Postcolonial Literature Coman (Pop) Anamaria Cristina

anul III LRE

Salman Rushdie- Midnight’s Children (1982)Excerpt from Book One: The perforated sheet

This fragment reflects the general perception that the West is advanced and the Orient is regressive up to a point. The text is a reaction to the effect of decolonization by bringing the psychological problems of the Indian society in front of the European public who could not perceive the real Orient because of the western education and culture. Dr. Aziz questions his identity of Indian citizen who studied medicine in Heidelberg. He bears in himself an old culture by birth, but was educated in Europe and thus his innate abilities were modeled by the environment he lived in and by the way he was educated. It is said that a person is the product of heredity, environment and education. His drama is not unique. The author illustrates through Aadam Aziz the drama of all Indian intellectuals who are indebted both to their origins and to the culture that sharpened their minds. They grew in innocence until the western gave them the experience of the world. The inner dilemma is generated by the conflict between the native values and the new culture brought by colonizers. After trying to live in the conditions set up by the Europeans, dr. Aziz has to make an effort to fit the society he left. In this process he tries to stay neutral and independent. The decolonization process left in him the type of a new man: a hybrid of Indian breeding and European way of thinking. One of the issues of decolonization was that most people remained illiterate and could not understand the progress of medicine. In his practice as doctor, Aziz confronts the impossibility of restoring the Indian way of treating ill persons. He is in front of a compromise: the

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perforated sheet. This metaphor could also suggest the fact that the new knowledge was accepted fragmentarily by the local people which is a normal process as not everyting European could be introduced and accepted right away in country that had another background and traditions. In fact, not even the perforated sheet should be used. The original culture is the one that should make some adjustments just as Aziz’s mother did when her husband suffered a stroke. Because of a natural accident the household roles were switched so as the family would continue to exist. Aziz does not see the exposure of his mother with critical oriental eyes , he sees the change as a common consequence of a change which happened first to his nation. He is only amazed by how quickly his mother changed her attitude concerning the fact that she lived isolated until that moment. An important detail is that Saleem, the narrator was born on the same date when the Independence of India was declared, on the 15th of August 1947, “at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence”. The birth of a baby coincides with the birth of a new liberated nation. History brings changes even in the nature of people. The individual represents the people as the narrator says: “ Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity.” As a newly born, India had not yet either the power to self determination: “I was entirely left without a say in the matter”, or the experience in deciding its own way. On the one hand, the country was perceived by the world through ‘a perforated sheet’ held by the former colonizers so as India would not attract so soon other economical powers to exploit it. The new nation was soon labeled as “Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Budha and even Piece-of-the-Moon”, nice nicknames for something that should appear serious and believable. The prejudices that accompany the Oriental world are treated by Edward Said in his book: "My idea in Orientalism is to use humanistic critique to open up the fields

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of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison us in labels and antagonistic debate whose goal is a belligerent collective identity rather than understanding and intellectual exchange." (Said)By telling the story of his grandfather Saleem tries to find his own answers regarding his identity and the identity of the country he lives in, things from which he cannot run as he says: “there’s no getting away from the date”. On the other hand, the change is obvious to Aziz when the stranger in him no longer perceives his country as native, the “frost-hardened tussock” does not touch him spiritually, the old values begin to perish. The call of the origins is illustrated by the fact that “the tussock of earth… was at bottom no more than a catalyst”. The initiation in a new culture suspends the knowledge acquired before, “he saw through traveled eyes”. Now, he looked at India with critical eyes, “instead of beauty” he saw “the narrowness”. Nature ‘punched’ him to make him fully aware of the change in himself. “To be at home and feel so utterly enclosed” was a feeling of the new self. As an individual, Aadam Aziz enriched his cultural background but he felt ‘enclosed’ because he could no longer communicate to his former self using the western code. As a consequence, “the old place resented his educated, stethoscoped return”. In the process of recapturing the ego of his childhood “he would try and recall his childhood springs in Paradise”. There is a fight in the individual between western and eastern values. The struggle of accepting a new belief in Germany turns into a struggle of returning to his original one. We could resume everything to the European manner of trying to set a new order without selecting the good things of the previous. “The anarchists” tried to convey Aziz another vision upon himself, “that he was somehow the invention of their ancestors”. It seems to me partially true

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as the Indians tried to model themselves after the European way partly because they were forced to, partly because they wanted to gain a higher social status. I guess this step had to be made because the Indians had the right to study in the country of their colonizers as a kind of reward for letting them use something which was not actually theirs. The doctor’s return to his country can be seen as a return in search of the lost paradise, in a miltonian paraphrase. In his wandering in Germany he could not find the answers to his questions, a reason for returning home at the people he thought they understood him. Tai, the boatman, is seen as the oldest, as if he existed ab initio mundi. He represents the authentic India. Some say that the Orient is always corrected for not being in the European or American space and that it has a triple force which actions against the Orient, against Orientalism and against the Occidental consumer of Orientalism. (Iliescu) The true quest for Aadam Aziz comes when he is supposed to cure an ill girl. India proves again not to be a conventional country. The HEIDELBERG bag is the root of all evil in Tai’s opinion. It means suffering and lack of feelings: “To the ferryman, the bag represents Abroad; it is the alien thing, the invader, progress”. This simple bag is the seed of distrust between the ferryman and Dr. Aziz. The doctor cannot pass over the allowance of the local doctor, he knows he is an intruder. Tai, not being initiated, thinks that the stethoscope in the “bag made of dead pigs” is used instead of smelling. This is the way simple people fabricate the way an unknown thing works. The status of this Indian born German doctor seems equal to a servant as he is almost criticized by the woman servant. When the final moment arrives Dr. Aziz is stupefied by the strange situation. This is the point when Orient stops being regressive: the doctor is called to examine the patient using the western knowledge but the patient is seen after rules of the eastern society. I watched a TV broadcast on TVRCultural on the 21st of January 2010 having Salman Rushdie as guest. Speaking about his latest book, “The Enchantress of

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Florence”, Rushdie says that the world would have been much improved had a union between Queen Elizabeth 1st and Akhbar the Great existed. He also mentioned the fact that “you become a meaningless person” by being in a place where you are unknown. But Aziz was known to his German friends and yet they did not try to understand he world he came from. In this way Aziz had to live two lives, to be the one who understands both culture and his quest is to conciliate them. It might be that the European eyes gaze at India through a perforated sheet because the old values do not unveil so easily in front of the ones who are not conaisseurs. This instinct of preservation is a warning to the fact that an ancestral tradition cannot be observed too close and all of a sudden as not to cause a disdain to its most guarded values. But this incapacity to reveal the beauty of the Indian nation represented in the text by a woman builds a void between East and West. To heal the flaws of a nation one needs to get to know it better but healing should not mean erasing good things and planting bad ones.

Bibliography:

Iliescu, Radu. “Orientul inventat de occidentali” Review of Orientalism by Edward W. Said (1978). 25 February 2009. Online. <http://www.bookblog.ro/stiinte-umaniste-religie/radu-iliescu/orientalism/>[22 Jan. 2010]

Said, Edward. Orientalism. Preface, p. xxii. Bookrags Staff. "Orientalism: Quotes". 2005. Thomson Gale. 22 Jan 2010. <http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-orientalism/quotes.html>.

I also used the course as a support of my analysis.

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