The Satanic Verses
of a story which, because totally fictional, was realistic enough for the newspaper-buying public to believe. However, the rumour that Gibreel Farishta had actually levitated away from the Earls Court stage and vanished into the blue under his own steam spread rapidly through the city’s Asian population, and was fed by many accounts of the halo that had been seen streaming out from a point just behind his head. Within days of the second disappearance of Gibreel Farishta, vendors of novelties in Brickhall, Wembley and Brixton were selling as many toy haloes (green fluorescent hoops were the most popular) as headbands to which had been affixed a pair of rubber horns.
He was hovering high over London! – Haha, they couldn’t touch him now, the devils rushing upon him in that Pandemonium! – He looked down upon the city and saw the English. The trouble with the English was that they were English: damn cold fish! – Living underwater most of the year, in days the colour of night! – Well: he was here now, the great Transformer, and this time there’d be some changes made – the laws of nature are the laws of its transformation, and he was the very person to utilize the same! – Yes, indeed: this time, clarity.
He would show them – yes! – his
power. –
These powerless English! – Did they not think their history would return to haunt them? – ‘The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor’ (Fanon). English women no longer bound him; the conspiracy stood exposed! – Then away with all fogs. He would make this land anew. He was the Archangel, Gibreel. –
And I’m back
!
The face of the adversary hung before him once again, sharpening, clarifying. Moony with a sardonic curl to the lips: but the name still eluded …
tcha, like
tea?
Shah
, a king? Or like a (royal? tea?) dance:
Shatchacha. –
Nearly there. – And the nature of the adversary: self-hating, constructing a false ego, auto-destructive.Fanon again: ‘In this way the individual’ – the Fanonian
native –
‘accepts the disintegration ordained by God, bows down before the settler and his lot, and by a kind of interior restabilization acquires a stony calm.’ – I’ll
give him stony calm! –
Native and settler, that old dispute, continuing now upon these soggy streets, with reversed categories. – It occurred to him now that he was forever joined to the adversary, their arms locked around one another’s bodies, mouth to mouth, head to tail, as when they fell to earth: when they
settled. –
As things begin so they continue. – Yes, he was coming closer. – Chichi? Sasa? –
My other, my love …
… No! – He floated over parkland and cried out, frightening the birds. – No more of these England-induced ambiguities, these Biblical-Satanic confusions! – Clarity, clarity, at all costs clarity! – This Shaitan was no fallen angel. – Forget those son-of-the-morning fictions; this was no good boy gone bad, but pure evil. Truth was, he wasn’t an angel at all! – ‘He was of the djinn, so he transgressed.’ – Quran 18:50, there it was as plain as the day. – How much more straightforward this version was! How much more practical, down-to-earth, comprehensible! – Iblis/Shaitan standing for the darkness, Gibreel for the light. – Out, out with these sentimentalities:
joining, locking together, love
. Seek and destroy: that was all.
… O most slippery, most devilish of cities! – In which such stark, imperative oppositions were drowned beneath an endless drizzle of greys. – How right he’d been, for instance, to banish those Satanico-Biblical doubts of his, – those concerning God’s unwillingness to permit dissent among his lieutenants, – for as Iblis/Shaitan was no angel, so there had been no angelic dissidents for the Divinity to repress; – and those concerning forbidden fruit, and God’s supposed denial of moral choice to his creations; – for nowhere in the entire Recitation was that Tree called (as the Bible had it) the root of the knowledge of good and evil.
It was simply a different Tree
! Shaitan, tempting the Edenic couple, called it only ‘the Tree of Immortality’ – and as he was a liar, so the truth (discovered by inversion) was that the banned fruit (apples were not specified) hung upon the Death-Tree, no less, the slayer of men’ssouls. – What remained now of that morality-fearing God? Where was He to be found? – Only down below, in English
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