detours.  Whatever its other qualities, Swindon isn't one of those "finds" savvy travelers happen upon, never mind set out for.  

Unless, of course, you happen to be us.  Three sisters on a sentimental journey. 

In 2012, my two sisters and I—plus a friend I manage to drag along (the invisible shutterbug above)—set off for our father’s home in Swindon, England.  Lucky coincidence and generous happenstance conspire to create a memory-lane itinerary—highlighting Swindon and Cardiff—of our father's design.  Growing up in Trinidad, at the southern end of the archipelago known in the day as the Lesser Antilles, England was be-all, end-all mother country and cultural beacon still to colonials like us.  Years after the Queen's arrival to proclaim independence, my younger sister and I still sat common entrance exams and shared the fever dream of studying in Britain via scholarships.  America and Canada might be bright up and coming stars, but England was the sun. 

In 1973 I graduated from high school in Florida where my family had decamped after leaving Trinidad four years earlier. (See October 1970 backstory.)  That summer my parents decided to take me and my younger sister still living at home on something of a “grand tour.”  England, including our dad's old stomping grounds of London and Swindon, formed the heart of our travels. 

A lifetime later, my older sister— the one "born there"—returns to a place she's connected with incidentally, not from memory.  It’s an unremarkable place to include on any visit of the sceptred isle.  On arrival at our destination,  I find the hedges and lushness of distant memory literally paved over.  The small front lawns—so typically "English" in the early 70's, as in my father’s day—now parking stalls.  The elderly couple next door who came out with their middle-aged son to greet my father—their neighbour from so long ago—are themselves long gone.

What's missing in tourist pamphlets and billboard advertisements is the house's situation as my older sister’s birthplace.  That she has spent her life away from this isolated event, having been removed as a young child under the worst of circumstances, her mother’s painful demise.  My sister’s mother—our father’s first wife—had left Guyana—then British Guiana—for England shortly after the War ended.  She would have met and courted her fiancé largely through photographs, family, and letters.  For all intents and purposes a latter-day picture bride, she would have found life in Swindon, then a sleepy semi-industrial town, entirely foreign.  Like the man she married, she was well past youth.  How she got along in her marriage, whether she was content, how she coped with what we now conveniently ascribe to culture shock—none of us can guess.  Not long into her marriage, however, and shortly after my sister’s birth, she developed uterine cancer.  Her husband, who had spent years carefully building up an accounting practice as a precursor to family life with a new bride, must have been devastated.   Whenever he spoke of those times to us as children, it was always with a sense of fatalism, as if no other course was possible or even thinkable.  As if the only path for him was to sell everything and take his little girl and dying wife home to her birthplace, where she could at least be in familiar surroundings, with her own family for comfort.

I can’t imagine the shock and distress he must have suffered.  Or the upheaval and disorientation my sister must have gone through.  One of the family stories regularly told was my sister’s first encounter with black people in Guyana.   Almost on cue, she asked why they didn't (just) wash.  We jeered at her ignorance then; her only contact—aside from her parents and maybe rare Chinese acquaintances—would have been with white people in England.

We arrive at 30 Langford Grove on a Friday morning to find the fondly recalled cul-de-sac of family lore mostly empty of cars and hum.  On first impression the street looks drab, less English quaint, less cared for than a lifetime ago.  This time, however, there is no garden enclosure, no barrier to the front door.  Against both my sisters’ better judgment, I knock on the door.  We have come so far, I silently insist, we will not go away quietly.  After a pause, a man appears.  He’s a scuffy, middle-aged bloke with glasses and a close-cropped head, probably stunned to be facing down no less than four Asian women on his doorstep. 

I relate who we are and why we’re here.  Assessing our threat, he essays us in.  We crowd into the large, newly renovated kitchen at the rear and listen to John recount how he came into the house from his grandfather.  The same man who built the homes of Langford Grove that sold to our dad.  John relates how his grandfather divulged details of what, apart from its coveted location at the "end" of the cul-de-sac, set this particular house apart from the others he built along the street.  A sensible, modest project for its time.  An appealing home in which to settle and raise a family.  As the compact scale of the original house reminds us, these were modest dwellings built right after the War, the likes of which are probably widespread throughout Britain.  Our dad, a Chinese bachelor, took a chance on Swindon, a quiet unassuming town near Wales, to settle into.

Swindon didn't disappoint him.  That he was accepted—even sought after in one account, by a particular divorcée—was no small feat.  Not only was he able to establish himself as an accountant —albeit under an English pseudonym—he became secure enough to acquire and operate a second business, a beauty salon.  His social stature in town was a source of fond pride; he enjoyed participating in Swindon life as a business owner, even joining the local association of beauty salons.  I picture him on his rounds at the beauty parlour—inspecting the equipment, interacting with staff, making small talk with customers. 

In all he spent more than 20 years becoming English. His wife’s untimely death forced him to a second crisis—the first left him bald not long after arrival—that saw him sell off and abandon a life he had taken great care to build.  He returned to the country he had left as a hopeful young man.  It was like stepping back in time; very little progress had occurred, nothing like the sweeping changes he had seen in England.  Here he found himself odd man out, almost a foreigner in his own country.  Gradually over time, Swindon receded into a trove of amusing vignettes of bachelor life highlighted by very occasional glimpses of withering isolation.  

John hesitantly offers tea, which we politely decline; intruders, after all, hardly guests. We are fortunate catching him, a car mechanic, home on one of his off shifts.  The room we're in, he relates, is an expansion of the small functional kitchen of the original house.  He has lived here probably longer than our dad ever did, long enough to convert the modest backyard of previous owners—where our dad grew brussell sprouts and hoped for frost to sweeten them—into a Japanese-style garden with pond and bridge.

For an unremarkable place—its depressed core showing signs of the global recession—Swindon is ordinary even shabby, a kind of nowhere young people escape from.   And perhaps more than occasionally—as with John—come back to.  Unexciting, perhaps, but more importantly, affordable.  Swindon's selling point—its safe dependability—sustains lives like John's. After the Blitz in London, and working on agricultural teams early in the war, it might have seemed a relative haven of potential to David Bennett.  Somewhere you could keep your head down and get on with the business of ordinary life.  Here he could imagine settling down, putting out a shingle, finding a wife and raising a family.   Not to pin his hopes too high, but there could be a future.  It was close to Wales, a beautiful place he was sure to visit—didn't they name a saint after him there?  With a bit of luck and hard work, he might even thrive.