Disfiguration

‘I must peel off history, the prison of the past. It is the time for a sort of ending, for the truth about myself to struggle out, at last, from under my parents’ stifling power’.

In Rushdie’s ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’, language, narratives, places, people and moral constructs are all inverted or disfigured. Moreover, Rushdie’s character portrayals also focus on the handicapped, may it be physical (Moor and Raman Fielding) or mental (Aurora and Abraham). However, the important question to ask is what function this disfigurement serves within Rushdie’s narrative- is it a literary trick or a purposeful attempt to challenge the reader’s conception of reality?

This unique way of describing characters as incomplete or deformed isn’t just a result of literary antics but an avenue through which the writer addresses the reader’s notion of normality and realness, especially by juxtaposing incompatible traits of believable/unbelievable, stable/unstable, rational/irrational and real/imaginary characters and situations. It is then that the voice of alterity, personified in a tragicomic Moor, is the voice through which one can trespass on the conventions of language, law and religion.

The chronology that Rushdie follows is rather logical- that the face, the figure and by extension the whole body is the site or the territory onto which identity finds its history, its memory, its contours and its manifestations. It is the physical features of the characters that defines and identifies them becoming an attestation of their individualism and idiosyncratic posturing in time and space. Facial and bodily traits then narrate a story that not only has to be endlessly retold, but which above all needs to be continually and incessantly renewed. It is then that the readers can question the concept of identity- is it static, vulnerable to change or in a constant state of evolutionary flux? In Rushdie’s contextualization, identity is the creative process of restating and reconfiguring oneself through the coordinates of time and space, the need to circumvent the condition of being stuck in our own rigid story or narrative. With the figure of the Moor, Rushdie confronts the reader with his/her understanding of identity through ideas of normality, abnormality, the conception of history and alterity.

To disfigure, as Rushdie does in his work is synonymous with ripping a person away from his/her story, to exile someone into the whirlpool of endless doubt, of nothingness and unreality. A defaced person is essentially a ‘non-body’, not because the personal lacks physical, tangible bodily flesh but because the person is bereft of a distinct, recognizable identity. But in Rushdie’s terms and stipulations, disfiguration also becomes a means to escape from a fixed, immutable and static definition of oneself, especially if this definition is culturally, socially and politically derived.

The Moor is the hybrid- a product of two worlds, of the Da Gama’s Christian and European ancestors and of the Zogoiby’s Indian Jewish family. This genetic configuration already puts the moor’s origin in a culturally disfigured state in that it reunifies the somehow divergent genealogical backgrounds of his two parents to form an amorphous and unidentifiable identity. Though his genetic heterogeneity makes the moor like a curse in our reading of the text, it is the same lineage that adds to his richness and ambiguity. His identity then, becomes a way through which someone else, another self comes into creation.