(originally posted on my other blog, hybrid tumbleweed, 02-24-2006)
I have just finished reading Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. It is truly one of the best novels I have read in a long time. And it deals very much with issues of cultural hybridity. Indeed, it is not unlike a case study of the many sides of hybridity, of identities (re)formed by external and internal forces.
Anyway, since so much has been written about this and Rushdie's other novels already, I will not write a review here. What I will do, however, is write briefly about the issue of people's discomfort with issues of hybridity.
People have been, and many continue to be, scared of any sort of racial and/or cultural mixture. In ancient times there were strict, sometimes explicit and strongly enforced rules against miscegenation. These fears continued well into colonial times (and in some quarters to this day). Of course mixture often occurred. Some continue to be very uncomfortable with hybridity. It seems most people feel uncomfortable outside of homogeneous environments. Heterogeneity upsets their notions of themselves, of their reality, messes with their worldviews. People often have fierce notions, among other things, of the purity of their race, language, culture, and religion.
A quote from Daniel Defoe's The History of the Devil at the opening of The Satanic Verses, illustrates the extent of humanity's historical discomfort with hybridities.
Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is... without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.
The state of being without roots, of wandering 'without any certain abode', is seen as punishment befitting Satan himself. The word 'vagabond' also carries negative connotations. Rushdie elsewhere has said that he sometimes thinks roots "are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places" (Shame, p.86). This makes a great deal of sense to me. It is a matter of control, of power.
I don't think the plant/root metaphor is relevant to modern society. I recently thought of a more apt metaphor, but since I am trying to recall it now, it eludes me. Sorry. The point is, however, that we need not have roots, but we DO need to have, and build, connections.
