Sunday, February 17, 2008
Opinion, Stephanie Ramage

Note to Rushdie ...

Accelerated migration is the challenge of our time

Salman Rushdie, who spoke at Emory University on Feb. 10, signs books at an event in Budapest last fall.
BALINT PORNECZI/AFP/Getty Images

By Stephanie Ramage

For those who heard him speak at Emory University recently, it was obvious why Salman Rushdie has won award after award in the book-writing world. He has a poet’s ear for rhythm and tone and a storyteller’s knack for pacing and imagery. So he could be forgiven for using a little hyperbole to underscore his favorite theme of people being thrust into places that are not their native lands.

“For good or ill, this is the time of the migrant,” he said, the words taking flight above the audience at Glenn Memorial Chapel like a flock of doves set free on some festive occasion.

Say it aloud: “For good or ill, this is the time of the migrant.” Ten staccato syllables tap a drumbeat leading to the low rumble of the two-syllable “mi-grant.” It’s an excellent sentence. “For good or ill” invites the listener to consider whether this is, in fact, a good thing. In so doing, Rushdie makes his statement interactive and neatly sidesteps coming right out and saying how he feels about it. “This” makes the “time” to which he is referring very specific, and “is” is the kind of word people like Martin Heidegger could live inside for all eternity—it’s the ultimate in the state of “being” and its authority is right there in front of you. As my father used to say to my mother during the ongoing argument that was their marriage, “It is so, damn it.”

Then there is “the.” Using the definite article does quite a number on anything. If, for example, I say that Jon Stewart is an Oscar Wilde for our time, that’s one thing, but if I say he’s the Oscar Wilde of  our time, I’ve just said he’s the one and only, and there ain’t no other. So when Rushdie, who surely knows a thing or two about language, says “this is the time of the migrant,” he’s implying that something new is afoot, as if this time is somehow different, and he’s simply wrong.

Brilliant and charming, but wrong.

The history of the earth is a history of migration. Rushdie came closer to the truth when he said, “Migration is an old subject here in America, but now it is the world’s subject, too.” But that was also a bit of artistic license. Migration is an old subject everywhere. The reason it is such a big deal today is that there are a helluva lot more people on a planet that hasn’t entirely improved distribution of resources in a way that keeps up with human reproduction. And today, we are able to relocate quickly in large numbers. What takes three weeks today used to take three decades or even centuries, a very slow pace that helped ease assimilation.

In the second millennium B.C., for example, groups of Aryans are believed to have migrated over a period of centuries from Central Asia to the Saptasindhu region, the area along today’s Indian-Pakistani border—the area where Rushdie would later grow up. For a long time, it was thought that the Aryans invaded, but many experts seem now to favor the theory that the Aryans moved in relatively peacefully. In general, the experts believe there weren’t a lot of Aryans. But there were enough of them to indelibly stamp the language group that we refer to today as Indo-Aryan, a branch of the Indo-European language family that has produced the words that you’re reading and the much smarter words of Salman Rushdie. In fact, his family’s native language was probably a derivative of Indo-Aryan.

This is not the time of the migrant. Our whole history has been that. But accelerated migration is the challenge of our time and we can’t even begin to address it properly if we believe that it’s an aberration.

Throughout most of earth’s history, migration has been like that of the Aryans, slower and less disruptive than the kinds of migration—often forced and invasive—that became common with the exploration of the Western hemisphere, ramping up to the large waves of economic refugees like Irish farmers who fled the potato famine to relocate to America in the mid-1800s and accelerating until we arrive at today’s kind of migration: many thousands of people uprooting and waking up a few weeks, or even days, later in a distant and alien place.

In today’s faster, smaller world, we can see migration’s cause and effect more clearly than ever. It is in fact the whiplash-quick collision of cultures that informs Rushdie’s haunting stories. But alarmists don’t see today’s migrations as an accelerated continuation of history. Instead, they would lead us to believe that some new, unheard-of thing is happening. When the magnificently erudite Rushdie gives them melodic lines like “This is the time of the migrant” (which, by the way, would make a fantastic first sentence for a book), they take it as vindication for their fear of change.

Migration is not new; it’s an age-old occurrence made new by a changed set of circumstances—a booming world population and media whose very livelihood relies upon finding what’s new, or making something old seem new. As a writer, Rushdie has notably explored the magic of how cultures come together and create something that’s new, but not entirely so—essentially how the world as we know it rejuvenates itself—and I wouldn’t want that overshadowed by a lovely but misleading turn of phrase. This is not the time of the migrant. Our whole history has been that. But accelerated migration is the challenge of our time, and we can’t even begin to address it properly if we believe that it’s an aberration. SP

Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.