The Republican chairman of the U.S. Senate judiciary panel on Wednesday requested a briefing from the FBI on the arrest of Roger Stone, a longtime associate of President Donald Trump, in an inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Senator Lindsey Graham said he was concerned about the number of agents involved, tactics employed and the timing of Stone's arrest on Friday in Florida. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating U.S. allegations that Russia meddled in the election and whether members of the campaign of then-Republican candidate Trump coordinated with Moscow officials.
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NASA had a big year in 2018 with several bold new missions to study various features of our Solar System, and one of the most exciting was the launch of the Parker Solar Probe which will study the Sun in more detail than has ever been possible before. The probe has already broken several records and proven that it's capable of enduring the intensity of our star, and it's starting out 2019 by adding another notch to its belt. The probe, which launched in August of last year, recently completed its first full orbit of the Sun on January 19th. It's a feat that the spacecraft will repeat many times over the next several years, but completing the first full loop is obviously cause for celebration. "It's been an illuminating and fascinating first orbit," Parker Solar Probe Project Manager Andy Driesman said in a statement. "We've learned a lot about how the spacecraft operates and reacts to the solar environment, and I'm proud to say the team's projections have been very accurate." The probe gathered a huge amount of data during its first trip around the Sun, and it performed much of its work without being in radio contact of its handlers back on Earth. As it orbits the Sun, the probe will regularly lose contact with Earth and then reconnect when it emerges from behind the star once more. Thus far, the probe has sent back over 17 gigs of scientific data and it's still streaming more observation data back. The data dump won't be finished until April, NASA says. The probe is expected to put in nearly seven years of work, making a total of 24 orbits and getting gradually closer to the Sun with each pass. It is tasked with observing many different functions of the star, including the generation of solar wind and the outflow of energy from the Sun into space, advancing our understanding of solar weather.
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Kids say the darndest things, and a young boy who was lost for three days in a heavily wooded area of North Carolina is spinning a yarn that is leaving investigators baffled. Casey Hathaway was reportedly playing with other children in his grandmother's backyard when he wandered into a nearby woods and disappeared from view. Nobody could find the young boy, and authorities and volunteers scoured the woods for three days before he was eventually found alive. Having endured chilly temperatures and heavy rain, the boy was still in good health, but he says he didn't make it through the ordeal alone. "He made a comment about having a friend while he was in the woods -- his friend was a bear," on of the investigators, Maj. David McFadyen of the Craven County Sheriff's Office, told CNN in an interview. "In the emergency room he started talking about what happened in the woods and he said he had a friend that was a bear with him while he was in the woods." The youngster likely had a rather uncomfortable time while he was lost in the woods, as nighttime temperatures dropped as low as 20 degrees and two inches of rain fell during the three days he was missing. As for whether or not a bear actually joined him, authorities can't say for certain one way or the other. Authorities note that there are indeed bears in the area, but nobody involved in the search for the boy reported seeing one while combing the woods. The boy was found in a tangle of vines, according to investigators, and while he was cold he was otherwise unharmed. Search party members could hear him calling out for his mother, which helped them locate him. Police say the young boy will be interviewed -- or at least questioned to the extent that one can question a three-year-old -- in order to get a better idea of how he survived, and perhaps they'll learn a little bit more about his bear friend in the process.
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THE LITERATURE ON the American Civil War is endless. Scholars estimate that on average one book about the war has been published every day since the war ended — about 60,000 since 1865. Even the most minor battles have a volume or two explaining the mistakes and successes of the combatants. The number of trees felled to print all the tomes on the great battles — Gettysburg, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Antietam — easily exceeds the number of human casualties in each battle. There are shelves of books on the great generals and heroes, and countless books about minor military figures. There are some significantly interesting and important books about a few famous brigades — most notably the 54th Massachusetts (the Glory Brigade), the Iron Brigade, or the Stonewall Bridge. However, there are also a numbing quantity of books about regiments, brigades, or even companies that almost no one remembers. We have biographies of almost all the major political leaders and most of the minor ones, and endless analyses of political campaigns from just before the war until the end of Reconstruction. There are enough books on the naval war to sink a small ship.
So, is there anything more to say about the Civil War? Peter Charles Hoffer not only thinks there is, but has actually found something new, interesting, and important to discuss. That in itself is an accomplishment. In his new book, Uncivil Warriors, Hoffer, a distinguished and stunningly prolific historian at the University of Georgia, looks at how lawyers contributed to the coming conflict, shaped the issues, and helped prosecute the war.
This is not a book about traditional military battles or equipment. We learn nothing about the value of repeating rifles, ironclad ships, or close order drills. There is little about overall strategy or battlefield tactics. Rather, we learn about the role of lawyers in the military and civilian governments, the nature and structure of arguments on both sides of the conflict, and to some extent (I wish there were more of this) the way law affected military policy.
Much of the book is about how law shaped the arguments leading to secession and public policy during the war. Hoffer dissects speeches by Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, Alexander Stephens, and Thomas R. R. Cobb as though they were legal arguments presented to a jury — in this case, the jury was the voting public. That politicians made lawyerly arguments is hardly surprising. In Antebellum America, lawyers often entered politics. Of our first 16 presidents, ending with Lincoln, only four — Washington, Madison, Harrison, and Taylor — had not practiced law (Madison studied law but was never admitted to practice). Furthermore, because politics was often a part-time job — legislatures at the state and federal level only met for a few months of each year — elected officials had to continue their law practices to survive. Lincoln’s cabinet resembled a law firm. Of the 13 men who served in his cabinet only one — Secretary of War Simon Cameron, who served just 10 months — was not also a lawyer. Many in the cabinet were distinguished and successful attorneys, including Secretary of State William H. Seward, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, and Attorney General Edward Bates. Only two of Jefferson Davis’s cabinet members (Secretary of the Treasury George Trenholm and Secretary of State William Browne) were not lawyers — and Browne went on to study law after the war. However, unlike Lincoln, Davis was not a lawyer. Among Davis’s many faults and failures as a leader was his inability to persuade an audience or even his colleagues. Unlike Lincoln, he had not spent much of his life convincing juries to side with him. Lincoln’s skill as an advocate, as Hoffer shows, was not just in persuasion. It was also in structuring logical and clear arguments.
Hoffer shows how many of the issues of the war — like the propriety or legality of secession, suspension of habeas corpus, conscription, and emancipation — were essentially legal. The Civil War was fought in part because the majority of Americans were unwilling to see their constitution trampled by people who were traitors to the nation. Seeing the legal issues set out helps us understand not only the role of law in politics, but also that Americans — especially those who remained loyal to their constitution and their country — saw secession as both illegal in the common sense of the term and treasonous. Reading Hoffer’s discussions of the legalistic arguments of politicians on the eve of secession and the war reminds us of how sophisticated those leaders were — and how attentive the electorate was to ideas and ideals. Obviously, this is a great lesson for our own time, but it is important to understand that Hoffer is writing history and not trying to shape a historical narrative for a presentist political purpose. That is to his credit.
More surprising is how many lawyers were involved in the war, not as politicians or in the civilian sectors of the United States and the Confederacy, but as military leaders. Jubal Early, a West Point–trained officer, notorious for his violation of the modern rules of warfare (more about this in a moment) was also a lawyer. Early is just one of the many lawyer-generals that dot this book, and he is hardly the only surprise lawyer. Many readers will be surprised to learn that Major General William Tecumseh Sherman was also a lawyer. Indeed, one of Hoffer’s important contributions is that he sets out in an impressive manner the presence of lawyers in positions of command. Many were like Major General Henry Halleck, a West Pointer who left the Army to become a lawyer, and then returned to the Army when the war began.
This phenomenon, as far as I know, was not replicated in any other American war. It may in part be a function of the easy access to the bar in Antebellum America. West Pointers were educated men, and with just a bit of hard work, especially on the frontier, they could read a little law and open a practice. Some, like Halleck, were successful and became clear legal thinkers; others, like Sherman, were indifferent to the law. But as Hoffer shows, their legal training came in handy. Despite myths of “Sherman’s March to the Sea” as a lawless rampage across the heart of the Southern slaveocracy, Sherman rigorously enforced rules against looting civilian property — as opposed to confiscating animals, weapons, and food that were legitimately seized for military purposes. Sherman the lawyer understood these clear legal distinctions, and not a few US Army soldiers ended their careers before firing squads for their egregious looting. On the Confederate side was the lawyer general Jubal Early, who led his troops in the Gettysburg campaign and openly violated all accepted rules of war, by purposely burning civilian property for revenge and kidnapping and enslaving free black citizens of Pennsylvania. Such behavior was considered a form of land piracy by this time and was a throwback to the actions of Roman legions in the ancient world. Hoffer’s book would have been stronger had he delved into the failure of a lawyer like Early to obey the law of war and civilized behavior (including the rules adopted by the Confederacy). On the other hand, Hoffer correctly (and importantly) shows that Sherman “evinced an almost autocratic faith in law and order.”
In addition to officers turned lawyers, who then became generals, there were a plethora of lawyer/politicians who became generals. Unlike later wars, the Civil War had a huge number of politicians with stars on their shoulders. Many had been lawyers before the war. For example, both Howell Cobb, a former governor of Georgia, and his younger brother Thomas R. R. Cobb, who had been the reporter for the Georgia Supreme Court, were generals in the Confederate Army. T. R. R. Cobb was one of the most distinguished lawyers in his state, the only Southerner to write a treatise on the law of slavery, and the co-founder of what later became the University of Georgia Law School. He left the classroom to organize “Cobb’s Legion,” only to die at Fredericksburg. They were matched by men like Benjamin F. Butler, Nathaniel Banks, and the future presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, and Benjamin Harrison, all lawyers with political ambitions before they became generals.
Hoffer admires his lawyer politicians and generals, but I think sometimes fails to see that many of them, especially in the Confederacy, seemed to forget their legal training and their previous fidelity to the rule of law. Hoffer claims that Alexander Stephens “labored almost incessantly to bring about an honorable peace.” But “honorable” peace is a misleading term for a man who explained before the war that the Confederacy was “founded […] its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” Furthermore, Hoffer asserts that “the war was horrific, but constrained.” He argues that this constraint resulted from “the influence of the lawyers.” This might be true about some parts of the war — and it seems certainly true for the United States Army, which adopted a new and more profound set of rules, known as the “Lieber Code,” which constrained military behavior. Indeed, as I have already noted, soldiers under General Sherman were executed under that code for looting civilian property.
But the claim for “honor” and “constraint” for Southern lawyers, politicians, and generals is less persuasive. Consider John A. Campbell, who resigned from the United States Supreme Court to support the rebellion. It is hard to find a more competent lawyer. But in his position as the Assistant Secretary of War under Jefferson Davis, he did nothing to stop (much less punish) the murder of black troops who attempted to surrender to Confederate forces, the enslavement of captured black soldiers, the enslavement of northern black civilians, or the absolute refusal of the Confederacy to exchange black POWs. All of these behaviors violated every known rule of civilized warfare at the time. Rather, the lawyer Campbell supported his boss, Secretary of War James Seddon (also a lawyer), who ignored (and thus implicitly supported) some of these behaviors, and personally ordered others, such as the enslavement of captured black troops. This was the behavior reminiscent of the armies of the Roman Empire that enslaved or murdered captured enemy soldiers and civilians. But no army had behaved this way for many centuries. One wonders how this behavior squared with the legal training of Seddon, Campbell, General Early, or Confederate Vice President Stevens. It is worth remembering that at Nuremberg German generals, such as Alfred Jodl, were executed for enslaving POWs. Similarly, other Nazis, such as Labor Minister Ernst Fritz Sauckel, were prosecuted (and executed) for enslaving civilians. Such behavior violated the law of war in the 19th century, just as it did in the 20th century. But, the obvious illegality of enslaving civilians and POWs seemed to elude the Confederate lawyer politicians and generals just as it eluded Nazis in the 20th century. Just as the Nazis would do in Eastern Europe, the Confederates, led by lawyers, engaged in the wholesale kidnapping of free blacks in Maryland and Pennsylvania and the enslavement of POWs. Hoffer unfortunately does not address this ignominious history of Confederate lawyers.
An alternative use of the law, which Hoffer discusses, concerns the creative response of US Army Major General Benjamin F. Butler to the arrival of three fugitive slaves at Fortress Monroe in Virginia. A Confederate major, under a flag of truce, tried to retrieve these three men under the Fugitive Slave Clause of the US Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, claiming they “belonged” to his colonel. Butler, a successful lawyer before the War, concluded that the slaves were “contrabands of war,” and could not be returned. Butler further noted that “the fugitive slave act did not affect a foreign country, which Virginia claimed to be and she must reckon it one of the infelicities of her position that in so far at least she was taken at her word.” It is hard to imagine a more brilliant use of the law in the Civil War.
Butler’s “contraband policy” — what Lincoln humorously called “Butler’s fugitive slave law” — quickly became military policy. More importantly, it led to the most legally significant moment of the war — the Emancipation Proclamation. What Butler could do for three slaves, Lincoln would ultimately do for more than three million. In the process, Lincoln became the most important lawyer in the war, and perhaps in American history.
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The post Warriors Without Guns: Yet One Way More to Think About the Civil War appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.
THICK IS A COLLECTION of essays that deals with very personal issues, including body image, sexual abuse, and the loss of a child. Yet, as the author Tressie McMillan Cottom asserts, the category of personal essay does not adequately capture her writing style or approach. This is to be expected, as McMillan Cottom generally defies single categories and genres in ways that have simultaneously helped her public image and given ammunition to academic gatekeepers. She’s a sociologist who balances a remarkably active research program and university teaching with guest appearances on Fresh Air and The Daily Show. In her own words, she’s “country” and, since entering academia, “middle class.” She’s an intellectual leader on Black Twitter but she can still be told by colleagues that, as a research pursuit, “black is over.” While black women make up two percent of higher education faculty in the United States, McMillan Cottom is unapologetically “black-black,” which to her means not only having a dark complexion and working-class Southern roots, but also being seen as “a problem.” The essays incorporate these and many more biographical truths, putting them into a series of conversations between the author and other scholars and public intellectuals, from bell hooks to David Brooks, people she encounters in everyday life and her digital audience.
Rather than firing off a series of hot-takes or merely aestheticizing her personal pain, McMillan Cottom offers what she refers to as “thick description,” a concept that, in the social sciences, refers to the practice of presenting detailed observations of human behavior and using its sociocultural context to extract meanings. This process is about combining the individual and the subjective with the empirical and the sociological to gain a richer understanding of the “how” and “why” behind what people believe and do. This phrase is an apt one to describe McMillan Cottom’s work because it blends personal experience with structural analysis, demonstrating how systemic racism affects whether or not one considers oneself beautiful or receives medical treatment in time to save the life of one’s child. Thus Thick in some ways again takes up the question at the heart of her first monograph, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy, namely: how are American institutions designed “so that most of us always fail?” Answering this question is not just an intellectual exercise for the author. As she professes in the titular essay, her interest is in telling “powerful stories that are a problem for power.”
Despite these high stakes, Thick is more thematically broad and stylistically free than Lower Ed, which should appeal to readers who like intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture. The playful, familiar tone of the eight essays reminds readers why the author has captured the attention of The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Slate, and her many social media followers. The essays in Thick are economical in their use of words. They can deliver a swift punch in the gut but also be pithy, tongue-in-cheek, and fun. This is writing with a soundtrack, or more accurately, a playlist, which the author released on social media. It features such songs as Grace Carter’s “Silence,” Fantasia’s “Ugly,” and Beyoncé’s genre-bending “Daddy Lessons.” This is all to say that one sees in this collection McMillan Cottom celebrating the kind of “fabulousness” — to use a concept she engages with — that ruffles the feathers of academic gatekeepers. But as the author herself knows, for the marginalized, fabulousness always comes at a price. When she was a grad student, a black senior colleague told her that she wrote too much and published too quickly, given the stage of her career. Though the criticism initially reminded her of being considered “too much of one thing and not enough of another thing” since childhood, it also led her to rethink her position in the racially exploitive economy of publishing, which hungers for black voices but not for black full-time employees. And yet, for McMillan Cottom, not writing is not an option, and so throughout Thick readers see her critically negotiate her participation in the various institutions designed to make someone like her fail. In addition to rhetorical thickness, the collection also reflects the author’s versatility and multifacetedness as she tackles topics ranging from Miley Cyrus to academia’s structural racism; she combines theory and slang, and speaks frankly about her desire to be “a socialist black feminist” while retaining a membership to Amazon Prime.
Sifting through the complexities that come with being a successful black female public intellectual, the author keeps in her rearview mirror the image of her grandmother, who educated herself with a public library card, took care of wealthy families for a living, and, at the end of her life, fit all of her possessions into a small senior apartment. “Why me and not my grandmother?” is a question behind all of the essays. Yet rather than answering it head-on, the author takes her readers on different journeys, among them, to a Trump rally, a 2007 Obama fundraiser party in a wealthy, predominantly white Charlotte suburb, and a hospital room where her father told her husband that when it comes to domestic violence, “There are two sides to every story.” A particularly moving anecdote involves McMillan Cottom’s mother, Vivian, who, by dressing to project an image of black respectability and using “the Queen’s English,” advocates for their next-door neighbor at the social services agency. McMillan Cottom transforms these narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women like her mother and herself.
Black girlhood and womanhood are themes that unite all of the essays, yet McMillan Cottom is not interested in making simple generalizations from her own experience. Being a thinker who is “hopelessly tethered to reality,” she is always conscious of facts on the ground and their power to shape individual destinies. While America continues to be “stuck in first gear” Thick’s essays challenge readers to go further, beyond “race 101.” Rather than asking how the same country that elected Obama could elect Trump, the author suggests that the ascents of both leaders had to do, in part, with white voters’ fantasies and fragilities. In a different essay, McMillan Cottom discusses beauty and, rather than advocating for widening beauty norms to include blackness, she theorizes why, without blackness, beauty itself, as concept and commodity, is impossible. She also offers an alternative to appeals for inclusion, the opting out of beauty, a refusal to play along and make white women, who tell her she’s attractive, feel better about themselves. Yet perhaps the most urgent and devastating essay is the one in which the author discusses the risks black women experience in childbirth and in the American health-care system more generally. Contextualizing her personal story within statistics on pregnancy and childbirth-related deaths among black women, as well as black children’s mortality rates, the author delves into the causes of black women’s struggles to receive equitable medical treatment, a struggle that even Serena Williams could not evade.
Academics tend to be skeptics, and McMillan Cottom is plenty skeptical. How can she not be when black female intellectuals have to juggle multiple jobs while David Brooks gets to opine about soppressata and its connection to class conflict on the pages of The New York Times? As she points out in “Girl 6,” the final essay of the collection, it is only in July 2018 that The New York Times, one of the most circulated newspapers in the United States, hired its first woman of color as a regular columnist, Michelle Alexander, author of the seminal book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. On its surface, the essay appears as a longform diss on Brooks, but it is much more than that: an interrogation of how a public intellectual with one of the biggest megaphones in the United States can avoid serious engagement with black female thinkers. But skepticism is not the same as hopelessness. If McMillan Cottom was hopeless, she would not spend her energy producing the kind of writing that’s “a problem for power.” Nor would she dare her readers to imagine a world in which liberal white America not only repeats the mantra “trust black women” but actually lives by it. What would it take to bring about such a world? First and foremost, black women would need to be presumed competent and thus taken seriously as authorities — at the very least, on their own experience — whether they are speaking in a major newspaper, a faculty meeting, or a doctor’s office.
¤
Maggie Levantovskaya is a writer, editor, and professor based in the Bay Area.
The post Why Me?: On Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Thick: And Other Essays” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.
Dedicated to the memory of Dr. Aliza Kolker.
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ON VALENTINE’S DAY 1989, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, declared a death sentence on British Indian novelist Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses, along with any who helped its release: “I ask all Muslims to execute them wherever they find them.” The Ayatollah accused Rushdie of blasphemy, of sullying Islam and its prophet Muhammad, though many saw it as a desperate cry for popular support after a humiliating decade of war with Iraq. There followed riots, demonstrations, and book burnings across Europe and the Middle East. Death threats poured in. Viking Penguin, Rushdie’s UK publisher, was threatened with bombings. The author himself was forced into hiding under the pseudonym “Joseph Anton,” a mash-up of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov and the title of Rushdie’s 2012 memoir of the controversy. The media and public still remember it as “The Rushdie Affair,” though most people born after the 1980s have never heard of it.
Unlike the recent attack on lampoon magazine Charlie Hebdo or the threats against Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, the creative text behind the Rushdie Affair was renowned as high art. It netted the 1988 Whitbread Award and was named a Booker Prize finalist (Rushdie had already won a Booker for his second novel, Midnight’s Children). It was lauded by the Who’s Who of 20th-century literature: Norman Mailer, Bruce Chatwin, Marina Warner, Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Nadine Gordimer, Peter Carey, David Lodge. Its author was forever crowned “godfather of Indian fiction” alongside Rabindranath Tagore, Amitav Ghosh, V. S. Naipaul, and Amrita Pritam. Yet recent coverage of the 25th and 30th anniversaries of the Affair focuses on everything but the novel itself, whether international politics, reflections by friends, or the author’s storied sex life. How many gems go unnoticed without a look at the writing? How are readers any different from fanatics like Khomeini if they remain content with contextless snippets and watercooler talk?
Rushdie writes in his memoir that when friends asked how they could help, he told them, “Defend the text.” While this reviewer’s goal is not to defend per se, it is to take the text on its own terms. The Satanic Verses does talk about Islam, though not as a whipping boy. Instead, the youngest Abrahamic religion stands as case of something new, of something unverified and unstable, keeping company with other new and unstable things — the India-Pakistan partition, reincarnation and rebirth, rock ’n’ roll, marital infidelity — in the book that make up one long rumination on the newness of being an immigrant, the novel’s master theme. In this way, Rushdie is also reflecting on himself, is “naming” himself, as a migrant to Britain from India, with resonances that echo the recent refugee crisis in Europe. He appeals to the patron saint of migrants, “of all exiles, all unhoused people” — namely Satan, the first castaway, whose revelations, the titular Satanic verses, supposedly slipped into the Qur’an along with God’s. But with the bitter irony of art imitating life, Rushdie’s Faustian contract turned on its framer in a way he didn’t imagine, reflecting the very theme of change at the novel’s core.
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Rushdie has described The Satanic Verses as the hardest thing he ever wrote. “I thought of the novel as a huge monster I was wrestling with,” he told Vanity Fair in 2014. “[When it was done,] I was utterly exhausted.” Nor should readers be surprised at such feelings as they grapple with its pythonic mass — loquacious, sprawling, and populous, the book could be split into three and still stand on its own. The loosely jointed plot follows two Indian immigrants to England: Gibreel Farishta, a film star known for interpreting Hindu deities and who has resurfaced after a near-fatal illness; and Saladin Chamcha, a voice actor living in London for the past 15 years, estranged from his Indian background and father. In the opening scene, they miraculously survive an airplane bombing by Sikh separatists, also actors, and float down to earth hurling song lyrics at each other. After a soft landing, they are taken in by Rosa Diamond, an immigrant from Argentina.
Gibreel’s and Saladin’s paths then diverge for most of the novel. Saladin is arrested but escapes police custody and goes into hiding with the help of his wife’s lover, “Jumpy” Joshi, after which he becomes swept up in a popular movement in London’s immigrant community. Meanwhile, Gibreel rekindles an old love affair with ice climber Alleluia Cone, starts his comeback into popular film, only to succumb to schizophrenia, but still agrees to headline a dance show. In the climax, Saladin uses his gift for voices to drive Gibreel completely into madness by making prank phone calls from apparent strangers, as popular protests cause fires to break out in Brickhall, a fictitious borough of London. Amid the conflagration, Saladin becomes trapped under a beam, and Gibreel, realizing it was he who made the prank calls, must choose whether to save him.
The main narrative of Gibreel and Saladin has two subplots folded in. The first is in seventh-century Arabia and chronicles the rise of an unnamed religion and its prophet Mahound, a thinly veiled analogue of Muhammad. First by preaching and later by force, he and his deputees conquer Jahilia, “The Age of Ignorance,” a derogatory Arabic term for pre-Islamic society and which Rushdie imagines as an actual city made completely of sand. In the second subplot, readers meet Ayesha, a 20-year-old prophetess and orphan, who leads her entire village of Titlipur in the land of Desh (both fictional places) on a pilgrimage to Mecca by foot across the desert, requiring them to walk right into the Arabian Sea. During Ayesha’s story, readers are briefly introduced to The Imam, an exiled leader who tries to incite revolution against her for control of Desh. But, in a memorable tableau, he winds up eating the very rebels who storm Ayesha’s house.
Binding these several threads are dream sequences that throw Gibreel into fits of madness, written in a style described by some as magical realism (Rushdie explicitly acknowledges the debt to Borges in a 2014 New York Times essay). However, this process turns out to be nothing less than divine revelation. As the plot advances, Gibreel realizes his true identity as the archangel Gabriel (the literal translation of his name, Gibreel Farishta). Both the Mahound and Ayesha stories, plus numerous shorter sequences, happen when Gibreel falls asleep and melds psychically with other characters. “All around him, he thinks as he half-dreams, half-wakes, are people hearing voices, being seduced by words. But not his; never his original material.” The progression of Gibreel’s divine mission coincides with the progression of his mental illness. He cannot fulfill the one without embracing the other. He even transforms physically into this role, emitting a halo of light and growing to gigantic size. Later in the book, he acquires a trumpet that he christens Azraeel, the angel of destruction in the Hebrew Bible, from which he shoots flames that destroy parts of London. This ends up starting the fire from which he must choose whether to rescue Saladin, the man who ruined him.
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In one dream sequence, Gibreel unwittingly transmits the whisperings of Shaitan, the Islamic name for Satan, to Mahound. Here the novel channels the apocryphal “Satanic verses” episode of Islamic history, wherein the Devil allegedly tricks Muhammad into reciting verses that exhort believers to worship three pagan goddesses, Al-Laat, al-‘Uzza, and al-Manaat. The traditional account has Muhammad repent and replace these verses with new ones repudiating the goddesses, found in Qur’an 53 (Surah al-Najm): 19–23. But in contrast to the original story, Rushdie makes Gibreel the transmitter of both godly and Satanic revelation. “[M]e first and second also me,” he says when Mahound tries to blame the Devil for the initial, faulty verses. Wrestling throughout the novel to contain God and Satan all at once in mixed-up revelations called “angelicdevilish,” Gibreel finally succumbs to insanity due to a second legion of voices that evoke the ones in his head — that of Saladin Chamcha making prank calls.
The notion of Gibreel as both angel and devil, a hybrid state aptly symbolized by the ambiguity of the Satanic verses, shapes the book’s leading themes of newness and change. In a 1989 New York Times article by Michiko Kakutani, Rushdie singles out the “constant possibility of metamorphosis […] What is being expressed [in The Satanic Verses] is a discomfort with a plural identity.” Almost every facet of the novel embodies this idea. The English writing itself, for instance, is peppered with words from Hindi-Urdu, Gujarati, and Telugu, at times sounding like a creole. The plots and subplots, names of characters, and settings overlap in narrative time. Even physical change plays a role. Gibreel starts to put on angelic properties as noted, but it is Saladin’s mutation into a goatlike satyr — a devil — that really occupies reader attention. Here the Kafkaesque overtones are unmistakable, as Rushdie clarifies in his memoir: “[I] liked the name [Saladin] Chamcha for its echoes of Kafka’s poor metamorphosed dung beetle, Gregor Samsa.”
The metamorphosis at the heart of these individual changes is that of immigrants coming to terms with their new reality. Whether the in-between space of human and beast, angel and devil, fiction and reality — it’s no accident that the novel is full of actors, pretenders, and make-believers — all of them point to what it feels like to lose one’s homeland and be planted in another, imaginary one (Imaginary Homelands is the title of a later essay collection by Rushdie). The link is especially clear in a scene where, having been whisked away to a private hospital, the goatman Saladin gets caught up in a patient outbreak by nonwhite immigrants who have transformed into water buffalos, manticores, and primates. When he asks how this happened, they blame their British subduers. “They describe us,” the manticore explains. “That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.” Thus with the power of word and image are the immigrants subjugated, a point that echoes postcolonial criticisms by Gayatri Spivak and others against British control of the Indian subcontinent through erasure of local cultures, to be overwritten with new, European ones.
In the novel, the only way the immigrants can fight back is by reclaiming word and image, which they do through a revolt under the icon of a devilish-looking face emblazoned on banners and T-shirts. Like Rushdie himself, they appeal for salvation to Satan as the patron saint of migrants and exiles. While the movement’s details are fictional, they draw heavily on tensions in 1980s London around an uptick of violence that presages the current migrant crisis in Europe and North America. Riots erupted in Brixton, Birmingham, Leeds, and Liverpool, out of widespread deprivation and distrust of the police among immigrant communities. In the book, such tensions are personified in the conflict between Gibreel and Saladin, the former a celebrity symbol of Indianness, the latter a devotee of all things British. As they plummet to earth in the opening scene, Gibreel is singing a 1950s Bollywood pop song while Saladin belts out “Rule, Britannia!”
Although larger social tensions form the postcolonial subtext, The Satanic Verses is a fundamentally introverted work, especially next to Rushdie’s earlier novels Midnight’s Children, about the India-Pakistan partition, and Shame, a round criticism of Pakistan that was later banned. Indeed more than introverted, The Satanic Verses is about the author himself. He is present in Mahound’s disillusioned scribe Salman (Rushdie’s own first name), who purposely distorts the prophet’s revelation to test its veracity. He is in Gibreel when the latter has an extramarital affair with Alleluia Cone, or when he loses faith in God and, breaking Muslim dietary laws, stuffs his face with pork to prove he won’t go to hell (Alleluia is based on Robyn Davidson, an Australian hiker and author; the pork scene is a real episode from Rushdie’s school days). He is in Saladin when, in one of the book’s most moving scenes, he is reconciled to his father just before the latter succumbs to cancer, as was Rushdie to his own father.
He is also present in the novel’s compassionate revisionist take on Islam. In his memoir, Rushdie attributes this outlook to his father, who saw the coming of Islam as an event inside of history, something with a context, and, therefore, something to be interrogated: “‘What kind of idea are you?’ the novel asked about the new religion.” Hence the concern for revelation as a subjective experience, and for Muhammad as a flawed mortal, in the vein of Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ. But what Rushdie thought of as a “humane” exploration of Islam and its prophet led to outrage at, for example, the implication that the Qur’an is partly inspired by the Devil. Other details invite misreading from those who do not prize nuance in thought. In one scene, characters who persecute Mahound call him and his companions “scums and bums”; in another, prostitutes take on the names of Mahound’s wives to arouse their clients, seeming to slander the prophet’s own wives. And more than one commentator has remarked on The Imam’s unflattering resemblance to Ayatollah Khomeini, his likely counterpart in reality, who too was forced to eat the fruits of revolution run amok.
In hindsight of Rushdie’s persecution, these details have led many to ask: Did Rushdie know The Satanic Verses would cause such a backlash? Could he have avoided the violence? The question misses the point, at least for this reviewer. Aside from abandoning freedom of speech by giving credence to the heckler’s veto, it overlooks the decision Rushdie made to devote himself to writing long before he crafted The Satanic Verses. Reflecting on how his early years were marred by failed personal relationships, Rushdie quotes the cautionary opening of William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Choice”: “The intellect of man is forced to choose / perfection of the life or of the work.” In taking the latter road, namely committing to craft at the expense of his personal life, Rushdie set a course toward what he calls a Faustian contract in reverse. “Dr. Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power,” he says in The Satanic Verses. “The writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he’s lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least.”
These words were written before the Rushdie Affair began; they appear again in the author’s memoir of that Affair over two decades later. That they have haunted him since is beyond dispute, but so is the fact that his bargain, for its being struck, led to a better world of literature. And Rushdie himself was finally able to name what he was and is, and perhaps what he continues to be.
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The post Rushdie’s Deal with the Devil appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.
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