HYBRIDITY & Salman Rushdie's Postcoloniality

Hybridity: a controversial term in post-colonial studies concerning the creation of a new identity, one that results from transcultural shifts produced by decolonization.  The term itself comes from the world of horticulture: the cross-breeding of two species to form a new, third species.  Hybridity repudiates the idea of a pure, national identity.  The Indian immigrant in London or the son of a Japanese woman and American man may represent these hybrid selves, these offspring of Postcoloniality (or the Post-Colonial Fall.)

In his novel, The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie places the post-colonial concept of hybridity in the Judeo-Christian context of the Book of Genesis.  In "A City Visible But Unseen," he writes of angels who "had been flung out of Heaven because they had been lusting after the daughters of men, who in due course gave birth to an evil race of giants" (331).  Salman Rushdie is alluding (rather explicitly) to Genesis 6:4: "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days - and also afterwards - when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them."  The Nephilim were a antediluvian hybrid spawned by the sexual union of angels and mortals. Here in The Satanic Verses (the title alone is an inversion of the Bible, or the verses of God), we are given the traditional story of the Nephilim, but told to think in terms of transcultural hybridity.  This is a deft and ironic rendering of the Judeo-Christian world after the fall.  The Fall is not our metaphysical fall from perfection, but the Fall of colonization.  In Rushdie's novel, the result of this momentous Fall is the protean, self-invented identity of the migrant.

Falling from the sky in the opening chapter, Rushdie writes of Saladin and Gibreel: "Hybrid cloud-creatures pressed in upon them, gigantic flowers with human breasts dangling from fleshy stalks" (7).  The recurrent themes of metamorphosis and reincarnation in Rushdie's novel have a post-colonial context when conceived of in terms of hybridity.  Rushdie's characters achieve a doubleness of nature, an inner-conflict between homelands (seemingly the necessary result of leaving one's native country, whether it be India or Antigua or Ireland).  In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie presents a cast of characters rocked by rapid metamorphoses and identity changes; for Rushdie, the "homogeneous, non-hybrid, 'pure'" self is "an utterlyfantastic notion" (442).  The result is a blurring of identities, a mutability of souls (analogous to reincarnation or put in more secular terms, self-invention).  Rushdie asks: "How does newness come into the world?  How is it born?  Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?" (8).

The Satanic Verses portrays the reconciliation of these hybrid selves; the novel presents not so much a search for one's mother, motherland, or the unfallen state per se.  Instead, characters grapple with the circumstances of their fall (both geographical and spiritual) as the sons and daughters of not only non-Western parents, but in a broader sense, non-Western nations.

Sources:

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Grffiths, and Helen Tiffin.  Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies.  (NY: Routledge, 1998)
Salman Rushdie.  The Satanic Verses.  (NY: Henry Holt & Company, 1988.)