"Exile and Migration : The examination of technological modes of perception through the novel "Satanic Verses", in terms of identity disorientation." (original) (raw)

In this text I will attempt to examine the particular condition of exile and migration in Salman Rushdie's novel, as an experience that is distinguished from its traditional definition. I would like to demonstrate more specifically the relation of current notions of migration with the technological models of memory, insisting in two ways of reproduction of the past, that of photography and that of cinema. Exile and the narratives of despair The mythological establishment of the exiled persona is already referred to in the epigraph of this novel in which Satan is depicted by Danniel Defoe's book as a vagabond in an " unsettled condition… that he is without a fixed place, or space... " 1 Migration as a concept is remarked as a painful subject translated within the frame of eschatological conditions in which migrant is interpreted as despaired, lost in a confronted and sometimes hostile place. The return to his privileged area of living is its main priority, and traditional narratives in fairy tales are built in relation to the enormous difficulties that heroes meet in the name of their destiny, that is always connected with a specific topography in their origin. But commonly the exiled was misunderstood, not only by the foreign part but also by its native land, for the necessity of the maintenance of social coherence. Geographic migrations confuse the establishment of power that is based upon the national identity. So the reason for which the persona of Satan is that of an exiled, is justified within the norms of monotheistic religions. But if the concept of the exiled was used to characterize devil in Christian and Islamic discipline, in Greek mythology it is much more complicated, the migrant is interpreted within the frame of a human tragedy, as a fact of rough and bad fortune. A paradigmatic model of this specific hermeneutic remains the myth of Odysseus for whom through his journeys there is always a permanent nostalgia, for his promised land. But the ideal home, that of an absolute emancipation of a specific place, is always related to the intention of the exiled to be recognised as someone that celebrates its return, in Satanic Verses this admiration can be found in the characters of Mahound and Imam. In these cases, similar to many migrants, the return to the native land is blessed by God. The divine recognition is the most important, or at least the divine protection of the migrant neighbourhoods in the foreign land 2. The migration in modernity/neo-migration My purpose here is to point out the change of focus from an immigration that is not so much an act produced by restrictions of historical determinations of the term to an option that appears omnipresent by current improvements of Western societies the Satanic Verses The migration traditionally connected with extremely unfavorable conditions such war, poverty and political expatriotism etc. has met with modernity's desires, for an expanded cosmopolitanism. Native home, considered to be attached with the past, has been the haunting image of a modernism that required the detachment of place from its historical witnesses 3 .