The Secret Society: Descendants of Crypto-Jews in the San Antonio ...

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Postcolonial writers who gain popularity in the West, especially Rushdie, present a skewed
image of the Third World they mean to represent. Brennan further argues that those
Postcolonial writers who attain Western celebrity do so by privileging the Western aesthetics
of irony and ambiguity over the alternative aesthetic sensibilities found in anti-imperialist
and social realist works. Thus, Rushdie gains Western media attention by propounding
Western aesthetic and political ideals from an ostensibly Eastern viewpoint. Furthermore,
Rushdie’s highly public “victimhood”—in addition to the fact that he belongs to that group
of Postcolonial exiles “who present their own ‘Third-World’ identities as a mark of
distinction in a world supposedly exempt from national belonging” 14 —somehow
authenticates his point of view in the eyes of the Western public.
Rushdie’s other remarks only further demonstrate the absolutist manner in which he
holds himself up as the paragon of cultural and religious understanding. He states, “Speaking
as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there’s not a single
woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted wearing the veil.” 15
Rushdie presents the members of his family as ideal, “enlightened” representatives of Islam,
even though he openly avows a decidedly secular upbringing and his current apostasy in an
interview with The Independent published around the same time period. 16
Even the phrase
“accepted wearing the veil” wrongly suggests that veiling is necessarily an externally
imposed, oppressive practice. If Midnight’s Children satirizes family as a coherent unit of
celebrated ideals that closely mirrors the oppression of a superimposed national identity,
Rushdie undermines this parody in his media presence by seriously attempting to promote his
family as a kind of cosmopolitan, diasporic-secular ideal.
Questions of Form