Nobelist and NBCC finalist Orhan Pamuk (hometown Istanbul) and Sir Salman Rushdie (hometown Bombay) took to the stage of the Highline Ballroom, where Queen Latifah will appear later this month, for a relaxed meandering conversation Friday night, nudged along by Deborah Triesman, The New Yorker's fiction editor.
Homeland has taken on a new set of meanings in the past decade, Treisman noted in her opening remarks to the first evening event of this year's New Yorker festival. "Now the term is associated with the war on terror, with security, with the Bush administration. Homeland also could refer to the notion of exile." Definitions?
"There's a sense in which a place in which you grow up you think about as home," said Rushdie, who was exiled from India for a decade after the riots and 1989 fatwah attending the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. "Bombay is home. I don't call it Mumbai. Mumbai is an alternate city occupying the same space as Bombay." He also associated home with the mother tongue, with the languages he spoke while growing up. "When I go back, the language is all there."
Pamuk, who has lived most of his life in Istanbul (with a few years in New York) ran afoul of the Turkish government in 2005 by referring pointedly to the 1915 Armenian genocide and treatment of Turkey's Kurdish minority; he was on the verge of being tried for "insulting" Turkey and Turkishness (he wrote about the forthcoming trial in The New Yorker), but charges were dropped after outcries from writers' groups around the world, including American PEN. As PEN president, Rushdie introduced Pamuk, who was giving the "Freedom to Write" Arthur Miller lecture last year, as the man "without the sword hanging over his head."
Pamuk placed homeland in a framework of culture, identity, and religion, as well as language and memory. "When I am outside of Turkey, I resist saying I'm in exile," he said. "I can return any time I want. Why is home home? It's the beginnings. It's like a newly born animal with tentacles registering everything....Home is where mother is, and she still is. Home is the beginning of the world. Home is the mother, also the language. I have the language with me. I carry it in my pocket, in my spirit. I write with it."
"I also don't feel like an exile," Rushdie said. "There was a period of 10 years when I was not able to go to India. I wrote The Moor's Sigh during that time." Although friends accused him of sneaking back in to get the details right, he added.
The two groused about being limited in some ways through being required to "represent" their cultures, and being confined to material rooted in their cultures. "Americans and Western writers felt they have the right to go anywhere," Rushdie said. "Fitzgerald to the south of France, Hemingway to Spain. The expectation, if you're an Indian writer, is you can only write about India. Americans have always felt free of this. John Updike's novel about Africa, The Coup, is one of the worst novels ever written. There is a double standard."
Rushdie: "We all leave home. We all grow up in our parents' home and leave. People who never leave home are kind of sad."
Pamuk: "I disagree."
Rushdie: "Finally we disagree."
Pamuk: "You get universal ideas from books. But back home they say to me, 'You're getting all these European ideas from books, but this is Turkey.' It's a constant struggle between the parochial home and the general. Humanity needs both....I believe in the art of the novel. You can do anything with it."
Rushdie: "The novel is not a reality. It's a formalized dream."
In Istanbul, Pamuk noted, he feels responsible for everything. "In Turkey, if you are a writer, you have to have answers about everything. Here, writers have more freedom. You write your books, you promote the books, and that's it."
Rushdie (playful): "I'm moved by your responsibility. I've always felt irresponsible."
This post first appeared on Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle.