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

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.