Emma D. (2/20)

Our pasts can be haunting, in fact, I think it is fair to say that our pasts haunt each of us (in a way). People always say it is important to focus on the here and now, and that looking back does us no good. Is this true? And, even if we were to not look back, doesn’t our past affect how we view things that are currently happening? In Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie, (I believe) Rushdie is battling his fragmented past, “The shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance, because they were remains; fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols, and the mundane acquired numinous qualities” (Rushdie).

So, I did a little research on Rushdie to see if he would have been considered a writer of the modernist era since the idea of fragmentation seems to be evident in this piece. Rushdie was born in 1947 in India… so, we are talking about two years after the end of WW2. This places Rushdie in the postmodernism era. In the piece Rushdie states, “Writers are no longer sages, dispensing the wisdom of the centuries. And those of us who have been forced by cultural displacement to accepts the provisional nature of all truths, all certainties, have perhaps had modernism forced upon us.” I may be reading too much into this, but I believe Rushdie feels that modernism was a trap to writers. And, I think he is speaking to this first-hand as an Indian writer living in England. Fragmentation seems to be a theme in both modernism and postmodernism writing. I am looking forward to reading Midnight’s Children to see if fragmentation appears there, too.