Haroun and the Sea of Stories

There is something reassuring and empowering about Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie.

To begin with, Haroun and the Sea of Stories is first and foremost a fable—at least, it’s presented as such. Surely, its premise reads like one. It is the story of the young Haroun Khalifa, whose father, Rashid, is a renowned storyteller. When Rashid suddenly loses his ability to tell stories to his adoring audiences, Haroun embarks on an epic adventure to un-pollute the Sea of Stories, which is the source of his father’s magical talent and the source of all the myriad stories in the universe. But Rushdie turns the typical fable trope on its head: the conceit masks allegorical underpinnings that become socially significant when understanding the context of the novel’s publication.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories was published in 1990. This was the first novel that Rushdie published after the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran declared the infamous 1989 fatwā as a response to the controversial reception of Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. The resulting fatwā made Rushdie a target of violence, and he was obliged to go into hiding in the wake of riots, book-burnings, and violent attacks on his associates. This incident became known as the Rushdie Affair. With this in mind, I realize that this novel’s place within the context of immediate/relevant post-Rushdie Affair literature reveals a defining trait of Rushdie: an untraditional approach to voicing his defiance against conformity.

Anguish, revenge, and violence—there is a vein of literal fire-and-brimstone motifs that run commonly amongst stories of exile. (We see it in an endless parade of works that include Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Homer’s The Odyssey, Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, Euripides’s Medea, the list goes on and on.)

But with Rushdie, we see hilarious puns, fantastical creatures, and magical kingdoms filled with gossip-loving eggheads.

This is what makes Haroun and the Sea of Stories so significant: before you read Joseph Anton, and before reading the essays of Imaginary Homelands, read this novel first. Because in publishing this novel immediately after his fatwā, Rushdie defends his cause before he defends himself and thus shows how important this is to him as a writer and as a father separated from his son due to the fatwā. All the more importantly, Rushdie does it in a way that is accessible in its humor and exuberance. Rushdie presents to both children and adults a paean to artistic free speech. Haroun asserts the power of story-telling as a way to celebrate diverse views in the face of homogeneity. Rather than putting his enemies in the third circle of hell as Dante did, Rushdie renders the censors and fanatics silly and obtuse in this new fable for the modern age.

I think this is what I love the most about this novel. Its very literal existence is a testament to the power of what narrative-telling can do in the face of cynicism and censorship. Rather than respond with equal fury—or worse, disappear from the public life altogether—Rushdie fights fire with flowers, neutralizes hatred with humor, and exposes fanatics as flimsy façades. I think that this is an approach that we can all get behind too.

With all this in mind, I had a lot of thinking to do. It’s time to ask ourselves—In an age where fights happen in comment sections and inflammatory memes can go viral within 30 seconds, are we more invested in tearing others down than we are in building up the positive merits of our own beliefs?

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Coda

I want to include one of my favorite excerpts from this book. It is a scene when Haroun is riding on the back of a telepathic mechanical hoopoe and meets a character that would become on of their allies, named Mali the Floating Gardener (‘mali’ itself literally means gardener):

“At that moment the high-speed vegetation actually reared up out of the water and proceeded to wind and knot itself around and about, until it had taken something like the shape of a man, with the lilac-coloured flower positioned in its ‘head’ where a mouth should be, and a cluster of weeds forming a rustic-looking hat. ‘So it is a Floating Gardener after all,’ Haroun said (Rushdie 82, 1990).”