The Palimpsest Model in The Moors Last Sigh

‘The city itself, perhaps the whole country, was a palimpsest, Under World Beneath Over World, black market beneath white’ when the whole of life was like this, when an invisible reality moved phantomwise beneath a visible fiction, subverting all its meanings’.

The opening of Rushdie’s ‘The Moor Last Sigh’ alludes to the village of Benengeli, which then becomes an allusive reference to Don Quixote’s seminal work ‘Cervantes’. Some readers might just take the village of Benengeli at face value but the referencing of Don Quixote calls for more reflection, particularly in the authors use of palimpsest as a model in his narrative. The use of the palimpsest as a model can be viewed as a common faux pas on the part of the reader to superimpose one vision, idea or image over another, confining the reader to a singular and monochromic view of events under which the complexity of certain occurrences become lost in translation. Thus, it is important to note that the palimpsest model makes lucid, not only our understanding of this intricate text but makes credible, the multilayered texture of the Moor’s family lineage.

In light of the Quixote illusion, it becomes important to note that the use of Benengeli in Rushdie’s narrative becomes a way for him to reinforce Spanish history and its salient features as one of the many underlying canvases of the Moor’s Indian history, almost like a painting of Aurora that becomes a torchbearer of eclecticism and unique dualities. The chronology of events- the expulsion of Boabdil, the last Nasrid Sultan, the Expulsion of the last Moor from Granada along with Portuguese explorer Vasco De Gama entering India all become isolated events in a larger narrative about identity- a tale that becomes not only convoluted but majestic. 

While Vasco and Boabdil become synonymous with atypical Indian ancestry, Rushdie’s painting and aesthetic portrayal of Indian nationalism becomes a strong parallel with Benengeli, an emblem of the eerier side of Spanish history where ‘folk had been plunged into deep mourning’. Thus, the text not only becomes idiosyncratic in its copious referencing of other works but becomes a message for the complexity and abstract nature of identity, lineage and larger questions of domesticity and nationhood.