Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism from 1981-1991 is a book of essays by acclaimed author Salman Rushdie. Though Rushdie is best known for his provocative novels, most of which are set in and around India, this book features seventy-four of his essays, which examine issues of migration, literature and colonialism, socialism and political activism, modernism, and more. Only loosely connected in their central themes, the essays reflect Rushdie's view of the world, politics, and his own personal experience as a migrant and native of a formerly colonized nation.

Though Imaginary Homelands consists of a series of disparate essays on a wide variety of topics, threads of migration and the need to recreate the home environment run through many of the essays, playing a prominent role in the overall theme of the book. Rushdie writes extensively about his personal experience as an Indian man from a Muslim minority family, who was set apart from others despite the fact that neither he nor his parents have a strong affiliation with Islam. Later, Rushdie attended school in England, where he experienced racism first hand, feeling the pull of living between nations and the identity crisis that can result from that pull. In the title essay of the collection, “Imaginary Homelands,” Rushdie writes explicitly about these racist experiences and the way he felt torn between India and England, where he was making a new home. As a bilingual person, Rushdie was torn also between languages – he writes about how, even when returning to one’s home country, those who migrate no longer feel at home, because they have been inundated with ideologies from another world. As such, Rushdie makes it clear that “imaginary homelands” are essentially the fictional creations of migrants, who seek an understanding of the places they live now and the places they come from. They recreate these places in order to satisfy their loss in their real, physical lives – something that Rushdie says he did himself, writing on India, Pakistan, and London.

In “In God We Trust,” Rushdie writes about losing his faith in God, and how faith in God was replaced, for him, by faith in radicalism. Instead of finding his faith in God, he focused on socialism and modernist art, both of which he saw as the most radical politics of his time, and in which he put all his faith. As such, his book is an examination of both of these ideologies and fields and their intersections. Rushdie writes extensively about authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass, and others, who play with the relationship between reality and fantasy in ways that reshape conceptions of the real. Interested in playing with this idea of reality in his own work, Rushdie examines authors with similar concerns in light of their modernist forefathers.



Rushdie also makes some interesting notes about translation and the idea of what it means to be translated in this collection. Saying that translation, from the Latin root, means “bearing across,” he sees himself and other immigrants as people who have been “born across” various oceans and continents, and are thus “translated men.” He is interested in the idea of being translated as an identity, fighting the notion that something is always lost in translation – as such, that there is always a loss of self. He claims that there is something to be gained, too, in translation, and that this is one of the reasons that migration is the predominant theme of nearly all contemporary world literature.

Overall, Rushdie writes on a huge variety of topics, making claims that many readers will find difficult to swallow. He is interested in this kind of work, and in inciting new thoughts and belief systems through making brave claims and forcing readers to ask difficult questions. He continues this work in his essays while including odd anecdotes to myth, songs, letters, books, poems, and much more.

Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist with a focus on the connection and “disruptions” between the Eastern and Western worlds. He writes predominantly about the Indian subcontinent, with a focus on historical fiction and magical realist fiction, which combine real historical events with fantastical or magical elements. His second novel, Midnight's Children, won the Booker Prize in 1981, and his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, caused an uproar among a number of Muslim nations, leading to him receiving death threats and being put under British police protection. He has written a number of novels, story collections, works of non-fiction, and two books for children. In 2007, he was knighted by the Queen of England for his contribution to literature.