Imaginary Homelands (missed blog)

Our memories it seems are contaminated, but what is it that contaminates them? Is it perhaps the lack of an identity or the presence of this inescapable desire to cling on to many identities that only deepens our confusion? Rushdie explores the dilemma of an Indian writer who must rebuild India in his mind yet must always do this as an outsider. He believes it is distance from the homeland, and the disconnects in our memories and unspoken tales that causes them to create an “imaginary homeland”, one that can only exist in the narratives and have little room to leave the pages that bind them.

Yet it is perhaps not just the circumstances that separate one person from an another, or the writer from his homeland, but the fact that we try so hard to separate ourselves on our own accord, to believe that experiences of displacement cannot be understood or experienced by the other that leads to the reality of alienation, and moreover isolation. It is maybe the fact that we purposefully muddle and contaminate our memories to fill the gaps that leaves us baffled about our past or is it that we are responsible for creating these gaps because we are not satisfied with the past that our memory connects us to. Just as the colonizer idealizes the oriental space and all that it could possibly encompass, the exile too creates an idyllic version of a homeland one that must include a violent history and tragic experiences.

Perhaps a mistake on Rushdie’s part is to believe that Indian writers in a foreign world are alone in experiencing uncertainty when it comes to their past and feeling of alienation due to their physical separation from the land. Yet we see in both colonial and post colonial narratives such as “A Passage to India” and “Men in the Sun” that the land will reject those who may be ‘living at home’. This is because the state of the exilic figure is such, that it is beyond just a physical manifestation of exile but perhaps is more effective as a state of mind and has a spiritual paradigm that is perhaps much stronger. As represented in his own work as well the exoticism and muddled uncertainty that surrounds the mere idea of India thrust the ‘Indian’ towards creating an imaginary homeland and his very own “version” of India.