Between Falling and Flying

The Satanic Verses begins and does not begin with a blast, a terrorist bomb in the skies above the English Channel. The text actually opens with the moments after the blast: the explosion is only told on page 87. The millenarian explosion of terrorist activity is, then, itself blasted out of its own sense of place in time – denied its self-aggrandising space in history – by the text itself. This textual explosion conjures Walter Benjamin's ‘materialist historiography’ which ‘blasts open the continuum of history’. Against ‘historicism’, Benjamin writes of the ‘constructive principle’ of historiography that crucially works from ‘the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop’. This is the endless ending and beginning of Rushdie's text, a moment of crisis restructuring history against the assumed discreteness of subjects in time. The text begins with its two protagonists, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, singing and talking as they slow-fall from the exploding aeroplane: ‘Gibreelsaladin Farishtachmcha, condemned to this endless but also ending angelicdevelish fall, did not become aware of the moment at which the process of their transmutation began’ (Rushdie, Satanic, p. 5). This still/falling/flying moment provokes an intricately spliced narrative in which time runs strangely (back and) towards the apparent collapse of subjectivity and history into a twisting deconstructive play of language.

Using Benjamin's ideas, Homi Bhabha writes against a teleological ‘transcendental temporality’ and ‘locate[s] an aesthetic in this time of inscription whose stillness is not stasis but a shock’. Bhabha defines this ‘transit’ aesthetic as ‘a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past’. For him, all forms of suppression can be challenged by such temporally and linguistically revolutionary expressions of ‘transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees’ (Bhabha, p. 146). In The Satanic Verses, the hectic and broken temporality of the text disrupts the monumental histories arising out of both the time of the nation and the pure, transcendental revolutionary agendas of terrorism and religious (and other) fundamentalisms. The text begins in an almost arrested moment. It floats above Britain of the early 1970s, and a groundswell of racism promoting a pure national space, and it floats beneath the aeroplane hijacked by the Sikh terrorists seeking the purity of a Khalistan.