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Wednesday
Donald Trump’s recent victory has given me new insights into Midnight’s Children, which I taught last week in my Ljubljana Post-Colonialist Literature class. Salman Rushdie’s novel about a dictatorial leader bringing to an end India’s dream of a multicultural democracy seems all too applicable.
Yet curiously I have found some solace in the work, especially in the narrator’s faith in the next generation. The children of Midnight’s Children, he says, won’t be led astray by naïve dreaming, he says as he accuses himself of a sentimental idealism that couldn’t withstand the blows of power politics. More on that in a moment.
First, however, a word on our own sentimental idealists. I’m struck by a Jonathan Last article in the Bulwark that Biden could either have been a ruthless politician or a consensus builder and he chose the latter. As Last puts it,
Joe Biden was given the choice of betting liberal democracy on structures and the levers of power, or on the innate goodness of the American people. He put his entire chip stack on the American people and lost.
I made a similar argument several years ago about Obama, who got rolled by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s scorched earth opposition to his presidency, even when Obama was willing to compromise on Republican initiatives. McConnell broke with tradition by stonewalling most of Obama’s judicial appointments, including his Supreme Court replacement, and then he blocked Obama’s attempt to do something about Russian election interference. At the time I compared Obama with a gullible Othello who thinks that, because he himself has risen within the system, that race is not an issue.
Saleem makes a similar miscalculation when he realizes that the extraordinary children born between midnight and 1 on India’s liberation day can be instrumental in achieving a unified nation. As the child who has the telepathic power to bring them all together, he commits himself to a “loose federation of equals, all points of view given free expression.”
And at first, the nation appears to support Saleem’s view of things. Talking of the letter that his family gets from the prime minister, he reports,
Newspapers celebrated me; politicians ratified my position. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: ‘Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.’
From the first, however, there is the problem of violence. While Saleem, having been born on the stroke of midnight, is the presumed leader of Midnight’s Children, the thuggish Shiva, born only seconds later, makes his own impact. Rushdie, by showing that Saleem and Shiva’s lives are inextricably intertwined (a midwife switches the two of them at birth), makes the point that nation building and violence are never altogether separate. When Saleem mentions the prospect of consensual democracy to Shiva, he gets in response “something resembling a violent snort”:
“That, man, that’s only rubbish. What we ever goin’ to do with a gang like that? Gangs gotta have gang bosses. You take me-“ (the puff of pride again) “I been running a gang up here in Matunga for two years now. Since I was eight. Older kids and all. What d’you think of that?’ And I, without meaning to, “What’s it do, your gang-does it have rules and all?” Shiva-laughter in my ears… “Yah, little rich boy: one rule. Everybody does what I say or I squeeze the shit outa them with my knees!”
And in truth, consensual democracy is difficult, as Saleem discovers as he tries to organize the 538 children:
We were as motley, as raucous, as undisciplined as any bunch of five hundred and eighty-one ten-year-olds; and on top of our natural exuberance, there was the excitement of our discovery of each other. After one hour of top-volume yelling jabbering arguing giggling, I would fall exhausted into a sleep too deep for nightmares, and still wake up with a headache; but I didn’t mind.
In his struggle with Shiva for ascendancy, for a while Saleem is like the traditional politicians who used to run the GOP: while they used to own the party, Saleem is the one with the telepathic power to connect the Midnight Children. At one point he has the following interchange with his alter ego:
‘You can’t run the Conference; without me, they won’t even be able to listen to you!’
And he, confirming the declaration of war: ‘Rich kid, they’ll want to know about me; you just try and stop me!”‘Yes,’ I told him, I’ll try.’
In the end, Shiva prevails. Named after the Indian god of destruction, he evolves from street thug to military hero to government enforcer. In this last position, his violence receives official sanction as “the Widow,” based on Indira Gandhi, declares the same kind of state of emergency that Trump wanted to unleash on Black Lives Matter protesters. The Widow uses these new powers to clamp down on her opposition and to institute a system of mandatory sterilization. As her target is India’s multicultural democracy, she regards the Midnight Children as a threat and sends out Shiva, who is one of their number, to root them out.
Shiva tracks down Saleem, who reveals names and addresses under threat of torture. All the children are subsequently castrated, which strips them of their special powers, and without their carnivalesque diversity, India becomes the monochrome nation that fascists dream of.
I know this is all terribly grim so here’s the comfort I promised you. Saleem is married to Parvati-the-Witch, whose name is taken from the archetypal mother goddess in Hindu mythology. Like the goddess, Parvati gives birth to a large-eared child, named Aadam Sinai in the book but clearly meant to evoke Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god of intellectual thought and new beginnings. Aadam Sinai, Saleem hopes, will succeed where he himself has failed.
To be sure, young Aadam—born at Midnight on the night of the Widow’s emergency declaration— is not Saleem’s biological child but Shiva’s, the macho war hero who has gone through India impregnating women. That’s how it is in Hindu mythology as well, with Shiva, the god of creation as well as destruction, being the father of Ganesh. But rather than regarding this as a bad sign, Saleem figures it will make the next generation tougher:
We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and too fast into our future; he, Emergency-born, will be is already more cautious, biding his time; but when he acts, he will be impossible to resist. Already, he is stronger, harder, more resolute than I: when he sleeps, his eyeballs are immobile beneath their lids. Aadam Sinai, child of knees-and-nose, does not (as far as I can tell) surrender to dreams.
These dreams, recall, are those of a unified India. Because he has both Saleem and Shiva within him, Adam will be more practical as he goes fulfilling the dream that both of his fathers were born into:
I understood once again that Aadam was a member of a second generation of magical children who would grow up far tougher than the first, not looking for their fate in prophecy or the stars, but forging it in the implacable furnaces of their wills. Looking into the eyes of the child who was simultaneously not-my-son and also more my heir than any child of my flesh could have been, I found in his empty, limpid pupils a second mirror of humility, which showed me that, from now on, mine would be as peripheral a role as that of any redundant oldster…I wondered if all over the country the bastard sons of Shiva were exerting similar tyrannies upon hapless adults, and envisaged for the second time that tribe of fearsomely potent kiddies, growing waiting listening, rehearsing the moment when the world would become their plaything.
I hesitate to automatically ascribe hope to the next generation since people are always doing that, with mixed results. But I do see where both my boomer generation and my sons’ millennial generation grew up believing that the long arc of history was finally bending toward justice. Now my five grandchildren, whose ages range from twelve to six, will grow up with rights being taken away, climate change accelerating, and an authoritarian lording it over them. Like Aadam Sinai, they may not be as complacent as their parents.
It’s not only the faith that Saleem has in the next generation that consoles me. There’s something powerful in Rushdie’s concluding message that fighting the good fight never ends. To be sure, at first it looks grim as we see Saleem, like India, cracking apart as he is swallowed by a large crowd. (What this cracking looks like he never makes clear—it seems more metaphorical than biological.) In this mass of humanity made up both of dreamers and destroyers, he sees the novel’s version of Donald Trump:
[F]rom another direction… I see a mythological apparition approaching, the Black Angel, except that as it nears me its face is green its eyes are black, a center-parting in its hair, on the left green and on the right black, its eyes the eyes of Widows; Shiva and the Angel are closing closing…
But even as the end closes in, we learn that the dreamers will continue on. Though they lose time and again, their resistance will not end:
Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, all in good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.
Even if the upcoming years reduce untold numbers to voiceless dust, there is something heartening in the idea that the dreamers won’t give up. To be sure, such dreaming does not allow us to live or die in peace. The children of the Declaration of Independence and Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” will always be restless in the face of authoritarian rule. That restlessness, however, is their soul salvation.
