Literature of the fantastic can capture our greatest fears and struggles.
 | By Basharat Peer Staff Editor, Opinion |
One of my favorite poems growing up in Kashmir was Thomas Moore's "Lalla Rookh," a narrative poem he wrote in 1817 that told the story of a fictional Mughal princess who travels to Kashmir to meet a prince she is engaged to, but falls in love with a poet in her entourage. I would wander around my village circled by mountains, consider the flowers, the brooks, the hills and think of Thomas Moore's words: |
Who has not heard of the Vale of Cashmere, With its roses the brightest the earth ever gave, Its temples, and grottos, and fountains as clear As the love-lighted eyes that hang over their wave? |
But Moore had never visited Kashmir. |
As I entered my teenage years, the carefree roaming across my fragile fairyland came to an end as the Kashmiri resentment against Indian rule morphed into an armed conflict in the winter of 1990. Terrifying years of fearful days and curfewed nights followed. More than 70,000 people have been killed in the violence since then, and a just peace remains elusive. |
In the early 1990s, my father bought me a slim novel, a wondrous, fantastical tale, that reminded me of the great epic tales of the Eastern canon I had grown up with. |
It was Salman Rushdie's "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," whose young hero is the son of a great storyteller who loses his gift of words. And like my Kashmir, torn asunder by brutal military campaigns, a calamity had fallen over Haroun's home as well. Rushdie described Haroun as living in "a sad city," one that was "so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name." |
I believed his novel was about Kashmir. There were signs and images across its pages that made me understand the politics, the oppression, the struggles for justice that surrounded me. It made me see how the literature of the fantastic captured our greatest fears and our most difficult struggles. Almost three decades have passed. I have returned to the novel numerous times. |
I am delighted that today we are publishing an essay on the power of literature of the fantastic by Rushdie himself, an essay that took me back to my boyhood and those days of shielding myself from the horrors outside by burrowing into the pages of works like "Haroun and the Sea of Stories." |
As Rushdie writes in his essay, "The stories that made me fall in love with literature in the first place were tales full of beautiful impossibility, which were not true but by being not true told the truth, often more beautifully and memorably than stories that relied on being true. Those stories didn't have to happen once upon a time either. They could happen right now. Yesterday, today or the day after tomorrow." |
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