Toward a Postcolonial Storytelling: Deciphering the Eastern Storytelling Conventions in Salman Rushdie’s TwoYears Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Year 2023, Volume: 27 Issue: 3, 231 - 235, 15.09.2023

Şennur Bakırtaş

https://doi.org/10.5152/JSSI.2023.23346

Abstract

Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie in one of his most recent novels, Two Years Eight
Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, adopts a language having the characteristics of his cultural
hybridity to reassert the conventions of Eastern storytelling narrative over a Eurocentric written
paradigm. Salman Rushdie is capable of successfully conveying the distinctiveness of a cultural
tradition unknown to most Western readers because his language and narrative enable him to
capture the flavor of Eastern storytelling tradition through a contemporary gaze. It is also worth
noting that in the novel Rushdie repeatedly refers back to Islamic history by narrating the life of
Ibn Rushd, who has a romantic affair with a fictional jinni Dunia (meaning universe or world). Dunia
is able to give birth to 5 to 19 babies at a time, each of which will carry a distinct role in the modern
world. Having already been quietly preoccupied with the reasons of his exile, notwithstanding the
rumors that his wife is a jinni. The extended dispute between the exiled philosopher and highly
respected Islamic theologian and philosopher al-Ghazali is embedded into the narration with a
taste of One Thousand and One Nights; unsurprisingly, the title of the fiction is implicitly referring to it when the math is done correctly, and Rushdie’s style is strikingly similar to Shahrazad’s.
This study elucidates to what extent Rushdie utilizes the oral tradition of the Eastern heritage to
reintroduce them to the Western world through a palimpsestic interpretation of them, with its
references to Eastern traditions of oral narration, as with Shahrazad, and Islam.

Keywords

Dunia (world), Ibn Rush, jinn, Salman Rushdie, Shahrazad

References

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