Imaginary Homelands Sir Salman Rushdie Imaginary Homelands is an important and moving record of one writer’s intellectual and personal odyssey. Made up of 75 essays which demonstrate Rushdie’s range and prophetic vision, as he focuses on his fellow writers, on films, and on the mine-strewn ground of race, politics and religion.

Background on Author Sir Salman Rushdie (born June 19, 1947, Bombay, India) He was educated at Rugby School and the University of Cambridge, receiving an M.A. degree in history in 1968 After graduating, he spent time working in television and a brief period as a copywriter for an advertising agency, before pursuing a career as a writer He wrote his first novel in 1975 First as a Muslim in predominantly Hindu India, then as an Indian migrant to Pakistan, next as an Indian-Pakistani living in Britain. The project ‘Imaginary Homelands’, was somewhat based on Salman Rushdie, during his nine year hermetic exile, as a result of the fatwa placed upon him.

Imaginary Homelands He said that in these essays he was writing about what it’s like to write about the places you’ve left To what extent are you making things up To what extent is it a real place Even if you live there you are making it up So basically we all live in an imaginary homeland

Imaginary Homelands The part that we read in class dealt with him talking about growing up in India and moving away He talks about coming home for the first time in years and looking in the phone book and his fathers name and number still being in there Which to me signifies that we are all still part of where we come from And, that we all have emigrated from the past to where we are now Migration—losing one country, language, and culture and finding oneself forced to come to terms with another place, another way of speaking and thinking, another view of reality—is Salman Rushdie’s great theme.

Imaginary Homelands You see him talking about using his imagination and bits of truth to rebuild his India He talks about how he thinks back about the way things used to be like a mirror And putting all the shards of the mirror together and adding stuff to the mirror when he couldn’t find that shard Reflections on migration and metamorphosis permeate these essays as thoroughly as embodiments of them populate his novels, making many of these pieces essential statements about contemporary urban society’s conflicts.

Just thought this was a cool picture I found that represented the last slide, talking about seeing things through shards of glass from a mirror.

Imaginary Homelands Quotes “It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.” “Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.” “human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions”

Imaginary Homelands http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDDKsZ-GZ84 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/513067/ Sir-Salman-Rushdie http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/525180- imaginary-homelands