Our theme for the month of June is “Celebrities and Me.” Writers were asked to select and write about a celebrity with whom they feel some connection.

It started when a now-ex-girlfriend’s Islamophobic dad recommended me The Satanic Verses. Salman Rushdie’s fictionalized account of the satanic verses, he assured me, would convince me Islam wasn’t just a false religion but a demonic one. 

I’m pretty sure he never read the book and just heard a conservative spiel about it on Joe Rogan’s podcast or something. But I read it and became convinced of one thing, though not what he intended: Rushdie’s prose was what I had been missing when my high school English teachers passionately raved about their love for literature. I fell in love with his writing and sought every publicly available Rushdie novel (other than his debut novel, Grimus, since he advised against reading it). 

The “satanic verses” refer to when Muhammad retracted verses he thought the Archangel Gabriel had revealed to him about permitting worship to three Meccan goddesses because he discovered the supernatural being involved wasn’t Gabriel but Satan. In Rushdie’s book, I didn’t see proof that Muhammad was inspired by the devil. The book isn’t even “about” Islam. It’s about two Indian actors, an angelic character named Gibreel Farishta who is a little devilish and a demonic character, Saladin Chamcha, with some salvific instincts. They act both holy and depraved like any other human.

I fell in love with Rushdie’s composition and diction.  The opening paragraph of Midnight’s Children, in which Indian history is retold through the childhoods of a few kids with magical powers, exemplifies much of what I love about his writing: 

I was born in the city of Bombay… once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more… On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate – at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn’t even wipe my own nose at the time.

Against the semi-mandatory E-prime writing required by my high school, Rushdie appeared the antithesis: completely free to use the language in any way he desired. Narrators can’t be trusted, the combination of “mere” and “trifle” isn’t redundant, not every list requires an “and” before the final noun phrase. It’s personal, yet grandiose; fathers break their big toes while nation-states gain independence. I was equally dumbstruck by his sentence structure variation. A three- or four- clause monster of a sentence could be joined with a semicolon to a creatively punctual statement, creating something almost lyrical. 

His style, combining the mundane and practical with outlandish and alien descriptions, perfectly fits the genre of “magical realism,” in which the two realms work together to “[open] new mythical and magical perspectives on reality,” to use the words of Italian writer Massimo Bontempelli (though Rushdie himself often rejects the genre descriptor). Recognizing the way content and form worked together, I felt like I understood something deeper about literature for the first time. I finally understood the joy of reading. 

Two summers prior, I had waited until the week before school started to even look for my summer reading book—too embarrassed to tell my parents, I found a sketchy PDF that looked correct: Haroun and the Sea of Stories, where One Thousand and One Nights meets The Wizard of Oz. It was the first “real” book I ever read cover-to-cover in a single sitting. It was also the book that opened me up to reading in the first place—I just never felt the need to look up the author, some “Salman Rushdie.” Not once but twice Rushdie made me crazed like Majnun for good literature. 

As far as “turning points” go, reading Salman Rushdie was one of the most consequential decisions in my life—I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life reading good books and thinking about the power of literature—and it all started because of an Islamophobic father of an ex-girlfriend. 

Joshua Polanski

Joshua Polanski (’20) is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, In Review Online, and Off Screen amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking and exhibition, slow and digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, and Middle Eastern film.